Using the full text of the Federal Register, the official publication of the US government, we develop a similarity score that compares the regulatory exposure of pairs of companies. A higher score means that the two firms comply with similar regulations by the same regulatory agencies. Existing similarity measures such as industry boundaries, geographic proximity, and product markets account for only one-quarter of the variation in regulatory similarity. Nevertheless, firms with high regulatory similarity comove along key dimensions such as overhead costs, profitability, and investment. Using a supervised machine-learning algorithm, we decompose the similarity into 12 topics and find that it is driven by regulatory issues related to fiscal policy and labor. Each firm has a unique set of peers for each topic, and they all lobby the government on similar topics. Combined, our results uncover economically important links between companies centered around regulatory issues.

The ACA has failed this woman, and in 2024, the Government will pay $125 billion in subsidies to insurance companies.

This winter, two strong climate drivers churning in the Pacific Ocean give more confidence to the low-snowfall forecast.

“We just passed 400 launches on Falcon, and I would not be surprised if we fly 400 Starship launches in the next four years,” Shotwell said at the Baron Investment Conference in New York City. “We want to fly it a lot.”

The latest evidence? Apple spent billionsdeveloping cutting-edge electric vehicle battery technology with Chinese automaker BYD, only to watch its innovations become the cornerstone of BYD’s rise to global electric vehicle dominance. Apple walked away with nothing. China walked away with everything.

Apple Offers $100 Million to Undo Indonesia iPhone 16 Ban

Chapelle is referring to the scene when Hillary Clinton accused Trump of using a loophole to avoid paying taxes. Asked by the moderator whether this was true, Trump replied that of course it was. “I absolutely used it and so did Warren Buffet and George Soros and many of the other people that Hillary is getting money from,” he went on before delivering the killer line: “She complains that Donald Trump is taking advantage of the tax code, so why didn’t you change it when you were senator? The reason is because all your friends take the same advantage that I do.” The fact that Clarkson was attracted to buying a farm because it came with the benefit of avoiding inheritance tax will also, I suspect, be of little interest to most people in Britain who do not like this government. The fact that he said he bought a farm to go shooting and avoid inheritance tax will, in fact, be seen as welcome honesty.

Forbes Marketplace had seemingly also provided SEO-minded review services to CNN and USA Today, as detailed by Lofgren. Lofgren’s term for this business, “Parasite SEO,” took hold in corners critical of the trend.

When China issued bonds last week, however, they traded at only 0.007-0.029% above the rate (3Y/5Y), and were oversubscribed by 19.9x.As one Chinese commentator put it (via Eric Yeung), “we replaced the Federal Reserve.”Not quite, but you can see a Novus ordo seclorum taking shape.

Ford’s 2024 Q3 Earnings Presentation delivers the details: The year-to-date losses on Ford’s EV business (what the company calls “Ford Model e”) totaled $3.7 billion. Profits from Ford’s “Model Blue” division, which sells traditional internal combustion vehicles, also happened to be $3.7 billion.

Very worthwhile thread about the Matt Gaetz investigation. Almost of this is publicly documented and verifiable, but also deliberately obscured in favor of the simple-minded narrative. Nothing arouses people, or blinds them, more than a DC sex scandal:

The new Jaguar ad also, as Elon Musk and others noticed, doesn’t feature a car.

The ability to encode arbitrarily complex knowledge structures and link them to information assets indicates a major role for topic maps in the realm of knowledge management: Topic maps can be used to represent the interrelation of roles, products, procedures, etc. that constitute corporate memory, and link them to the corresponding documentation.

“The ultralow-cost carriers built a better mousetrap than us for customers that only cared about price,” United Chief Executive Scott Kirby acknowledged earlier this year. But that’s no longer the case: “We just are winning. It is structural. It is permanent.”. …“It achieves the absence of discomfort,” he said. 

One of the most compelling 2 hours I’ve spent listening to a world leader. I had greatly misunderstood Javier Milei. His holistic perspective on economics, philosophy, society, history, and spirituality is profoundly inspiring.

One of Bessent’s strongest attributes/strengths is having seen his own father lose it all

I like to tweet this every six months or so. Just to creep people out. And so younger people can learn a little history.

A new paper by the NBER on the McKinley tariffs of the late 1890s claims that the US economy did not benefit from the tariffs, mainly because they “may have reduced labor productivity in manufacturing.”

That’s easier said than done. During development of the Vision Pro, executives aspired for the device to eventually become an Apple Watch-sized hit — something that now seems unlikely. But perhaps a broader line of Vision wearable products (including things like smart glasses, augmented reality spectacles and iPhone-connected head-worn displays) could become a $25 billion business.

How is it helping users to suggest a location that is different to what they search for?

An innovation-forward culture may feel like a huge acceleration today, but it’s actually a return to the moral norm of Americans being and feeling comfortable, competent, and confident taking charge of their tools and toolmaking.

The radical notion of mixing and matching culinary traditions spread. By 2003, the quietly brilliant chef Tyson Cole, of Austin’s Uchi, was wowing customers with dishes you’d never see at old-school Japanese sushi bars. Less than a decade later, in 2012, the Houston restaurant scene got the star it deserved when irrepressible, bear-hugging chef Chris Shepherd opened Underbelly, where he merged cuisines from around the world. Side by side on one menu you could find Korean-style braised goat and Appalachian vinegar pie.

Slightly more than 1 in every 5 men ages 65 to 74 live alone, according to 2022 Census Bureau data. That rises to nearly 1 in 4 for those 75 or older. In 2000, only 1 in 6 older men lived by themselves. It’s difficult to find information about this group – which is dwarfed by the number of women who live alone – because it hasn’t been studied in depth. But psychologists and psychiatrists say they can be quite vulnerable. Research shows that men tend to have fewer friends than women and be less inclined to make new friends. Often, they’re reluctant to ask for help. Add in the decline of civic institutions where men used to congregate – think of the Elks or the Shriners – and older men’s reduced ability to participate in athletic activities, and the result is a lack of stimulation and the loss of a sense of belonging. Of all age groups in the United States, men over age 75 have the highest suicide rate, by far.

We are a remote company. Everything is going well. No plans to be in person, but I’d say we can do a better job at communicating. Any tips or articles to read?

This is why I’m so fascinated by the early Christians. They played the doomed COOPERATE-BOT strategy and took over the world.

On Haul, Amazon’s new rival to Temu and Shein, nothing costs more than $20 and items typically arrive in one to two weeks — not days — as they ship from overseas directly to US customers.

Luddite attitudes to new technology and an obsession with old industries are imperilling German prosperity

What an odd thing for her to say.

There has been a residency cap since 1997

Three, they all share a reputation from the mainstream media, bicoastal elite, or administrative state guardians as a little “out there” or even “crazy” and “nuts”, whether RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, or Pete Hegseth. So, their opponents rightly fear they are immune from mainstream media disparagements, the usually leftwing generated hoaxes, and beltway tsk-tsk scorn.

CEO of Palantir, $PLTR, Alex Karp: “You are sitting at your elite school pretending that because you watched TikTok twice and got an A+ on some crazy paper, because your professor couldn’t get a job anywhere else, that you actually understand the world.”

The DNC needs an organizer who gets people. Not someone who sends fish heads in the mail

Here is the full talk from @Gwynne_Shotwell at the Baron Capitol conference from yesterday!

“If our whole power projection platform is aircraft carriers, and if 15 hypersonic missiles can take out our ten aircraft carriers in the first 20 minutes of a conflict, what does that look like?” he said on The Shawn Ryan Show, hosted by the former United States navy seal and CIA contractor. Similar questions are being asked about the UK’s two £6.2 billion aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, commissioned into the Royal Navy in 2017 and 2019 respectively.

REPORT | June 18, 2024
Management Advisory: Review of DoD Funds Provided to the People’s Republic of China and Associated Affiliates for Research Activities or Any Foreign Countries for the Enhancement of Pathogens of Pandemic Potential (Report No. DODIG?2024?099)
Audit

While they waited for city agencies to inspect and approve their lodging, among other bureaucratic hurdles, they felt migrants “were getting fast-tracked to shelters, they were getting cash, they were getting debit cards.”

Harvey Epstein for New York City Council

With Air France now avoiding the southern Red Sea, flights are now routing north over the ocean, then west through Oman and Saudi Arabia.

Berlin’s aviation tax regime, combined with ambitious sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) regulations and competition from Chinese carriers, has engendered fear among airline employees in Germany. On Oct. 30, trade union Verdi and representatives from Lufthansa signed a petition calling for a swift…

The new document underscores that in addition to serving a legion of startups and fledgling businesses, SVB was a go-to bank for tech industry giants, including some that have kept their relationships with the bank confidential.

Have you ever known someone whose technical brilliance was overshadowed by personal failings? This is the story of Hans Reiser, a software developer driven to create a superior Linux filesystem, but whose difficult personality got in the way.

One of the best parts of antitrust trials is how much information comes into the public domain about corporations that usually keep details about their industry private. The Kroger-Albertsons supermarket merger case is no different. One interesting nugget is that supermarket executives see rural markets as particularly easy to monopolize, because there is often just one store. They even have a name, “no-comp[etition] or low-comp[etition] zones,” according to one executive on the stand.

Ghost jobs are wreaking havoc on tech workers

Somehow missed Particle’s response to Epic.

The Munich crisis in 1938 triggered air-raid precautions, including the distribution of gas masks and sandbags. Actual war in September 1939 brought rationing, recruitment and requisitioning. Ministries required buildings and the military needed billets. Everyone wanted both the old with brains and the young with brawn. 

People in Berlin like to complain about the perpetual gray weather and they’re completely right. Seasonal affective disorder is very real, and it might be a good idea to look into Vitamin D and light therapy lamps. One note: a lot of people buy cool-colored light bulbs or a SAD lamp and use it like a regular light. To get the real effects of these lamps, you need to get a real one and use it very close to your face for a long time! I went with the complete nerd option: Luminette lamp glasses, which I use right as I wake up. 

Kamala Harris – $1 BILLION
Donald Trump – $388 million.

What seems increasingly clear in modern campaigns is that paid ads, door knocks, sound bites, la etc. are increasingly less effective than content, long form, direct to consumer, personal social, memes, etc.

My first months here, I realize now, led me astray. I knew no Japanese when I arrived in August of 1983. Unable to read the signs in train stations, few of which were in English then, I took a slow local train from Narita to Ueno, where an American friend was to meet me.

Embrace Uncertainty: Boyd teaches that growth and innovation come from navigating uncertainty, not avoiding it. Welcome the unknown as a space for new opportunities.

Moreover, they make decisions as a committee, based on the internal politics of the FOMC and the external pressure of the press. The difference between a step up from 1.25% to 1.5% is much bigger proportionally than from 4.5% to 4.75%, but they talk about them similarly. There is no more “science” here than there was during COVID.

The Pennsylvania Senate race is not over. More soon.

With an unimaginable to-do list, Trump plans to tear into issues both foreign and domestic. Erik explores the possible applications and outcomes in a world that is currently acting with weak, or vapid leadership.

Hilarious. Woman is depressed because Kamala lost, but she is unable to walk in the park near her because of all the homeless people.They will never make the connection.

The United States is about to become a vastly superior place to do business. We are already the safest and most militarily capable country in the world making us an extremely attractive place to live and raise a family in an increasingly dangerous world.

The Kamala Inc. Fire Sale.

Jeppesen is, remarked one senior Boeing official to TAC recently, one of “the few places in the company that write good software.”

What you can’t see in this video is the hoard of hungry pelicans crashing all around me as dozens of baitfish swam between my waterlogged legs. Glad I’m not a fish.

Boeing desperately needs a replacement for the 737, but billions of dollars of losses, new debt since 2019, and other problems make pursuing a new design impossible right now. Mulally undoubtedly has views on this score, too.

The SuperTicket is playing with fire. I would highly recommend that someone in the transition team get Gary Hart on board, who is one of the last living links to the Church Committee, and could thus advise as to what it is actually like to frontally engage the covert and intelligence operations groups in a hostile fashion

“I am a humble Scottish merchant trading in the China Seas. My family has followed this profession for almost 200 years,” he wrote. “When we are bearing the sticky heat of China’s Pearl River Delta or the tropical rainforests of equatorial Borneo, we dream about the cool, soft mist of the green Galloway hills where we were bred.”

Example:   The Democratic Secretary of State in PA issued a memorandum in September 2020 to all the counties that the statute requiring matching of signatures on absentee ballots was being “waived” because of COVID.  And when the PAGOP sued to ask the court to uphold this black letter law, the lower court agreed but the Democrat-controlled PA Supreme Court overruled and said that no signature matching was necessary, notwithstanding the statutory requirement to the contrary. 

The classic story of Epic is “don’t take on debt”, so it’s interesting to see the handful of companies quietly listing their investments in Epic.

It’s truly impossible to comprehend the scale of solar power deployment in China these days. When I saw how much solar power China had installed in the first 9 months of the year, I thought I must be reading something wrong. I checked a few times. But, indeed, China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) reports that a shocking 160 gigawatts (GW) of new solar power capacity were added in the first three quarters of the year. 160 GW.

Over the past decade, my work helping teams deliver competitive PWAs gave me a front-row seat to a disturbing trend. The rate of failure to deliver minimally usable experiences on phones seemed to be increasing over time, despite the accelerating costs associated with the client-side JS-based stacks that teams were reaching for. Worse and costlier is a bad combo, and the opposite of what competing ecosystems did.

This map shows that first section of the trip. I’m taking the “Lake Shore Limited”, an overnight train. Will arrive in Chicago in around 20 hours, and amazingly, that’s the only time I’ll have to change trains!

An HTML pre-proces­sor for web ty­pog­ra­phy (fonts). Typeset pro­vides ty­po­graphic fea­tures used tra­di­tion­ally in ?ne print­ing which re­main un­avail­able to browser lay­out en­gines. Typeset’s pro­cess­ing brings the fol­low­ing to your web­pages:

Indeed, the irony is that it is not Trump but the more radical Democrats who openly discuss constitutional changes that would fundamentally alter the U.S. political system to their own advantage. To give one example of many, in an article published two years ago in the New York Times, two liberal professors at, respectively, Harvard and Yale, Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn, urged Democrats not to try to ‘reclaim’ the ‘broken’ Constitution but to ‘radically alter the basic rules of the game’.

The turbine-turned-tiny house is also an experiment in material reuse that could become more critical as wind turbines across the globe reach the end of their life cycles.

Porsche CFO Meschke assesses that China is effectively lost to European automakers in both the short and medium term. “We simply can’t assume anymore that the market there will return to what it once was for European manufacturers. China has transformed toward electrification, and unfortunately, Europeans no longer play a significant role there.”

Colossus, the world’s largest AI supercomputer, is being used to train xAI’s Grok family of large language models, with chatbots offered as a feature for X Premium subscribers. xAI is in the process of doubling the size of Colossus to a combined total of 200,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. The supporting facility and state-of-the-art supercomputer was built by xAI and NVIDIA in just 122 days, instead of the typical timeframe for systems of this size that can take many months to years. It took 19 days from the time the first rack rolled onto the floor until training began.

xAI is currently more than doubling its size by adding another 50,000 H100s and 50,000 H200 Nvidia GPUs

HTML Forms have powerful validation mechanisms, but they are heavily underused. In fact, not many people even know much about them. Is this because of some flaw in their design? Let’s explore.

We present a model to convert photos of handwriting into a digital format that reproduces component pen strokes, without the need for specialized equipment.

Answer: the talk claims that “the legacy of the crypto wars was to trade privacy for encryption—and to usher in an age of mass corporate surveillance”. Wow. That sounds bad, and surprising, definitely something worth understanding better. If cryptographic export controls had instead remained in place after 1999, how would that have improved privacy and reduced corporate surveillance?

But seven or eight years later, Fox’s clinic emailed her to say she was being de-rostered—removed from her doctor’s list of patients—and would have to find a new doctor. The doctor didn’t come in very much, and they needed her for other patients. “Don’t you just shift your patients around?” Fox recalls asking. They didn’t, and it was up to her to find someone new. With three kids and a declining number of doctors accepting new patients, that proved easier said than done. Her family joined the 650,000 other Albertans who, according to the Alberta Medical Association, lack access to regular primary care.

The Most Important Car Person You’ve Never Heard Of — Ferdinand Piëch

XiaomiSU7Ultra prototype has set the record as the fastest four-door car in Nürburgring Nordschleife history. FPV.

“I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself.” If we accept that a mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?”

These circumstances did not yet exist in 1692, when Dutch artist A. Boogert created a huge, almost 900-page book on color, Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau. But they were slowly coming into being, thanks to studies by philosopher-scientists like Isaac Newton.

Both sides have been trying to use artificial intelligence to speed up these phone, paper and fax-heavy processes, but there’s concern that if both sides build separate admin bots, it will lead to a robot logjam rather than a human one. “I think we’re headed for a battle of AI versus AI unless we change course,” Sumit Rana, Epic’s president said during the company’s annual meeting while dressed as the Belgian comic book character Tin-Tin.

THIS YEAR IS the 50th anniversary of Scarry’s 1974 Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, which strikes me as a commemoration worthy of ballyhoo, especially now that, as a dad myself, I’ve spent so much time ferrying my own daughter to and from school and birthday parties in various cars that—well, mostly goed. (I’ve owned five automobiles in my life, all of them cheap, one of which smoked and required the driver’s side door to be kept shut with a bungee cord hooked to the opposite armrest, stretched across both driver and passenger. What can I say? I was a young cartoonist on a cartoonist’s budget.)

Colorado Secretary of State posted spreadsheet with voting system passwords

The Distaste for Housing Density

@_CitizenAG has filed a federal lawsuit after discovering Wisconsin’s DOT gave 2 nonprofits DMV data containing the personal info of millions of Americans AND non-citizens for targeted voter registration & outreach efforts

In many cases, we are seeing websites that have served visitors for years lose 95%+ of their traffic from Google and not even rank for their brand name. This is a shadow ban where something in Google’s system has effectively blocked that website from existing. Google refuses to acknowledge it is happening or speak about it. Meanwhile, search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing rank Kevin’s page in the #1 and #3 spot, as they should.

This is the story of Ed Roberts, the man who created the personal computer, launched the careers of Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak, and decided—at the height of his success—to walk away. It is based on archival video interviews with Roberts, Gates, Steve Wozniak, and many of the other key figures involved. I also draw on written accounts by Forrest Mims, Paul Allen, and others who were there; contemporary publications, such as Dr. Dobbs Journaland Popular Electronics; and books like Fire in the Valleyand Endless Loop: A History of Basic. 

There is a good chance that a system in which the Europeans essentially defend themselves and the United States plays, at most, a peripheral role in European affairs would be more stable than the one we are now living with.

This is one of those documents that could be easily overlooked – in truth is is a nuclear bomb. I am familiar with some of this investigation that has been underway for a few years now. It is not pretty. But there is only one truth & it’s way past time for every American to know.

As for the bondholders, in the 2023 debt swap they negotiated a better collateral package, higher contractual interest payments and strict covenants. With those elements, as well as hedges, other side trades and falling interest rates, they will do just fine. But Apollo and the others should rue that they did not demand equity warrants. That would have let them share at least some of the spoils of the improbable turnaround engineered by Garcia.  

Oracle’s latest EHR is equipped with cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities that will make it easier to navigate and set up, the company said. There are no menus or drop-down screens, and doctors can pull up the information they need by asking questions with their voices. Ideally, this will allow doctors to spend less time searching through records and more time caring for patients, Oracle said.  “It’s not just a scribe. It’s not an assistant. It’s almost like having your own resident,” Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, told CNBC in an interview. 

CBS doesn’t own the airwaves, we do, the people of the United States own the airwaves. CBS is licensed to use the airwaves, but only to advance the public benefit.

Beyond the previously untold story of China’s early exploration of the hydrogen bomb theory, the article also explores in detail the so-called “100 days in Shanghai”—a milestone of China’s hydrogen bomb development—and describes the efforts that led to a series of three nuclear tests that happened in 1966 and 1967 and that are often called “the trilogy” of the H-bomb development in China.

It took bravery and courage for IRS Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley and Special Agent Joseph Ziegler to blow the whistle on the politicization and misconduct in the federal criminal investigation of Hunter Biden. Their lawfully protected disclosures to Congress have resulted in unrelenting personal and professional attacks by the

Farley told The Wall Street Journal that the growth of the Chinese auto sector poses an existential threat to his company, and that “executing to a Chinese standard is now going to be the most important priority.”
Source: https://research.gavekal.com/article/prejudice-and-china/