Over the past three decades, it has become arguably the most high-profile purveyor of — and flag-bearer for — architectural salvage. Today it is both a retail business and an interior design studio, headed up by Speake, that reimagines how reclaimed materials can be used. 

There are so many controls in macOS that sometimes you can’t see the wood for the trees. This can leave uncertainty over essentials, such as whether your Apple silicon Mac really is properly secure, or maybe there’s something sinister going on with it? This is a question I’m asked not infrequently, usually when someone has been spreading disinformation or FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt). So how can you check that your Mac is properly locked down and boots securely?

People threatening and throwing items at passersby, fights and other disturbances led residents and business and property owners in the area to reach out to the city to respond, Kipp Hartman, police captain for the Central District, told the Wisconsin State Journal. “We started to see some of the larger things being set up, kind of the bigger pieces of furniture, bigger things of property, tarps and stuff like that, which is kind of out of the norm,” Hartman said.

Funeral directors are increasingly asking the relatives of the deceased whether they would prefer for AI to write the obituary, rather than take on the task themselves. Josh McQueen, the vice president of marketing and product for the funeral-home management software Passare, said its AI tool has written tens of thousands of obituaries nationwide in the past few years.

Once again, we need to go back in time to understand how we got here. In the early days of computing, color was not a priority. Monitors were monochrome and most applications were text-based. The first color displays were developed in the 1970s, but they were expensive and not widely used. It wasn’t until the 1980s that color became more common, with the introduction of the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh.

A 2019 federal rule that went into effect in 2021 created a federal requirement for the prices of many hospital services to be posted but a November report from PatientRightsAdvocate.orgshowed that just 30% of Wisconsin hospitals are fully compliant with the requirements.

“It was the money magnet that attracted these people. It wasn’t a crisis—it was the money magnet that brought them here.”

Use the interactive map below to explore every one of Paul’s stops along his journey, the roads he traveled, and the stories that came about.

„Wenn Sie mich das Wort ‚Verhandlung‘ nicht haben sagen hören – das liegt daran, dass es keine war.“ Mit diesem Satz beschreibt Sabine Weyand den geopolitischen Preis, den Europa für Stabilität bezahlt hat: Die Generaldirektorin für Handel und wirtschaftliche Sicherheit in der Europäischen Kommission sprach ungewohnt offen über das neue Abkommen mit den USA – es ist ein Deal, der den USA den Zollvorteil lässt und Europa wenig zurückgibt.

Politics in the Trump era.

While the nationwide increase in massive data center projects has been seen in several other states, such developments in Wisconsin didn’t begin in earnest until July 2023, when Gov. Tony Evers signed the state’s 2023-25 budget, which included sales and use tax exemptions specifically for data center projects.

I’m now in the possibly-unique position of having (a) publicly opposed Lisa Cook’s appointment to the Fed board and (b) publicly opposed Lisa Cook’s removal from the Feb board, absent an actual finding of guilt.

The growing postal boycott of the U.S. is the latest proof that eliminating the de minimis tariff exemption on goods valued $800 or less is a shortsighted policy. As Taxpayers Protection Alliance Chief Regulatory Analyst Juan M. Londoño noted in a recent piece for The Baltimore Sun, “Under the executive order [ending the de minimis exemption], international suppliers will have two options: either pay the tariffs as a percentage of the package value or pay a simplified flat fee that starts at $80 and can go as high as $200 per package, depending on the effective tariff rate of the country of origin. Suddenly, [a] $17 bag of Colombian coffee could cost you a whopping $97. Justifiably, you go back to the lesser-quality option that you could find at the grocery store, which will also likely be ebhigher in price (and probably not from the U.S.).”

Removing human excrement was, however, a secondary purpose of Rome’s vast sewer system. There are very few examples of private latrines in Rome, which carried the risk of pipes becoming blocked, bad smells, vermin, and built-up gases causing explosions. Instead, historians have assumed that most Romans used the limited public facilities, though “there is abundant evidence showing that many people relieved themselves in streets, doorways, tombs, and even behind statues.” 

The core problem was the inability to turn abundant resources into a clear vision backed by political will. Federal dollars were funneled into a maze of state agencies and local governments with clashing priorities, vague metrics and near-zero accountability. Billions went to contractors and government consultants services such as schools, transit, health care and housing were neglected. For example, one firm, ICF International, received nearly $1 billion to administer Road Home, the oft-criticized state program to rebuild houses. More.

It’s unclear what Meta’s long-term retail strategy is as it scales its wearables business. Maybe we’ll hear more at Meta Connect 2025 in three weeks. But this much is obvious: if VR is ever going to move beyond its niche, we can’t leave the magic of the first demo to chance. Someone – Meta or otherwise – must give the right demo to hundreds of millions of people.

I was disappointed they chose to serve hot dogs over brats at the tasting, but executive chef Jacob Moss told me that hot dogs are more popular than brats at Camp Randall by a 3:2 ratio.

“When an insurance company becomes both health care provider and insurance payer, questions arise regarding potential conflict of interest,” according to a statement issued by the American Dental Association.  “From a business standpoint, dental insurance companies seek to minimize cost and maximize profit,” the statement continues. “As a result, patients may find their treatment options limited to what is most cost-effective for the insurer, not necessarily what is most effective for their oral health.”

As de Mero said: ‘The medieval streets in Salamanca, Siena and Heidelberg haven’t changed dimensions in 20 years. And [there’s no space] to make the garage bigger.’ He also pointed out that the proportion of cars under four metres built by European makers has shrunk from 50 per cent in the 1980s to five per cent now.

as usual, this post is a self-contained html file with no javascript, images, or other external resources – everything on the page is handwritten html/css, weighing in at around 49kB gzipped. it was really fun creating all the little interactive widgets and visuals this time around, i think i’ve improved in css a lot since the last time i posted.

Three Chinas, one lifetime: I imagine a Chinese family and there’s three completely different Chinas. One was about survival, the second aspiration, and the final one about prosperity.

Fun to look at property taxes in absolute dollar terms (left) and as a percentage of home prices (right).

The corruption is especially deep where employees use their access to receive both paychecks and benefit checks, a situation that was first identified during the COVID Pandemic when federal unemployment benefits were widely available and with little anti-fraud attention, according to the Ernst DOGE Caucus report.

Many of those services are still around in some form—someone who really wanted to could still launch a new blog on LiveJournal, Xanga, Blogger, or WordPress.com. But one of the field’s former giants is shutting down—and taking all of those old posts with it. TypePad announced that the service would be shutting down on September 30 and that everything hosted on it would also be going away on that date. That gives current and former users just over a month to export anything they want to save.

There are two possible explanations: Felicia is just not very smart, and allowed herself to be used by deep state con men. Or she’s in on it, and used her position to willingly participate in a literal foreign influence operation. Either way, it’s disgraceful.

How States and Cities Decimated Americans’ Lowest-Cost Housing Option is an excellent, hard-hitting piece making and extending these points and  significantly it’s not from a libertarian think tank but Pew: [more]

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution had 630,000 print subscribers in 2004. After two decades of major population growth in the region, it now has 40,000, along with 75,000 online. It just announced that it will no longer have a print edition.

And a little south in Seal Beach, a scrappy company called AstroForge aims to land a satellite on an asteroid just a football field wide and mine possibly billions in platinum riches.

3. Reversible vs. Irreversible Decisions

This one’s gold. According to Werner, good decision-making starts with this split:

• Reversible decisions (two-way doors): move fast. 70% of the info is enough.
• Irreversible decisions (one-way doors): slow down. Think deeply.

We conducted a retrospective, observational study at four endoscopy centres in Poland taking part in the ACCEPT (Artificial Intelligence in Colonoscopy for Cancer Prevention) trial. These centres introduced AI tools for polyp detection at the end of 2021, after which colonoscopies had been randomly assigned to be conducted with or without AI assistance according to the date of examination. We evaluated the quality of colonoscopy by comparing two different phases: 3 months before and 3 months after AI implementation. We included all diagnostic colonoscopies, excluding those involving intensive anticoagulant use, pregnancy, or a history of colorectal resection or inflammatory bowel disease. The primary outcome was change in adenoma detection rate (ADR) of standard, non-AI assisted colonoscopy before and after AI exposure. Multivariable logistic regression was done to identify independent factors affecting ADR.

Yet, despite adhering to a long list of requirements and city requests, they diverge on everything from the number of buildings and amount and type of housing to what they would offer the public. Those include having no more off-street parking spaces than the 270 the lot has today, benefitting public transit by increasing demand for service in the area, and returning $9 million — a “fair share of revenue” — to Metro Transit. A request for proposals issued in April also outlined a number of city goals and recommendations, like having all-electric and energy-efficient buildings, a low ratio of parking spaces to units, plenty of electric vehicle charging stations and many subsidized units. Three developers responded by the city’s July 9 deadline.

Like Napoleon, Putin needs a settlement that will bring Russia back into the Western fold. Battlefield victory means little if Ukraine becomes a forever war. Like Alexander, Trump needs to find a way to turn Western defeat in Ukraine into a victory for him (as peacemaker) and a new way ahead, in which a losing war is magically turned into a stable and bountiful new strategic relationship.

Litigation is already looming. In the US, technology worker Derek Mobley has sued Workday, alleging an algorithm in its ubiquitous candidate-screening software discriminated against him on the basis of age, race and disability, throwing out his applications for more than 100 posts at different companies since 2017. The potential implications for the whole HR technology industry as it rolls out more sophisticated tools have “got everyone scared”, according to Stacia Garr, co-founder of RedThread Research, an HR technology research consultancy. (Workday has said the suit is “without merit”.)

To figure out who will win any given technology race, just look at the rate of acceleration of innovation & growth.

We’ve now had enough electric cars on the road – and for long enough – to have a good idea of how the battery holds up over time. Here we’ll focus on a metric used to capture the battery’s “State of Health” (SoH). It’s what percentage of a battery’s initial capacity is still usable after a given number of miles or years.

The name Hamna Wakaf might mean little to many readers. The name of its reported owner, however, is much better known. Multi-billionaire London real estate mogul Asif Aziz, who controls some of London’s most iconic properties, has been making quite the name for himself, described variously as “Mr West End” (Aziz owns everything from souvenir stores to high-end hotels in the West End) and, less generously, “the meanest landlord in Britain”.

Remarkably, investigations have found that most end up in one place: Huaqiangbei market in Shenzhen. Demand in China for second-hand phones is huge; those that cannot be unlocked are broken apart and rebuilt. And there is no better place to do that than Huaqiangbei, the world’s largest electronics market. Because Shenzhen is where many of the phones were made in the first place, there is a ready supply of skilled workers. 

Hyperclay returns to a simpler model: your app is a single HTML file you (and your clients) manipulate directly. Edit the file through its visual UI and it persists its own state.

Ed Martin sends letter to Letitia James asking that she resign for “the good of the nation.”

The new FAL building is essentially a copy of the present FAL, doubling the final assembly line capacity for the 787. Boeing has reached rate seven and plans to be at rate 10 per month next year. The expansion is planned to be finished in 2028, after which Boeing will have the facilities to reach a rate of 16 787 per month.

Mark Bertolini is the CEO of Oscar Health. We cover the near-death experience that shaped so much of his life and leadership framework, how a decision to raise wages actually increased shareholder returns, and what Oscar’s strategy for disrupting the healthcare industry has in common with pirate ships.

The ultimate goal of this factory is to build one Starship rocket a day. This sounds utterly mad. For the entire Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s, NASA built 15 Saturn V rockets. Over the course of more than three decades, NASA built and flew only five different iconic Space Shuttles. SpaceX aims to build 365 vehicles, which are larger, per year. Wandering around the Starfactory, however, this ambition no longer seems undoable. The factory measures about 1 million square feet. This is two times as large as SpaceX’s main Falcon 9 factory in Hawthorne, California. It feels like the company could build a lot of Starships here if needed.

A more apt label would be cash flow before bad stuff. But suppose for argument’s sake that all of Ford’s adjustments are defensible. Ford says it aims for shareholder distributions—including dividends and share buybacks—of 40% to 50% of adjusted free cash flow. It says it determines its first-quarter supplemental dividends based on the previous year’s adjusted free cash flow, suggesting that those payments count toward the prior year’s payout ratio. Calculated this way, Ford could come close to staying within the 40% to 50% range for 2025—if it hit the top of its guidance for adjusted free cash flow, skipped share buybacks completely, and decided not to pay a supplemental dividend in the first quarter of 2026. In that scenario, if Ford kept its regular dividend unchanged, its payout ratio for 2025 would be 53%, slightly higher than its target range. Ford has said it expects adjusted free cash flow of $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion this year, after factoring in $9 billion of capital expenditures.

I’ve written it for decades now: if you’re actually a “systems camera” maker, you need to enable the ecosystem that surrounds your product. Not partially, but fully. Canon is trying to not just control but own the entire EOS ecosystem. Witness the non-licensing and apparently suit-threatening surrounding the RF mount, for instance. I’d tend to say that Canon’s approach here is contradictory to one of their long-stated goals: own the majority of the camera market in volume. 

In an email to Tesla last month, a top NHTSA official asked for more information about the size of the robotaxi fleet, whether company employees can remotely control the vehicles, and the maximum speed of the cars. The official also sought a test drive for NHTSA employees. It is unclear if one occurred. 

Total revenue that SpaceX will receive from NASA this year is ~$1B out of ~$15B total, so ~7%. Moreover, NASA is paying SpaceX for astronaut & cargo transport to the Space Station, launching research satellites and some work for returning to the Moon.

“help build a purely AI software company called Macrohard. It’s a tongue-in-cheek name, but the project is very real!”

A local reporter pressed the Executive Director of Mpls for the Many today with some simple questions about the relationship between the Minneapolis DFL and the State DFL. This came after she criticized the process of overturning Fateh’s endorsement.

Revenue per room is down year on year in all but the most expensive hotels.

Nothing more fun at the Minnesota State Fair than getting super stoned and riding the SkyGlider.

But of the three bubbles he has inhabited in his working life, Clegg said he found Westminster “the most insufferable, partly just because of the living on past glories and the pomposity of it”. “I think what they’ll learn, which I learned, is you only have one crack at it.”

Meanwhile, the war goes on, which is another way of saying the destruction of Ukraine goes on. Talk about an unnecessary catastrophe.

“Drones and smart systems are redefining the modern battlefield,” Yu explained. “Rather than clinging to expensive legacy platforms, we must invest in capabilities that reflect the future of warfare.”

Moreover, this techno-centric narrative overlooks a critical reality: that militaries do not win wars merely by acquiring new gadgets, but by developing the institutions, training regimens, logistical networks, and doctrinal concepts that enable those tools to be used effectively at scale. Technology does not exist in a vacuum; it must be embedded within a structure that can harness it to achieve strategic effects. The belief that the United States can leapfrog its adversaries through agile startups and disruptive prototypes reflects the same flawed logic that plagued earlier revolutions in military affairs. Drones and AI systems may be tactically sound, and in many cases, they are; however, they do not, by themselves, answer the questions of manpower, sustainment, strategic coherence, or political will. In elevating technology to the status of strategy, these commentators and entrepreneurs mistake innovation for “warfighting” and “disruption” for victory.

My view of the collision at sea of China Coast Guard 3104 and PLA Navy 164 in the vicinity of Bajo de Masinloc in Zambales, Philippines. Before this, the Chinese navy and coast guard ships nearly collided twice trying to outmaneuver BRP Suluan of the Philippine Coast Guard.

For SpaceX, this is great business. The company gets to flex its “anti-monopoly” credibility as well as put cash into its pockets. Because the incremental costs of flying a partially reusable Falcon 9 are so low—perhaps as low as $15 million, by some estimates—SpaceX can plow competitors’ cash into further development of Starlink or Starship.

Not anymore. BYD’s new cars are good-looking, powered by world-class batteries, and boasting better overall build quality than most automakers in the West.

We investigate the information content of personal stock trades by IRS officials. We collect transaction-level data on over five thousand IRS officials’ personal investments and document substantial trading activity in individual stocks by officials across IRS departments.

Farmers want California to change its autonomous tractor ban.

Kodak, Olympus and Fujifilm – The Rise and Deep Fall of the Camera Industry.

The largest deciding factor in the application process has been “technical considerations,” Kuntz said. (EV charging) sites must meet needs for accessibility, ADA compliance and lighting, and be outside of a floodplain. No mention of electricity rates….

The effort has moved quickly. Middleton applied Monday for federal Transportation Alternatives Program grant funding after the City Council voted unanimously in support of the plan Aug. 5, said Abby Attoun, the city’s director of planning and community development. If accepted, Middleton’s bid for $240,000 would help it build infrastructure for BCycle docking stations. The city would contribute $60,000 of its own money toward the project.

Ever since I first encountered the medical field, something struck me as off about their relentless focus on blood pressure. Before long, I began to notice that the blood pressures the same acquaintances (e.g., relatives or friends) shared with me varied immensely. As I was pondering this, a long-time Eastern spiritual teacher shared with me their belief that the West’s relentless focus on blood pressure was due to it being much easier to measure than blood perfusion (healthy blood flow). Then, as I became more acquainted with the medical field, I began to notice a consistent pattern—whenever a drug existed that could treat a number or statistic, as the years went by, the acceptable number kept on being narrowed, making more and more people eligible to take the drugs that treated the number.

Trader said she’s in litigation with the company in an attempt to recover some of the nearly $500,000 she said she’s sunk into the project that it “left in a really bad spot,” as well as on other costs, such as rent incurred because the home wasn’t done on time.

“Safety today is a luxury,” writes Giugiaro. “Those who can afford a new car have a better chance of making it home alive.” He goes on to say, “I owe it to the technology I’ve helped, in my own small way, to shape. If I’d been driving a car from fifteen years ago—the average age of vehicles on Italian roads—I probably wouldn’t be here telling this.”

God writes our story even when we think we have the pen in our hand.

Melting ICE

Building a culinary legacy: Jeanie Roland’s recipe for success.

But in that sale, the question of public resources and private profits arose again. Delaware North demanded $51 million in compensation for Aramark continuing to use the names of several historic properties within the park, such as the Ahwahnee, a hotel, and Curry Village, another group of visitor accommodations. The company claimed those names were a part of its assets under its contract with the park service.

Realizing little had changed in Michigan, she thought about a college teammate whose parents operated a swim school and told Chris she wanted to start one in Birmingham, perhaps in their backyard. Chris suggested they tour a few swim schools around the country to make sure there’d be a market.

Then, in 2009, during efforts to mitigate the financial crisis, newly elected President Barack Obama signed the $787 billion economic stimulus bill. Part of it contained the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, also known as the HITECH Act, which budgeted $49 billion to promote health information technology and EHRs in the United States.

As a result, Tom, like most Americans, now has an electronic health record. However, many millions of Americans now have multiple electronic health records. On average, patients in the United States visit 19 different kinds of doctors throughout their lives. Further, many specialists have unique EHR systems that do not automatically communicate medical data between each other, so you must update your medical information for each one. Nevertheless, Tom now has immediate access to all his medical treatment and test information, something not readily available 20 years ago.

AOC’s attorney, David Mitrani, explained in no uncertain terms in a May 16 letter to the House Ethics Committee that Roberts is considered AOC’s “spouse” only in the context of federal campaign finance law, but NOT for financial disclosure requirements.

I had never bought a property on my own before, and I was glad to find that mortgage advisors, estate agents and solicitors just basically do it all for you (albeit at exorbitant cost). What should have been a straightforward, no-chain purchase took six months due to the complexities of leasehold properties, listed buildings and so forth; I’d made the offer in July, finally exchanged contracts in the run-up to Christmas, and completed in early January last year.

This has become the typical result at BCA, where expenses are understated on the income statement, with a sizable portion capitalized and stored in Inventory.

If, though, I were forced to select the single most revealing video clip of the last decade, it’d be when Chuck Schumer told Rachel Maddow that Trump was dumb for criticizing the CIA, because everyone in Washington knows CIA will destroy you if you do:

For Penn State, among the favorites to leapfrog the Buckeyes for this year’s championship, the cost to pry Knowles away was a contract worth $3.1 million a year. That’s not just half a million dollars higher than the salary of any other assistant in college football. It’s more than what 65 Division I head coaches are earning.

This deep dive into Ford’s Q1 results disclosed after market close yesterday.

FONOPs = mere theatrics for the dim-witted

In 1979, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration faced a problem: how do you track 100+ million vehicles across 50 states when every manufacturer uses different serial number schemes? Their solution became one of the most successful information architecture projects in history – the Vehicle Identification Number standard.

Dotted around the Scottish countryside, honesty boxes are a heartwarming tradition reflecting the trust and community spirit of rural life. These unstaffed stands offer all sorts; from fresh eggs and home-baked goods to seasonal fruits and vegetables, and even handmade crafts. This practice not only supports local farmers and artisans but also fosters a sense of integrity and mutual respect among residents and travellers. Here is a selection of the unique things you can find in and around honesty boxes across the country.

This is either the biggest tech-infrastructure project since the 1960s (since the beginning of the computer age) or the 1880s (the heyday of the railroad age).

this is what you have to go through if you want to get an api key for your gmail.

The announcement comes on the day Colorado law changes the classification of nuclear energy’s definition under state law to include it as a clean energy resource.

Are the strange 39% tariffs on Switzerland (nearly the highest in the world) a tactic to force a gold short squeeze so they can revalue their holdings and acquire a dominant BTC position?

The series will discuss the typical development cycles for an FAA Part 25 aircraft, called a transport category aircraft, and what different ideas there are to reduce the development times.

Once your data is on their computer you don’t really have full control of it anymore. If it is unencrypted then they can access it and depending on their terms of service use it for various purposes like training their AI models etc. If asked they can share your data with US law enforcement or others even if the server is physically not in the US. (Microsoft admitted under oath that it ‘cannot guarantee’ data sovereignty)

Just for the record, what actually happened: UK government officials asked for my input leading into the US President’s upcoming visit to the UK. I provided input, which was then leaked by the UK government to the FT in mutated form for reasons I can’t explain.

FAA anticipates that the operations conducted under part 108 would have a variety of operational personnel positions and therefore does not propose to require any additional operations personnel positions. All operators would be responsible for identifying the necessary operations personnel to ensure the safety of the operation, in addition to ensuring that the operations personnel have the necessary knowledge and skills for their role. In this manner, responsibility is tied to the company operating the UAS rather than an individual that has limited control of the actual operation and can be removed from their position if necessary.

The idea to write a book about everyday absurdities of the Soviet Union was given to me by my good friend Markus Hess who, although born and raised in Canada, has Estonian roots. During our conversations it became clear how difficult it is for a Western person to fully understand what really happened and what daily life was really like in the Soviet Union. Even today, the Westerner regards the vanished Soviet way of life as if from another planet and can ask odd, sometimes humourous questions. Perhaps the most shocking, but also a classical,  example of this lack of comprehension  is the question posed by a Western lady after hearing about the brutal forced mass deportations in the Soviet Union.

She asked, “But why did people let themselves be stuffed into cattle cars bound for Siberia? Why didn’t they call the police?”

Wplace.live happened. Out of the blue, a new collaborative drawing website appeared, built from scratch using OpenFreeMap.

I don’t know what it is, but the internet seems to be crazy about it. One thing is for sure: the traffic it generates is out of this 

Matt Taibbi:

Letter to Bill Grueskin, former Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, on his recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review

Mr. Grueskin,

Regarding your August 1 article, “Knowing: Still Only Half the Battle,” which lauds Charlie Savage of the New York Times for having “dissected and eviscerated” Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s claims about corruption of intelligence in the Trump-Russia investigation:

You praised Savage’s article, “New Reports on Russian Interference Don’t Show What Trump Says They Do,” as an example of the work of an “experienced beat reporter” who can distill complex stories into a “coherent, compelling whole.” Your sub-headline stressed the importance of “showing receipts” in journalism, where “most people don’t follow stories very closely,” but “they can learn a lot when an experienced beat reporter helps them sort out what’s important and what’s chaff.”

Except — and you should know this because the Columbia Journalism Review published over 20,000 words on the subject in January 2023 — Savage and his colleagues at the Times have badly miscovered this story for nearly a decade, and continue to do so. The 2018 Pulitzer Prize the paper won on the topic along with the Washington Post will go down as the same kind of “disgrace” as its 1932 Pulitzer for Walter Duranty’s breathless coverage of Stalin’s Russia. In this case, the Times drifted so far from its traditional mission that it became an animating motive for Gabbard and other investigators in Donald Trump’s administration. 

Witness FBI Director Kash Patel throwing down a gauntlet this weekend, right after your piece ran. He challenged media figures who called him a “liar” in 2018, when as an investigator in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) chaired by California’s Devin Nunes, he outed the Steele Dossier as “fictitious intelligence” used to deceive a federal judge and unlawfully spy on Trump’s campaign. Patel added, “Now I’m the FBI Director,” then hinted that he might release “more docs” so “we can see who is lying,” before ending with a reference to “bogus Pulitzers.”

Why does a fire truck cost $2 million?

And the fab is conveniently located not far from my house ?

Ban AC for DC

If the courts and antitrust regulators are reading—they probably won’t read my blog, but one can dream—this is yet another example of Google advantaging its own browser Chrome over other web browsers.

According to the New York Times, Elias Law Group originally represented Media Matters against Musk’s lawsuit, which accused the group of manipulating X posts to falsely link the social media platform to white nationalists and anti-Semites, part of what Musk alleged was “a ploy to drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.” The litigation and other legal fights with the attorneys general of several red states have left Media Matters with $15 million in legal costs, forcing the Democratic media juggernaut to consider laying off staff, filing bankruptcy, or shutting down altogether, the Timesreported.

The Microsoft memo portends the new reality of the technology industry. For years, the sector has been generous to its employees, offering unheard-of perks and placing a premium on skills such as software development. AI, however, inverts that relationship. As a result, we now face a different set of parameters.

• Loyalty has become a one-way street: Employees must be committed, but technology companies owe only “opportunities,” as and if they deem necessary.
• Layoffs will be used for strategic positioning, regardless of a company’s financial health.
• Profit provides an opportunity to invest in transformation, which sometimes involves eliminating jobs.

Don’t be surprised if normalization of profitable layoffs becomes the next big Silicon Valley export to broader economy. 

Admiral Daryl Caudle, President Donald Trump’s nominee as chief of navy operations, told his confirmation hearing it was not yet certain the US defence industrial base was capable of producing enough Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines to sell three to Australia.

FOIA: 600+ pages of communications between Dr. Francis Collins, Science EIC Holden Thorp, etc:…

Small business owners play a central role in all advanced economies. Nonetheless, they are an understudied occupational group politically, particularly compared to groups that represent smaller portions of the population (e.g., union members, manufacturing workers). We conduct a detailed investigation of the politics of small business owners and offer new insight into the evolving role of education, class, and occupation in electoral politics. Leveraging diverse sources of data – representative surveys from around the world, campaign finance records, voter files, and a first-of-its-kind, bespoke survey of small business owners – we find consistent evidence that small business owners are more likely to identify with and vote for right-wing parties. We find that this tendency cannot be fully explained by factors that cause people to select into being small business owners. Rather, we identify a key operational channel: the experience of being a small business owner leads people to adopt conservative views on government regulation.

Presumably it is well-known what huge company founders did not complete college.

Shunsaku Tamiya was responsible for creating Tamiya’s signature branding and reputation for quality. He invited his brother Masao to create the “twin stars” logo and hired illustrators to create the “white box” look that made Tamiya stand out in sharp contrast to the box art of other model makers.

This paper provides the first systematic and comprehensive empirical study of management and strategy consulting. We unveil the workings of this opaque industry by drawing on universal administrative business-to-business transaction data based on value-added tax links from Belgium (2002-2023). These data permit us to document the nature of consulting engagements, take-up patterns, and the effects on client firms. We document that consulting take-up is concentrated among large, high-labor-productivity firms. For TFP and profitability, we find a U-shaped pattern: both high and low performers hire consultants. New clients spend on average 3% of payroll on consulting, typically in episodic engagements lasting less than one year. Using difference-in-differences designs exploiting these sharp consulting events, we find positive effects on labor productivity of 3.6% over five years, driven by modest employment reductions alongside stable or growing revenue. 

Speaking of eyeglasses that understand and facilitate your personal agenda… here’s the ad that was served up to me in the very next thing that I read.

Holly Paz, the commissioner of Large Business and International Division, and Elizabeth Kastenberg, acting director of the Office of Professional Responsibility, were put on leave while the IRS investigates their conduct against Republicans, the source said, adding that the leave doesn’t mean they are fired. It hasn’t been decided who will replace them, the source said. (Lois Lerner IRS scandal)

“In absence of direct evidence, Crowdstrike and ThreatConnect will supply the media“

NEW: Emails obtained by @SecureUSA and shared with @FreeBeacon show that West Point officials CONFIRMED Hegseth’s acceptance on Dec. 10. But West Point waited until AFTER Hegseth posted his acceptance letter on Dec. 11 before correcting its false statement to ProPublica.

Yes. You are going into political oblivion.

But what we want to know is, who owns our orbit? The research team at Dewesoft analyzed data collected by the UCS Satellite Database, ESRI, and the Space Foundation to create a list of the 50 owners of the most satellites orbiting Earth. As of Sept. 1, 2021, SpaceX is leading the race, with their Starlink satellite program planning to send more than a thousand new satellites into orbit every year. SpaceX owns an incredible 36% of the satellites in orbit around Earth. Read on to see which governments, organizations, and companies own the most satellites in our orbit with this galactic graphic. 

Complete fuselage barrels will consequently not be considered for future aircraft, not by Boeing or any other airframer. While they are not unsafe (rather the contrary, the principle has very few joins), it’s a very challenging, and thus expensive, way to produce a composite aircraft.

Atlassian CEO and co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes sent the video titled “Restructuring the CSS Team: A Difficult Decision for Our Future” to staff on Wednesday morning (30 July), informing them that 150 staff had been made redundant. The video reportedly did not make it seem that the decision was difficult, but rather said it would allow its staff “to say goodbye”.

The Fed’s giant asset purchases, most recently executed during the Covid-19 pandemic, have held down bond yields and enabled more government spending, while simultaneously lining Wall Street’s pockets. The central bank believes itself to be unaccountable to the president on monetary policy, even as it has made critical mistakes such as allowing Covid-era inflation to spike.

Financial Lessons from My Family’s Experience with Long-Term Care Insurance