Chinese officials and automakers are eyeing German factories slated for closure and are particularly interested in Volkswagen’s sites (VOWG_p.DE), opens new tab, a person with knowledge of Chinese government thinking told Reuters. Buying a factory would allow China to build influence in Germany’s prized auto industry, home to some of the oldest and most prestigious car brands, the person said.

American bus stops are often significantly closer together than European ones. The mean stop spacing in the United States is around 313m, which is about five stops per mile. However, in older, larger American cities, stops are placed even closer. In Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, the mean spacing drops down to 223m, 214m, and 248m respectively, meaning as many as eight stops per mile. By contrast, in Europe it’s more common to see spacings of 300m to 450m, roughly four stops per mile. An additional 500 feet takes between 1.5 and 2.5 minutes to walk at the average pace of 2.5 to 4 miles per hour.

“The national interests of countries like the US and Russia won’t always match up. Most of the time, they won’t. But when they do overlap, it would be a mistake, a serious mistake, not to use that moment to agree on practical and mutually beneficial projects: in the economy, trade, investment, and so on.”And then he added: when US and Russian interests don’t align, it would be criminal to let that disagreement slide into confrontation. Especially a direct, “hot” confrontation.

The bottom line is two-fold: 1) the tag team failed to overthrow the regime in Iran, although it surely has not given up on that goal; and 2) there is good reason to think that Israel and the US did not win the12-Day war.

@SenFeinstein abused her Desert Protection Act to close down America’s most profitable Mountain Pass mine in the Mojave in 2002. Her husband Blum was exclusive importer of rare earth metals from China

Verizon has started enforcing a 365-day lock period on phones purchased through its TracFone division, one week after the Federal Communications Commission waived a requirement that Verizon unlock handsets 60 days after they are activated on its network.

In June 2007, Marc Andreessen published what became the defining essay on startup strategy. “The Only Thing That Matters” argued that of the three elements of a startup—team, product, and market—market matters most. A great market pulls the product out of the startup. The product doesn’t need to be great; it just has to basically work.

Mark Carney cannot simply return to Parliament and expect, as he has for the past year, that re-announcing projects or creating new bureaucracies will suffice to fix Canada’s woefully inadequate military, underdeveloped natural resources, and entrenched internal trade barriers. Small ball and tinkering is not going to cut it.

The state told Marin it needed to plan for 14,000+ new homes (a ~12% increase in a county with ~115K homes). The county nodded. Then it upzoned a few dead malls and commercial sites, leaving 99% of its residential land untouched

In 2018, for instance, the West Michigan Woman Brilliance Awards named her woman of the year. In 2020, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer appointed Ezeh to the executive committee of Michigan’s Early Childhood Investment Corporation. In 2021, Aquinas College honored the Nigerian fraudster with its Distinguished Service Award. The acclaim and upward mobility evidently weren’t enough for Ezeh, who decided to live a jet-set lifestyle at taxpayers’ expense. According to a 2023 whistleblower complaint, Ezeh used various interrelated organizations to funnel hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to herself as well as to friends and family members while serving as CEO of the Early Learning Neighborhood Collaborative.

“I think Ken Howery was an effective ambassador to Sweden several years back. I absolutely believe in the private-sector experience,” said Rufus Gifford, who served as President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Denmark and was a top fund-raising official on Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.

RGGI forces its member states to buy emissions credits…from RGGI. It’s a non-profit-run carbon tax system. Those credits then get charged directly to you on your electric bill. Youngkin pulled Virginia out of RGGI and saved Virginian’s nearly a billion dollars on their electric bills.

Before you go writing off Virginia know this, Abigail Spanberger has been groomed to run for President(the new Hillary). Being governor is just a stepping stone. So while everyone is distracted with Gavin she is the plan. The VA Legislature will push crazy, radical stuff&she will veto some of it to appear moderate.

Unlike other megaconstellations, including SpaceX’s Starlink, Blue Origin’s new constellation will not serve consumers or try to provide direct-to-cell communications. Rather, TeraWave will seek to serve “tens of thousands” of enterprise, data center, and government users who require reliable connectivity for critical operations.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is highlighting the worst of worst criminal aliens arrested by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Europe is pathetic at getting anything done. Strategically weak Prevaricating. Disunited. Naive. A confused gaggle of middle managers waiting for distinct leadership, all looking to one another for answers because nobody seems to have any. Clinging onto rules and treaties that are no longer fit for purpose rather than actually using instinct and confidence, as it is the only foothold the lemming-like bureaucrats have to help formulate decisions.

ICE did NOT target a child. The child was ABANDONED.

Tons of headlines from Davos. Here’s a quick run down…

A 2024 filing shows the group awarded just $158,811 in grants that year while Armstrong brought in a salary of $215,726

Bugs Apple Loves: Why else would they keep them around for so long?

Downtown Denver’s office vacancy rate grows to 38.2% as tenants reimagine the workplace

SFPark: interactive map of SF parking regulations.

Got on the Red line in Chicago. One car had guy living in his own shit, sprawled out in his filth eating Chinese take out food, and the car smelled like it. The other had two guys openly smoking joints yelling about the Bears. I chose the shit car because I didn’t want to get into an argument about Caleb’s lucky toss since that might have ended with one of us being stabbed. Thanks Chicago for such luxurious choices.

Due to massive demand, I’ve added English subtitles to the German Amelia/Maria video. Now the message can be understood worldwide

Police at my stop tell me they can’t/won’t do anything. Why give him a ticket when the judge will toss out it anyways.

The lawsuit alleges the companies accessed patient medical records and then sold them to lawyers who sifted through the files to identify potential clients. These companies are “exploiting health information exchange frameworks to fraudulently access and steal sensitive patient health information for financial gain,” the lawsuit argues.

Veterans generally understand the prevalence, presence and immediacy of danger intuitively. This is a trait they share with LE. For example, as a veteran I plan to never again enter the Minneapolis/St. Paul region, ever.

And here’s the hard truth we’ve lived, the people shouting loudest about “protecting immigrants” and hating on ICE don’t actually care about immigrants like us. They care about looking morally superior. That’s it.

Did you know that we fought an entire war in Somalia with 28,000 troops? No. How could you? For you are on the “inside” and unable to see the whole of the host. The host does not want to see itself. If it could, then it would see itself for the bloated, obese, grotesque monster that it is, a monster that has ravaged nearly every small country in the world.

Apple’s annual spend at TSMC grew from $2B in 2014 to $24B in 2025. That is 12x in 12 years. Apple went from 9% of TSMC revenue to 25% at its peak and settled to 20% in 2025. More striking is Apple’s dominance at node launches: consistently >50% since 20nm and in some cases near 100%. Apple effectively funded the yield learning curve for every major node transition since 20nm.

But there’s a small workaround that seems to work. Browsers won’t delay the loading of an image if it’s already been fetched. You can take advantage of that by conditionally preloading the image using a media query, then marking the image as lazy later. I tested it using the HTTP link header, but may also work fine with a <link rel="preload"> tag.

The Remnant: The Last Christians of Denmark is an independent documentary film exploring the lives, hopes, and challenges of traditional Christian families in one of the world’s most secular nations.

Richard Stallman’s list of protests. More.

Too often, technology becomes obsolete before the procurement cycle even finishes. The thesis of Klein and Thompson does not simply apply to FAA acquisition; it explains why so many modernization efforts languish or fail.

What I am saying is that I, nor anybody, can tell the difference between the conference coverage and a very well-executed hoax. Consider that the Great Moon Hoax was walking a very fine tightrope between giving the appearance of seriousness, while also not giving away too many details that’d let the cat out of the bag. Here, the conference rhymes.

“We don’t want to be perpetual renters of disposable crap,” she told an interviewer for the website Front Porch Republic. “We want things that last.”

Like Houellebecq and Céline, however, Obertone’s literary reputation is difficult to separate from his political positions. Houellebecq once described Islam, the faith of many French people of immigrant origin, as “the dumbest religion.” He later published a novel imagining France under the rule of a Muslim president whose title—Submission—mischievously alluded to the Arabic etymology of “Islam.” Obertone, for his part, has been highly critical of immigration’s impact on French society and has ties to “great replacement” theory. His three-volume novel, Guérilla (published between 2016 and 2022)is the story of France’s descent into civil war following an uprising of racial minorities. 

The booming second-hand luxury market and stricter anti-money-laundering regulations have intensified this scrutiny. As one sales associate at a major Paris boutique told Glitz, “Every new client is automatically a suspect.” Staff now collect and assess far more data than before, from home addresses and their perceived prestige to social media activity and online presence. Sales associates are trained to evaluate whether a client’s buying journey appears coherent.

There were 372 distinct emojis used within 4162 notes (Figure). Approximately one-quarter (1011 notes [24.3%]) contained more than 1 emoji (maximum?=?32; median?=?4). Emoji usage rates remained mostly stable at 1.4 notes with emojis per 100?000 notes from 2020 to 2024, increasing to 10.7 per 100?000 notes by quarter 3 of 2025.

Another big court win against the very corrupt Wisconsin State Attorney General Josh Kaul and his lackey Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne.
Surprise ending.

After four matches, Wisconsin silenced 11,549 at Carver-Hawkeye Arena by taking a 9-3 lead over the fourth-ranked Hawkeyes, who haven’t lost to the Badgers since 2007.

The software engineers — all white males dressed casually in sweatshirts and jackets — were soon confronted by protesters who surrounded the restaurant, shouting insults and blowing whistles in their ears as they attempted to leave, according to Lee.

We call this quality resonance. It’s the experience of encountering something that speaks to our deeper values. It’s a spark of recognition, a sense that we’re being invited to lean in, to participate. Unlike the digital junk food of the day, the more we engage with what resonates, the more we’re left feeling nourished, grateful, alive. As individuals, following the breadcrumbs of resonance helps us build meaningful lives. As communities, companies, and societies, cultivating shared resonance helps us break away from perverse incentives, and play positive-sum infinite games together.

A cold-blooded project uses boring technology. The build and test scripts don’t depend on external services that might change, break, or disappear entirely. It uses vendored dependencies.

The product development problem was structural. Donahoe reorganized Nike from sport-specific teams to general categories: Men’s, Women’s, and Kids’. This destroyed the organizational capabilities that had driven product development. The running team understood biomechanics and materials science. The basketball team understood court dynamics and performance requirements. When you collapse these into general categories, you lose the specialized knowledge that creates functional differentiation. Senior designers and executives left for competitors. The company began relying more heavily on retro basketball shoes, which worked during the pandemic. But when trends shifted toward lower-profile shoes like Adidas Sambas, Nike was left holding excess inventory. Inventory turnover deteriorated, and gross margins compressed further.

Stern hauled her aboard. With the wind at their backs, the final leg to a Caribbean island — which he declined to name, but is widely reported to be Curaçao — was mercifully smooth. A private plane was waiting to take her the rest of the way to Oslo.

So, if you’re Neon, why not try to put this movie you believe in front of as many eyeballs as possible?

Unfortunately, that is not what happened. Instead of simply de-indexing the search result, like they do for so many other items, Google refused to acknowledge that I was the author of the book. After receiving my DMCA complaint, they replied:

There were many exciting and unprecedented developments in the world of databases. Vibe coding entered the vernacular. The Wu-Tang Clan announced their time capsule project. Rather than raising one massive funding round this year instead of going public, Databricks raised two massive rounds instead of going public.

Middle-earth is guided not just by the opposing wills of good and evil but by another, providential force beyond the material. In the earliest chapters of the series, we learn that Gandalf is keenly aware of this, when he warns against the pragmatic decision of slaying Gollum:

“I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end.”

Everything makes sense when you consider the following seven immutable truths:

A Visual Guide for Canadian Voters DOTTING THE MAP FOLLOW THE MONEY! Take a peek into the complex web ensnaring Canada as we head into the election. Poke on each map below to learn more! Via Kovrig.

ICE has provided @FoxNews a list of the most egregious criminal aliens they’ve arrested during their surge in the sanctuary state of Minnesota, & it’s the most disturbing list I’ve ever seen, including numerous convicted child rapists/sodomizers & ten convicted killers, most with deportation orders going back many years. Several from Laos, Somalia, and Sudan.

“Qui tam is a legal provision that allows a private individual (known as a relator) to file a lawsuit on behalf of the government to recover funds lost to fraud. The term comes from the Latin phrase qui tam pro domino rege quam pro se ipso in hac parte sequitur, meaning “he who brings the action for the king as well as for himself.”  In California, these actions are primarily governed by the California False Claims Act (CFCA), which is modeled after the federal version but tailored to protect state and local taxpayer money.  How Qui Tam Uncovers Fraud in California:

impact on Postmarking Timing: The rule clarifies that the date displayed on a machine-applied postmark represents the “date of the first automated processing operation” performed at a processing facility, rather than the date the mail was dropped off

The British empire had largely completed its Red Line cable network by 1902. This network allowed news and messages to be delivered in a few minutes or several hours at most depending on the message queue’s length. It spanned the globe and formed a network ring so traffic could be routed in the opposite direction in case of disruption. 

A ship in the wrong place isn’t all that much better than no ship at all, so there are reasons to want numbers.

The Sermon on the Mount did not come to inspire us. It came to strip us. Then it led us to the only place hope could survive: “It is finished.”

Meet the sword-wielding man hired to kick squatters out of empty Oakland homes. A squatter removal cottage industry has grown out of California’s housing crisis, catering to property owners who don’t want to go to court.

The first recorded articulations of the West as a political identity came around the time of the 1821-1829 Greek War of Independence, Varouxakis told me. Until then, the Ottoman Empire had been Europe’s most worrying threat. So, when people wanted to talk about their collective otherness and defense against the Ottomans, they’d speak of Christendom, or of Europe.

Average family medicine wait times across major U.S. markets compared with the national average. Markets dominated by academic medical centers consistently exhibit longer waits. Markets with fragmented, independent primary care access cluster near or below the national norm.

It turned out that the real unlock of reasoning was in driving tools. Reasoning models with access to tools can plan out multi-step tasks, execute on them and continue to reason about the results such that they can update their plans to better achieve the desired goal.

Many of the convenient tools we use today (email, messaging, social media, password manager) are essential for daily life but they also yield control over to organizations (Google, Facebook, Amazon) that don’t necessarily have our best interst in mind [1][2].

My setup

Questioning how “incentives align” is a really good litmus test for most things.

Most of the following recommendations are based on my own threat model and comfort level. There will always be a compromise between effort and easy. It’s best to pick what fits your lifestyle.

As we will soon see, the typechecking step is probably the most relevant for most developers. Like most things, nothing is that simple. Different languages have differently flavored compilers, doing a wide range of things. This is not a thorough review on all things compilers, so instead, let’s take a sample of languages and see what kind of compilers they have.

On 22 Oct 1925, Julius Edgar Lilienfeld (a Polish¹ professor in Germany) patented the field-effect transistor (FET).^[LIL1] In 1928, he also patented the metal oxide semiconductor FET (MOSFET).^[LIL2] Lilienfeld’s designs worked.^{[ARN98][ROS95]} The much later point-contact transistor (Bell Labs, 1948) was a dead end: today, almost all of the billions of trillions of transistors in our computers and smartphones are FETs of the Lilienfeld type.

Readings in Database Systems (commonly known as the “Red Book”) has offered readers an opinionated take on both classic and cutting-edge research in the field of data management since 1988. Here, we present the Fifth Edition of the Red Book — the first in over ten years.

Let’s try to see what sort of picture would be taken by a sensor that is placed near the objects without any enclosure. I’ll also significantly increase the sensor’s resolution to make the pixels of the final image align with the pixels of your display. In the demonstration below the left side represents a view of the scene with the small greenish sensor present, while the right one shows the taken picture:

“When I was in grade school, the teacher, Mrs. Dow, said, ‘Who would be willing to recite the Gettysburg Address on Memorial Day in Cottage Grove?’ I was the only one who raised my hand,” he said.

The other mechanism is mostly only understood by a handful of libertarians; it is law as a violence-minimizing equilibrium among a number of roughly equal agents playing an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game. In such settings, cooperation evolves naturally and doesn’t have to be handed down by a single ruler or coalition. I’ll call this “IPD law”.

It all started when he stepped in one of the pool cars that Ford employees drove around campus. Since it wasn’t his vehicle, he didn’t know where the fuel tank was. But when the gas light turned on, so did a lightbulb over his head. After driving to the wrong side of the pump, it occurred to Moylan that a simple graphic on the dashboard could save others from his mistake. Fueled by a desire to solve real problems, he figured this information would be especially useful for rental-car customers and families with multiple cars—and Ford employees in pool cars.

I have never used this, either, I’m publishing it here because the MPAA is attempting to suppress public knowledge of it.