Smart Beds Helped Them Sleep on a Cloud. Then the Cloud Crashed.
A week ago, I set up an infinite nonsense crawler trap – now it makes up 99% of my server’s traffic. What surprised me is that feeding scrapers garbage is the cheapest and easiest thing I could do.
TV’s top creator has just closed a massive deal with rival NBCUniversal for film and TV when his commitments with Paramount are up. It’s a major move for the ‘Yellowstone’ and ‘Landman’ creator, but perhaps an even bigger coup for NBCU’s Donna Langley—and suggests that her company is still playing to win.
Why does Prime Minister Mark Carney’s “Buy Canadian” policy exclude Albertan oil? How can Canada become a self-sufficient energy superpower while importing crude oil into Ontario, Quebec and the Atlantic provinces? Canada spends approximately $20 billion annually importing oil into eastern Canadian provinces. Every year eastern Canadians convert $20 billion Canadian dollars into USD to pay for the imported oil they consume. Essentially $20 billion Canadian dollars are exported from Canada’s economy annually.
Today, it has the highest GDP per capita of any city in Germany. Yet, much like the country, it looks to the future with fear. As its entire existence depends on the ailing German car industry, Wolfsburg worries: will it become the next Detroit. At first glance, Wolfsburg might seem an unlikely symbol of Germany’s economic unease. Neat, prosperous, and meticulously planned, it is dominated by the monumental VW plant, which still ranks among the largest car factories in the world. Yet to look closely at Wolfsburg today is to glimpse the deeper structural malaise afflicting Germany’s once-mighty industrial power. As Detroit once did for the United States, Wolfsburg mirrors the fate of its nation’s manufacturing heart – a city built on the dream of mobility, modernity and prosperity, now confronting the limits of its model.
Unfortunately, big clients are cottoning on to the advantages too. One finance chief of a large UK company outlined the issue for Breakingviews via an illustrative example. Say an outsourced project costs the client $1 million to do themselves, and Accenture and the like have historically been able to do the same job for $200,000. With the advent of machine learning, companies can do the same work for just $10,000.
Money is almost no object. The new government managed to exempt all defence spending above 1% of GDP from the country’s once-rigid fiscal rules. While larger items on the wish list will still have to be signed off by a parliamentary committee, the scale of the overall plan suggests that the government expects consensus on the general direction of rearmament.
Now, almost a year later, OKDiario released a new report claiming that Apple is installing more than 100 cameras at Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, Real Madrid’s home, to conduct tests during the Wednesday match against Juventus.
These observations suggest that strategic assessments of emergent technology and novel weapons are shaped by several cognitive biases: (1) a tendency to assume the future techno-strategic setting will resemble the present; (2) the belief that strategic assessments are universal and are not driven by the somewhat idiosyncratic influence of strategic culture and the pressing political and bureaucratic imperatives of the moment; and (3) a tendency to embrace a “one-size fits all” attitude that fails to consider how black swan events could upset the applecart. Indeed, that black swan took flight on September 11, 2001, a few short years after Gray tapped into another strategic theme of the day — that low-intensity conflict was on the strategic horizon.
And while the US had successfully built thousands of ships very rapidly during the war, it had come at a cost: the US cargo ships, using modern methods, were more expensive to build than similar British ships. Though some British shipbuilders recognized the potential of welding and prefabrication, they weren’t clearly worth reorganizing the entire industry around.
England and Germany got into printing very slowly because the numbers were so small. But Luther’s 95 Theses printed over 5,000 copies in two weeks (1517) Luther’s prolific German established his language instead of clinging to Latin, which was the norm of scholars.
To return Americans to the Moon, SpaceX aligned Starship development along two paths: development of the core Starship system and supporting infrastructure, including production facilities, test facilities, and launch sites — which SpaceX is self-funding representing over 90% of system costs — and development of the HLS-specific Starship configuration, which leverages and modifies the core vehicle capability to support NASA’s requirements for landing crew on and returning them from the Moon. SpaceX is working under a fixed-price contract with NASA, ensuring that the company is only paid after the successful completion of progress milestones, and American taxpayers are not on the hook for increased SpaceX costs. SpaceX provides significant insight to NASA at every stage of the development process along both paths, including access to flight data from missions not funded under the HLS contract. ……. To date, SpaceX has produced more than three dozen Starships and 600 Raptor rocket engines
Dr. Räsänen and Bishop Pohjola were first charged with hate crimes in 2021 for the publication of a 2004 booklet which articulates historic Christian teaching on human sexuality, with Dr. Räsänen charged as the author and Bishop Pohjola as the publisher. Dr. Räsänen was also charged for a 2019 tweet which included a picture of a Bible verse and for comments made during a 2019 radio program. The two stood trial in 2022 at the Helsinki District Court, where they were unanimously acquitted by a panel of three judges who declared: “It is not the role of the district court to interpret biblical concepts.” An appeal by the prosecution was subsequently heard in the Helsinki Court of Appeal, with the two again unanimously acquitted on all charges in 2023.
In August, a B.C Supreme Court judge ruled the Cowichan Tribes have Aboriginal title over the land on the Fraser River, that Crown and city titles on the land are defective and invalid, and the granting of private titles on it by the government unjustifiably infringed on the Cowichan title.
Powell’s Books’ flagship store on West Burnside Street downtown represents the world’s largest independent bookstore, according to the company’s website. They have other locations, including on Southeast Hawthorne Street, among others, around the Portland area. “As with many businesses right now, we’re seeing expenses rise faster than sales. This has been an ongoing challenge since the pandemic, and while we’ve taken many steps to grow revenue and control costs, this most recent action was an unfortunate but necessary step to help ensure the long-term stability of Powell’s Books,” Solly added.
But how? The most important thing rich countries — including China — can do is to fully open their markets to these countries’ products. The economic literature is pretty conclusive that this raises economic growth in poor countries, at least somewhat. There are many instances in which rich countries have actually done this, and there are a lot of ways we can evaluate the results of those experiments. For example, Romalis (2007) found that when America reduced its tariffs under the Most Favored Nation program, poor countries sold more products to the U.S. and grew faster as a result:
Orion and SLS have burned through nearly $100b to date. If I took $100b in $20 bills and stapled them end to end, they would run from my office, down the hall, out the front door, down the drive, onto the road, onto the ramp, down the local freeway, past the crumbling remnants of JPL, up the mountain, then up into the sky, through the troposphere, past the space station, between 10,000 Starlink satellites, past geostationary orbit (my string of bills is now longer than a space elevator!), all the way to the Moon, around the entire lunar equator, between all the legs of all the lunar landers of all the missions that have landed there, then all the way back to the Earth, through the atmosphere, down the mountain, down the road, through my front door, and back to my desk. At the present rate of NASA’s budget, additional bill consumption, stapling, and ejection from my office desk would break the speed of sound.