Over the last 12 months, the US Treasury issued a cumulative $21 TRILLION of T-Bills, the most in history.

Even after wrestling with nature, winemakers face spiralling labour costs as the twin forces of urbanisation and the ageing population drain the Chinese countryside of its agricultural labour. Then there is the stubbornly elusive question of who will buy the wine. Despite improving in quality over the past decade and winning acclaim in international competitions, Chinese wine still struggles to compete overseas with new-world alternatives on price and old-world ones on reputation. Meanwhile, domestic drinkers with a penchant for regular consumption remain in the minority.

So the Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos) put out a hit piece on those discussing the mental health side effects of hormonal birth control + bragged about getting videos on the topic removed from TikTok. In the same week, Amazon started selling the first ever OTC birth control

This tool lets you visualise British place names that match certain search terms on a map.

The incorporation of RCS support is anticipated to bring several enhancements to communications between iPhones and Android smartphones, including:

The results of this year’s survey show significant obstacles remain for independent reporting in China, especially in the form of heightened intimidation and surveillance, both in-person and through more sophisticated digital means. Reporting trips during which foreign journalists do not experience problems are the exception.

This is the story of Lore Harp McGovern, founder of Vector Graphic. With her friend Carole Ely, she launched a multi-million-dollar computer company from her suburban home and became one of the most important founders of the microcomputer age. It is based on contemporary accounts in publications such as the Harvard Business Review, Interface Age, Kilobaud, Time, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as books such as Women, Technology and Power by Marguerite Zientara; Future Rich by Jacqueline Thompson; and The Untold Story of the Computer Revolution by G.H. Stine. It is also based on the words of Lore Harp McGovern herself.

The Army can currently buy commercial drones off of the Blue UAS list, a list of drones vetted for government use. Such drones, however, can be eight to 14 times more expensive than those sold by Chinese companies, the Financial Times reported in 2021.

Interesting progress trend in American wrestling: all of a sudden there are a handful of high school wrestlers dominating fully-grown former NCAA champs and truly competing at World Team Trials

The United States shouldn’t manage the competition with China; it should win it. Beijing is pursuing a raft of global initiatives designed to disintegrate the West and usher in an antidemocratic order. It is underwriting expansionist dictatorships in Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela. It has more than doubled its nuclear arsenal since 2020 and is building up its conventional forces faster than any country has since World War II. These actions show that China isn’t aiming for a stalemate. Neither should America.

We need to talk about the fact that Elizabeth Warren isn’t actually very smart. I’m a great believer in the “show, don’t tell” school of political commentary, and I try to discipline myself against the cheap temptation to insult political opponents instead of taking on their arguments. Liberals and progressives have a particular addiction to insisting that all of their opponents are dumb. But sometimes, you have to draw the conclusions out loud. This week’s flap over Warren’s comments on Israel and Gaza is the latest proof of something that’s been clear for quite some time: Warren isn’t a smart person …

in january 2023, i had a simple ultrasound done at SimonMed. they sent me 4 bills totaling $5137 for it. after a year of emails and phone calls, they finally admitted today that i only owed $140.53 and are mailing me a refund check!

Tractor Supply’s CEO on How It Escaped the Post-Pandemic Curse

Our favorite pictures from the North American eclipse

‘Help’ written in palm fronds assists US forces in rescuing Micronesians stranded on tiny island.

The Lever Announces New Hires In Big Expansion
What started as a two-person newsletter has grown into a powerhouse newsroom.

I’m sad—and frankly baffled—to report that the House voted today to reward the government’s widespread abuses of Section 702 by massively expanding the government’s powers to conduct warrantless surveillance.

“They call you while you’re sitting next to your dying loved one and they ask you if they can have his organs,” said his wife. “Meanwhile, he wasn’t good enough to receive organs from them… I can’t describe the feeling … It makes me sick to my stomach.’’

Tiambra’s current bail is one hundred times higher than the $3,000 price for her freedom set after a hit and run 11 months before the Schroeder Road fatalities. The earlier one (on 03-02-2022) injured four people in a Whole Foods parking lot. Best we can figure, the guy who bailed her out so cheaply, one Liam Manjon, is now in Chicago. He should remain there. His organization, Free the 350, celebrated by the progressive media hereabouts for striking a blow against supposedly racist slave-catching police, appears to be quiescent. We wrote about it here:

But during her first week she walked into a conference room at headquarters with brown paper covering the windows and door to ensure privacy, and she started piecing things together. The mysterious conference room was filled with boxes of Trader Joe’s snack foods piled high on shelves, which Amazon had bought up to study for its own brand. This alarmed the employee, who was eventually told she was hired to help create the product assortment for Wickedly Prime. 

We examine the relation between earnings information content and the use of trust words, such as “character,” “ethics,” and “honest,” in the MD&A section of 10-K. We find that earnings announcements of firms using trust words have lower information content than earnings announcements of firms that do not use trust words. We also find that the value relevance of earnings is lower for firms using trust words than those not using trust words. Further, firms using trust words are more likely to receive a comment letter from the SEC, pay higher audit fees, and have lower corporate social responsibility scores. Overall, our results suggest that firms that use trust words in the 10-K are associated with negative outcomes, and trust words are an inverse measure of trust.

But the Highlands neighborhood is the only part of Madison still zoned TR-R — and under the city’s current rules, nothing else can be zoned that way again. To save its rare status,more than 70% of property owners in theHighlands have put covenants in place to “protect the historic character of their neighborhood,” said attorney Dan O’Callaghan, who’s representing the group.

He set out to live quietly — and then pass away just the same.

Crawl and convert any website into clean markdown.

There’s a whole paid industry dedicated to restructuring what doctors and nurses do to reduce costs and increase output.

The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony

Until recently, information from rescue excavations was sequestered in a vast gray literature of reports published in Greek by the state archeological service. But, in 2014, a group of Greek archeologists and a cartographer launched an organization called the Dipylon Society, which aims to share these discoveries more widely. Dipylon has undertaken a series of fascinating, high-tech projects, including digital maps, searchable databases, and free mobile apps with guided walking tours. Its first app, Walk the Wall Athens, appeared in 2018. It leads users through a twisting six-kilometre course, past thirty-five locations where parts of the ancient city’s walls survive. The route snakes through the basements of hotels and apartment buildings, beneath shops and through parking garages, connecting points where the twenty-five-hundred-year-old monumental walls are still accessible. At these hidden spots, the app allows you to see historical photos, read key findings from the rescue excavations, and hear an audio narration in Greek or English.

Organized labor paid the price for embracing illegal migrants

Asra Nomani

Soon after, this past November, lawyers for Fairfax County Public Schools filed a motion, alleging that Kate had committed a “fraud on the court,” an allegation that U.S. District Court Judge Rossie Alston rejected in late January, ruling that the school system “overreached” in attempting to dismiss the case. Alston noted that the Facebook messages hadn’t been authenticated. 

Indeed, after Chris testified, a Facebook official told the Fairfax County Times, “You can’t see deleted messages or conversations. Deleting a message permanently removes it from your Chat list.” The Facebook official added that “Facebook User” means an account has been “deactivated or deleted.”

The dueling – and deeply contradictory – narratives underscore the complexity of cases of alleged sexual assault and coverup, but the new information from Facebook raises serious questions about the veracity of Chris’s statements and the efforts by Fairfax County officials to flip the narrative on Kate and frame the alleged victim as the alleged “aggressor.” The Fairfax County Times attempted to purchase a court transcript of the heated testimony. However, in an unusual move by the court, a court reporter said, “By agreement between the parties and the Court, transcripts will not be released at this time. Thanks.” The school district’s lawyers have attempted to raise issues with the judge about routine reporting the Fairfax County Times has done while covering the trial. On Wednesday, the Fairfax County Times submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act to identify the official representing the school district on the Zoom call with Chris. When someone communicates with a third party, it removes legal privilege. 

Kelley Meyerhofer

Newly released reports raise questions about the financial viability of Wisconsin’s public universities and signal additional cuts coming to some campuses in future years.

The University of Wisconsin System paid outside firm Deloitte $2.8 million to assess the financial health of its individual campuses. The reports released this week underscore the difficult financial forces facing most UW campuses and their unsustainable reliance on reserves to cover year after year of budget deficits.

——

More.

Alex Tabarrok:

In my 2011 book, Launching the Innovation Renaissance, I wrote:

At times, teacher pay in the United States seems more like something from Soviet-era Russia than 21st-century America. Wages for teachers are
low, egalitarian and not based on performance. We pay physical education teachers about the same as math teachers despite the fact that math teachers
have greater opportunities elsewhere in the economy. As a result, we have lots of excellent physical education teachers but not nearly enough excellent
math teachers. The teachers unions oppose even the most modest proposals to add measures of teacher quality to selection and pay decisions.

As I wrote, however, Wisconsin passed Act 10, a bill that discontinued collective bargaining over teachers’ salary schedules. Act 10 took power away from the labor unions and gave districts full autonomy to negotiate salaries with individual teachers. In a paper that just won the Best Paper published in AEJ: Policy in the last three years, Barbara Biasi studies the effect of Act 10 on salaries, effort and student achievement.

Compensation of most US public school teachers is rigid and solely based on seniority. This paper studies the effects of a reform that gave school districts in Wisconsin full autonomy to redesign teacher pay schemes. Following the reform some districts switched to flexible compensation. Using the expiration of preexisting collective bargaining agreements as a source of exogenous variation in the timing of changes in pay, I show that the introduction of flexible pay raised salaries of high-quality teachers, increased teacher quality (due to the arrival of high-quality teachers from other districts and increased effort), and improved student achievement.

We still have a long way to go but COVID, homeschooling and open-access voucher programs have put a huge dent in the power of the teacher’s unions. There is now a chance to bring teacher pay into the American model. Moreover, such a model is pro-teacher! Not every district in Wisconsin grasped the opportunity to reform teacher pay but those districts that did raised pay considerably. Appleton district, for example, instituted pay for performance, Oshkosh did not. Prior to the Act salaries were about the same in the two districts:

After the expiration of the CBAs, the same teacher could earn up to $68,000 in Appleton, and only between $39,000 and $43,000 in Oshkosh.

——-

Wisconsin’s Act 10, Flexible Pay, and the Impact on Teacher Labor Markets: Student test scores rise in flexible-pay districts. So does a gender gap for teacher compensation.

If not to teacher salaries, where is this money going?

More on Act 10 and the related Milwaukee pension scandal.

——-

More. “Important insights into the impact of flexibility in teacher pay schemes on student outcomes.”

——

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Thomas Massie:

I questioned Intel Committee Chairman Turner about special treatment Congressmen get in the proposed FISA bill.

Instead of giving a carve out to Congress from unconstitutional spying, just require a warrant for all Americans!

Eric Hoover:

The latest @usedgov update is a doozy:

~16% of FAFSAs require a correction.

~30% of forms “are potentially affected by known processing or data errors.”

~20% require corrected tax data from IRS. Colleges will start receiving those forms “by May 1.” tinyurl.com/4ey3s4h6

“while making the cat-converter inaccessible for Sawzall-wielding thieves”.

SpaceX’s Gwynne Shotwell on the future of space travel.

“All who sincerely believe in Him, experience that remarkable, supernatural love toward Him. This phenomenon is unaccountable; it is altogether beyond the scope of man’s creative powers. Time, the great destroyer, is powerless to extinguish this sacred flame; time can neither exhaust its strength nor put a limit to its range. This is it, which strikes me most; I have often thought of it. This it is which proves to me quite convincingly the Divinity of Jesus Christ.”

More than 100 million Americans don’t have regular access to primary care, a number that has nearly doubled since 2014. Yet demand for primary care is up, spurred partly by record enrollment in Affordable Care Act plans. Under pressure from increased demand, consolidation, and changing patient expectations, the model of care no longer means visiting the same doctor for decades.

The tragedy hardened Longo’s views on crime and abortion. “I could not vote for President Biden,” he said. Khanna sat quietly as Longo spoke. “One of the challenges we have as a country is we have a wrong stereotypical view of the Trump voter,” Khanna said to us after the conversation had moved on. “The Trump voter includes possibly the teacher you most respect.” Longo spoke highly of Khanna, praising his slogan of “progressive capitalism” and his push to use technology to create economic opportunity. He even said he might be able to vote for Khanna one day. “A Trump-Khanna voter!” Khanna marveled.

One reason Anderson was so effective in the area of digital rights is that he had the ability to look forward and see the next challenge while it was still forming. Even more important, he had an extraordinary ability to explain complex concepts in an understandable manner. You can experience this for yourself at the YouTube channelwhere he posted a series of lectures on security engineering or by reading any of the massive list of papers available at his home page.

“So you draft up a fake lease, you use that lease to get the power and things turn in your name, you pay the bill.”

Judge Merchan, who is presiding over President Trump’s New York City trial regarding the charges brought by DA Alvin Bragg, has a daughter named Loren Merchan, who is the Partner and Part Owner of Authentic Campaigns, a firm whose “featured client” is the Biden-Harris Campaign. Loren Merchan’s X account, known as @LorenM426, has a profile picture of President Trump behind bars in a jail cell. On Tuesday, Merchan placed a gag order on President Trump over his TruthSocial posts highlighting Merchan’s conflict of interest. This further proves President Trump can’t have a fair trial in New York. More.

Loren Merchan’s firm was paid $4 million by Adam Schiff at the same time he conspired with Michael Cohen to take down Donald Trump. Cohen will be a witness in Judge Merchan’s courtroom next month. More. More on campaign donations.

Financing Global Health.

“Secretary Oliver and the Attorney General violated the Public Inspection Provision by refusing to timely produce voter data in response to Voter Reference’s February, 2022, and May, 2022, voter data requests; (v) Voter Reference is entitled to reasonable attorney’s fees, litigation expenses, and costs accrued in its prosecution of claims made under the National Voter Registration Act”

It is vaguely about “…having profiling used for future decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you.”

Trash from the International Space Station may have hit a house in Florida. NASA collected the item to confirm whether it came from the International Space Station.

What is a json number?

At issue is a once widely used test that overestimated how well Black people’s kidneys were functioning, making them look healthier than they really were — all because of an automated formula that calculated results for Black and non-Black patients differently. That race-based equation could delay diagnosis of organ failure and evaluation for a transplant, exacerbating other disparities that already make Black patients more at risk of needing a new kidney but less likely to get one.

Has Trust in the U.S. Intelligence Community Eroded?Examining the Relationship Between Policymakers and Intelligence Providers.

Control Data Corporation understands that reliability is important for any computer user, so ECS features 5K words (38.4 KB) of “reserve memory” to tolerate failures. If part of ECS memory fails, the user can bring reserve memory into operation in 1K word increments by simply exchanging two wires. ECS storage is also parity protected.

I downloaded 10 years of the “Ask HN: Who is hiring” and put them through a Python script to spot hiring trends. Getting a tech job 10 years ago is definitely different than getting a tech job today. Knowing these trends will help you know what skills to leverage in the rapidly changing tech job market.

So you can run Postgres on many file systems, which raises the question: Are there any significant differences between them? Does it even matter which filesystem you pick? Exploring these questions is the aim of this analysis.

MYCENAEAN WARRIORS AND THE SEA-PEOPLES

Autonomous truck companies plan a major expansion this year to deliver your packages and food, speeding well ahead of federal safety regulations.

According to WisPolitics, the state Democratic Party spent $191,000 in ad buys supporting Rosenberg. Diny spent about $92,000 on ads, according to the site, and received $21,800 in donations from the Marathon County Republican Party. Diny also benefited from mailers by the Wisconsinites for Liberty Fund and other sources that attacked Rosenberg.

Lastly but importantly, I think highly of Nelson Peltz. I am sure he would be greatly additive as a member of the Disney board. Ask yourself, why is the company fighting so hard to keep him off? The fact that the company leaked the early returns to the media is further evidence that an activist of Nelson’s caliber deserves to be on this board for all shareholders benefit.

The size and diversity of the company in some ways helps Bosch to pivot quickly and commit to its new strategy wholeheartedly: ‘We have 38,000 software specialists and developers – that’s massive! Even if you go beyond all of the automotive players, it’s a tremendous workforce that will help us to catch up to the train of digitisation,’ says Heyn.

To understand why major innovation is impossible under the current healthcare system in America, one must carefully examine policy implications, government actions, reasons for the lack of antitrust enforcement, and how a few players have been able to keep the whole industry (and the government) hostage. I touch on some, but not all, of these issues in this article. As previously mentioned, the scope of research required to thoroughly analyze these issues could easily fill an entire book. #insuretech.

The abortion debate is on track to destroy the United States. Because it takes Republicans out of the game and lets Democrats run their national suicide scheme. Puts the batshit crazy Democrats in charge.

But what if I told you that the people in the political and media classes are the ones who are polarized—in fact, they are the onlyones who are so polarized?

A study reveals the influence of the olive trade between the New and Old Worlds. Magellan’s expedition had six thousand liters in the holds of its ships

Because of the enormous costs of housing, it’s worth understanding where, specifically, those costs come from, and what sort of interventions would be needed to reduce these costs. Discussions of housing policy often focus on issues of zoning, regulation, and other supply restrictions which manifest as increased land prices, but for most American housing, the largest cost comes from building the physical structure itself. However, in dense urban areas — the places where building new housing is arguably most important — this changes, and high land prices driven by regulatory restrictions become the dominant factor. 

As you file your returns this tax season, consider including the “Rumsfeld Memo” – Donald Rumsfeld would attach this letter to his tax return each year. “it is important for you to know that I have absolutely no idea whether our tax returns and our tax payments are accurate.”

Gavin Newsom Forces Fast Food Franchises To Pay Their Workers $20 an Hour. His Luxury Restaurants Pay Their Workers Less. Golden State governor’s Lake Tahoe cafe advertises job openings at $16 an hour.

American scientist Ralph Baric developed the spike protein that was inserted into Covid-19 and he worked with the Wuhan lab where the virus was created.

The simple fact is that the amount of liberal material published in RCP every week dwarfs the annual conservative content in the New York Times. This is a newspaper where columnist Bari Weiss was bullied into resigning and editorial page editor James Bennet was fired in response to demands from leftist activists on the paper’s staff. It’s happened to others at that paper, too. The Times’ criticism of RCP, in other words, seems to be a classic case of psychological projection. We tolerate diverse voices where I work. We encourage it. It’s our business model and our belief system.

As @polanskydj & I wrote in a special report: “The alliances Washington presently maintains largely disempower America, because its allies have clear, regional purposes, and the United States does not. The dawn of multipolarity demands a paradigm shift in our strategic thinking, a course correction toward habituating a culture of realism that heeds the importance of strategic flexibility and sheds the scales of idealism, passions, and ideology.”

As a federal judge in Texas recently pointed out, applicants to the program are approved at a rate of 97.5%. Thus, applicants are virtually guaranteed admission to the United States.

According to election security activist David Cross, one of the most significant changes will be the addition of a”visible watermark security feature” on ballots that will identify each ballot as an “official Georgia ballot.” This election security measure is one of many the Georgia Assembly passed before it adjourned for Sine Die after midnight on Mar. 28. 

Yet the story, Davies continues, is not so simple. Seen from another perspective, accountability sinks are entirely reasonable responses to the ever-increasing complexity of modern economies. Standardisation and explicit policies and procedures offer the only feasible route to meritocratic recruitment, consistent service and efficient work. Relying on the personal discretion of middle managers would simply result in a different kind of mess. The question, therefore, is not how to return to a world without non-human decision-making systems — it’s how to ensure that they’re open to feedback, able to adapt and improve. The Unaccountability Machine scrutinises two intellectual frameworks that aim to supply an answer. The first will be well known to most FT readers: economics. Davies judges it hopelessly deficient. Its highly abstract theories of how firms and markets operate are trivial, he argues. Worse, the classical postulate of the optimality of market outcomes positively feeds the accountability crisis by convincing managers and politicians that it is better to let the market decide.

Garcia-Gutierrez’s first arrest was back in 2001, and he has used at least seven different names and three different birthdates, Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones said during a Wednesday press conference. Garcia-Gutierrez has been charged with over 20 crimes in that time period and is also a gang member, Jones added

Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage
Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments
Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning
Enable your car to make money for you when you aren’t using it

With the record actually set straight, let’s actually understand the unholy PR/journo nexus, the function PR used to perform in the old market for news, why the new market for news has rendered PR obsolete, and why you should hire creators over public relators.

Biden was raised in the Puerto Rican, Greek, Irish, Catholic, Jewish, Italian, Polish, Palestinian, Persian, and Black communities of Delaware. Incredible!

The chain took advantage of then prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation of the profession in the 1980s, which allowed opticians to advertise their services and prices to customers for the first time, and is now one of Britain’s most successful private companies, with more than £3bn in annual sales.

It also clearly helps move books, and that, in the end, not the health of the US, is all the authors really care about.

By  Rachel Pritzker

Twenty years ago, in the mid-2000s, I was a partisan warrior, and my philanthropy was entirely dedicated to pursuing my ideological beliefs. At the time, I served as a founding board member of the Democracy Alliance, a network of philanthropists focused on advancing a progressive policy agenda.

But at a certain point, I came to see that my efforts, under the banner of “democracy,” were actually furthering the decline of democracy. Our passionate advocacy, while aimed at strengthening the country, was contributing to mounting gridlock and toxic partisanship. Democratic elected officials felt increasingly pressured to adhere to party orthodoxy rather than passing legislation through compromise, lest they be primaried by a progressive group for being insufficiently pure. Recognizing the extraordinary period of U.S. and global democratic backsliding in which we live, I have since shifted my philanthropy toward creating spaces, such as the Democracy Funders Network, where supporters of liberal democracy from across the political spectrum can step out of our ideological bubbles, build new relationships, and learn together how to defend democracy.

Caleb Wethington

A bill aiming to classify food containing a vaccine or vaccine material as a drug has passed and is moving to Gov. Bill Lee’s desk.

The bill, HB1894, was discussed in the Tennessee Senate on Thursday before a vote to send it to Lee’s desk.

“As introduced, defines food that contains a vaccine or vaccine material as a drug for purposes of the Tennessee Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act,” the bill reads.

Sen. Joey Hensley, R-Hohenwald, spoke during the session about the bill, which he’s sponsoring.

“House Bill 1894 merely would require any food that contains a vaccine or vaccine material would have to be classified as a drug and labeled as such,” he said.

George Leaf:

Many Americans realize that our higher-education system is decaying, its standards in decline while costs continue to rise. Is this situation like a tooth with a cavity that can readily be fixed? Or is the decay so deep that we need something far more serious, such as a root canal?

David Barnhizer’s new book, Conformity Colleges, strongly suggests that we must have the latter. His subtitle explains that we suffer from “the destruction of intellectual creativity and dissent.” That’s an accurate diagnosis.

An emeritus professor of law, Barnhizer has written a no-holds-barred exposé of the tragic fall of our institutions of higher education. Our colleges, he states, “have turned into a one-sided process where true believers who see the world through an ideological lens have taken control.” Instead of graduating thoughtful, mature people who can employ reason to evaluate claims and arguments about the world, our schools produce increasingly large numbers of people who act as “social justice warriors,” single-mindedly following the lessons drummed into them in college.