5.26

Under 18 U.S.C. §2071, an individual who “willfully and unlawfully” conceals, removes or destroys a federal record can be fined and imprisoned for up to three years. The statute also applies to attempts to conceal, remove, or destroy a federal record.

The “right to roam” movement in England seeks to reclaim common rights to access, use and enjoy both private and public land, since citizens only have access to 8% of their nation’s land currently.

Coffee houses are one of the earliest examples of ‘Third Places,’ a term popularized by urban sociologist Raymond Oldenberg, who described them as “public places on neutral ground where people can gather and interact. In contrast to first places (home) and second places (work), Third Places allow people to put aside their concerns and simply enjoy the company and conversation around them.” More than that, Third Places are essential to community-building because they bring people together within a shared space who may otherwise remain in more disparate social circles.

This part 2 of the Secret History of Polaroid and Edwin Land. Read part 1 for context. Kodak and Polaroid, the two most famous camera companies of the 20th century, had a great partnership for 20+ years. Then in an inexplicable turnabout Kodak decided to destroy Polaroid’s business. To this day, every story of why Kodak went to war with Polaroid is wrong. The real reason can be found in the highly classified world of overhead reconnaissance satellites.
Here’s the real story.

All tabular knowledge can be stored in a single long plain text file. The only syntax characters needed are spaces and newlines. This has many advantages over existing binary storage formats. Using the method below, a very long scroll could be made containing all tabular scientific knowledge in a computable form.

So, instead of focusing on the pixels, we think of design decisions as how we intentionally use gestalt principles to communicate meaning. And like Tufte’s data-ink ratio compares the strictly necessary ink to the total ink used to print a chart, we can calculate a gestalt ratio which compares the strictly necessary design decisions to the total decisions used in a design. This is design density.

“The Financial Times reported earlier this year that a McKinsey-led think tank, the Urban China Initiative, produced a report….The report, titled, The Trend and Impact of World Technological Revolution and Industrial Transformation, made scores of recommendations to enhance the military and industrial capabilities of the Chinese government.

In the last few weeks there has been a sea change in crypto regulation:

1. Bitcoin spot…

Worse yet, you’re not actually expected to use any of it directly. Instead you’re also supposed to follow the developments of framework abstractions that are layered on top of the foundation specialities, at least doubling the number of complex fields a web dev has to follow and understand, right out of the gate.
This is immense – an expectation so mind-boggling that we need to acknowledge just how remarkable it is that each of us has managed as well as we have.

Google “doesn’t have a choice right now,” Thomas Monteiro, a Google analyst at Investing.com, said in an interview. “Companies need to move really fast, even if that includes skipping a few steps along the way. The user experience will just have to catch up.”

This brings us to the close of our brief tour through the various energy intensive industries. More or less extreme changes to these processes are indicated by the emergence of extremely cheap solar power. These changes present infinite possibilities for disruption of the large, risk averse, growth averse incumbents. The incipient emergence of solar cheaper than fossil fuels is probably the last opportunity to reshuffle the deck in terms of ownership of these various means of production, and represents a unified, industry wide investment thesis with unlimited capacity for outsize returns in response to technical innovation.

With Minnesota having repealed its anti-municipal broadband laws, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance says that 16 states still restrict the building of municipal networks. The Minnesota change “is a significant win for the people of Minnesota and highlights a positive trend—states are dropping misguided barriers to deploying public broadband as examples of successful community-owned networks proliferate across the country,” said Gigi Sohn, executive director of the American Association for Public Broadband (AAPB), which represents community-owned broadband networks and co-ops. There are about 650 public broadband networks in the US, Sohn said. “While 16 states still restrict these networks in various ways, we’re confident this number will continue to decrease as more communities demand the freedom to choose the network that best serves their residents,” she said.

Essays on programming I think about a lot
JULY 2020. Every so often I read an essay that I end up thinking about, and citing in conversation, over and over again. Here’s my index of all the ones of those I can remember! I’ll try to keep it up to date as I think of more.

The inaccessible and abandoned islands of New York – in pictures

USDoD is a high-profile player in this field, closely associated with “Pompompurin”, the operator of the first iteration of data leak site BreachForums. USDoD is said to have plans to set up a successor to the second iteration of BreachForums which was recently seized by law enforcement. Releasing this database may be USDoD’s way to round up some interested users. USDoD is also believed to be involved in a breach at TransUnion, the data of which was (partly) dumped in September, 2023.

We investigate whether an LLM can successfully perform financial statement analysis in a way similar to a professional human analyst. We provide standardized and anonymous financial statements to GPT4 and instruct the model to analyze them to determine the direction of future earnings. Even without any narrative or industry-specific information, the LLM outperforms financial analysts in its ability to predict earnings changes. The LLM exhibits a relative advantage over human analysts in situations when the analysts tend to struggle. Furthermore, we find that the prediction accuracy of the LLM is on par with the performance of a narrowly trained state-of-the-art ML model. LLM prediction does not stem from its training memory. Instead, we find that the LLM generates useful narrative insights about a company’s future performance. Lastly, our trading strategies based on GPT’s predictions yield a higher Sharpe ratio and alphas than strategies based on other models. Taken together, our results suggest that LLMs may take a central role in decision-making.

To conduct this part of our analysis, we collected a random sample of just under 1 million webpages from the archives of Common Crawl, an internet archive service that periodically collects snapshots of the internet as it exists at different points in time. We sampled pages collected by Common Crawl each year from 2013 through 2023 (approximately 90,000 pages per year) and checked to see if those pages still exist today.

After decades of strategic drift and costly acquisition failures, the U.S. Navy is sailing straight into a storm it can’t avoid. Despite the Defense Department’s lip service about China being the “pacing challenge,” decades of deindustrialization and policymakers’ failure to prioritize among services and threats have left the Navy ill-equipped to endure a sustained high-intensity conflict in the Pacific. The United States is unable to keep pace with Chinese shipbuilding and will fall even further behind in the coming years. 

Luckily for the government there isn’t an example of a company building a nationwide charging network much faster and cheaper for them to be compared against. More.

5.19

Welcome to CPU DB, a complete database of processors for researchers and hobbyists alike.

A study found corporate recruiters have a bias against ex-entrepreneurs. They get stereotyped for not wanting to ‘be a small piece of the puzzle’

Hopefully, at this point, you see where I’m going with this. What I’ve concluded, based on experience, is that positioning your project as an alternative implementation of something is a losing proposition. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. It doesn’t matter how hard you work. The problem is, when you build an alternative implementation, you’ve made yourself subject to the whims of the canonical implementation. They have control over the direction of the project, and all you can do is try to keep up. In the case of JITted implementations of traditionally interpreted languages, there’s a bit of a weird dynamic, because it’s much faster to implement new features in an interpreter. The implementers of the canonical implementation may see you as competition they are trying to outrun. You may be stuck trying to ice skate uphill.

A professional developer does thorough work when it matters, and cuts irrelevant corners that aren’t worth wasting time on. Extremely productive developers don’t have supernatural coding skills; their secret is to write only the code that matters. How can we do a better job cutting corners? I think we can learn a lot from people building tables and dressers

The “employment ice age” that followed the collapse of the 1980s bubble condemned hundreds of thousands to low-paying temporary jobs and a meager pension to match. Who will sustain Japan’s Lost Generation as it enters retirement in the years ahead?

Biden’s $7.5 billion investment in EV charging has only produced 7 stations in two years.

Germany may introduce conscription for all 18-year-olds. Both men and women could be called up to boost numbers in the armed forces.

Incora Health was established in 2022. It plans to start selling its earrings, currently in clinical trials, in a few months. “We’re first-time founders in a small city trying to change women’s health care, and that’s not lost on us,” says Theresa Gevaert, a co-founder. But the audacious young firm is part of a wave of startups that have been launched in America over the past few years. Many will fail. Some will succeed. Together they suggest profound change is afoot.

Tesla FSD vs Mercedes Driver Assist! Is Mercedes really better?

This article is a partial-rebuttal/partial-confirmation to KGOnTech’s Apple Vision Pro’s Optics Blurrier & Lower Contrast than Meta Quest 3, prompted by RoadToVR’s Quest 3 Has Higher Effective Resolution, So Why Does Everyone Think Vision Pro Looks Best? which cites KGOnTech. I suppose it’s a bit late, but it’s taken me a while to really get a good intuition for how visionOS renders frames, because there is a metric shitton of nuance and it’s unfortunately very, very easy to make mistakes when trying to quantify things.

Moreover, meticulously measuring and filling the gaps during assembly of each 787 is as expensive as Hart-Smith warned it would be.  Boeing has projected the cost of inspecting and reworking the gaps on previously built 787s before it delivers the jets to airlines at $6.3 billion. “It’s not a catastrophic safety issue, as Salehpour suggested, but only a major disaster for Boeing in regard to costs and assembly times,” Hart-Smith said. “As everyone now knows, it’s a financial disaster.”

We sent a letter to @WisDOJ after they were asked to define who is a lawful “election official.” There is no need for the AG to provide such an interpretation because the WI Constitution and statute is quite clear.

Associations of Internal Medicine Residency Milestone Ratings and Certification Examination Scores With Patient Outcomes

And when Charles Singleton, incarcerated at the Hamilton Aged and Infirmed prison in north Alabama, died at a hospital in November 2021, his body was returned to family after an autopsy at UAB. It was missing a brain, among other organs.

That makes Sweetgreen — popular for peddling premium salads that can cost as much as $20 — one of the best performing stocks in America this year, having soared more than 185% in 2024.

A study analyzing Apple, Microsoft, and SpaceX suggests that return to office (RTO) mandates can lead to a higher rate of employees, especially senior-level ones, leaving the company, often to work at competitors. The study (PDF), published this month by University of Chicago and University of Michigan researchers and reported by The Washington Post on Sunday, says:

Along with the corporate overhaul by Noyes and his associates, husband and wife team Charles and Ray Eames also worked closely with IBM to re-imagine the company for the 20th century. While Elliot Noyes was an industrial designer who focused on corporate design and branding, the Eameses were renowned for their contributions to furniture design, architecture, and multimedia productions.

The Littoral Combat Ship was designed with the current crisis in mind, instead it turned into a boondoggle. Here’s why. …. The Zumwalt program saw massive cost growth which forced Navy leaders to slash the planned fleet size from the originally planned 32 to 7 and finally to the three which were actually built. 

And Chinese EVs are very good. China has struggled to make good internal combustion engines, but the shift to EVs has allowed them to leapfrog ICE vehicles entirely. Since China dominates the battery industry, mastering EVs was easy. Kevin Williams has a long article about the high quality of Chinese electric cars, which you should read despite the fact that it contains a fair share of histrionic hand-wringing “We’re cooked”, etc.). Williams’ conclusion is spot on:

“We really don’t know how the (Chinese) politburo think,” one Western official concedes.

“Doubly tough and truly sad,” Buckley said, because the city’s history was interwoven with Hamilton, and it was for a time one of the area’s largest employers. “Frustrating, too, for a city and workforce that put forth our best efforts to keep Hamilton manufacturing jobs here. But it was not to be.”

 And in Revelation 12:7, we are told, “Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon. And the dragon and his angels fought back…” In this passage, we see Michael as a military commander of some angels. This is a reference to John’s apocalypse, where the archangel sees a great war of heaven. The devil’s forces were too weak to remain in heaven, so they were thrown down to heaven.

Monday was day five of a live stream that has connected Ireland’s capital with New York via an interactive sculpture and webcam that allows people to see, but not hear, each other.

One very real election issue that @GovEvers refused to address was the number of indefinitely confined voters. This status allows people to check a box & vote without showing an ID. Today, that list still stands at more than double 2016.

Recently, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe thanked Pritzker for the $827M incentive package it received from the State of Illinois despite the company’s massive net loss of $5.4 billion dollars in 2023.

While other people have had similar devices implanted, Arbaugh has become the most public recipient. Part of this is because of the enormous attention that surrounds everything that Musk does. Arbaugh is sharing his story here for the first time. Obviously he isn’t happy about being paralyzed. But he says that it happened for a reason and that dedicating his body to science in this way is part of God’s plan for him.

The case against her gathered force on the basis of a single diagram shared by the police, which circulated widely in the media. On the vertical axis were twenty-four “suspicious events,” which included the deaths of the seven newborns and seventeen other instances of babies suddenly deteriorating. On the horizontal axis were the names of thirty-eight nurses who had worked on the unit during that time, with X’s next to each suspicious event that occurred when they were on shift. Letby was the only nurse with an uninterrupted line of X’s below her name. She was the “one common denominator,” the “constant malevolent presence when things took a turn for the worse,” one of the prosecutors, Nick Johnson, told the jury in his opening statement. “If you look at the table overall the picture is, we suggest, self-evidently obvious. It’s a process of elimination.”

“Whenever you see somebody’s spending way, way more than the current value on real estate, that’s creating an epicenter,” Richards said. “These guys aren’t stupid. Whatever he’s doing, he’s here for the long haul.”

Early in his first term, Gov. Tony Evers tried committing Wisconsin to rejecting all fossil fuels as a source of electricity by 2050, an aim the Legislature rejected, but one that the governor has since pursued with executive orders. As context, Wisconsin still obtains the majority of its electricity from such conventional types of fuel. Which fossil fuels predominate, however, has changed in recent years.

Watch out for mainstream disaffection based on the fact that this movie contains traces of Ayn Rand: (“your education is not complete when you’ve not read Rand” – long chat on a DFW – LAX flight years ago.)

McVey — whose official title, as she keeps pointing out, is minister of state without a portfolio — was immediately and mercilessly mocked over her new role, and made to look very foolish on Question Time when she failed to properly explain what a minister for common sense actually does.

5.12

Market intelligence says Airbus Commercial Aircraft CEO Christian Scherer visited with Southwest executives in Dallas and Breeze leadership near Salt Lake City in mid-April. This was well after Breeze’s February order for 10 additional A220s.

Two months ago, we sounded the alarm about independent publishers being demoted on Google to give way to big media sites. This is what happened next.

In just a few months, this Speaker has worked to give the Executive more authority and more money than even Pelosi granted

“The difference between the two company’s cultures, design philosophies, and decision-making structures allowed SpaceX to excel in a fixed-price environment, where Boeing stumbled, even after receiving significantly more funding,” said Lori Garver in an interview. She was deputy administrator of NASA from 2009 to 2013 during the formative years of the commercial crew program and is the author of Escaping Gravity.

China today has enough capacity to manufacture half of the world’s 80 million vehicles. By 2030, China’s capacity could climb to 75% of the world’s volume, according to Global Data.

Some startups that launched buzzy generative AI products are now narrowing their offerings to try to make them more useful to business clients.

Each permit, according to sources who have acquired one, is being sold for up to 50,000 Mexican pesos, roughly $2,000. Without one of these, migrants are stuck at the Mexican southern border for months and end up having to pay sometimes more as a bribe to the same INM officials to let them out of Mexican southern border towns like Tapachula. 

Whereas, on April 18, 2024, the Rules Committee passed H.Res. 1160—the rule providing for consideration of the 95-billion-dollar foreign funding package—by a vote of 9 to 3. Notably, all Democrat members of the Committee voted to advance the measure to the floor while three Republicans opposed it. It is unprecedented for members of the minority party to advance a resolution out of the Rules Committee. Since 1995, there have been a few instances of rules advancing out of Committee with minority support; however, H.Res. 1160 is the only instance where this was done to bypass opposition from members of the majority party.

Despite the fact that the first sentence of his bio still calls him the “Editor-in-Chief of The Athletic’s Bay Area coverage,” Kawakami no longer is in charge of Bay Area coverage, something that he wrote in a February 2021 mailbag was “due to an editorial restructuring.”

WHY DID SEVERAL HUNDRED PEOPLE in Texas pay good money to spend a beautiful Saturday inside, listening to three living members of the Habsburg family and a scattering of Carlists talk about what ails the world? It’s clear what the Habsburgs got out of it: the conference, held in Plano and organized by David Ross, a Dallas-area realtor and right-wing Catholic, was in support of the family’s effort to win a sainthood for Emperor Karl I, perhaps the least successful and most tragic Habsburg monarch, who reigned for the last two years of World War I and then died penniless on the Portuguese island of Madeira. The family hoped to keep their memory alive—and maybe sell a few books. What everyone else might get out of it was unclear, at least at first.

Higher Ground Labs created and published its 2022 report that describes its landscape and connections in the election industry complex.  This document outlines the many initiatives, connections and activities it is involved in and the players it interacts with to ensure radical far-left and increasingly communist anti-American Democrats win elections. This landscape involves “non-profits” and publicly traded companies which prevent the public from requesting information that would be required to be provided by the government in FOIA requests.

Wow, how wonderful of our local Government to threaten anyone found with a Starlink dish the amount of up to £125,000 we might as well live in a few countries I could mention that live under a dicatorship..

Which is why Total SF is introducing the San Francisco Starter Pack: a virtual welcome basket for someone moving to the city for the first time, serving as a primer for city life, a way to blend in and early exposure to some of our deeper cuts. (It also works as a checklist for locals who want to re-engage with San Francisco.)

What’s a “lens relay system?” Think of a telescope. Instead of focusing an image on a plane of film or a sensor, it creates what’s known as an “aerial image” that you capture with another lens system — your eye. If you’ve ever smashed your phone up to a pair of binoculars successfully, you’ve made a lens relay system.

I Went To China And Drove A Dozen Electric Cars. Western Automakers Are Cooked. A trip to the Beijing Auto Show reveals just how advanced China’s EVs are. So what are the so-called “foreign” automakers doing about it?

No more. Thanks to TikTok, I discovered a new (to me, at least) spin on walking: backward walking, also known as “retro-walking.” Though it’s trending onsocial-media platforms right now, physical therapists and fitness trainers have been touting its benefits for years. It’s a low-impact way to burn calories, strengthen your legs, test your coordination, and even improve pain, experts say—all of which lured me onto my quiet, rural street one afternoon to give it a whirl.

To understand why engine development has become a challenging task, we need to understand engine fundamentals and the technologies used for these fundamentals. In the last Corner we started a discussion around Open Rotor engines after looking at geared versus direct-drive Turbofans. We now look deeper at the Open Rotor Propulsive Efficiency.

“I correctly forecast that there would be no near term impact on the industry, but boy, was I wrong on the long-term impact,” he said. “I think I called for possibly a partial impact on certain segments of the industry. Incorrect. But remember the context back in 2015, the largest constellation in existence was Iridium with 66 satellites, and back in 2015, it wasn’t even entirely clear that they were going to make it successfully without a second dip into bankruptcy.” It is clear that SpaceX has been successful on the launch and technical challenges. The company has deployed nearly 6,000 satellites, with more than 5,200 still operational and delivering Internet to 2.7 million customers in 75 different countries. But is the service profitable? That’s the question Quilty and his research team sought to address.

Despite abundant risks to supply chains, demand for container trade increased in Q1 2024. Global container demand is estimated to have grown between 7 to 9% YOY with all import regions contributing positively. Import growth was strongest in North America, Latin America and Oceania. The top three fastest verticals in Q1 were retail, tech and lifestyle. Global container demand growth is expected to remain positive in coming quarters but likely at a slower pace. 

Charcoal Blasting Olmsted Point.

The time has come for Chicago Residents to initiate a petition calling for a binding referendum to authorize and establish an ordinance to recall The Mayor of Chicago from office. In many states throughout the Midwest (including WI, MI, MO and OH), the mechanism is already in place for voters to recall their mayor when warranted. In 201

The working tugboat Mirene, where @Ryanphelan6 and I have lived for 40 years, is properly celebrated in Dwell magazine this month.

To this day, it’s the most backdoor-looking bug I’ve ever seen. Google Translate does a good enough job on the original article, which is still available on Habr, but I’m going to walk you through it along with some context. Telegram is a popular chat app that uses its own… bizarre protocol to encrypt chats, called MTProto. The protocol is used both to encrypt all messages to the Telegram server, and to encrypt opt-in 1:1 end-to-end “Secret Chats”.[1] In text I can’t do justice to the facial expressions of cryptographers when you mention Telegram’s protocol, so just believe me that it’s weird. The current consensus seems to be that the latest version is not broken in known ways that are severe or relevant enough to affect end users, assuming the implementation is correct. That is about as safe as leaving exposed wires around your house because they are either not live or placed high enough that no one should touch them.

General counsel for the secretary of state’s office Charlene McGowan confirmed that Fulton County broke the law in their recount. “Fulton County used improper procedures during the recount of the presidential contest in 2020.”

From the era of insane economic policy

Archive officials immediately claimed they found material with “classified markings” among the boxes’ contents. That prompted for the first time ever the archives sending a criminal referral to the DOJ in February 2022. Smith indicted Trump and Nauta in June 2023; the following month, Smith added De Olivera and additional charges in a superseding indictment.

Howell then signed off on a warrant for Nauta’s location history from his cell phone. Among Howell’s other abuses are signing a warrant sought by Jack Smith to get Trump’s Twitter data AND an NDO preventing Twitter from notifying Trump as well as piercing atty-client privilege to help Smith get all of Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran’s records.

Politics and taxpayer funded Truman Scholars

Benjamin Rothove:

Nearly three in four recipients of this year’s prestigious, federally funded Truman Scholarship have clear ties to Democratic politicians or progressive causes, a College Fix analysis found.

Approximately 43 of the 60 students have worked for Democratic politicians, advocated for progressive causes, or identify as left-leaning — continuing an annual trend exposed in past Fix analyses.

In contrast, only five scholars have worked for Republican politicians, advocated for conservative causes, or identify as right-leaning. The College Fix determined this information based on provided biographies, LinkedIn profiles, and email inquiries.

4.28

The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.  In my essay “No one will read your book,” I said that publishing houses work more like venture capitalists. They invest small sums in lots of books in hopes that one of them breaks out and becomes a unicorn, making enough money to fund all the rest.

For example, training GPT?3 in Microsoft’s state-of-the-art U.S. data centers can directly consume 700,000 liters of clean freshwater (enough to produce 370 BMW cars or 320 Tesla electric vehicles), and the water consumption would have been tripled if training were done in Microsoft’s data centers in Asia. These numbers do not include the off-site water footprint associated with electricity generation.

You’ll never guess which one is on the FBI domestic terror watchlist:

In the past two years, the company (TSMC) has relocated hundreds of Taiwanese workers and their families to Arizona. Instead of a gleaming new facility, these workers found an active construction site, and a company struggling to bridge Taiwanese and American professional and cultural norms. 

The donations underscore how ambitious employees in Baldwin’s office have decided against heeding her calls to slow the revolving door. A total of 24 of her employees have reportedly come from or gone into lobbying, including on behalf of companies in Wisconsin. Moreover, the cash is an apparent irony that Republicans are aiming to exploit this election cycle amid the GOP rallying around Eric Hovde, a businessman largely self-funding his Senate campaign.

Global powers are racing to expand their presence. China has expressed interest in building a port complex near the Strait’s Atlantic mouth just across Chile’s border in Argentina. From there, Beijing could grow its presence in the region and also project influence in Antarctica, where geopolitical rivalry is heating up as the sea ice melts. In April 2023, the head of the U.S. military’s Southern Command, General Laura Richardson, visited Argentina and Chile, stopping in Punta Arenas for a security briefing and a tour of the strait. “For Magallanes, this will be like going back in time, when we were a free port and ship traffic was enormous.” —María José Navajas, regional director of Corfo

How bots, mercenaries, and table scalpers have turned the restaurant reservation system inside out.

The Department of Justice on Tuesday announced it has reached a $138.7 million settlement deal with victims of the disgraced former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar to resolve their claims of wrongdoing against the FBI in its failures to investigate allegations of sexual abuse.

A service called ReplyGuy advertises itself as “the AI that plugs your product on Reddit” and which automatically “mentions your product in conversations naturally.” Examples on the site show two different Redditors being controlled by AI posting plugs for a text-to-voice product called “AnySpeech” and a bot writing a long comment about a debt consolidation program called Debt Freedom Now. 

In emails released as part of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google, Dischler laid out several contributing factors — search query growth was “significantly behind forecast,” the “timing” of revenue launches was significantly behind, and a vague worry that “several advertiser-specific and sector weaknesses” existed in search.

Upon reading this, I realized it was time to stop procrastinating and tell you all a story I’ve been meaning to set down for a long time now about the time I visited that house (the cheap $33.75 million one, I mean). Strictly on a need-to-know basis. Because you really need to know how deeply twisted some of these plutocrats who run our society truly are.

10+ years ago I created an annual list of websites that FORBADE you from linking to them, DEMANDED you write to ask for permission or LIMITED links to only their home page. Royal Mail even promised to post me a paper licence.

Wizards of the Coast has been in the drivers seat at Hasbro for some time, and the gradual disintegration of the consumer products business has made Wizards an increasingly crucial part of the company’s portfolio.  Magic: The Gathering remains incredibly popular and very lucrative, but the business has had troubles lately. 

Person: Yes, hello, I heard there is a new hospital price transparency law. I’m trying to be a Good Consumer, so I was wondering if you could share the machine readable fi-

That car was burnt in effigy, not by a solitary individual, but by a giant crowd. These crimes are not punished because the Democrats who run the city want them to happen. The message is simple: today it’s your car, but tomorrow it’s you in the car.

It is set to bring to an end more than 120 years of production in the city. The designer, manufacturer and supplier of high-quality ceramic and porcelain tiles has been operational since 1901.

Cash price being cheaper than insurance prices has also been documented for prescription drugs. While counterintuitive, these findings reflect the inherent and inevitable trade-offs between using cash and using insurance to purchase healthcare. Insurance shields us from financial risk exposure but adds administrative complexities. When financial risk exposure is low, it makes little sense to use insurance. That’s why car insurance does not cover oil changes, and home insurance does not cover faucet replacements; otherwise, premiums would skyrocket and such plans would be driven out of business. Why Are Cash Prices Lower Than Health Insurance Negotiated Prices?

Women now author the majority of books published, according to an NBER study.

The change was positioned by the company as a way to more quickly and deeply integrate AI into its products, but make no mistake about it: This is an attempt to mimic Apple’s product development model.

People Are Slowly Realizing Their Auto Insurance Rates Are Skyrocketing Because Their Car Is Covertly Spying On Them.

From 2021 through 2023, venture capital firms reportedly pumped nearly $100 billion into defense tech startup companies — an amount 40 percent higher than the previous seven years combined. This report examines how Silicon Valley startups, big tech, and venture capital who benefit from classified Defense contracts will create costly, high-tech defense products that are ineffective, unpredictable, and unsafe – all on the American taxpayer’s dime.

The $72-per-square-foot pricing for the tower at 995 Market St., which anchors the corner at Sixth and Market streets, represents a 90% drop in value from when the building last sold in 2016, for roughly $62 million.

GM shared our driving data with insurers without consent, lawsuit claims

Ex-Post Office boss sought ‘non-emotive words’ for Horizon bugs, inquiry hears

I previously highlighted the 1910s, 1940s, 1970s, and 2000s as weak decades for both stocks and bonds in real terms. During those decades, energy assets invariably did well. Gold and silver usually did well. Copper and other commodities usually did well. The benefits of diversification in that sense are clear throughout modern financial history, both logically and quantifiably. The higher prices of these base materials are what’s pressuring stocks and bonds during those periods, and so it helps to own the base materials and/or their producers alongside stocks and bonds.

4.21

This post covered my experimentation with the technical aspects of Apple’s fisheye projection format (Vision Pro). Along the way, it’s been fun to collaborate with Andrew, Paul, and others to work through the details. And while we were unable to arrive at a 100% solution, we’re most definitely within range.

The Port of Oakland Board of Commissioners unanimously voted this week to change the name of Oakland International Airport to San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport, infuriating San Francisco officials who promised to sue over the decision.

A conference on National Conservatism is proceeding today in Brussels after a Belgian court ruled in the event’s favour against a police shutdown ordered by the local mayor, in what has been hailed as a “victory for free speech”.

Barcelona bus route removed from map apps to tackle tourist overcrowding.

Take, for example, A Chart of Biography, which is considered to be the first modern timeline. This unusual, and unusually beautiful, pedagogical tool, which was published by Priestley in 1765, while he was in his thirties and working as a tutor at an academy in Warrington, England, tends to get lost in the shuffle of Priestley’s more notable achievements—his seminal 1761 textbook on language, The Rudiments of English Grammar, say, or his discovery of nine gases, including oxygen, 13 years later.

I went to Cairo, Illinois, the capital of the fastest-shrinking county in America, and wrote about why in the future, much larger parts of America are likely to lose population.

Report card comparing Biden & Trump’s accomplishments.

How Amazon built an unrivalled EV charging network in just two years.

Hospital prices for the same emergency care vary up to 16X, study finds.

‘Rather Despicable’: John Eastman Speaks Out After Bank Of America, USAA Shut Down His Accounts

4.14

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

“I had them deleted,” he told the jury, “but when I went through the archive, it was able to pull up every message that I’ve ever had.”

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. 

“This study cost….$2.8 MILLION???!!!!??!?!?….to say that the UW system is not sustainable but to offer no real solutions. Yikes”

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.

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