Why does a fire truck cost $2 million?

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

Ban AC for DC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes. You are going into political oblivion.

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

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

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

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

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

The Big LLM Architecture Comparison

The Roman Roads Research Association was formed to advance knowledge of the Roman road network and promote the study of Roman roads and Roman heritage throughout the British Isles. Our work is inspired by Ivan D. Margary whose “Roman Roads in Britain ” (1955) remains the most comprehensive gazetteer ever compiled

Maybe wait and see what Dershowitz does. 

“Anita Dunn has made $40-$50 million off the Democratic Party.”

Importantly, these fare buckets are nested in a hierarchy rather than strictly partitioned. Higher-fare buckets are usually kept open as long as lower buckets have availability, so that expensive fares can always be sold until the flight is full. In fact, if you sum up the seats shown across all buckets, it often exceeds the plane’s actual seat count – because the same physical seat is sellable in any one of several buckets, but obviously can only be sold once. For example, a single economy seat might be simultaneously counted in Y, B, M, and H class availability. This nested structure ensures that if cheap seats sell out, the next bucket opens, and so on up the pricing ladder. Conversely, if demand is weak, an airline might reopen lower fare buckets to stimulate bookings, even after initially closing them. Thus, fare buckets function as overlapping groups of seats with a yield-management-driven pecking order.

How the diamond industry lost its sparkle.

While everyone’s laughing at Hunter Biden again today, remember he is not a nobody. Hunter Biden held a seat on the board of one of the most powerful NGO networks in the world: the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition (USGLC). This is a group that directs U.S. foreign aid strategy and partners with top corporations, nonprofits, and military sector. Its CEO, Liz Schrayer (formerly AIPAC political director) still advises USAID, and just last year took credit for pushing through $90 billion in foreign aid during a gridlocked Congress.

Within two years of physician groups being acquired, the study found, physician prices increased an average of 15.1%.

The Oshkosh Air Show began this week. One of the airplanes to come to the show is the Boeing B-29, “Doc.” LNA’spartner, AINOnline, reviewed the book written by the organization that restored “Doc” to flying status. Here’s a preview of the review with a link to the full review at the bottom of this post. I had the opportunity to fly in “Doc” in 2022. My story is here. — Scott Hamilton.

Why are there so many hotels named after cities they are not in? Follow along for a data analysis on hotel names.

Relatedly, Advance has long kept its digital brands unusually distinct from its print ones — and it’s insisted on others taking that distinction seriously. (I don’t hear from Advance PR people often, but I’ve received several emails over the years complaining about referencing “The Times Picayune” instead of “The Times-Picayune | NOLA.com”³ or “The Plain Dealer” instead of “The Plain Dealer | cleveland.com.” Hey, bub — you stick to your style guide and I’ll stick to mine, okay?)

Personalized pricing, made possible via surveillance and AI, is distinct from dynamic pricing, in that the former allows a firm to condition pricing on the circumstances of the customer. Hence, two people shopping for airfares at the same time might see different prices based on things like travel purpose (business or leisure), income estimates, browsing behavior, ticket purchase history, website used, or type of device used.

Professor Sun shares:

• Why most Chinese factory workers are surprisingly optimistic about automation, and the unique role of China’s hukou (household registration) system in shaping those attitudes.
• How automation is changing the very structure of Chinese industry, and why large-scale layoffs haven’t materialized the way many feared.
• The migration of millions of former factory workers into service sectors and new forms of employment—and what this means for China’s labor market.
• How China’s experience with automation compares with other countries, and what sets its path apart.
• The emerging challenges and opportunities for both workers and policymakers as AI and digitization continue to advance.

I used to think this Democratic strategy was a conspiracy theory. Turns out it was neither a conspiracy nor a theory.

This literally shut me down. I used to get clients who want to make toys because they visited my site for blog posts and information. Now they don’t need to. Google scraped my content and regurgitates it at the top of the search. Zero visitors now. No clients.

Left unsaid at the time: Healey is giving those same managers — 3,600 in total — a separate raise this month, a 2 percent increase her administration estimates will cost roughly $10 million this fiscal year. Members of Healey’s Cabinet, most of whom were making more than $202,000 a year, are also eligible for the increase, which would boost their pay by more than $4,000 apiece. The raise would mark the second time in six months Healey has given administration managers and Cabinet members a salary bump.

Missing in China offers readers with crucial insights and practical advice to deal with the detention of a loved one in China.

Of course we now have smartphones that sort of do that on the fly. Adobe’s Project Indigo camera app essentially is taking multiple exposures with my iPhone and processing them into a finished image much the same way (actually better, as it will stack out matching detail to reduce noise in it). 

“That’s probably one of the bigger challenges that we have,” VandeWettering said. “You know, there isn’t a lot of comps. There’s not a lot of data out there yet for us to be able to truly model this out in a way that makes sense.”. He’d love for the business to progress where this is more common knowledge, but part of VandeWettering’s job, now, is figuring out questions like: “What’s a starting point guard in the Big Ten worth?“

The facility can support 250 employees per shift and has four main assembly lines with a space for a fifth, Martin said. It currently has 130 employees with hopes of building the staff to 320 members by the end of the year.

I’ve dabbled in all of these. But it was Captain Ron, a Vietnam War vet with a master’s degree in counseling, who truly understood me. Captain Ron’s FearlessFlight® is the only one of these methods I’ve ever stuck with because, well, I like the guy. In our first meeting, a fifteen-minute free coaching session that sprawled well past the time allotted, I asked: How can I have flown so much, and still be so scared? Why am I getting worse, not better, with time? He nodded sagely and explained to me that this is common among people with severe flight anxiety, that our anxiety has created bad mental pathways, and with each bad flight, we reinforce them, making them worse.

As he watched his father stand firm while trading a franchise icon in Montana 32 years ago, Policy likely didn’t imagine he’d one day make a similar call with the Packers after stops at Stanford Law School, the Arena Football League, the NFL office, and beyond. Regardless of what those outside — or even inside — 1265 Lombardi Ave. may think, Policy said he will always do whatever best helps the Packers win.

The U.S. once had more than 19 copper smelters, Dan said. Now, there are only two in operation. China, meanwhile, has more than 50. “The processing of minerals is also where the Chinese have a very dominant position,” he said. “It’s very hard to build anything in the United States because of permitting and judicial delays,” Dan said. “It would be impossible to build the Interstate Highway System today, given our current system.”.

Then there’s the matter of the ongoing competition with China for economic. supremacy. Dan described it as “The Art of the Deal versus the Long March.”

Up-to-date pricing information for major LLM APIs including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and more. Compare costs across different AI models and find the best value for your use case.

The lawsuit claims that Portland has failed to quell the nightly noise disturbances at the ICE facility, causing local residents persisting harm.

OpenAI follows Elon Musk’s lead — gas turbines to be deployed at its first Stargate site for additional power

In an ideal world, the Brooklyn widow would be able to rent her home to the visitors from Buffalo for a week. Unfortunately for all of them, New York has made that transaction illegal by effectively banning short-term housing rentals. In the city that never sleeps, you can only rent out your home if you never leave it.

The cost of misaligned incentives in the pharmaceutical supply chain.

“The last administration was obsessed with imposing restrictions on AI, including extreme restrictions on its exports. As you know, they made it very difficult to export. This alienated American partners and drove even our friends into the arms of China and other countries.”

Lately I have become obsessed with the Federal Aviation Administration’s new MOSAIC rulemaking on light-sport aircraft. The agency’s proposed rule is smart, counterintuitive, and potentially transformative. If not literal flying cars, it could make personal aviation in general much more viable. It’s an action that deserves both applause and careful study.

Around 1.2 million vacation homes in the US, slightly more than 1/4th of the total, are in census tracts within 5 kilometers of the ocean. Virtually the entire East and Gulf Coasts are lined with vacation homes. Interestingly, this is somewhat less true of the West Coast. There are still many coastal census tracts with large fractions of vacation homes, but there are many fewer than on the East Coast. Florida has 1.5 to 2.5 times California’s coastline (depending on how you calculate it), and around 60% of its population, but around 5.6 times as many ocean-adjacent vacation homes. In fact, both New Jersey and Massachusetts have more coastal vacation homes than California does. In the continental US, there are roughly 5 times as many vacation homes on the Atlantic coast as there are on the Pacific coast.

The two biggest U.S. manufacturing success stories of the last twenty years are Tesla and SpaceX. And this is a problem.

?? “?? ??? ???? ?????? ???? ?? ????, ???? ??????? ??? ???? ?? ??? ??????? ?? ??? ???? ????? ?? ??? ?????? ?????? ????? ?? ???? ?? 25 ?????.”

Oh, wait, never mind, this was published 30 years ago. ? timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1…

But here’s the best reason the $430,000 doesn’t make sense. Walz served in Congress from 2007 to 2019. He was on countless committees and commissions. He held congressional hearings. Walz could walk through the nation’s Capitol building blindfolded. He not only knows all the nooks and crannies, he knowns all the tricks, the deflections, the stunts, the BS, you name it. And we’re supposed to believe that Walz needed highly specialized and outrageously expensive coaching for two months so he could handle those evil attack dogs, of whom he once was one. JB Pritzker of Illinois was also summoned to appear the same day as Walz. Pritzker isn’t much of a governor, either, but it should be noted that he personally paid for his legal prep.

I am a Singapore-controlling-Michigan’s-Upper-Peninsula accelerationist. Not only should they own the land, but they should institute SIngaporean law there and build a hyperfuturist Great Lakes megalopolis-thalassocracy.

Getting ready…just one week until @EAA Oshkosh–one of the largest airshows in the world??. I asked Grok4 to analyze MiG-29 from brake release at SLF to a Falcon 9 from ignition. The Falcon 9 overtakes the MiG at ~T+77 seconds at ~50,000 feet. Does Grok math checkout @DJSnM?

Insurers call this type of screw-up “mortality slippage.”  Mortality slippage means accidentally classifying someone as lower-risk than they actually are. It’s ridiculously expensive. A single mistaken classification can cost insurers millions in unexpected payouts over the life of a policy.

Kirk also has a gigantic database of each guest — about 115,000 people — and knows how many times they’ve dined at Lazy Bear since it first opened as a supper club in 2009. She then dives into social media and finds extra information that is publicly available to get a sense of who the guests are before they come in. Finally, she puts all the data she’s gathered into a color-coded Google document that every member of the team, front and back of house, studies.

Car Magazine’s 2003 take on the Toyota Prius is epic to this day ??. “the Prius is such an insipid driving device that all the emission-trimming cleverness gets effectively forgotten. Zero dynamic reward, identical fuel economy to the rather fun WW Golf TDI 130. Why?”

Just in: Stanford shows that virtual reality lectures outperform in-person lectures from PHD professors.

To aid the Port Washington and Beaver Dam projects, Gov. Tony Evers last week signed a bipartisan bill that creates exceptions for tax increment districts in the two communities. It’s unclear what if any type of tax incentives could be part of the proposed data center in the town of Vienna.

Remember when Democrats would look at those who did build things and assert that they didn’t build that? Now, that was ideology! Remember “You didn’t build that”? Who said that? Was it Elizabeth Warren or… oh! 

It’s that unelected people exploited it to run the country in secret in Biden’s name.

New documents show an officer known only as Howard managed a Cuban group that interacted with Oswald in the months before the JFK assassination.

In selling law enforcement agencies bulk access to such sensitive information, these airlines—through their data broker—are putting their own profits over travelers’ privacy. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently detailed its own purchase of personal data from ARC. In the current climate, this can have a detrimental impact on people’s lives. 

That’s the takeaway for any brand. Clarity isn’t something you’ll find on an explore page – it’s an ongoing discipline. It’s a refusal to do everything just because you can. It’s knowing which moments are yours to own – and which to let pass. It’s constantly asking: is this what we’re here to do? If the answer is no, then just don’t. And if there isn’t a bit of tension in your choices, you probably aren’t saying no enough. Clarity is the best constraint.

Generally, doing less is faster and easier! Depending on the task, you may be able to soften the requirements.

Some example questions to ask:

• Could I combine multiple screens into one?
• Is it okay if we don’t handle a particularly tricky edge case?
• Instead of an API supporting 1000 inputs, what if it just supported 10?
• Is it okay to build a prototype instead of a full version?
• What if we didn’t do this at all?

Was this the saltiest press conference ever?

Washington state spent about $80 billion in the 2013-15 budget but is set to spend more than $173 billion in 2025-27, a more than 116% increase over that time. U.S. inflation since 2015 has risen just 35.63%.

CureIS may not have Epic cornered, but they’ve probably earned their day in court.

Dr. Jay Greene and Dr. Ian Kingsbury show that members of “The Squad” receive an extraordinary amount of their campaign donations from foreign-trained doctors.

Benjamin Franklin first discovered the Incentive Flywheel, when fires threatened Philadelphia’s growth. He gathered neighbors and founded America’s first fire insurance company. They created volunteer fire departments and established the first building safety standards.

Of course, everything breaks when you scale that quickly: how to communicate as a company, the reporting structures, how to ship product, how to manage and organize people, the hiring processes, etc. Teams vary significantly in culture: some are sprinting flat-out all the time, others are babysitting big runs, some are moving along at a much more consistent pace. There’s no single OpenAI experience, and research, applied, and GTM operate on very different time horizons.

The final chip challenge: Can China build its own ASML?

Beijing and SMIC lead effort to replicate the world’s top chipmaking machines.

This is a whole series of decisions on the part of the city to eliminate citizen participation in government.”

“The point is that we have been doing it for 30 years, and they (Huawei) have been doing it for a few years, and Huawei can already tell everyone how powerful they are. Now no one has put more effort into building (the AI ecosystem) than me. I have been (doing this) at an extremely high level and at a scale that is difficult to execute, and Huawei can already be compared with us, which explains something.”

But their refusal to acknowledge the violence that some residents were seeing with their own eyes came off not as reassurance but as erasure. At the rally, Romero described herself as a “former lifelong Democrat,” explaining that the denials had turned her against the party. She thanked Trump first and foremost “for believing me.” Mike Coffman, Aurora’s Republican mayor, found himself caught between dueling narratives as the city became a flashpoint in national politics. “There’s one side that said there’s never been a problem,” he said at a town hall in October. “There’s another side that says, yeah, the whole city is overrun. And I think that the truth lies in the middle.”

A big shocker since working in Gov: Most agencies don’t know how many people work there, or even have org charts. It’s not only State Dept. And good luck trying to tally up how many contractors are employed. No one would ever run a company this way.

Marco Pizzi, a sociologist who has conducted extensive research into the impacts of the €1 house campaigns in Umbria, told me that though he was sceptical when he began his research, he’s come to see the programme as an innovative local approach to economic redevelopment. The foreign investment may, in fact, be what allows some of these towns to survive – and the very fact of their survival would allow their traditions to continue. Almost everyone I spoke with in Italy with first-hand experience of €1 house initiatives agreed: these schemes were a form of revival and had drawn people from abroad who were curious to learn about and participate in local ways of life.

As an indication of Twitter’s tendency to expose people to more news, a simple breakdown of our data shows how a higher proportion of Twitter users (28% of them) accessed seven or more online news sources in the last week, compared to users of other platforms, those who don’t use social media, and the total sample in general. This is perhaps again a reflection of how Twitter has been seen as a destination for news.

His first solo exhibition, underwritten by the communications department of the Michelin Corporation, caused a stir in the Paris art world.

The entrance to the hall was barred by a big panel, leaving two-meters-wide passageways at either side, on which Jed had displayed a satellite photo taken around the mountain of Guebwiller next to an enlargement of a Michelin Departments map of the same zone. The contrast was striking: while the photograph showed only a soup of more or less uniform green sprinkled with vague blue spots, the map developed a fascinating maze of departmental and scenic roads, viewpoints, forests, lakes, and cols. Above the two enlargements, in black capital letters, was the title of the exhibition: THE MAP IS MORE INTERESTING THAN THE TERRITORY.

The review in Le Monde was “ecstatic in its praise.”

In recent days, there has been a rush for bottled water at the Aldi supermarket in Blagny, in the Ardennes region of eastern France. “I sold an entire pallet in two hours this morning, 786 liters. That’s up 120% in sales,” said Gauthier Denis, manager of the store. In the parking lot of the Carrefour Market directly across the street, a customer loaded her car trunk with six packs of six bottles. “That should last us four days, no more,” said Sandrine Bouvet, 46, who lives with her husband and stepson in the neighboring village of Malandry. “We were told we can’t drink tap water anymore because of ‘pfffasses’ – I can’t remember how to say it – so we’re buying bottled water.”

The enhanced subsidies started during the COVID-19 pandemic under the Biden administration and helped dramatically decrease the cost of premiums for these plans.  It turns out that people liked those lower premiums. “The number of people signing up for coverage has more than doubled,” says Cox, who directs the Program on the Affordable Care Act at KFF. In January, enrollment hit a record 24 million. That high enrollment helped drive the uninsured rate to its lowest level ever.

The irony is that history will prove @epochtimes to be the true journalists in one of the most epic betrayal stories in American history. Meanwhile the New York Times will cling to its debunked Pulitzer “Prize” like a rejected sweetheart clutching old love letters.

Study finds that there is more diversity of thought on the political right than on the left.

At least seven states and the District of Columbia have offered coverage for immigrants since mostly 2020. But three of them have done an about-face, ending or limiting coverage for hundreds of thousands of immigrants who aren’t in the U.S. legally in California, Illinois and Minnesota.

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

This post is about the reason I will probably never try to warn any organisation in Belgium about any vulnerability again. Recently I have been dealing with an attempt at coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) with an organisation in Belgium. This post is not about that, because I’m not allowed to write about it. This post explains why I believe Belgium is unsafe for people trying to do CVD. I believe it’s important to warn others so that they know what to expect and can decide for themselves.

as well as a wariness of tech companies’ utopian promises.

The course will measure 7,600 yards from the tips, which would make it one of the longest courses in Wisconsin, and will unfold across rolling land, with some holes routed through wetlands.

CT is an intrinsically distributed system: CAs must submit each certificate to two CT logs operated by third parties and trusted by the browsers. This list is, and has been for a couple years, uncomfortably short. There just aren’t as many independent log operators as we’d like. Operating a log right now would be an immense contribution to the security of virtually every Internet user. It also comes with the bragging rights to claim that your public key is on billions of devices.

However much you like to be reminded of your vacuum cleaner’s power, the over-emphasis on statement-making is itself a disturbance from using the product. For many product categories symbolic value allows us to express our individual tastes and values – and that’s great. But for the categories Dyson operate in we largely want to ignore the product, complete the task and get on with our lives.

Leon Black, founder of Apollo Global Management, paid Epstein $158 million for “tax advice.” In 2023, Black paid $62M for immunity in an Epstein suit, admitting his money helped fund Epstein’s operations. In January, Donald Trump appointed Leon Black’s son—apparently unexpectedly.

Discussion of dabbling in samplers of ‘avant-garde’ perfumes and other perfumes; what I liked and didn’t like, and what 2 perfumes I ultimately bought for myself (Acqua di Sale and Kyoto Incense).

If the package passes, city planners estimate 32,000 residences would be able to accommodate two units — about 1,500 new homes. Developers could pursue more 6-story apartment buildings downtown without needing special permits. 

This gets my tag “MSM reports what’s in social media.”. Here‘s the viral video the article is about. It’s exactly the video you’d expect from a 24-year-old barre instructor and fitness influencer who studied political science and communications. It’s what I’d have said at age 24. By the way, I just watched a movie made by a 24-year-old woman, and I got the feeling it was exactly the kind of story I thought up when I was that age. Not saying I could have made the movie that topped the Sight & Sound “Greatest Films of All Time,” just saying I remember these young-woman thoughts. 

Those days are long gone. I’ve driven nearly every BYD model and they are now as good as other top brands like Tesla in terms of design, features, advanced technologies and overall quality. The company’s Blade Battery is among the safest and most cost-efficient in the world, so good that Toyota and Tesla have used it in some of their cars. Most worrying for its competitors, BYDs are affordable: Its least expensive models sell in China for under $10,000, a third of the price of the most affordable electric vehicles available in the U.S. market.

3/ The topline result is below. The average suspects per 100,000 rate for Germans is 1878. The highest rates are, in order, Afghans (8753), Iraqis (8638), Syrians (8236), and Bulgarians (7058). These numbers don’t include crimes related to immigration issues.

In fact, the rot runs much deeper. Americans can see that something is wrong, especially when it is staring them in the face: Navy “bureaus” that cannot design ships, builders that cannot build, shipyards that cannot repair, depots running out of munitions, command failures and corruption, accidents at sea, and billion-dollar fires in port. 

The disorder is in fact positioned in the heart of the Navy Ethos itself. The precise term-of-art — “Navy Ethos” — was first introduced in 1980, here. It signifies the core, or essence of the Navy’s sense of self: Its codification of meaning, belonging, and identity — as a society and culture.

Hence, the real story of the Navy’s roads to ruin lies in the unraveling of the Navy’s own Ethos.

According to the people familiar, the available information on the black boxes at this point cannot rule in or out improper, inadvertent or intentional actions that preceded or followed the apparent loss of thrust before the aircraft crashed into a hostel for students at BJ Medical College. It is not known to TAC whether one or both of the fuel control switches for the GE engines in the cockpit were moved in the moments after takeoff from Runway 23 in Ahmedabad.

The cross of Christ is the ultimate call to adventure for any man willing to fight. It is a call for young men to glory in their strength and enthusiasm while storing up plunder for themselves in heaven, instead of working for self-aggrandizement and passing pleasure. It is a call to make the epic a reality and to take your rightful place in it. And instead, we use the cross to domesticate our men.

So to address vaccine inequity, GAVI is investing in local production….but the need to manufacture “demand solidarity” among African governments reveals both the flaw in the premise and the weakness of the plan.

In practice, as we’re going to briefly outline, American civ-mil is, in a sense, fundamentally based on a bargain, the foundations of which date to the American Revolution but which has evolved and solidified since then. That bargain has been remarkably successful: the United States has avoided the sort of major civ-mil disjunctures (like military coups) that are often distressingly common in many states and has done so for two and a half centuries.¹ That isn’t to say the American civ-mil has been forever untroubled, as we’ll see: it is an evolving bargain, based on norms and thus fundamentally both precious and fragile.

Innocent subpostmasters went to jail, but now it is clear: the Post Office boss class belong there instead.

A Hotel Made Famous by Graham Greene Is a Victim of Haiti’s Violence. Haiti’s famed Oloffson Hotel, a cultural landmark and celebrity haven, was incinerated amid rising violence by gangs that control most of the country’s capital.

This teaches us two things (well actually, two things relevant to this abbreviated discussion today): first, that in the system of government God personally designed, the legislative body (admittedly a bit less of a Congress and more of a Constitutional Convention, but elected and representative which is the principal point) had power to elect and to dismiss Kings; and second, that this power was in fact used lawfully, more than once (it comes up again after David’s death as well as Solomon’s) and with God’s express approval.

What’s more, the report notes “a complete lack of leadership” from both Witzel-Behl and deputy city clerk James Verbick. “It was the job of the City Clerk to immediately take action once notified about the found ballots, and she did nothing,” according to the report. “It was the responsibility of the Deputy Clerk to take action in her absence, and he did nothing. These ballots were treated as unimportant and a reconciliation nuisance, rather than as the essential part of our democracy they represent.”

How Volkswagen’s Electric Bus Went From American Flagship to Flop. The German company’s hyped reboot of its iconic vintage van has been stunted by a luxury price tag, Trump’s trade war and an embarrassing recall.

Despite the reduction, the size of the central bank’s balance sheet remains +$2.5 trillion, or +60%, above its pre-pandemic levels.

The Budget Lab (TBL) estimated the effects all US tariffs and foreign retaliation implemented in 2025 through July 9, including the effects of the US-Vietnam trade framework, the 50% commodity tariffs on copper, and the July 7 & July 9 announcements on new rates for 22 countries. TBL analyzed the July 9 tariff rates as if they stayed in effect in perpetuity.

It’s full service. Labor costs are higher. Food costs are a little bit higher. So it’s just harder to operate.

Then we look at Miko Poke, which had a great run. We were the first poke restaurant in Madison. We were doing fantastic. But then everybody started putting poke on their own menus. There were new poke restaurants, so the growth wasn’t there like in the past.

Patrick waded into the water to intercept a blue kayak that was floating by. An older couple, watching from a house on a nearby hill, brought Lance and Patrick an inflatable inner tube, and they decided the tube was the better option to catch Rosemary. More control, softer landing. 

This article follows Part 1 of the Tandy Corporation’s history, which covers the company’s founding and the lead up to and launch of the TRS-80, and Part 2, which covers the TRS-80 Models I, II, III, CoCo, and Pocket Computer.

By reclassifying most lanes to dry van service, I reduced freight spend, improved trailer utilization, and reserved flatbeds for truly specialized loads.

“We’ve seen projects come in that promise community benefits, but then the rents go up and the small guys get squeezed out,” Lee said. “If the city and developers are serious about keeping space affordable for local businesses, that could be a game-changer — but we need to see that commitment in action.”

Can’t believe Elon actually did it. FSD has gotten shockingly, eerily good. Just did another drive from Malibu to LAX without taking the wheel once. Plenty of tricky, subtle situations along the way. What a time to be alive!

Should we expect the US electric grid to gradually devolve to a patchwork of microgrids? Why or why not, and on what technological, legal, economic, and political bases would you make this prediction?

Key Findings. Only Arkansas had an overall relative price below 170 percent of Medicare prices, while other states (California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, New York, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Wisconsin) had relative prices that were above 300 percent of Medicare prices.

You will struggle mightily inside American technocapitalism to afford a home insulated from crime caused by deluded politicians, private school to avoid woke social experiments, and you’ll still see a homeless guy taking a shit on your sidewalk.

The “most transparent administration in history” has spent years trying to hide embarrassing financial secrets from the public

Apple Vision Series and Smart Glasses Roadmap (2025–2028): Smart Glasses Set to Drive the Next Wave in Consumer Electronics

Small Modular Reactors, or SMRs, in particular. They have long been viewed with cautious optimism in clean energy circles. In China, they are quickly becoming an emerging backbone of the country’s AI infrastructure strategy. The logic is simple: If compute (industry jargon for the infrastructure powering AI) is the engine of AI progress, energy is the fuel. And China wants control over the pump.

Trends come and go—cottagecore, coastal grandma, goblin mode, clean girl, brat summer, whatever’s next. But the people who endure aren’t optimizing for today. They’re building libraries. Languages. Signature worlds that last.

https://climatedrift.substack.com/p/whats-stopping-america-from-goingWhat’s important to understand is that a heat pump does not create heat. It also doesn’t create cold (cold is the absence of heat, just like darkness is the absence of light). A heat pump simply transfers – pumps! – heat from one place to another.

What did they create? Two key innovations:

1. SDBench: A testing environment using 304 real medical mysteries from NEJM where AI starts with just “29yo woman with sore throat” and must decide what to ask/test next

If they were average members of the S&P 500, trading at a trailing price-earnings (P/E) ratio of 27 to 1, Fannie and Freddie’s combined market capitalization would be almost $780 billion. But they are not; they are financial companies, with a “special relationship” with the government. That special relationship resulted in their being forced into conservatorship in 2008—in spite of  being in full compliance with their applicable capital standards—by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who was not comfortable having to rely on them as shareholder-owned companies to get the country through the mortgage crisis, after the private-label securities market had imploded in the fall of 2007 and commercial banks had greatly pulled back on their residential mortgage lending because of soaring delinquencies. For virtually all of the time since their conservatorships, Fannie and Freddie’s P/Es have rounded to zero, and even with the recent optimism about their potential release, their average P/E still is languishing at under 3 to 1, or less than 11 percent of the S&P 500 P/E.

Last week, I wrote about some challenges of accessing and analyzing Epic’s EHI exports. Let’s leave access challenges for another time; today I’m sharing a draft of an open-source project to help with analysis: The EHI Living Manual. This guide is for anyone who has been handed a folder of TSV files and needs to make them useful — whether you’re an individual with your own health data, a developer building a new application, or a data engineer tasked with integrating a large-scale export.

Ultimately, the 5 series was so successful that it was a major factor in the demise of Canon’s previous professional full-frame series of cameras, the 1Ds series.   The 5 series prompted Canon to rethink how to provide value to its professional and prosumer user base. 

According to a preprint posted to the bioRxiv server this month, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide—or miticide—of its kind left in humans’ arsenal.

This isn’t just about abortion. It’s also about judicial respect for democracy and the legislative process. Even if you want broader abortion rights, you need to be concerned about who decides. 5/5

An Enormous Scandal, Dwarfing Watergate & The Pentagon Papers.

A quick steel man of the $55 billion number: We can be confident this is Apple’s internal figure—just as the author claims—because multiplying this 2016 number by five yields the exact $275 billion five-year deal reported by The Information in 2021, part of Apple’s MOU with the NDRC.

On Monday, ASTP/ONC announced (link) they will no longer enforce most Real World Testing (RWT) requirements for Certified Health IT. To most, this is an obscure policy shift. But it effectively ends a short-lived, and arguably unintentional, era of transparency into how health IT systems actually perform.

Whether or not one can comprehend all of the elements above as genuinely additive to Moby Dick itself (a feat unworthy of lesser minds), one cannot deny their literary-historical significance in opening up the form of the novel beyond simple storytelling. Sure, there is no Infinite Jestwithout Melville, but there is no Grapes of Wrath, either.

A puffin was found in a Hereford garden after being blown more than 100 miles from her seaside nest.

I started off by asking him whether there is a unifying theme to his seemingly diffuse life’s work, which has included old-school magazines and books, bleeding-edge technology, conservationism, photographing Asia, and teaching. “Following my interests,” he said simply.

While many voters have become skeptical toward the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of Democrats embrace restrictive policies, including punitive measures against those who haven’t gotten the COVID-19 vaccine. 2022.

A few dozen people of all ages arrived ahead of the 8 am opening of the Bras Marie swimming zone – one of three open in Paris this summer – donning swim caps and goggles as they prepared to dive in and celebrate the long-awaited return of bathing in the Seine. The seasonal opening of the Seine for swimming is seen as a key legacy of the Paris 2024 Olympics, when open-water swimmers and triathletes competed in its waters which were specially cleaned for the event.

Seems possible if not probable that while every open-source reporter in the world was watching very public and eventually government-confirmed B-2 flights westward, a guy in his backyard in Missouri saw the real, undisclosed and untracked mission heading east.

The idea of a “Python dev” or “React dev” is outdated. Going forward, I won’t be hiring for languages, I’ll hire devs who can solve problems, no matter the stack. The language barrier is completely gone.

Hawaii Highways.

The main strongpoint for TPUs is in their scalability. This is achieved through a co-design of both the hardware side (e.g. energy efficiency and modularity) and the software side (e.g. XLA compiler).

While the Covid mRNA vaccines may have provided a therapeutic effect during the fall 2021 B.1.617.2 variant wave, helping to keep some vulnerable individuals out of the hospital, this benefit did not translate into reduced infection rates or into any arguable offset in overall mortality. In contrast, the Week 14, 2021 inception of the mRNA vaccine has led to a pronounced and pervasive inflection in mortality across multiple-dozens of ICD codes. This shift has resulted in more than 840,000 excess deaths from causes other than Covid or non-natural means (see Charts 3b and 4c). These deaths have come mainly as a result of the vaccine itself (see Charts 3c and 3d) – a mortality total which is 25 times greater than the 33,000 lives the CDC claimed could have been saved by the B.1.617.2-valent vaccine during the Delta Variant wave. Nations with a low rate of Covid and high rate of mRNA vaccination serve to confirm both the timing and cause of this excess mortality.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is the only rocket among Amazon’s launch providers that has actually flown at the kind of cadence envisioned for the Kuiper network. The Falcon 9 currently flies at an average rate of once every two days, primarily on missions with SpaceX’s own Starlink broadband satellites. So Amazon went to SpaceX in 2023 and booked three initial rides on the Falcon 9. SpaceX’s Starlink network dominates the satellite broadband market, with more than 5 million subscribers connecting to approximately 7,000 satellites currently active in the constellation.

The Nicene Creed in Old English, translated by Ælfric

Live data from all US ISOs/RTOs in a single, intuitive platform. Gain seamless visibility into the grid, stay ahead of market shifts, and never miss critical events with instant, customizable alerts.

That was the theory at least, but the economic case was always confused. Stewart is (correctly) a fan of the book ‘How Big Things Get Done’ and quotes a line from it: “Projects don’t go wrong, they start wrong.” HS2’s problems started with the vision: while the strategic case was about capacity, the economic case focused on travel times, which were easier to measure and talk about, and more in line with how the Department for Transport typically talks about projects. The conflict between the strategic case and how the economic case was talked about led to constant confusion about the purpose of HS2 in the public discourse (epitomised by Jenkins above), but also made it hard to know how to evaluate proposed solutions.

“We have 50 people that have given $50,000 or more,” Gee said.

Gifts of $1 million or more came from the state of Wisconsin, Dane County, Ascendium, American Family Insurance Dreams Foundation, Summit Credit Union and TruStage. U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Rep. Mark Pocan helped the center secure federal grants for the project, too.

The gift that pushed the campaign to meet its goal was actually a second donation from Ascendium, the Madison-based nonprofit that supports education and workforce training. Ascendium gave the final $626,000 to help the center meet its fundraising goal.

Steve Vig, 51, of Madison, had just left the produce section with his shopping cart and was walking up the meats aisle toward the back of the store about 8:40 p.m. when he heard a loud crash behind him. “For a moment I thought a display had fallen over but realized the sound was too loud for that,” Vig said. When he turned around, a veritable Niagara Falls was pouring through the roof onto the sale items between the produce and meat sections.

Anthropic purchased millions of physical print books to digitally scan them for Claude.

Tanden confirmed that during her tenure as White House staff secretary, she oversaw the many documents coming to and from the president’s desk, and she noted that her role included authorization to direct autopen use.

One also starts understanding how much the American NGO community, by blathering on about future monetary opportunities for nation-building, contributes to the unending nature of all these crises. National collapse of Iran is in none of the primary three demographics I named above. Urban elites are aware of the results of chaos. The IRGC and the mullahs lose their retirement plan. And the rural poor are still bereft, and powerless. There is no land war even for their sons to be drafted into. And the Iran-Iraq War is not that long ago – only 38 years.

German automotive industry signs Memorandum of Understanding for joint software development based on open source.

San Francisco Streets.

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur (The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived.)

— attributed to Petronius (c. 27-66 AD)

But the city has taken well to the vacuum of our present national drift. Here a new, more bloody-minded politics thrives, in which eccentrics and civic entrepreneurs can achieve cult status by picking up the litter where the council will not, invading Cineworld to cancel a screening of an Indian film deemed anti-Islam and calling the Prime Minister a “wasteman” in a viral TikTok.

The vast majority of Americans (83%) say they have not paid for news in the past year, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March. Another 17% say they have directly paid or given money to a news source by subscribing, donating or becoming a member during that time.

At the same time, 74% run into paywalls at least sometimes when they are looking for news online. This includes 38% who say they come across paywalled articles extremely often or often.

I continue to hold that feminism is the KEY movement that has undermined the success of western culture. Their zealotry has led to the destruction of the nuclear family (the most important factor in a healthy nation). They have helped to facilitate the near collapse of the west and this problem needs to be addressed before it’s too late.

During my time in Ukraine, I collected statistics on the success of our drone operations. I found that 43 percent of our sorties resulted in a hit on the intended target in the sense that the drone was able to successfully fly all the way to the target, identify it correctly, hit it, and the drone’s explosive charge detonated as it was supposed to. This number does not include instances when our higher command requested a sortie but we had to decline because we knew that we could not strike the target for reasons such as weather, technical problems, or electronic interference. If this type of pre-aborted mission is included in the total, the success rate drops to between 20 and 30 percent. On the face of it, this success rate is bad, but that is not the whole story.

This is not a niche opportunity; it’s a growing, scalable energy resource. More than 100,000 EVs will come off U.S. roads this year alone. Today, over 5 million EVs are active on U.S. roads, representing an estimated 350 GWh of energy that will reach end-of-life in the coming years. And with another 150 GWh entering the operational fleet annually, that total is increasing fast and could supply 50% or more of the entire energy storage market.  

Log rolling is a sport with deep historical roots, derived almost 200 years ago on river drives, according to Verstegen. “Lumberjacks put the timber into the rivers, and they had to steer the timber down the rivers and kind of prevent log jams.”

But the move has been canceled, and the brick house at 427 W. Mifflin St. — deemed historically significant by the city in part because it was designed by a noted Madison architect — will be demolished to make way for a larger residential development at the site.

The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) has held strong in Windows for nearly 40 years, but that’s about to change. Microsoft revealed earlier this year that it was overhauling its BSOD error message in Windows 11, and the company has now confirmed that it will soon be known as the Black Screen of Death. The new design drops the traditional blue color, frowning face, and QR code in favor of a simplified black screen.

Society said in its suit, filed Nov. 6, that “while responding to the fire call, the Madison Fire Department discovered several city-owned fire hydrants were under-pressurized or not pressurized at all.”

Now with the full set of nearly a thousand comments on the CMS RFI.

Chief Justice Roberts Speaks at Fourth Circuit Conference.

Available on this site is a complete history of cycling maps, including well over a hundred carefully-selected and restored extracts from the main providers of such maps. It has been created specifically and wholly for that purpose for the general public with an interest in such matters. it was first published in 2021 and is now much expanded. 

An underappreciated passage of Justice Jackson’s dissent in CASA is her appeal to the authority of a fictional space alien.

Last June, alders greenlit the rezoning of parcels from 6610 to 6706 Old Sauk Road that would have allowed the space to be developed into a new three-story apartment building. However, the rezoning was vacated after Judge Rhonda Lanford ruled that city officials didn’t follow the law in the process of rezoning the parcels.

Once I was in office, we restored the limits to cover those living in poverty and eliminated the waiting list. Today, my state is the only one in the nation to have no gap in insurance coverage despite not having taken the expansion. Second, I did not want to put more people on government assistance. For those who are able, public assistance should be more like a trampoline than a hammock. True freedom and prosperity do not come from the clumsy hand of the government. They come from empowering people to control their own destiny through the dignity of work.

Toyota released a pro-life ad highlighting Lauren Woolstencroft—born without legs—who went on to defy the odds and become an 8X Paralympic gold medalist.

Lifting the ban on supersonic flight.

Note that this is the inevitable result of mass immigration that was predicted by proto-nationalists decades ago. It is why the entire immigration debate about crime and economics was always irrelevant and fundamentally missing the point. The reason for banning immigration and protecting the nation’s demographics, as was done in the early 1920s, is to preserve the nature of the society.

Boeing now hopes the 777X will be certified later this year and first deliveries in 2026. But all the Xs that have been built and stored must go through Change Incorporation to whatever new standards the FAA requires for certification; and upgrades that happen in the normal course of elapsed time. The airplanes also must be pulled out of long-term storage, all systems tested, and if necessary repaired or replaced.

This glossy rebrand rings hollow when juxtaposed with the company’s actions. USAA is close to becoming a corporate zombie, animated by its historical association with U.S. military members and veterans but rotting on the inside.

In experiments with mice and studies with human tissue samples, the researchers conducting the new study saw that anaerobic microbes from the colon not only colonized the small bowel after a single transplant but also persisted there for months. These microbes also changed their new intestinal environments to their advantage, “terraforming” them in ways that caused changes in the recipient’s metabolism, behavior, and energy balance.

As for the business’s iconic green and yellow color scheme, Lance said it was his dad who came up with it some time after he returned from Korea. Back then they had to mix the colors carefully to get the correct shade, he said. Apparently it worked. People would always recognize the colors. A woman in Waterloo hand-lettered the trucks and signs until probably 2000, Lance said, when they started wrapping the trucks.

However the other name in the email raised some eyebrows, coming so soon after the announcement that New Glenn’s cadence would be significantly slower than expected. Jarrett Jones, the senior vice president running the New Glenn program, was said to be “stepping away from his role and taking a well deserved year off” starting on August 15. It is not clear whether this departure was linked to Bezos’ displeasure with the rocket program. One company official said Jones’ sabbatical had been planned, but the timing is curious.

For those new to ACIP who want to know why RFK blew up the entire racket today, you need only watch this clip of a typical meeting.

As a result, people began contacting the Armstrong company asking for the contact information for the artist who “made those beautiful stools.” Esherick received dozens of letters from people inquiring about purchasing his stools from all across the country including Alaska, Georgia, Nebraska, Massachusetts, California, Ohio, and New York. Esherick, and later Miriam Phillips, would answer each letter, letting the potential customer know what was available, how much each stool cost, and on several occasions letting designers know very pointedly that he was not a mass production studio!

I also now deeply understand why experienced business people have a strict “no assholes” policy. I always thought this was throwaway advice, but it only takes one lawsuit to make it clear how incredibly valuable it is to work with people you trust.

“Now, I have a question for you,” Federer said, looking out across a sea of umbrellas at the commencement ceremony for Dartmouth College. “What percentage of points do you think I won in those matches?”

He paused.

“Only 54 percent,” he said.

It was one of those statistics that at first seemed incorrect. Federer was one of the most dominant athletic forces of this century. That guy lost nearly half of his points?

Two differing game styles collided in the women’s final with Aryna Sabalenka’s willingness to produce winners and Coco Gauff’s defensive skills and tennis IQ. To understand the difference between the players, one needs to understand the difference in mentality. Players with an aggressive mindset (like Aryna) value winners hit more than unforced errors gained. It’s almost as if a clean winner counts double the points in terms of how it feels to the player. Whereas an extracted unforced error from the opponent is brushed over like it never happened. For Coco and players of Coco’s mindset, on the other hand, an unforced error from the other side is just as much confirmation for doing things right as a down-the-line shot nobody can reach. If you think of the quarterfinal match between Novak Djokovic and Alexander Zverev, for example, every mistake Zverev made was a confirmation of the strategy applied by Djokovic.

Technology development is inherently risky and the book goes into detail on the many false starts and near misses. Although the focus of the book is usually on hardware and physical concerns such as wire propagation delay, the book pays attention to software concerns in parallel to market changes. Early on, supercomputer customers wrote almost all of their own software but, as the market grew, customers expected more software support from vendors. The latter half of the book includes discussion of operating system development, evolution of compilers (mostly Fortran) and their interplay with instruction sets, and specialized tools for specific industries (e.g. computational fluid dynamics). I was unaware of the early resistance to Unix and the concern that it was “slow.”

Mapbox MCP Server.

Open Planet Data:  first project offers daily snapshots of OpenStreetMap.

Ikuyo Travel Planning

Today’s web development tools are undeniably more powerful, but they’ve also introduced significant complexity:

JetZero has daunting tasks ahead to successfully bring its BWB, called the Z4, to the market. It needs $7bn to $10bn (it has, publicly, less than $300m). JetZero plans to make a site selection announcement any day now, before the air show. An entirely new production plant is required. It needs to build the plant, production tooling and the final assembly line

Following his visit May 1-2, Phelan ordered Marines and sailors be moved out of the Air Force-owned barracks within 10 days and that new housing aboard Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz be opened about a month ahead of schedule in response to the squalid conditions, according to POGO and confirmed by the Navy. “I actually thought the buildings were condemned,” Phelan told POGO in an interview. “When we pulled up to them and saw what shape they’re in, I was shocked.”

Since 2010, Illinois has increased taxes and fees 70 times at a cost of $110 billions with 49 of the tax and fee hikes coming under Pritzker.

Similar to Mike Posner’s mindset: Instead of trying to figure out what your audience likes, just create what you like. That’ll help sustain motivation when your audience doesn’t really exist. You’ll be more likely to push through plateaus, and you’ll enjoy the process. You’ll also just produce better work.

this was a Techbuilt, which was a prefab home manufacturer started by a group of Harvard architecture professors and based in Cambridge, MA

Shortly after New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen spoke with the Transportation Security Administration about her husband, William Shaheen, TSA officials removed him from a list of people subjected to additional scrutiny under TSA’s “Quiet Skies” domestic surveillance program. 

“Here you don’t second-guess,” a friend of Winters says. “In London if someone is not drinking, you think they have an alcohol problem. Here it is either that, or they’re Mormon or have other religious reasons, or because they look at health.”

Then there’s the newfound ability of non-technical people in the humanities to write their own code. This is a bigger deal than many in my field seem to recognize. I suspect this will change soon. The emerging generation of historians will simply take it for granted that they can create their own custom research and teaching tools and deploy them at will, more or less for free.

Based on intelligence files, field investigations, and dozens of interviews, it lays out a stark diagnosis: The Muslim Brotherhood has built an extensive ideological infrastructure in France—not through violence, but through schools, charities, mosques, and soft power. It states: “The Brotherhood’s strategy is to install a form of ideological hegemony by infiltrating civil society under the guise of religious and educational activities.”. The report is the most detailed government study to date of the Brotherhood’s presence in Europe. Written by two civil servants, it draws on months of fieldwork and analysis conducted in France and abroad, with input from diplomats, intelligence officials, academics, and religious figures. Its conclusion is blunt: The Brotherhood operates as a political project. Its goal is not sudden revolution, but gradual transformation. Its targets are hearts and minds. Its strength lies not in secrecy, but in strategic ambiguity. And it is not coming just for France. It is coming for all of the West.

Hovde Properties plans to start the renovation of the Churchill Building this fall and open the hotel about a year later, Schwenker said, though he noted that the opening date is tentative. “We’re going to take our time and do it right,” he said. The renovation will begin with a meticulous interior demolition, informed by an extensive documentation and planning process, he said.

The statement comes some 40 hours after the Postupdated its initial story without an editor’s note or correction notice. One of the authors, former Al Jazeera correspondent Louisa Loveluck, was part of the Post team named as a Pulitzer Prize finalist for international reporting on Gaza. She celebrated the affair with a speech to the Post newsroom that condemned the “level of suffering” in Gaza but did not mention Hamas or the Israeli hostages. Loveluck also has a history of receiving editor’s notes on Israel-related coverage.

“This is America’s, and the world’s, Achilles’ heel, which China continuously exploits,” said Nazak Nikakhtar, who was the assistant secretary of commerce overseeing export controls during Mr. Trump’s first term.

The essay isn’t just poorly argued: It has policy implications. Samson both insults and threatens allied governments, implying there will be some kind of US punishment if European states do not change their policies on free speech, election administration, and (for some reason) migration.

A person still has to stare at the results and discriminate if they are good. This is my major criticism of LLM coding in that they casually spit out way too much code per query at arbitrary complexity, pretending there is no stage 2. Getting that much code is bad and scary. Instead, the LLM has to actively work with you to break down problems into little incremental steps, each more easily verifiable. It has to anticipate the computational work of (2) and reduce it as much as possible. It has to really care. and that means knowing the topic well enough to correct the AI

“The agency is doing a lot of littles, a lot of things that other agencies, departments, companies are capable of doing,” Isaacman said. “That’s not why the taxpayers fund NASA. NASA’s funded to do the near impossible that no one else can do.”

These depth maps, along with other imagery, are stored in High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) container files. These files can contain multiple images and vast amounts of metadata. This format was originally designed between 2013 and 2015 and Apple adopted its HEIC variant in 2017.

The tell-tale element is neatly hidden at the back: a church tower like no other in Berlin today. The only original baroque church tower, in fact. It belongs to Sophienkirche – built in 1712-1713 and, as if by a miracle, not hit by massive bombs in the WW2 air-raids or pulverised during the battle for Berlin in April-May 1945.

Went into Chicago yesterday. Some sticker shock. Uber wanted $38 for a 1.7 mi ride from the train station to the Sheraton hotel (it was raining otherwise would have walked). A regular cab was $8. Our breakfast companion said the hotel wanted $500/nite. Ridiculous.

2a. If they have expired, what is the legal basis you think the family has to stay? Particularly in light of the fact that their illegally here father is an antisemite accused of some pretty heinous crimes. (see 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(3)(B))

county officials told her it would be “quite a while before any real estate transactions would take place.” Baron said she reached out to politicians and county officials but came away with the impression no one knew how long rebuilding the system would take.

“Fighting drones isn’t so different from fighting malware: both are a cat-and-mouse game,” Hypponen said. “We try to detect threats that don’t want to be seen. Our adversaries study our methods and adapt, and we update our defenses in response. I’m bringing decades of expertise to this area, tackling a fight that matters now more than ever.”

BREAKING: I have obtained the internal memo outlining reasons behind Microsoft Build’s(@Microsoft) exit from Seattle. This is an absolute indictment on Mayor Bruce Harrell’s(@MayorofSeattle) administration and shows his failure to get the homeless drug crisis under control. ??

As part of the transaction, the new ownership group did two things: 
1?? Sold the land to Prudential for $29M and entered into a 114 ground lease (with rent payments going down over time, this is important)  2?? Raised $33 million from over 3,000 shareholders in Empire State Building Associates.

I told him I had to finish my PhD, a required credential for researching brains and consciousness. But Jef would not take “No” for an answer, and sent me roundtrip airplane tickets with a note: “Just visit for a weekend, no strings attached.” My dad lived in nearby Los Gatos so I decided to visit.

If you want even more understanding, you can go further and test the tap water that comes out of your faucet. Doing so is not cheap — but it is much more affordable and far less of a hassle than a lifetime of maintaining a filtration system that you may not have needed in the first place. (Because about 15% of the US populace, or 43 million people, uses water from unregulated private wells, we include both utility and well-water test kits in our guide.)

BREAKING: Apple just proved AI “reasoning” models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don’t actually reason at all. They just memorize patterns really well.

Furthermore, look at the libertarian & green parties. They have been working for years & still don’t have complete ballot access.

This approach reflected a belief by the policymakers that property ownership could strengthen community responsibility and social stability. During the war, the federal government rented these homes to workers at regulated rates designed to be fair, while covering maintenance costs. After the war, the government began selling the homes – often to the tenants living in them – through affordable installment plans that provided a practical path to ownership.

One thing I’ve noticed in watching people photograph—and I do that any chance I can get, because it’s so informative—is just how many people are (a) get to a place; (b) pick up the camera; (c) take a quick photo; and (d) move on. No time contemplating, no time checking or making settings, no questioning their choices, and often very bad handling because they’re moving so quickly doing things. I expect those folk to fail. 

The propaganda was the purpose, all ramping up Islamophobia to justify the Western destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. When the Manchester Arena attack eventually did happen, it turned out that MI5 had been the perpetrator’s sponsor and he and his father had been ferried from Libya by the British armed forces. Sponsorship of terrorism abroad is always likely to result in blowback at home.

Just in: The American Land Title Association (@ALTAonline) has compiled title insurance industry financial data? for 2024. I always like to break this down in a big ?to share what I think is important. Glad to hear your thoughts, too.

Toyota mounts software challenge to Tesla and Chinese rivals.

It is easy to think of examples of software which has made work more prescriptive or structured, from real-time tracking of logistics workers to the use of tools which allow managers to keep track of white-collar workers’ productivity. Felstead describes this trend as “discretion-sapping technological change.”

The in-house system, known as Arene, will provide over-the-air updates to help drivers with manoeuvres such as lane keeping and parking, as well as multimedia and entertainment features. It will debut in the next-generation RAV4 sport utility vehicle.

The software platform is central to Toyota’s efforts to lay the groundwork for autonomous driving, accumulate driving data and catch up with competitors that have banked on the provision of digital services — paid and unpaid — to add value to cars.

It is the first fruit of seven years of labour by the entity that became Woven by Toyota, a subsidiary established by the automaker to boost software development competitiveness and break from its slower-moving car manufacturing culture.

Anton has risen to the top by playing his cards close to his chest and deftly navigating the right’s warring foreign policy camps.

If Mark Papko is confirmed this spring as the Dane County Regional Airport’s new leader, one of his first priorities will be securing an international designation for the travel hub.

That’s because the bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema—and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong. It has haunted not just me but, as I’d later learn, the birding community at large for almost a quarter of a century.

“We weren’t expecting to automate so many processes in China, but the Chinese suppliers’ pricing is very low,” says Tobias Liebeck, Audi’s head of manufacturing engineering at the Changchun plant. China now has more robots per 10,000 workers than Germany.

That was the case, until Frank Luntz (American political commentator commonly seen on CNBC, Bloomberg, who also has a 400,000+ follower count on Twitter) somehow saw my tweet and took interest in the site.

Tariff court decision

Once implemented, the second-home tax approach will divide residential properties into two tiers, applying higher rates to second homes and short-term rental properties in an effort to backfill residential cuts and minimize spillover onto business properties. The package also includes several rate tiers that lean the tax system harder on high-value homes in an effort to focus more relief on lower-value properties.

• U.S. providers conducted 42 orbital launches in Q1
• Chinese providers conducted 17 launches
• A total of 900 spacecraft were launched globally
• Satellites under 1,200 kg accounted for 98% of spacecraft launched and 85% of total upmass

If you go more south and inland, you get the edge of the Sahara Desert. I’ve seen plenty of that before in Mauritania but I didn’t have much experiences with oases, which are quite cool with their palm groves growing in the middle of the desert. Better yet, completely unbeknownst to me before going and presumably to the rest of the world too, Tunisia has an Aral Sea thing going on with at least two large lakes in the south called Chott el Djerrid and Chott el Gharsa. If you look at them on Google Maps, you’ll see two blue bubbles:

Congress can’t give this power over from the legislature to the executive just by passing a normal law. That would take a constitutional amendment. But it can pass laws to delegate part of its power to the president in limited ways.

On Henry James and the State of Literary Criticism

As things stand today, he said, “I will not recommend this for anyone else unless they have a stomach of titanium.”. The relocation, if it takes place, will come almost exactly a year after Madison developer Brandon Cook transported a four-story brick apartment building about two blocks — from 438 W. Dayton St. to 531 W. Mifflin St. — over the course of three days, at a cost that topped $1 million. Cook’s ambitious project nearly fell through at the last minute, and he ran out of time to move a second structure to the West Mifflin Street lot before it was demolished. But the main building reached its destination intact.

Graham’s crackers were intentionally bland and reportedly tasted like bran saltine crackers without the salt. Free from spices or sugar, these graham crackers were invented with the goal of suppressing undesirable passions.

If we do this well, AI models will become capable of the same kind of online learning that humans can do: instead of having to work inside bespoke RL environments with custom graders, we will be able to deploy them in the real world for them to learn from their successes and failures. The most plausible way for models to reach this level of meta-learning skill goes through RL, which will require environments of much greater volume and quality than the ones that are available today.

Terrible legacy media and how they went after Elon Musk. Now they are defending Cory Booker for the same hand gesture