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.

That fit people have a reduced risk of premature death from various diseases is a recurring result in many studies. New research from Uppsala University shows that people with high fitness levels in their late teens also have a reduced risk of dying from random accidents. This suggests that the associations seen in previous studies have probably been misleading.

I have done the same thing using an Economist subscription as the singular item in the basket, rather than a hamburger. What picture of the world emerges and how does it compare to the Big Mac index?

There’s one catch: Tunkhannock’s plan to go solar is contingent upon winning more than $1 million in funding from the state’s Solar for Schools program. Currently in its inaugural year, Solar for Schools was born from a bill that faced an uphill battle in a legislature where environmental bills often die by attrition — a battle that required its creator, progressive Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler (D-Philadelphia) to reach across the aisle and help marry what are often competing interests in the state — labor, education and climate. 

State of the art PFAS

Elon Musk’s change to the Twitter block – which renders tweets from people who have blocked you visible, but you can’t interact with them – is actually useful in continuing to show you opposing views.

Miracle of miracles, it worked. Critics and audiences from coast to coast raved at the couple’s onstage antics, as Lucy clowned with a battered cello while Desi sang and drummed his heart out. A.H. Weiler of The Times pronouncedthe pair “a couple who bid fair to become the busiest husband-and- wife team extant.” Soon enough, they were.

“Three-Body Computing Constellation,” which will directly process data in space, rather than on the ground, reducing reliance on ground-based computing infrastructure. The constellation will be capable of a combined 5 peta operations per second (POPS) with 30 terabytes of onboard storage. 

But nearly all maritime accidents and failures occur in complex systems by illustrating how multiple layers of defense, each with vulnerabilities, can align to allow a hazard to pass through. This is what investigators call the Swiss cheese model.

The EIB plans to launch this initiative, dubbed TechEU, later this year, creating a centralized hub for financing requests from researchers and companies. This initiative aims to streamline the process, making EU funding processes faster and simpler. A quicker decision-making process can differentiate between the survival and failure of startups navigating tight cash flows and competitive markets.

At the heart of the accusations are Nestlé Waters’s allegedly unauthorized use of carbon filters and ultraviolet light — methods normally used on tap water — to treat mineral water for several of its brands, including its flagship sparkling water Perrier. But France’s stringent regulations aim to ensure that natural mineral water remains pure and unaltered, justifying the steep price tag paid by consumers.

The alternative is for the U.S. to reject the resource-rich Gulf States and drive them into the arms of China, which is eager to sell them a Huawei+DeepSeek tech stack. And China won’t gainsay the opportunity by asking local partners why they aren’t building their data centers in Beijing or Shanghai instead. China will just fill out the purchase orders and ship the chips, making Chinese technology the standard. We shouldn’t let this happen. We still have a limited window to ensure American technology dominance in global AI infrastructure. Let’s seize it.

The second-largest supplier of Spanish gas? Russia

“You have no intention of paying off your collateralized burrito obligations, do you?”

Both Microsoft and Google are locking down search APIs not because of “access control,” but because search is now an input to AI.

Not even Jackson, though, could have wished for a disaster as complete as the panic of 1837 produced. Nearly half the banks in the United States failed, leaving businesses and individuals in the lurch. Millions of Americans were without jobs. In those days of no social safety net, joblessness often led to homelessness and hopelessness. As Americans had done for generations, many headed west. But where previous waves of westering had been fueled by hope, this one was driven by despair.

The Biden administration’s policy on AI:
— Insert DEI requirements into AI, making it WokeAI.
— Hobble American AI companies with a hundred pages of unnecessary regulation (Biden E.O.).
— Burden American semiconductor, data center, and cloud companies with 200 pages of unnecessary regulation (Biden Diffusion Rule).
— Limit energy production and permitting, making massive data center build-out impossible.
— Exclude the countries with the largest sovereign wealth funds from partnering with Team America on AI.

The rent-stabilized unit belonged to her grandmother, Gisela Venta-Perez. Vines, 22, is the fourth generation in her family to call the apartment home. She claims she lived there with Venta-Perez for about two-and-a-half years, until her grandmother’s death last spring. Now, Vines wants to stay in the apartment, which she said Venta-Perez rented for about $900 a month. But the owner of the building said she doesn’t meet the strict criteria to take on a deceased relative’s rent-stabilized lease.

In my view, one of OpenAI’s motives for announcing its collaboration with Jony Ive now is likely to shift market focus from recent Google I/O. Google’s ecosystem and AI integration, showcased in the I/O keynotes, pose a challenge that OpenAI currently struggles to address. As a result, OpenAI is leveraging a new narrative to redirect attention.

The gene editing technology used for KJ is not exactly new, nor is the delivery system. CRISPR has already proven to be a successful gene therapy. What’s stunning is the speed. KJ’s mutation was identified within days of his birth. Within weeks, researchers were growing cells in petri dishes that carried genetic sequences copied from KJ. In month two, they used those cells to train molecular gene-editing machinery to target and correct KJ’s mutation—a spot in the DNA coding for the liver enzyme where there’s a T (thymine) instead of a C (cytosine). At the beginning of the third month, researchers had created genetically engineered mice that carry KJ’s specific mutation, too.

“In other words, if the US’s rating were commensurate with the current US CDS spread of 58bps, the US’s credit rating would be six credit-rating notches lower … it’s perhaps a good thing that the rating agencies typically lag the market.” – Macquarie

Another geriatric Democratic congressman dies in office, and then within hours the Republicans pass their Big Beautiful Behemoth legislation by literally one vote. Fitting encapsulation for the current era

At Kure, National Bulk Carriers built a series of record-breakingly large ships: the 38,000 deadweight ton Petro Kure in 1952, the 45,000 deadweight ton Phoenix in 1954, and the 55,000 deadweight ton Sinclair Petro-Lore in 1955. The Universe Apollo, launched at Kure in 1958, was the first tanker in the world to exceed 100,000 deadweight tons. Altogether Ludwig built 42 ships at Kure, many of them the largest in the world when completed. When his lease at Kure expired, the shipyards were acquired by Japanese shipbuilder IHI, which continued to build enormous tankers for Ludwig.

Primarily a liturgical composer, Zelenka was not simply working over or within forms perfected by Bach, whom he personally knew. Zelenka spoke in his own voice. As Heinz Holliger, the brilliant oboist who has helped revive Zelenka’s music, puts it: “Zelenka (like Bach) obviously has absorbed the total compositional knowledge of the previous generations, and, by virtue of his most individual personality, exposes it to a breaking test, thus setting free a critical element opposing the tradition.” 

Paul Ryan runs the American Idea Foundation, a small nonprofit where the vast majority of contributions fund salaries for his former staffers.

Prior to termination, Wimmer believed he would have a long-term career with Generac, having earned glowing performance reviews, merit-based raises, and multiple promotions into a leadership role. He lost his job after almost 5 years of dedicated service.

Senator Jones, and others, including this author, have long warned that California’s restrictive policies and costly regulations have contributed to make the price of gasoline in California the highest in the nation and have precipitated the imminent shutdown of two major refineries by April 2026. The exiting of the two refineries from California represents the possible loss of up to 10.5 million gallons a day of in-state gasoline production. Consequently, California’s need for foreign sourced gasoline is likely to increase, and with regulatory costs associated with the state excise tax, cap and trade, and the new LCFS likely increasing the cost of gasoline, Californians are facing the potential for gasoline price increases to possibly $6.04 to over $8.00 a gallon, inclusive of the replacement costs to make-up the nearly 10.5 million gallons a day deficit in in-state gasoline production. 

Comparison of spreadsheet software

The failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.

Some quotes are too good to cut.

The coverup of @JoeBiden’s condition is the greatest fraud ever perpetrated by the media and an administration against the American people

in 1936 only some 32% of Berlin flats had a bathroom or a bath tub as such

This is a common pattern: America doesn’t just survive crises, it gets stronger because of them. America is blessed with geography, abundant natural resources, and the most valuable resource of all: a driving entrepreneurial spirit that can overcome any obstacle put in our way and build technological solutions to short-term challenges that lead to long-term strength.  Today, once again, the economic data paints a different picture than the political sentiment, one that speaks to the difference between America and the Roman Empire, or any empire that’s come before. 

We investigate the information content of personal stock trades by IRS officials. We collect transaction-level data on over five thousand IRS officials’ personal investments and document substantial trading activity in individual stocks by officials across IRS departments. We find that IRS officials’ trades, predominantly their purchases, generate positive abnormal returns on average, consistent with officials’ information being not yet fully impounded into stock price. Next, we examine whether stock trades by these officials are associated with the firm’s future tax enforcement outcomes. For a given firm, we find IRS officials’ purchases are associated with subsequent decreases in tax reserves and specifically lapses in the statute of limitations. We also find that IRS officials’ sales are associated with subsequent unfavorable tax settlements. These findings suggest that IRS officials possess, and trade on, material tax-related information and that these trades are associated with future tax enforcement outcomes for firms.

Despite paying dramatically more than any other country for healthcare, the United States has fewer physicians per capita than most developed nations.

“It was very fast — when they were refuelling in those days — and there were a few shots which suddenly reminded us of the problem we were facing. Essentially, if you look down on the pitstop from above, there’s your [driver] in the car and all the people looking after that precious parcel and when you look down on a baby on a trolley moving from one place to the other, it’s the same thing.”

Using ‘virtual unwrapping’, the scroll PHerc. 172 which is housed at the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford has been identified as On Vices by the Greek philosopher Philodemus. The ethical treatise, known in full as On Vices and Their Opposite Virtues and In Whom They Are and About What, provides guidance for cultivating a virtuous life. In recognition of this achievement, researchers have been awarded the Vesuvius Challenge First Title Prize which includes prize money of $60,000.

Jones was routinely unavailable to make key decisions about the airport, neglecting messages from her staff as well as representatives of Southwest Airlines who had reached out about starting service at the airport, according to documents obtained by the Wisconsin State Journal.

5 Powerful Persuasion Methods for Engineering Managers

Experts predicted that artificial intelligence would steal radiology jobs. But at the Mayo Clinic, the technology has been more friend than foe.

A new crowd-sourced transit platform allows riders to propose, vote on, and activate new bus lines in as little as three days.

MICHELIN Guide Distinctions are now on Apple Maps!

“Millions for defense, but not a penny for tribute.”

These factors of high costs and low prices all led to much of rural America being gutted. Equipment dealers, feed mills, hardware stores all took big hits, if they survived at all.

Delays and cost overruns are in part driven by the Navy’s ship design and acquisition process. Broadly speaking, the Navy creates high-level requirements for complex, multi-role ships, and then outsources the design of these ships to third-party contractors. Once a design is selected, it is turned into production drawings (so-called “detail designs”), which are used to produce the ships. In an effort to reduce the time it takes to deliver a ship, ship construction is often started before ship design is complete. However, this strategy frequently backfires: as design work is completed, changes to under-construction ships are often required, resulting in costly and time-consuming rework.

As consumers begin to use AI agents to do their shopping, retailers are trying to figure out how to market to bots in addition to humans.

We seem to be moving to a world where there will be four major AI powers — adding Saudi and UAE — rather than just two, namely the US and China.  But if energy is what is scarce here, perhaps we were headed for additional AI powers anyway, and best for the US to be in on the deal?

Funny story SBFs dad helped write the Dem tax plan for crypto (obv terrible). And Caroline’s parents contributed to the game theory paper on how to nudge the population into Covid compliance. Shocker

Never heard a room go quite as fast as when someone suggested to a room of aging HHMI Investigators that they should retire so postdocs can get jobs.

The influential venture capitalist Katherine Boyle is making the case that creating things for America—from weapons to rockets to nuclear-energy plants—is pro-family.

“Now, did we go spend a lot of money in the offseason, guys? Let’s call a spade a spade. No we didn’t.”

Car designs look more like each other than ever. Color is disappearing as most cars become white, gray, or black. From Sydney to Riyadh to Cleveland, an upscale coffee shop is more likely than ever to bear the same design features: reclaimed wood, hanging Edison bulbs, marble countertops. So is an Airbnb. Even celebrities increasingly look the same, with the rising ubiquity of “Instagram face” driven by cosmetic injectables and Photoshop touch-ups.

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly
I’ll now cover the opposite case: my peers who see generative models as superior to their own output. I see this most often in professional communication, typically to produce fluff or fix the tone of their original prompts. Every single time, the model obscures the original meaning and adds layers of superfluous nonsense to even the simplest of ideas. If you’re lucky, it at least won’t be wrong, but most often the model will completely fabricate critical details of the original writing and produce something completely incomprehensible. No matter how bad any original human’s writing is, I can (hopefully?) trust that they have some kind of internal understanding to share; with a language model, there is no such luck.

“Whenever the time came to elect a new doge of Venice, an official went to pray in St. Mark’s Basilica, grabbed the first boy he could find in the piazza, and took him back to the ducal palace. The boy’s job was to draw lots to choose an electoral college from the members of Venice’s grand families, which was the first step in a performance that has been called tortuous, ridiculous, and profound. Here is how it went, more or less unchanged, for five hundred years, from 1268 until the end of the Venetian Republic.

The average crowd size for University of Wisconsin men’s basketball games slumped again this season.

…. and has used reserve funds to balance its budget in recent months.

You will then have a lean, mean combat-ready cadre of senior leaders, I promise.

The latest work builds on earlier breakthroughs from the Vesuvius Challenge, a global competition launched in 2023, which offers prizes for progress in reading the scrolls from 3D X-rays. Last year, a team of computer-savvy students shared the $700,000 (£527,350) grand prize for developing artificial intelligence software that enabled them to read 2,000 ancient Greek letters from another scroll.

Good call. Tweet it from the official account.

And we STILL don’t know why U.S. taxpayers were paying China to alter a virus previously harmless to people so that it would be lethal to us. WHY did Fauci want this?

A $1 billion company has operated for 53 years with ZERO managers. Workers buy $500,000 machines without approval. Hire their own colleagues. Set their own salaries. And they’re outperforming every competitor in their industry. The coolest company you’ve never heard of ?

The way we build and ship software these days is mostly ridiculous, leading to apps using millions of lines of code to open a garage door, and other simple programs importing 1,600 external code libraries—dependencies—of unknown provenance. Software security is dire, which is a function both of the quality of the code and the sheer amount of it. Many of us programmers know the current situation is untenable. Many programmers (and their management) sadly haven’t ever experienced anything else. And for the rest of us, we rarely get the time to do a better job.

Because one day, when the machine stops, we’ll need to remember how to think.

WW2 Aircraft recognition posters.

In short, getting things done means getting them in a state where:

(a) executives at the company understand what’s happened, and (b) are happy with it

To many, this will be an unsatisfying definition of what it means to get things done. Lots of engineers will want a more solid definition than “it’s a social construct”. However, as someone with a philosophy background, I have a healthy respect for social constructs. The concept “chair” is a social construct, and chairs are plenty real[2]. In some ways, “getting things done” is even more real. It can pay your rent! If you don’t respect it, it can even get you fired.

“You think I’m gonna be sitting in line at United?!” The utter contempt for the victims of his own policies is just breathtaking. This is the Democrats FAR LEFT flank! Fighting the oligarchy and climate change from private jets, sentencing you to carbon taxes, sneering at coach.

That’s why, as uncomfortable and old-fashioned as it may sound, you should let someone set you up.

Among the most impressive manufacturing achievements of the US during WWII was the number of ships it produced. Prior to the war, the American shipbuilding industry had been moribund. Shipyards had been busy during and immediately following WWI, but the huge flood of wartime ships greatly reduced demand for new ones, and American shipyards didn’t produce a single oceangoing hull between 1922 and 1928. The onset of the Great Depression only made things worse, and by 1935 annual tonnage produced by US commercial shipbuilders had fallen to its lowest level in more than 100 years.

What’s unfolding now is a case study in how some progressive movements have become more invested in symbols than systems;

I suppose you could argue Sanders goal, of among other things, decreasing the amount of private jet flights, is so morally righteous he has to fly a few private jets to accomplish it.

At the heart of the energy plan is the construction of a small modular reactor, a type of transportable nuclear reactor assembled on site, which can power a wide range of applications, including AI data centers. If successful, Argentina could be the first country in the world to have a commercially available SMR, and only the third after China and Russia to have an operational one.

The absurdity is everywhere. You see it in music, where record labels prefer to invest in 50-year-old songs—instead of new hits. You see it in film, where a studio dumps 36 Marvel superhero movies on the market—and then acts surprised because audiences sicken of them. These ridiculous actions tell us that a reversal is at hand. We don’t measure that by anything logical. We measure it by the absurdity.

To fill the remaining vacancies, the Admiralty waived their “able-bodied” requirement and drafted 500 men from the “Corps of Invalids,” a stockpile of army veterans who were too old, injured, or otherwise infirm for further army service. Some of these men were barely able to stand unassisted, let alone walk, or handle rigging on a lurching deck. Among those who could walk, many of them did, directly away from the navy ships, before the squadron was even underway.

In 1981, the Hearst Corporation donated its newsreel collection to the University of California. In cooperation with the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the Packard Humanities Institute is developing this website as part of a joint project to make the Hearst newsreel collection more easily accessible to the public.

Porsche and now Mercedes limiting charging performance of some of their EVs. Not knowing all the details, but mein Gott, german engineering: was hat dich bloß so ruiniert?

I know the series is cringe now but my theory remains that Jill Biden thought she could pull a Claire Underwood.

VW down a million cars. GM down a million cars. Jeep JV bankrupt. Suzuki out. Nissan deeply wounded.

There are unconfirmed reports that Riza Altun, a veteran PKK commander & hardliner, was killed in an alleged Turkish drone strike, a message no doubt of the risks of not falling in line with Ocalan’s call to disarm & disband.

Which brings me to Boston. Ever heard of Route 128? To my surprise, neither have any of my students at Duke or the entrepreneurs I’ve met in Silicon Valley. I’m surprised because it wasn’t so long ago that Silicon Valley was considered a poor cousin of Boston’s tech center—a cluster of technology companies located along this freeway which partially rings the city. Starting in the 1960s and on through the 1980s, Route 128 was, if anything, more closely associated with tech than Silicon Valley. Today few young technology workers even know where Route 128 is located, let alone its importance in the tech world. Silicon Valley has simply left Boston’s tech center behind.

A U.S. defense official told TWZ yesterday that Yemeni militants have or are suspected to have brought down six MQ-9s since March 15. Fox News reported today that U.S. officials have acknowledged the loss of another Reaper, the seventh one since the beginning of last month. Back in March, an unnamed U.S. defense official told Stars and Stripes that the Houthis had downed 12 Reapers since October 2023.

the pipe organ is a big box of whistles. Each pipe sits on top of a hollow wind chest that is filled with compressed air provided by a bellows or blower. Each ‘stop’ at the organ console represents a set of pipes (a rank) of a particular tone color, with a different pipe for every note on the keyboard. Pulling the stop activates a slider under that specific set of pipes on the windchest, making them available as a sound-source. The wind chest also contains a series of valves (pallets) connected to the keyboard by a mechanical linkage. These pallets govern the flow of air to each pipe, and even though a stop may be on, no pipes will sound until a key is depressed and its respective pallet opens. This allows the compressed air to pass up through the pipe for that note, creating sound

Reading obituaries can boost creativity by exposing you to distant ideas, fueling the associations that lead to unexpected breakthroughs.

And… Not every address is relevant. Some benches are on streets. But we probably don’t want to imply that the bench is inside or belongs to a specific nearby house.

In China, doing business there meant providing “benefit” to its new and growing industries. “Benefit” was a loosely defined term that generally meant transferring technology, helping create a supply chain and ordering parts and components made in China. For some, it meant providing kickbacks. (This is not suggesting Airbus engaged in kickbacks, but corruption is a matter of public record. Such was suggested to me when I was doing business in China between 1989 and 1993.)

Informants weren’t just deployed to sabotage group activities and implement Zersetzung plans, but also to gather intelligence on individuals and groups (around 160km worth of Stasi archives survived the end of the GDR). Most intelligence was used to evaluate relationships and activities (which then led to an extension of intelligence gathering to previously untargeted individuals and groups), and as a basis for planning Zersetzung operations. Obviously plans for actions and activities were also reported, but these were acted upon only in rare and serious cases – if intelligence were used to disrupt the activities in any obvious way then suspicion could be drawn to the informant.

“Subsidence has become a huge challenge,” said Mehdi Pirhadi, a member of Tehran city council. He warned the “massive land sinking will destroy infrastructure and threaten lives” unless it was addressed urgently.

This interactive tool allows you to toggle between 5 different maps of Milwaukee from different points in its history. Much changes between them. Two of the most dramatic changes to explore are the demolition of many neighborhoods to create freeways and the creation of much of the modern-day lakefront via infill.

Zhaoxin is a Chinese x86 CPU designer. The KaiXian KX-7000 is Zhaoxin’s latest CPU, and features a new architecture dubbed “????”. ???? is a road in Shanghai called “Century Avenue”, following Zhaoxin’s practice of naming architectures after Shanghai landmarks. Zhaoxin is notable because it’s a joint venture between VIA Technologies and the Shanghai municipal government. It inherits VIA’s x86-64 license, and also enjoys powerful government backing. That’s a potent combination, because Zhaoxin’s cores are positioned to take advantage of the strong x86-64 software ecosystem.

Between 1960 and 1967, the almost forgotten Lebanese Rocket Society, led by its founder Manoug Manougian, competed with the great powers of the Cold War to create a space program in Lebanon. Founded as a student association within the Haigazian College in Beirut in November 1960, the Rocket Society operated without any official funding from the state or the university. Relying on the dedication of a few professors, seven students, and a modest donation from the Lebanese entrepreneur and Parliamentarian Emile Bustani, what the burgeoning Society lacked in resources, it made up for in ingenuity, drive, and vision.

Regardless of how one feels about DeepSeek’s open-source R1 model, it is a clear indication that innovation is moving rapidly around the world, with or without leading U.S. tech. If U.S. platforms are absent, companies will turn to strategic competitors like Huawei to fill the gap. This is why leadership in AI depends not just on what we restrict—but on what we enable.

If you or someone you love has lost the ability to speak, you can sign up to our Patient Registry today and help shape the future of communication. (3/3)

For the first time in US Gov history, 25 people are retiring online only, to inform scaling to everyone. This is a big win for retirees to get their full check faster, and testament to how quickly @USOPM is working towards the President’s software modernization Exec Order ????

The budget contains some notable changes for the US space agency. Overall, NASA is asked to take a 25 percent cut in its budget, from about $25 billion to $18.8 billion. Ars has previously reported on some of these proposed cuts, most notably to its science budget. These include a $2.265 billion reduction in Space science and a $1.161 billion reduction in Earth science. Perhaps the most notable cancellation here is the Mars Sample Return mission, which the budget proposal says will be achieved by human missions to Mars.

100x better models running on 100x better chips running in data centers with 100x more chips is a total increase of 1,000,000x. A million times more artificial intelligence.

This is the story of the people who made music visible.

The Altair was created by a small company called MITS, which initially stood for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry. In 1974 MITS had been selling calculator kits via mail order. Later in the year they started working on a computer based on the then-new Intel 8080 8-bit CPU. About this time they were contacted by Popular Electronics magazine who was looking to do a feature on a computer project.

So why are American SOF used almost exclusively at the tactical level?  Because the people employing them, the staffs of major commanders, don’t understand operational art.  Some service schools claim to teach it but they don’t.  They reduce it to processes, as Second Generation war does with everything.  But an art reduced to process results in crap.  One U.S. military school goes so far as to say that all you have to do is write a paragraph where this is a noun, that is a verb, and presto!  You know what to do at the operational level.  That’s operational art for dogs.  As General Hermann Balck said, “It is an art; only a few can do it, most can never learn.  The world is not full of Raphaels either.”

The MNP is the world’s first purpose-built drone carrier.  And it costs only about $135 million, approximately one-hundredth of the price of a Ford-class American aircraft carrier.

“Bomb, bomb, bomb, that’s all my generals know how to do.”

One of the core questions discussed in the breakouts and in the halls was how to broaden the geospatial audience. How can we better communicate geo data’s utility, in all industries and domains? Many tactics and case studies were debated, but the one I kept coming back to is that of DuckDB.

There are so many solutions to this problem. We don’t need to list them all here. I documented some of them one time, but there are many more.

Ultimately, SpaceX’s simplified Starlink deployment architecture has fewer parts and eliminates the need for a carrier structure. This allows SpaceX to devote a higher share of the rocket’s mass and volume capacity to the Starlink satellites themselves, replacing dead weight with revenue-earning capability. The dispenser architecture used by Amazon is a more conventional design, and gives satellite engineers more flexibility in designing their spacecraft. It also allows satellites to spread out faster in orbit.

We paid $50 million for half of GEICO in 1976, what turned out to be half of GEICO, $50 million. We now own 100%, but 50% of $2 billion that we earned in the first quarter is $1 billion, which on a $50 million investment… The only thing I’d like to add is in addition to the underwriting profit, GEICO provides $39 billion of float.

It improved coverage but not care. It was the result of complete regulatory capture from health insurance companies (requiring 85% Medical Loss Ratio) and medical record/billing vendors (requiring Meaningful Use).

Two young German travelers expected their Hawaii trip to be the highlight of a months-long world adventure. Instead, their visit ended in handcuffs, jail time, and deportation — a stark reminder of the risks some international visitors face at U.S. borders. (more)

This reliance on readily available solutions, particularly for familiar problems, creates a real risk: engineers may inadvertently atrophy their own problem-solving skills, hindering their ability to tackle truly novel challenges.

A podcast on epic systems.

“No one would build a volume that’s a void like that anymore,” says Paul Aferiat, a former employee of Gwathmey’s, whose firm Stamberg Aferiat + Associates was tasked with expanding the barn in 1995 when it was bought by new owners Dana and Paul Caan. Gwathmey recommended Aferiat when the Caan’s asked who would be a good fit to work on the barn as they had run out of bedrooms for their three daughters.

The only thing the Fed seems to be good at is using its vast powers to inject trillions of dollars of liquidity into the financial system to bail out banks from a problem the Feds often “help” the banks create. Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke even called the subprime mortgage crises “largely contained” as late as May 2007 when the crisis was turning into an economic tsunami.

What has gotten less attention is that his case is an example of the self-defeating absurdities of our immigration system and, in particular, of how it hands out “humanitarian protection.”. When Abrego Garcia avoided deportation back in 2019, he didn’t take

Consider where we are in this debate: 20 years ago the cry from LGBT activists was “leave us alone, let us live our private lives.”. Now it’s “you will bake me the cake, and you will force your children to sit through our curriculum, regardless of your religious beliefs.”

DeepSeek represents a profound threat to our nation’s security. Although it presents itself as just another AI chatbot, offering users a way to generate text and answer questions, closer inspection reveals that the app siphons data back to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), creates security vulnerabilities for its users, and relies on a model that covertly censors and manipulates information pursuant to Chinese law. Equally troubling, the model appears to have been built using stolen U.S. technology on the back of U.S. semiconductor chips that are prohibited from sale to China without an export license and when it was released, PRC-affiliated social media accounts amplified and celebrated the model, according to Graphika research. This report documents some of the risks DeepSeek poses and explains how its development is based on common Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tactics designed to unlawfully undermine U.S. technological leadership and critical American policies to protect national security.

Should we expect a gale of chaos to continue blowing through American tariff policy for the next four years? Yes, we should. By imposing punitive tariffs and threatening to retract America’s security umbrella, Trump hopes to coerce the world into sharing what he sees as the burdens of providing public goods like the global dollar system and military protection. Within Trump’s White House, at least three factions are vying for influence on these matters. Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, holds the most aggressive and hawkish views. The titles of his books, like The Coming China Wars (2006) and Death by China (2011), give a flavor of his approach, as does a document he circulated within the White House during Trump’s first term alleging that a “weakened manufacturing base” would cause a “higher abortion rate,” a “lower fertility rate,” and “increased spousal abuse.” The administration’s more technocratic figures, such as Miran and J.D. Vance, have a clearer set of goals and a more coherent, but still predatory, worldview. Their thinking rests on a nationalist critique of global finance, which they blame for deindustrialization and the long-term unemployment left unaddressed after 2008. Both camps are in tension with Elon Musk, the South African industrialist, whose multinational corporations will suffer from trade conflicts. At the moment, however, Navarro seems to be ascendant. 

SpaceX raised $10B. NASA spent $450B. Only one is reliably sending humans to orbit. I was bored this weekend so did some digging on where NASA’s $450B went since 2002.

A new profile on billionaire heir and socialite dilettante @AlexanderSoros details the noble and inspiring ways that the Democratic Party is combatting the evils of oligarchy (by @svzwood in @NYMag):

A Practical Way to Get More Out of Limited Foreign Assistance Budgets

Grades for Water Quality-Health, Infrastructure & Operations, and Finance are based on data provided by Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSC) for the years 2022 and 2023. Grades for Communication are based on data the WWEP team collected in 2024. Some inaccuracies in grading may be due to accidental misreporting or errors in the underlying data. Water customers are encouraged to contact their utilities with questions or concerns.

Let’s summarize:

? Allies are being asked to pay
? IMF is being retooled
? U.S. assets are being monetized
? Tariffs are a negotiating tool, not a tax policy
? Dollar is being gradually reweighted
This is the setup year. The real game is 2025–2029.

NTT Corporation (Headquarters: Chiyoda, Tokyo; President and CEO: Akira Shimada; hereinafter “NTT”) has become the first in the world to successfully trigger and guide lightning using a drone. This experiment also demonstrated, under natural lightning conditions, the effectiveness of both the drone’s lightning protection technology and the electric field-based lightning triggering method. These results are expected to contribute to further research on the still-mysterious mechanisms of lightning and to help reduce lightning-related damage to cities and people.

The internet is littered with digital ghost towns—premium domains once associated with thriving businesses, now sitting dormant or parked, waiting for their next life. Some of the biggest companies in the world have made strategic acquisitions, only to shut down the businesses they bought, leaving behind valuable domain names that are either redirected, held indefinitely, or simply left in limbo. Let’s take a look at some high-profile cases where major corporations scooped up valuable domains, shut down the original companies, and left the URLs in the digital graveyard.

First BETA-collection of Berlin-based DeepTech Startups

Pick the cheapest geocoding API provider for your project. An impartial comparison of pricing for HERE, Google Maps Platform, Azure Maps, OpenCage, TomTom Maps, LocationIQ, and Nominatim.

The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of Lionel Trains.

Sons had tried to disinhert murderer’s girlfriend,
their adoptive sister. The adopted daughter of Dr. Beth Potter and Robin Carre has settled out of court with her two siblings over the slain couple’s contested will. Miriam’s boyfriend, Khari Sanford, was convicted of their murder in 2022 and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Sanford and a young accomplice abducted the two from their beds on the near West side of Madison on March 30, 2020. Sanford held a handgun on them as he directed the driver to the north entrance to the UW Arboretum. That is where Sanford shot each in the head, execution style, trial evidence showed. Joggers found the two the next morning, still in their night clothes on that frigid morning, Dr. Potter was alive but barely. She died in a hospital emergency room hours later.

Yet, in an era of airlines placing loose bets on aviation startups, United’s investment and interest in JetZero’s design stands out from its previous venture capital investments, which have been in aircraft whose market niches don’t target a spot in its current fleet. Notably, this JetZero investment is the first to offer a potential direct challenge to the Airbus and Boeing duopoly.

Yet even as the Chinese argument has some surface plausibility, many of its claims are dubious. While it’s true that China has sought to forge a new economic order through initiatives such as the BRI and agreements such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership—and that its exports to BRI countries now exceed those to the United States, the European Union, and Japan combined—these figures tell only part of the story. A significant portion of these exports are transshipments ultimately destined for the U.S. market. These transshipments can take various forms: simple repackaging of Chinese-made goods, basic assembly using Chinese components in third countries, or even falsified export documentation listing obscure jurisdictions like Heard Island and McDonald Islands as the country of origin. As a result, the apparent decline in China’s direct exports to the United States—from 19.2 percent in 2018 to 14.7 percent in 2024—is likely overstated. In reality, the volume of Chinese goods reaching the United States might not have fallen much, if at all.

The IRS Tea Party scandal is about as black-and-white a scandal as you can imagine. All the information is out there and uncontested. If you think it’s fake, that is a problem you have with being able to digest plain factual information over partisan talking point.

The victims were in the courtroom ready for the pre-trial conference; they were waiting for justice. Judge Dugan found out that ICE agents were in the hallway. She put Flores-Ruiz in the jury box (unusual) & went to confront the federal agents in the hall.

How did we end up with a more than 5000 pound BMW M5 in the year of our Lord 2025?

The ex-ATF informant, Carol Howe—who warned her handlers in early 1995 that neo-Nazi extremists in Oklahoma were planning to attack federal buildings—had vanished in the late 90s after being acquitted from explosives charges. In the remaining years of her life, she was reportedly living in Sparta, Tennessee under the name “Sarah Collins.” She died in a house fire on Jan. 6, according to documentarian Jon Ronson.

‘I have an assumption that my chromosomes are probably XY but I don’t know.’

Arthur John Keeffe, ‘Practicing Lawyer’s Guide to the Current Law Magazines,’ 48 American Bar Asso. J. 491, 491 (1962) (explaining that during the American Civil War, federal authorities arrested Judge James L. Bartol of the Maryland Court of Appeals and Judge Richard Bennett Carmichael of the Maryland Circuit Court, and the “latter was arrested while conducting court”).

What is described above happened under President Obama and under President Lincoln. Judges are not above the law; judges cannot interpose their courthouse and personal rules and policies against federal officers. And when state judges violate the law, they must be arrested .  .  . like you and me and anyone else. We all know that—or, at least, we should. 

I must admit I did not realize that if you are a prior deport, you do not need to appear before a judge. I also learned that some who are not prior deports can be removed without a judge as part of the Expedited Removal System created by Bill Clinton in 1996. (verified by the American Immigration Council)

Shelter I spent the majority of nights on my trip inside a Naturehike Cloud-Up 1 Person Tent. I was happy with the volume of the assembled tent as a 5’11” person. It was also a small, light (~1500 grams) piece of luggage. That said, the tent didn’t make it through an overnight rainstorm without leaking water through the floor. I’d recommend finding another one :/ I also brought a 20-degree sleeping bag and a small sleeping pad. If I had taken the trip in the summer, a 40-degree bag would probably have sufficed.

Before I get to some supporting evidence for that statement, let’s recap what apertures really do:

• f/1.2 — let’s call this our new “baseline”
• f/1.4 — half stop slower (-0.5EV)
• f/1.8 — one and a third stops slower (-1.3EV)
• f/2 — one and a half stops slower (-1.5EV)
• f/2.8 — two and a half stops slower (-2.5EV)

“All you need are a good pair of tennis shoes or some sort of sneakers that you can run in, and they can come play,” Feldman said. 

In The Final Flight of Captain Forrester, Texas Monthly staff writer and podcast host Josh Alvarez takes listeners along Karoni’s harrowing journey to find her father. Traveling to Hawaii, Utah, Vietnam, and Washington, D.C., Alvarez chronicles Karoni’s fight for answers. Through interviews with American and Vietnamese government officials, Forrester’s family members, forensic scientists, anthropologists, military pilots, and a retired CIA spy, The Final Flight of Captain Forrester reveals the extreme challenges involved in finding missing soldiers decades after the fight has ended.

Over four weeks she drove 2,600 miles and visited hundreds of local breweries, restaurants and cheese shops throughout the state. The result is a 200-page highlight reel titled “Beer, Brats, and Cheese: A Wisconsin Road Trip.” “Was it crazy? In more ways than one. Did I question my life choices? Maybe just a few times. But was it worth it? Undoubtedly, 100 percent yes,” she wrote in the book.

At one of the milking robots, several cows are lined up, nose to tail, politely waiting their turn. The cows can get milked by robot whenever they like, which typically means more frequently than the twice a day at a traditional dairy farm. Not only is getting milked more often more comfortable for the cows, cows also produce about 10 percent more milk when the milking schedule is completely up to them. “There’s a direct correlation between stress and milk production,” Jacobs says. “Which is nice, because robots make cows happier and therefore, they give more milk, which helps us sell more robots.”

Typography is a discipline that studies the formation and appearance of letters, not only as symbols of verbal sounds but also as elements in design. The art of typography refers to the arrangement of letters as the main element (Wijaya, 1999). The difference between Japanese typography and Latin letter typography is based on the complexity of Japanese character writing. The Japanese language has a writing system that uses Chinese characters (kanji), ideograms; hiragana and katakana, and the Roman alphabet (Romaji (Igarashi, 2007)

Researchers from China are to be allowed access to half a million UK GP records despite western intelligence agencies’ fears about the authoritarian regime amassing health data, the Guardian can reveal. Preparations are under way to transfer the records to UK Biobank, a research hub that holds detailed medical information donated by 500,000 volunteers. One of the world’s largest troves of health data, the facility makes its information available to universities, scientific institutes and private companies. A Guardian analysis shows one in five successful applications for access come from China.

Recently I was targeted by an extremely sophisticated phishing attack, and I want to highlight it here. It exploits a vulnerability in Google’s infrastructure, and given their refusal to fix it, we’re likely to see it a lot more. Here’s the email I got:

Divorce formularies from PBMs. Require them to come from independent organizations with no economic incentive from the formulary
Make them about wellness, not pay for play like a grocery store endcap. This ends rebates and allows for net pricing. It also allows for better care and wellness.

As promised, I have declassified the Biden Administration’s Strategic Implementation Plan for Countering Domestic Terrorism.

Mauch has made some upgrades to his operation. In our previous story, we described how Mauch was renting an air compressor to blow fiber through his conduits. He recently bought an industrial air compressor at a government liquidation auction, spending under $4,000 for equipment that often costs about $20,000, he said. He had previously spent $8,000 on a directional drill machine that installs cables or conduits under driveways and roads without digging giant holes.

California-based Natilus is on target to begin delivering its first aircraft for service in 2029, a Blended Wing Body (BWB) turboprop cargo aircraft, according to CEO Aleksey Matyushev.

What if UBER partnered with Hertz on an AV fleet roll out over time?

So it’s interesting that an American brand is trying to bring its concept to France. While France isn’t hurting for large chain stores, Costco is a different story. What they sell is more specialized, many items are their own brand, Kirkland, and almost all items are sold in larger quantities, such as 3-pound (1,35kg) bags of almonds vs. 4-ounce (125g) bags at Carrefour. When I see those tiny bags in my local grocery store, I wonder: Who buys a 1/2 cup of almonds? I eat that in one afternoon.

The Chinese growth and stability model also requires relatively secure energy supplies. For that it relies on the United States and its allies, as the Chinese programs for nuclear and solar power remain far from their final goals. If the Western alliance system collapses, who is to keep the Middle East relatively stable, at least stable from the point of view of procuring fossil fuels? China hardly seems up to that task, as the country has neither the means, the inclination, the experience, nor the allies to do the job.

Effective April 5, 2025, all shipments to the U.S. with a declared customs value over USD 800 require formal entry processing – down from the previous USD 2,500 threshold due to new U.S. Customs regulations.

They even possess many of the characteristics of a nation—all they need to become a network state is to recognize that they are part of a group that has the potential to have a political identity. Once they have this consciousness, they can create a state to represent and protect them.

Distributed filesystems provide two main advantages over local storage – they can serve massive amounts of data (up to petabytes) and provide high throughput that exceed the capabilities of a single machine. They offer fault tolerance (the system keeps running if one machine goes down) and redundancy (if data gets corrupted on one node, other nodes have original copies).

Those five values will replace Boeing’s current set of principles put in place by former CEO Dave Calhoun, who took over after two fatal MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 and then stepped down after the panel blowout last year. 

judyrecords is a 100% free nationwide search engine that lets you instantly search hundreds of millions of United States court cases and lawsuits.judyrecords has over 100x more cases than Google Scholar and 10x more cases than PACER, the official case management system of the United States federal judiciary.As of Jul 2022, judyrecords now features free full-text search of all United States patents from 1/1/1976 to 07/01/2022 — over 8.1 million patents in total.

Today, I bring you an interview with Ryan Allen. Ryan Allen is a professor of international education at University of America in Southern California and the author of the newsletter “College Towns,” which explores the intersection of higher education and urbanism. Our conversation covers his transition from academic publishing to public writing, the challenges facing higher education, and how colleges can better integrate with their communities through thoughtful urban design.

Peter felt as if he had stepped on to an alien planet. There were no billboards, the streets were vast and the signs were incomprehensible. In South America, Rudi and Peter had explored on foot; here, they were whisked around by stern men in black Volga limousines. After a day in Leningrad, Rudi and Peter were driven to the railway station, where a private compartment in an overnight express train to Moscow awaited them. On arrival, they took a drive to one of the Stalin-era skyscrapers on the river embankment. To Peter, it looked like a vast castle from a fantasy comic. A safe-house apartment in the building was to be their home in Moscow. Inge was already there. A housekeeper cooked meals for the family, and that first evening the table was set for eight with plates of local delicacies and three glasses per person, for tangy Borjomi mineral water, wine and vodka. Several handlers from Directorate S, which ran the illegals programme, soon arrived for dinner.

the thing about stuff like this (demonstrated here in replies) is that people will say, “that was different” which is true but also elides the part where the difference is of degree rather than kind, so the only argument you can make is for restraint rather than principle.

I’ve highlighted in red what I think won’t work, yellow, what I’m unsure about, and green what I think will work.

beautiful losers model of the respectable Right….

Gen. Caine said the military is too slow to integrate advanced technology into its weapons and other systems.

For Synology customers, the challenge of being vendor-locked into using Synology branded drives is not just about alleged firmware improvements. It is also about being able to keep data secure while finding easy replacements.

Because the information is suppressed.
The planning and execution of Brennan’s anti-Trump ops took place at Cambridge University, England. The word University and the country, UK with capital London was classified for 9 years until Pres Trump released the docs this month.

Criticism #4: “He’s pushing anti-vax conspiracy theories again!” This one is just false. Not once during his 27-minute speech did he mention vaccines. Instead, he discussed toxins such as mold, pesticides, and additives. But the media (who appear to hate him for past positions) decided to resurrect the vaccine angle even though he didn’t bring it up. This is yet another example of a targeted smear campaign by individuals more invested in promoting narratives than seeking the truth.

Edward Feser wrote a critique of President Trump’s new tariffs and his trade policy. A reader asked ChatGPT to respond to his critique as if it was me. And apparently AI now does non-fiction nearly as well as it does fiction.

1. Feser’s Overemphasis on Prudential Moderation over Existential Necessity

Vox Day might begin by pointing out that Feser’s argument is essentially one of technocratic prudence—tariffs might be useful in moderation, if well-targeted, in the right economic climate, with good timing, and clear justification. Vox would call this academic dithering in the face of civilizational crisis. From his view, America is not merely suffering a mild imbalance of trade—it is being gutted by decades of globalist betrayal that have systematically offshored its manufacturing capacity, hollowed out its industrial base, and turned its working class into wage-serfs of the service economy.

Forget “incrementally,” it’s got to be exploded. Would more of the same and a slow death be better?

In the absence of a more senior officer, the surrender was accepted by Colonel Bùi Tín, a journalist who many years earlier had witnessed the departure of the French from Hanoi. Bùi Tín would eventually become disillusioned with the new order. He was destined to end his days in Paris, an exile from his homeland. His memoir Following Ho Chi Minh is one of the very few inside accounts of life in the upper reaches of the secretive Vietnamese Communist party.

“The threat to democracy, indeed the existential threat to democracy, is the unelected bureaucracy of lifetime tenured civil servants who believe they answer to no one, who believe they can do whatever they want without consequence, who believe they can set their own agenda no matter what Americans vote for.”

Final conclusion be: Some tariff be permanent, much America company move back. Trump say he victory. China increase better relation with other Asia countrys for increase trade to make up for lost America trade, China also cheat and steal less. China reputation enhance. Then Xijinping say he victory

MUSK: “People think that Biden was asleep at the switch. They weren’t asleep at the switch. It was a massive large scale program to import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people and making it a deep blue one party state from which there would be no escape

Find new friends. I just left visiting my two youngest daughters, one with a 5 day old son and one with a 3 month old daughter. They are happier than I have ever seen them. Their joy was palpable.

A few months back Linneaus reached out to me on Twitter, asking if we could have a formal debate on the topic of Race. I agreed, and our opening arguments are published here (and on his website oldluth.com). 

The restaurant was broken into twice within three months, prompting Tarantino to spend thousands of dollars on reinforced security windows. Pink Tarantino was in the building in her office when the second break-in unfolded and saw the whole thing on their security cameras.

The statements the jury was not allowed to see demonstrate the FBI’s deep involvement in concocting not only the Whitmer plot but a separate one against VA governor Ralph Northam (by using same handlers and informant, Dan Chappell), organizing almost all of the events including the “recon” trip to Whitmer’s vacation cottage, and even disclosing exculpatory evidence.

Hurdles to convenient voting access once worked to the benefit of the Republican party in Wisconsin, whether deliberately or not. Now, the calculus appears reversed. The best chances for a GOP candidate will appear in an electorate of 3 million or more. As any Democrat working on campaigns in the Obama years could tell you, winning elections by maximizing turnout is possible, but hard.

Altair Basic.

1) 1996 Chuck Schumer says the number one reason illegals come to the US is to defraud Social Security

Does the Governor realize that since 2000 the number of Illinois manufacturing jobs has fallen from over 900,000 to less than 600,000?

Now you identify genuinely strategic areas. You do not care about French wine or Canadian maple syrup. You do care if the US military’s vendor’s vendors are located in China, as per this Pentagon-commissioned study:

A year and a half since fires devastated the historic town of Lahaina on the island of Maui, Hawaii, only six houses have been rebuilt—six out of more than 2,000. more.

The Crouches had unwittingly stumbled into a little-known battle over tidy neighborhood lawns. Celebrated in modern American suburbia, tended lawns have become a prized avatar of the American dream of home ownership, a key backdrop to neighborhood rituals and a symbol of order and calm and safety — of a good life. The moral rectitude around lawns has been given muscle through HOAs — which governneighborhoods home to more than 75 million Americans — and town and city ordinances that stipulate how long grass can be and how often people should trim it.

As with cryptocurrency, if it were so easy, it wouldn’t be worth anything. Value is tied to scarcity, and scarcity on social networks derives from proof of work. Status isn’t worth much if there’s no skill and effort required to mine it. It’s not that a social network that makes it easy for lots of users to perform well can’t be a useful one, but competition for relative status still motivates humans. Recall our first tenet: humans are status-seeking monkeys. Status is a relative ladder. By definition, if everyone can achieve a certain type of status, it’s no status at all, it’s a participation trophy.

In the meantime, those fascinated by accounting minutiae still have plenty to hold their interest, as Tesla invests heavily in AI infrastructure and has almost $7bn worth of assets under construction. Cash generation and debt issuance remain areas of interest.

The end of Argentina’s extensive rent controls has resulted in a tripling of the supply of rental apartments in Buenos Aires and a 30 percent drop in price. More.

Do you know how many times NPR interviewed Adam Schiff about the Russia Collusion hoax?”

NPR CEO: “Idk.”

REP FALLON: “25 times. How many times did NPR interview Chairman Comer about the Biden impeachment inquiry and the Biden family’s illicit business dealings?”

NPR CEO: “Idk.”

REP FALLON: “0 times. 25 to 0. Between June and November of 2023, PBS’s News Hour used the term ‘far-right’ 162 times, and ‘far-left’ was only used 6 times. Do you find that troubling?”

The most surprising thing about Ezra Klein is how he takes zero responsibility for his work lauding Obama, the ACA, and the entire framework he’s now criticizing. The idea of demand stimulus without looking at supply and regulatory bullshit is Obamacare!

Gotta find the guy who did that!

“I have contempt for such people and I want to make that clear. Because they’re virtue signaling and their lack of a solution means that kids don’t have a father. It means parents lost a son. For what? Nothing.”

2011: Obama signs a @DOGE-style executive order to “cut waste and promote efficiency.”

Recently, for no good reason at all, I did some archaeological research into the Postgres buffer manager locking design evolution for the past 30 years. I suppose no one but the most hopeless Postgres nerds will find this topic interesting. So, here we go!

First of all, what does Postgres buffer manager do? Just briefly, Postgres organizes on-disk data files in 8KB fix-sized pages. It also maintains a fixed-size array of page buffers in memory, to cache recent reads and writes of these disk pages and improve performance through caching and lazy disk flush.

This sprawling diagram was designed by Daniel McCallum in 1855 shortly after he became general superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad and drawn by Civil Engineer George Holt Henshaw. He created it as part of his efforts to improve accountability, operational efficiency, and lines of communications throughout the complex railroad system. Unfortunately, his insistence on enforcing rules he devised to govern all employees ultimately resulted in their resentment toward him, financial difficulties for the railroad as a whole, the first strike of railroad engineers in America, and his resignation. He was later appointed by President Lincoln to take charge of the United States Military Railroads due to his bridge and railroad expertise (Wrege et al., 2005). Despite its origins and the outcomes it precipitated, the diagram remains an impressive feat of design that up until just a few decades ago was relatively unknown.

I was first to report on a January 2016 letter from the intelligence community’s internal watchdog that exposed the Clinton email scandal. The Intelligence Community Inspector General concluded Clinton’s emails contained “CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET AND TOP SECRET/SAP” intelligence.