“The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – A “Study”

So, interestingly enough, the restaurateur came before the restaurant, and there was never an n to drop.

This cultural divergence also explains why it’s difficult to name successful German startups on par with Airbnb, Uber, or Stripe—let alone tech giants like Google, Facebook, or Amazon. And there’s little indication that this will change anytime soon.

A French official said there was “no definitive agreement” on the nature of US back-up in Ukraine given the discussions were at a preliminary stage. But the official added: “There is no objection from President Trump to the Americans giving security guarantees.”

Trump, surprisingly, announced that President Vladimir Putin would accept the presence of European troops in Ukraine, although the Russian leader had not said so publicly. “I’ve specifically asked him that question, and he has no problem with it,” said Trump. The Kremlin on Tuesday denied any such concession. /p>

Honestly, my last year in politics changed that. Learning just how far some will go to inflict atrocities on innocent Americans has shocked me awake. Other unexplainable events have also forced me to reconsider whether we are waging a war not merely with flesh and blood but with spiritual forces. Many people shy away from acknowledging the reality of spiritual warfare. But anyone who has seen addiction up close or lived through deep trauma and witnessed how evil takes hold in this world knows that the battle of good versus evil isn’t just theoretical—it’s real and all around us.

Ahead of Trump’s first Cabinet meeting today and the “controversy” over Elon Musk participating, in September 2024 Jill Biden attended Biden’s Cabinet meeting, the first he held in a year, and ran it (for obvious reasons)

Indeed all these Western movements defending the weak & the underdog are rooted in Christianity. BTW the same applies to Shiism. My essay “On Christianity”, foreword to Tom Holland’s book…

Perhaps Ray Dalio has different data, but Grok thinks US, Europe & Japan manufacturing output is significantly higher than China

Why does this matter?
The New Testament is unique in all of antiquity—it can be largely reconstructed entirely from quotations in contemporary writings. By comparison, the earliest surviving manuscript of The Iliad dates to the 10th century AD despite being written in 8th century BC, yet it is still considered the second most well-attested ancient text in history.

The Stuttgart-based investment vehicle has recently bought stakes in long-distance coach company Flix, which owns the Greyhound brand in the US, as well as drone maker Quantum Systems and Waabi, which develops software for self-driving trucks.

When your invoice wants to get paid as much as you want it to be paid, when your sales opportunity is as motivated to close as your sales rep, when your data entities can find and utilize information regardless of organizational boundaries—that’s when enterprise software truly changes.

Designed by North Macedonian architect Janko Konstantinov, who had previously worked with the legendary Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, the modernist building was relentlessly avant-garde and futuristic. The structure was built in two stages: the main building and tower, inspired by a nearby fortress across the city’s Vardar river, was built in 1974, while its central circular element, described as a brutalist flower or insect, was completed in 1982. Inside, underneath the dome, the building featured Cubist murals by Macedonian artist Borko Lazeski, depicting the horrors of the earthquake and posterior rebirth of the town.

By this time my dad had spent six years working on the XB-70 project. So this is the story of my dad’s brush with the Cold War and, as best as I can piece together, the story of my dad before he was my dad.

Wang’s key insight? Stop trying to create perfect mathematical models. Instead, design adaptive feedback loops using real-time sensor data to make continuous micro-adjustments. This shift to practical adaptation formed the cornerstone of DJI’s future technical advantage.

NEW: Meet couple running Indivisible’s anti-DOGE agitation op targeting GOP townhalls & flooding Hill phonelines: Leah Greenberg+Ezra Levin who have $11.7m warchest thx to $7.26m from Soros. Greenberg’s parents worked for Obama. 501(c)4 Indivisible pays a “DEI director” $155,163.

The Military Aviation Museum is making strides toward returning its Messerschmitt Me 262 replica to the skies, with hopes of debuting the aircraft at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2025

The new test, developed by EDX Medical Group, based at Cambridge Science Park, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse blood and urine samples, looking for more than 100 biological markers. These markers, including specific genes and proteins, have been clinically validated as having a connection to prostate cancer in previous trials. The test is the first to combine them into one tool. It aims to provide a comprehensive assessment of a man’s overall risk of prostate cancer, discover whether the disease is present and assess what stage it has reached.

It’s not that building a working commercial jet engine itself is so difficult. It’s that a new engine project is always pushing the boundaries of technological possibility, venturing into new domains — greater power, higher temperatures, higher pressures, new materials — where behaviors are less well understood. Building the understanding required to push jet engine capabilities forward takes time, effort, and expense.

X users can choose between two content feeds, called For You and Following feeds. The default feed is the For You feed. Both feeds rank content algorithmically, but the Following feed contains posts exclusively of users followed by the feed owner, prioritizing recent content. By contrast, only 20% of posts shown in the For You feed are from the users they are following.

Robert Fico of Slovakia has released a powerful statement about the Trump-Zelensky meeting. Finally, a realist. Europe must take note.

To wallow in the idiocy, watch Lauren Sanchez do TikTok:

As you know better than most, during the long Lend Lease discussion with FDR, it was excruciating for Churchill as Britain was losing the war but never once did the great man reduce it to barbs and gripes. He had to grind it out and wait for a change of facts, which finally presented over Pearl Harbor that December morning in 1941.

The U.S. does not just pay 16 percent of NATO’s budget but also puts up with asymmetrical tariffs that result in a European Union trade surplus of $160 billion, plays the world cop patrolling sea-lanes and deterring terrorists and rogues states that otherwise might interrupt Europe’s commercial networks abroad, as well as de facto including Europe under a nuclear umbrella of 6,500 nukes.

the activists and left-leaning media members were in town for a private meeting to discuss how the left’s well-funded digital media ecosystem failed in the 2024 election.

I spent two years following Barrows and some of those she calls her “clients”  to better understand what it takes to unstick someone who’s been stuck on the streets — or in a park – for a long time. A welter of problems can make someone chronically homeless: addiction, mental illness, disabilities, trauma, poverty, not to mention failures of the system. None are easily or quickly solved, even after the person is housed. To do more than just clear a person off the sidewalk demands persistence, patience, coordination of services, and intense personal engagement. Which raises the difficult question: If this is what it takes to help one person, can the city find the resolve to help the thousands living rough? 

Your enjoyment of a trip will be inversely related to the weight of your luggage. Counterintuitively, the longer your trip, the less stuff you should haul. Travelers still happy on a 6-week trip will only have carry-on luggage. That maximizes your flexibility, enabling you to lug luggage up stairs when there is no elevator, or to share a tuk-tuk, to pack and unpack efficiently, and to not lose stuff. Furthermore, when you go light you intentionally reduce what you take in order to increase your experience of living. And the reality of today is that you can almost certainly buy whatever you are missing on the road.

In this op-ed, AI researcher Louis Rosenberg argues that as conversational AI agents become more interactive and personalized, they will surpass human influencers in their ability to shape our decisions without us realizing it.

The reason, according to multiple sources at the agency when the Gateway was conceived, is that the lunar space station would offer jobs to the current flight controllers operating the International Space Station, which is due to retire in 2030.

Wahlin purchased the remaining assets of a small, bankrupt business in 1961 and founded Stoughton Trailers. Over the course of the next four decades, the company became one of North America’s largest trailer manufacturers.

Generators are installed to protect WPR’s systems for backup when they lose utility power and when those generators attempted to kick in, the transfer switch that transfers from utility power to generator power failed, Hargrove said.

The dollar’s supremacy, already shaky in a world of rising digital currencies, gets a blockchain-powered second wind. AI Killed The Tech Interview. Now What?
How can we do better interviews in the age of AI

Option four and five are likely the only answers in the long term. A lot of companies are doing RTO, but even companies that are 100% in-office still interview candidates from other cities. Spending money to fly every candidate out without an aggressive pre-screen is too wasteful. One of the things we can do, however, is change the nature of the interviews themselves. Coding interviews today are quite basic, anywhere from FizzBuzz, to building a calculator. With AI assistants, we could expand this 10x and have people build complete applications. I think a single, longer interview (2 hours) that mixes architecture and coding will probably be the way to go.

Additionally, if your employer will sign off on you working in Spain, Spain has a 1 year digital nomad visa, renewable every year. After five years, you can apply for permanent residency. If you apply while in Spain on a tourist visa, it’s good for 3 years (one renewal gets you to permanent residency).

When the peace was finally won in 1991, the minor functionaries started hatching new villains, disputes, and even viruses just so they could fight them. Washington turned into a Cold War LARP. The result:  Ukraine is destroyed. The Taliban is governing Afghanistan and ISIS has taken Syria. The pipeline that supplies Germany’s energy supply has been blown up, tanking its economy. And you know what happened last time the West’s guardian of democracy project tanked the German economy. Just sayin’. Ancient Christianity has been expelled from every place in the Middle East where American soft power has meddled. They have set their sights on destroying Catholic-Lebanon (by law, the president of Lebanon must be Catholic – did you know that?) in a proxy war with Iran.

In the winter, Yosemite has 451 people directly employed by the National Park Service, according to government records. In the summer, it has 741. But they fired the only locksmith. Grand Canyon National Park has 382. But they couldn’t find anyone to work the most popular entrance. This is intentional infliction of harm on the public in order to gin up opposition to staffing cuts.

NEW: “This case presents the question whether @WisDOJ is for sale.” Lawsuit – and ethics complaint – filed against AG Josh Kaul for taking Michael Bloomberg’s money to prosecute environmental cases against dairy farmers

The most striking aspect of this situation is that every major branch of the U.S. military is in crisis at the same time. All major branches are struggling with recruitment and retention targets, and the problem is particularly acute for the Army and the Navy. All major branches have serious sustainment and maintenance issues due to a combination of aging equipment and general rust inside the industrial base. All major branches are arguably also facing real problems trying to adapt and update institutionalized twenthieth-century thinking to experiences from twenty-first century battlefields (though the Marine Corps is at least undergoing a serious and controversial restructuring in an attempt to alleviate this). Looming over all of this, of course, is the big elephant in the room: the budget contraints resulting from America’s massive fiscal deficts. Interest payments on the federal debt are devouring an increasing share of total federal revenues with each passing year. America is already running a World War II–style wartime fiscal deficit in what is officially a peacetime, near-full-employment economy. Though it’s a common refrain to bemoan waste and fraud inside the DoD budget, the simple reality is that a fifty-plus-year-old aircraft carrier hull like the USS Nimitz cannot be maintained forever. The carrier, just like every other military platform, requires somewhat regular replacement due to mechanical wear and tear over time.¹ The U.S. military now has a massive backlog of such aging platforms, and there is simply not enough money to replace them.

I used to work at FICO in the behavior scoring division and this kind of transaction pattern would have totally flipped the fraud switch. So, the question is, do they have their own processing and if so, it should be terminated due to fraud. If not, who are they using, and why aren’t they reporting and stopping the fraud? AND how many of these transactions resulted in a charge back? If not many, then smurfs were used for names but not credit card numbers, so whose numbers were used, and if it was their name, what account was attached…. This should be one of @Kash_Patel first investigations. If we want to clean up elections before midterms we need to get all this unravelled and get back to individual human citizens supporting individual human candidates and that is all.

While America is battling exhaustion and political polarization at home, it is now facing something it’s never faced abroad: it is locked into a security competition against multiple opponents who, when taken together, are in fact vastly superior to America in terms of industrial capacity. This on its own would be an incredibly tough row to hoe, even at the best of times. The times, however, are not particularly good: the U.S. military currently finds itself in a state of acute crisis, beset by a number of intractable problems that neither the political nor military leadership have been able to solve. The most striking aspect of this situation is that every major branch of the U.S. military is in crisis at the same time. All major branches are struggling with recruitment and retention targets, and the problem is particularly acute for the Army and the Navy. All major branches have serious sustainment and maintenance issues due to a combination of aging equipment and general rust inside the industrial base. All major branches are arguably also facing real problems trying to adapt and update institutionalized twenthieth-century thinking to experiences from twenty-first century battlefields (though the Marine Corps is at least undergoing a serious and controversial restructuring in an attempt to alleviate this).

To put it bluntly, the military was given a deeply ideological mission, one that would assuredly result both in failure and damage to or destruction of limited logistical assets. Military leadership, knowing which side their bread was actually buttered on, complied: the mission duly failed, and the limited equipment was damaged and destroyed.

The calculus for joining government is radically changing. The promise of gaining control of enormous dark money government slush funds and routing them to your friends who stand up totally vague and nebulous NGOs that then launder the money back to you and your other friends, is disappearing before our eyes. People who go into public service will actually have to be motivated by public service, not by kleptocratic, self-enrichment schemes. If they want to get rich, they will have to write a book or “produce” some show or documentary for Netflix that no one watches.

The company’s deliveries in Europe reached 3.8mn vehicles a year — a drop of nearly 1mn compared with when Merkel visited in 2019 — driven by lukewarm interest in its EV line-up.

The human users no longer interact directly with these tools; instead, agents seamlessly work behind the scenes to complete tasks. 

Steve is saying that the knowledge of the backdoor had to have come from Apple (assuming they implemented the backdoor, which again is the only logical conclusion). Whether knowledge of the backdoor was a leak, or intentional, is unknown.

The company planned to sell circuit modules before attempting to sell complete computers, and Olsen had largely worked out the technological side of that. The real first step then was to create the financial plan for the company. Olsen and Anderson did so, and they presented that plan to AR&D who provided them with $70,000 which would be around $786,000 in 2025 dollars. With that money, the infant DEC of three men bought the equipment they would need, made some silk screens, etched boards and dipped them in solder. Everything. They were extremely careful with their money, and they learned quite a bit. While they did learn how to handle accounting and business operations, they chose to spend some of their limited funds on secretaries, accountants, and other supporting roles.

We have reviewed our writings with respect to Silvergate’s broadly deficient BSA compliance regime, including the anti-moneylaundering (AML) errors it made. We stand by the entire analysis, most particularly the conclusion, which we did not articulate lightly.

The Index’s initial report provides first-of-its-kind data and analysis based on millions of anonymized conversations on Claude.ai, revealing the clearest picture yet of how AI is being incorporated into real-world tasks across the modern economy. We’re also open sourcing the dataset used for this analysis, so researchers can build on and extend our findings. Developing policy responses to address the coming transformation in the labor market and its effects on employment and productivity will take a range of perspectives. To that end, we are also inviting economists, policy experts, and other researchers to provide input on the Index.

Fifty years ago, during the Battle of the Bulge, Bragg drove a stolen German ambulance twenty miles to get the wounded Martz to an Allied hospital in Belgium. The story of Bragg’s heroic drive is recounted in The Bitter Woods, a book written by John Eisenhower, son of former president General Dwight David Eisenhower. “I’m forever grateful to Roland Bragg for saving my life,” said Martz, now 74 and living in Oceanside, California.

The premise of The High Cost of Free Parking, Shoup’s 800-page magnum opus, is as simple as it is provocative: parking is nearly always too cheap. An unfortunate fact about cars is that they occupy a lot of space. Worse yet, they only spend about five percent of their lifespan in motion. The remaining 95 percent of the time, we must find a place to put them. When Americans first started buying cars en masse in the early twentieth century, the solution seemed obvious: park them along the curb. In the most radical shift in city planning in human history, urban streets—once the site of gathering, selling, and playing—were redesigned around moving and storing cars.

A complete list of the top 100 most watched talks of 2024 ordered by the number of views.

While the Jacquard loom gets all the attention for being the first code, the punch card knitting machine transitioned from being a Jacquard attachment on lace and knitting machines in industrial textile production to the kind of local, DIY code that a lot of people in textiles interacted with—many of whom were women. By the 1970s, they were used by people knitting for themselves and their families, for take-home piece-work, and in textile factory settings. The punch card machine was eventually replaced in commercial and, if you can afford it, home contexts by machines that could control individual needles, instead of depending on a punch card’s repeat—but the machines are still in use in a number of hobbyist workshops (like my own!) and are even still in  production (albeit much-reduced). 

When I disclosed my metastatic prostate cancer in Jun-2020, I didn’t expect to live as long as I now have – the 5-year survival (which I am now approaching) is about 30%. However, after exhausting 4 lines of therapy and resorting to experimental treatments that are only available overseas, I have now reached the point where outcomes are measured in months rather than years and my symptoms and side-effects are making it harder to function. I hope to reach 60 in August and all I want for my birthday is another one, but before I become more dysfunctional, I need to make plans for the orderly conclusion of this pro bono, loss-making work rather than leave managing it as a burden for my family. One of the few benefits of knowing that you’re dying is being able to plan the end on your own terms.

The goal of this article is to make clear that the large scale engagement of corporations in open source has happened and is continuing to happen, that it is fueled by natural incentives, and that it must be treated seriously because it is having and will continue to have negative consequences even if every individual involved is participating in good faith.

We were inspired by 9-year-old Memphis’s passion for farming at Evers Dairy with his motorized wheelchair and Radio Flyer wagon. Now, he has a custom-built CLAAS wagon, designed to meet his needs. Memphis shows there’s no barrier to making an impact on the farm. We’re proud to support his dedication to agriculture! More.

Madigan built a system that rewarded his public union cronies with unaffordable benefits, including pension systems so overly generous that taxpayers will eventually need to infuse another $143.7 billion to keep them from failing. The system that paid him nearly $600,000 in a little less than four years is in the worst shape of the five statewide pension systems, with only 24.6% of the money it will eventually need and well beyond what experts see as the point of no return.

The Irvine office will close by 2029, the company said in a release. Snyder said that some of the corporate workers there will move to Baldwin Park, while others will make the cross-country jump to Tennessee, where the company is currently building a new corporate office that’s slated to open next year.

China is ready, following these three principles, to build stable, sound, and sustainable bilateral relations with the US and find the right way for these two major countries to live alongside each other on this planet. Of course, we hope that the US will work in the same direction with us. However, if the US is not willing, if it is bent on suppressing and containing China, then we have no choice but to ???? play along to the end. We will resolutely uphold China’s sovereignty, national dignity, and our legitimate development rights, and we will resolutely respond to unilateral bullying practices of the US. We do so also to maintain international fairness and justice and to uphold basic norms of international relations. The Chinese people ???????have never been swayed by fallacies or deterred by intimidation. The People’s Republic of China has grown by overcoming various difficulties and obstacles.

So thrilled to see Xiaomi SU7 Ultra set a lap record at the Shanghai International Circuit, outpacing the Porsche Taycan Turbo GT!

EPA said it is sending Biden’s waivers that green-lit the mandates to Congress for approval. That means the mandates are effectively dead.

What is that “history of use of Nazi language”? The link on that phrase goes to another NYT article, from last May, “German Court Fines Far-Right Leader for Using Nazi Phrase/Björn Höcke, a state leader of the nationalist Alternative for Germany party, used the phrase ‘Everything for Germany,’ a slogan of the Nazi paramilitary wing, during a campaign stop.” Excerpt:

Liberals in 2010 weren’t the same as liberals in 2020. They just weren’t. They changed in comprehensible and expressible ways. And this absolutely dogged insistence that no such change occurred is one of the weirdest, most obviously dishonest political claims of my lifetime. It’s a record of a political and intellectual tendency defined by its powerlessness and directed by people who think that asking them to defend their ideals is a kind of crime. And, just… why? 

the attitude of the US itself to European security was the most ambivalent it had been since before the second world war.

The IMF estimates that Europe’s internal barriers are equivalent to a tariff of 45 per cent for manufacturing and 110 per cent for services. These effectively shrink the market in which European companies operate: trade across EU countries is less than half the level of trade across US states. And as activity shifts more towards services, their overall drag on growth becomes worse…

To be clear, the primary culprit here isn’t the U.S. or Trump: any student of history knows that we live in a deeply unfair world where, as ancient Greek historian Thucydides wrote 2,500 years ago, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” As such the blame lies almost entirely on us Europeans, or more precisely on our immensely incompetent leaders. And I want to stress this last point: they are literally incompetent on a millennia scale, given that they’ve managed to reduce Europe to a position that lacks any historical parallel, where it’s expected to simply accept and implement whatever security arrangements others decide for it. Trump himself does what’s best for the U.S. – “America first”, remember? – and to be fair to him the Biden administration left him with a pretty bad hand. It’s crystal clear that Russia won in Ukraine, despite all of NATO’s efforts, and as such the U.S. very much risked coming out of it looking like the loser that it objectively is.

In what can only be described as a campaign platform, Damian Williams wrote a lengthy column in Jan 2025–shortly after launching his campaign style website and less than 4 months after announcing the indictment against Eric Adams–for a NY publication.

I’m remembering this today because there are times and places when it is made clear to unwilling and horrified participants that the world they are used to, and the assumptions they allow themselves in that world, no longer apply. They have so suddenly been stripped from them. Vice President JD Vance delivered just such a moment in his speech to the collected European great and good at the Munich Security Conference on Thursday 13th February.

However, on Wednesday, Santa Barbara’s Historic Landmarks Commissiondetermined that the building is not historically significant.  Local developers Jim and Matthew Taylor acquired the Macy’s building for about $63 million in December 2021. The building will be razed and converted into 689 apartment units as soon as Macy’s vacates the store in 2028. 

This new book offers stunning night-time photographs of the Crescent City – and an insightful introduction by Richard Campanella.

I’ve tried cases to Delaware juries, enjoyed friendships with Delaware judges, and taught classes to Delaware lawyers. The Hotel DuPont is a familiar stay, and I’ve bought too many shirts and ties to count at Wright & Simon in Wilmington. And so I share this with affection, not animosity: Delaware is at serious risk of losing its standing as the leading state of incorporation for American companies.

Only in America can a plane flown by a Mexican American airline pilot filled with Korean American adoptees and Chinese American skaters air traffic controlled by a black man be killed instantly by a woke white feminist combat pilot. What a country! ??

Steve Hamm was a mobile technician for 30 years. And this past week, the same farmers who Hamm served for all those years, found a way to show just how grateful they were with a touching goodbye.

Now, in the aftermath, I see Angelenos of both parties asking hard questions and demanding answers from L.A.’s liberal political leaders that I haven’t seen before.

Yet despite decades of research, no treatment has been created that arrests Alzheimer’s cognitive deterioration, let alone reverses it. That dismal lack of progress is partly because of the infinite complexity of the human brain, which has posed insurmountable challenges so far. Scientists, funders and drug companies have struggled to justify billions in costs and careers pursuing dead-end paths. But there’s another, sinister, factor at play.

This is the first and likely the last time I’ll retweet an ad, but I love it.

After an eight-year suspension following an accident in 2016, the historic Opicina Tramway resumed service on Saturday, February 1. The reopening marks a significant milestone for the city’s public transportation network, bringing back a beloved connection between Trieste and the hilltop village of Opicina.

Which brings us to accessories (which includes lenses). Nikon had this grand plan—and even shared their goal with the financial community—that they’d achieve two lenses sold for every camera in the Z System. Didn’t happen. Not going to happen. And now with the Chinese producing more lens choices for the Z mount than Nikon, even the current level of lens sales will be challenged. 

“from Jones on airport business and never got a response while she was purportedly working from home, according to the investigation”. Jones’ falsehoods about the position included telling the Airport Commission that smaller airports had similar positions.

There is widespread agreement that aid to Pakistan has not been spent effectively over the past decade. There is less agreement over how to fix it. This paper contributes to the debate in two ways.

A pilot programme of replacing plastic bin bags with sealed containers, hailed by the mayor as ‘trash revolution’, is being credited with reducing rodent sightings

The U.S. Navy is in a fight for survival, a quickening battle being waged from the halls of the Pentagon to the boardrooms of industry to hearings on Capitol Hill. The consequence of this contest will determine if the nation is destined for maritime irrelevance and the laying of its prosperity at the whims of autocrats a world away. At the core of the battle are these questions: What sort of Navy does the nation need; and how can it be built? The last major change to the maritime industry was thanks to two American innovations perfected during and after World War II: modular ship construction and containerization of cargo. Modularization proved critical in World War II by rapidly connecting dispersed U.S. factories. The other innovation that revolutionized shipping was cargo containerization. Containerization was the brainchild of Malcom McLean, who, in 1956, used a repurposed wartime tanker to move 58 truck trailers.

Newly obtained contract shows Hard Rock International paid a consultant a whopping $28 million finder’s fee in 2014 just for identifying Kenosha as the place to build a new casino, a revelation that has major implications for the now-revived project. Here’s why:

Elon figured out that if you control OPM (HR for the entire federal government) and the Treasury payment system (outlays for the entire federal government) you can zap any government program not explicitly authorized by statute and no one can do anything about it

Last year, for example, SpaceX launched 134 orbital missions. Combined, Europe had three. SpaceX operates a massive constellation of more than 7,000 satellites, delivering broadband Internet around the world. Europe hopes to have a much more modest capability online by 2030 serving the continent at a cost of $11 billion.

He added that he envisions Penny, a former Marine, helping to strengthen the firm’s relationships with the Department of Defense and public safety sector. Penny will work in New York for the firm’s American Dynamism practice, a branch of the company that “invests in founders and companies that support the national interest.”

More than two decades ago, the EU unveiled its Lisbon Strategy, which set out to transform the bloc into “the most dynamic, competitive, sustainable knowledge-based economy, enjoying full employment and strengthened economic and social cohesion”. We know how well that worked out. Hardly dynamic, certainly not competitive, the EU has consistently lagged behind other nations across virtually every key economic metric. As the US and China intensify their race for 21st-century technological supremacy, Europe is left watching from the sidelines — beset by economic stagnation, high energy costs, political upheaval and bureaucratic inertia.

This post breaks down some of the pros and cons of Nevada, Texas, and Delaware as well as discusses high level process to leave the state. TradeDesk published a good primer as well. While many companies have physically moved their headquarters from California to other states (Palantir, Oracle, SpaceX, to name a few) most CA-based companies have left their incorporation in Delaware. This is starting to shift as more companies consider moving Incorporation to Nevada or Texas.

The hexagonally tiled cartogram is more than just a creative reimagining of county maps—it’s a powerful visualization tool that reorients our perspective on how we interpret data. By standardizing the shape and size of each county, we place emphasis on the attributes that truly matter, like population density and socio-economic variables. Whether used to highlight urban centers, track public health crises, analyze economic trends, or even understand political dynamics, this approach brings clarity where traditional maps sometimes fall short. And with the added benefit of state or region-specific filtering, this tool becomes even more versatile for anyone looking to dive deep into the data of the United States.

“The Chinese are so fast… we’re late to the party.”

A conversation with Elon Musk recorded last August at West Point Military Academy has just been published. Here’s the full interview covering topics like the future of warfare, AI and innovation.

As suggested by the recent release of a new artificial intelligence model from the Chinese company DeepSeek, we no longer possess technology superiority. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute determined that the United States trails China, for example, in research for 57 of 64 critical technologies. We are not competitive in important products like personal computers, semiconductor manufacturing, solar panels, shipbuilding and much more.

Wright’s justification for the project was quite clever. He argued that the sheer size of The Illinois would encapsulate an entire city within a single building, which would kill two birds with one stone. It would provide the density that people crave, while freeing up the surrounding landscape for his Broadacre City plan, with its parks and low buildings. Essentially, Wright was using the if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em mentality when it came to the city. Give ‘em their density so they can come together, but concentrate it into one massive structure and surround it with your larger vision for the world-as-one-big-suburb. He envisioned skyscrapers like this built here and there throughout the countryside, taking the place of cities. That way, everyone could live in a suburban paradise, surrounded by green space and ample daylight.

Steve Bannon calls himself a ‘neo-Brandeisian’ and says Lina Khan should have been given more power.

Because DOGE is essentially ending Blue American colonialism. Of course, DOGE is doing this for its own reasons, which include shattering blue power centers and saving money for Red Americans. But it is doing it. And this presents the greatest opportunity for India since the fall of the USSR. It is India’s third independence moment: first from British colonialism, then from Fabian socialism, and now from Democrat-funded leftism.

Let me say at once that I have no desire to discourage anyone from believing in either extraterrestrials or global warming. That would be quite impossible to do. Rather, I want to discuss the history of several widely-publicized beliefs and to point to what I consider an emerging crisis in the whole enterprise of science—namely the increasingly uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy.

Ever wondered where all that PPP loan money ended up? Now you can see it—mapped out, visualized, and easy to explore.

The DO-NOT-PAY list of entities known to be fraudulent or people who are dead or are probable fronts for terrorist organizations or do not match Congressional appropriations must actually be implemented and not ignored. Also, it can currently take up to a year to get on this list, which is far too long. This list should be updated at least weekly, if not daily.

This is frequently left blank, making audits almost impossible.

The legacy media used to be so powerful. But this 60 minutes raw footage is just pathetic. I almost feel sorry for them now.

All friend. Soon america people start their favorite hobby: Watch negro man fight for egg ball.

If all this is true, the CHIPS Act, which was designed to slow China in the AI race, may turn out to be one of the worst backfires in history. (I tried to warn a number of people in the Biden administration about this possibility in the summer of 2023; instead of listening, they recently doubled down, in one of Biden’s final executive orders.)

Take photos of daily life. I’m stunned by the pictures my father didn’t take. There isn’t a single photo that represents what my parents did for a living. They weren’t the type to attend company picnics, fine. But I found nothing indicating “take your daughter to work” or “Mom typing up a report” or “the building I worked in” or “the woman Mom commuted to work with for 10 years.” That would be more understandable if my parents disliked their jobs, but both of them were passionate about their careers.

100 years of Bell labs

For most protesters, activists, and journalists, your smartphone is an essential tool you depend on for organizing with your peers, accessing and distributing information, and helping others. It also represents a great risk, as a tool that is easily appropriated by authorities for targeted and mass surveillance. The perennial question when it comes to protests is whether you should bring your phone at all. If you leave your phone at home, that is probably the safest your data will get, and you will be at very low risk of being tracked by mass surveillance tools. On the other hand, your phone is a critical resource when it comes to coordinating with others, getting updates on the protest from social media, or simply documenting what is going on with your phone’s camera.

China has a huge and growing trade surplus, as you can see in the chart above. That chart is via Brad Setser, who is really a one-man army in terms of tracking global trade and financial flows. Here’s a thread from Setser with a lot more detail on China’s surplus. Interestingly, China’s exports to the developing world are a lot bigger of a factor herethan its exports to the U.S. and the EU, though the latter are up by a little bit.  This is the Second China Shock. Trade surpluses like this can’t be explained by the good old theory of comparative advantage — a Chinese trade surplus is just countries writing China IOUs in exchange for physical goods. Countries don’t really have a comparative advantage in writing IOUs.1

The two field performance aspects limited the design space for the C Series in general. As a consequence, in my opinion the C Series’ design was not optimised for the larger “more normal” market.

Caldwell is part of a foreign policy movement on the right who call themselves “restrainers.” They believe countering Iran, Russia—and, for some, even China—is not worth the smoke. Caldwell himself told the Financial Times in December that he would not make a commitment to defend Taiwan, or make “more security commitments in the Pacific.” Instead, Caldwell said he believes the U.S. should focus on arming the island in a bid to deter China.

Such is the nature of today’s left—divorced from the working class but intimately connected to the leftist strongholds of the professional class. The latter connection has kept them blissfully unaware of how far outside of the public opinion mainstream their current commitments are and therefore how quickly the hills they are defending could be overrun. That’s happening right now but the left seems determined to fight on to the bitter end.

Visitor visas can be extended for up to nine months, although the ministers warned that working in New Zealand for more than 90 days could require them to declare themselves as a New Zealand tax resident.

In interviews after Boeing posted its detailed financial results Tuesday, new CEO Kelly Ortberg indicated the key priorities for 2025: getting airplane production back up safely, generating much-needed cash, integrating Spirit AeroSystems smoothly back into Boeing — and coping with the realities of the new Trump administration. more.

Cage-free varieties — which are required in Oregon and Washington — are even more expensive. At a Portland Fred Meyer on Monday, the cheapest eggs available were store-brand cartons of a dozen priced at $7.49. Signs at many area grocery stores warn of rising prices and the potential for empty shelves. Some grocery stores have even limited how many eggs shoppers can buy.

This tweet deserves a national holiday.

You just copy the CIA, whatever it might be saying at the time, accurate or not, and call it journalism

“There’s a reason Florida is known as a retirement paradise – it ranks as the best state to retire due to its relatively low taxes for retired people, including no estate, inheritance or income taxes,” WalletHub said. “Plus, Florida receives more funding per senior from the Older Americans Act than all but two other states. This funds things like transportation, homemaker assistance and nutrition programs for seniors.”

“It’s a ‘composite‘ – like @NYMag does.”

Axios’ Mike Allen gets first question at the first White House press room briefing, in the “new media seat. Two weeks ago to Vanity Fair: “We beg our reporters to never go to a White House press briefing.”

Below is the email that was sent to federal employees on January 28, 2025 presenting a deferred resignation offer. If you did not respond to that email and wish to accept the deferred resignation offer, you may do so by following these steps.

A takeover of Intel has become a Gordian knot. The big problem is funding the company’s fabs, which will will require tens of billions of dollars and years to get back on track. Few companies, and no private equity funds, really want to deal with that large of a funding need and time horizon. On the other hand, the US government has given Intel a lot of money, and so simply shutting down the fabs is deeply problematic. No one wants the fabs, but the company cannot be sold without them.

Bagley’s experience is of a piece with the broader trend in retail toward automation and other technological shortcuts. From self-checkout machines to payment by app, technology is rapidly changing the way we buy groceries. Progressive members of Congress are sounding the alarm: Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and 13 colleagues wrote to the CEO of the supermarket behemoth Kroger in November about electronic price tags (often called electronic shelf labels or ESLs). These digital displays allow companies to change prices automatically from a mobile app. Tlaib warned that this so-called “dynamic pricing” permits retailers to adjust prices based on their whims. Just as Uber raises prices during storms or rush hour, retailers like Kroger use ESLs to adjust prices based on factors like time of day or the weather. Supermarkets could conceivably mine a shopper’s personal data to set prices as high as possible. “My concern is that these tools will be abused in the pursuit of profit, surging prices on essential goods in areas with fewer and fewer grocery stores,” Tlaib wrote

But Epic’s implementation doesn’t include the last piece. After easier app registration and record location, they require the patient to log into each health system a record is found. This is a bewildering choice. Even though the record location is a step forward, the architecture adds friction to the process (instead of just using portal credentials, patients have to identity proof and then also log in with credentials). Portal credentials are also not automatically provisioned to patients! So the percentage of patients that can actually use the pattern is a fraction of the total population.

We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can successfully perform financial statement analysis in a way similar to a professional human analyst. We provide standardized and anonymous financial statements to GPT4 and instruct the model to analyze them to determine the direction of firms’ future earnings. Even without narrative or industry-specific information, the LLM outperforms financial analysts in its ability to predict earnings changes directionally.

The hostility @RobertKennedyJr experienced at his hearing was directly proportional to how much Pharma money each Senator received. In fact, each of them simply repeated the same attacks we just saw flood the mass media (all of which were blatant lies). ?

Beyond Bernie, 2 of key Committee members — @RonWyden and @MartinHeinrich — built their careers as self-branded privacy crusaders, against spying excesses of NSA/CIA. Trump appoints Tulsi as the first-ever DNI to share those concerns, but they’ll vote NO because Party First.

The Nunes memo, primarily authored by Kash, was not only accurate but actually understated the depth of the corruption. We now know the Russia collusion hoax was completely fabricated—every part of it. Meanwhile, the Schiff memo was a blatant exercise in dishonesty and cover-up.

Remember when Biden claimed that it was Congress’ fault that they couldn’t stop the mess at the border?

A conversation with Morris Chang.

The 21st Century Cures Act was passed in 2016 with numerous provisions promoting the sharing of healthcare data. The ONC Cures Act Final Rule and CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule implemented interoperability standards in 2020. And yet: in the year 2025 patients are still unable to easily access their own claims and records and share them from doctor to doctor. Accusations of abuses abound, such as Particle Health’s information blocking suit against Epic, and the hundreds of information blocking complaints submitted to the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy (ASTP) annually. Where there is smoke there is often fire.

This graph is causing a stir in the Danish political debate around mass immigration, and it’s easy to see why. But I think what’s just as interesting as the substance is the fact that Denmark actually collects the data so finely grained!

Trump’s is an understandable impulse. Decades of “free” trade hollowed out American industrial capacity and left us dependent on China’s hostile dictatorship for everything from prescription drugs to iPhones. What’s more, he’s right to want to curb Beijing’s regional influence, squeeze Chinese- and Russian-aligned socialist dictatorships in Venezuela and Cuba—not to mention keep his campaign promises to stop mass migration and drug trafficking.

This is hardly surprising since, on a map, the Arctic Ocean offers notable shortcuts compared to routes going through the Suez or Panama canals. For instance, a voyage from Japan to Europe takes around 22 days via the Suez, but only ten days via the Arctic. However, while distance is one variable, cargo shipping considerations are much more complex. Economic sailing—like “super-slow steaming” where speed is decreased to reduce the amount of fuel needed to complete a journey—and scheduling are much more important than speed alone. Some shipping routes, like Rotterdam to Hong Kong, are actually shorter through the Suez than the Arctic.

In many respects, this is better than working in Photoshop on my Mac. I never expected to say that. The last 5% is due to the pieces that Procreate doesn’t do, that Photoshop does – text, labels, some of the more advanced features. So that’s software, not hardware – and I expect the app store will get a lot more firepower very quickly once developers really get to grips with the Pro. This is a serious piece of kit that will find a central place in an illustrators workflow – but it will not replace a desktop.

This really does deserve to be cast in solid platinum and hung in the Smithsonian.

This is the US effectively saying “our attempt at running the world is over, to each his own, we’re now just another great power, not the ‘indispensable nation’.”. It looks “dumb” (as the WSJ just wrote) if you are still mentally in the old paradigm but it’s always a mistake to think that what the US (or any country) does is dumb. Hegemony was going to end sooner or later, and now the U.S. is basically choosing to end it on its own terms. It is the post-American world order – brought to you by America itself.

“If I was Lady McBiden, I’d put on my big girl pants, play the long game and think about my husband’s legacy,” Alexandra Pelosi, the former speaker’s daughter, told me Saturday. “There aren’t that many people left in America who have something nice to say about Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi is one of them.” The younger Pelosi made clear she was speaking only for herself.

We have a good idea of what happened:  an extreme/unusual Santa Ana event associated with severe downslope winds.   In this blog, I will show you some early simulations and explain why this event occurred.   I will also describe why climate change did not play a significant role.

Some also saw it as a sign of détente sent by Captain Ibrahim Traoré (nicknamed “IB”), at the helm of Burkina Faso since the 2022 coup. Like his Malian counterpart, General Assimi Goïta, the 36-year-old officer who came to power in a putsch severed ties with France after the takeover. Relations between Ouagadougou and Paris then turned sour with the removal of the French ambassador and special forces – based in the country for over a decade – and vitriolic statements against the former colonial power. 

This Unit 8200-to-big-tech pipeline is global, with former spies specialising in AI based in locations around the world, from San Francisco to New York, Spain to Switzerland, London to Jerusalem. Additionally I found that acclaimed leaders in the field of AI – men and women working for AI start-ups or heralded by corporate media as the next generation of AI – are former unit 8200 members.

RDEL #75: How do interruptions impact different software engineering activities? Certain tasks, and their complexity, change how impactful an interruption is. Research also discovers a disconnect between perception and physiological data.

And while I would recommend, in the spirit of owning your data, self-hosting your own reader, FreshRSS has hosted instances you can use if you don’t know how to setup and host your own application.

The Democratic schmoozing of big tech is still going strong today: When Chuck Schumer convened a closed door Senate hearing on AI policy in 2023, he invited Silicon Valley CEOs like Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to take the lead. Biden’s Treasury  bailed out Silicon Valley Bank after it collapsed in the wake of deeply irresponsible risk management practices and VCs demanded cash to save it. Last year, star Democrat Gavin Newsom sided with Google over working journalists and threatened a veto that doomed a bill that would have required tech giants to pay newspapers a small share of the ad revenue for hosting news on their platforms. The Democratic congressman Ro Khanna argued on CNN that Democrats have simply been *too hard* on Elon Musk, not showering him with enough praise and thus driving him into Republicans’ arms. He has also offered to work with Musk’s DOGE to eliminate federal jobs.

Building anything of value around a proprietary platform is very risky. Whether it’s a software application, a brand, or anything that you can categorize as a major revenue source, should be owned and hosted by yourself. Platforms that you have no control over can disappear overnight, or change in ways that would make it impossible to continue using them in ways you’ve anticipated. History shows this happens constantly.

This work is designed as a textbook for a course in software testing or security testing; as supplementary material in a software testing, security testing, or software engineering course; and as a resource for software developers. We cover random fuzzing, mutation-based fuzzing, grammar-based test generation, symbolic testing, and much more, illustrating all techniques with code examples that you can try out yourself.

I think the DC elite is perhaps the only group fully surprised by what happened this election. That it happened with increasing minority support is a big slap in the face that their worldview simply cannot understand.

Perhaps this is why we forget that isolation can be edifying. To that great pioneer of modern solitude, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, time spent alone offered “the pleasure of conversing with my soul”. “It is only in myself”, Rousseau writes in his Reveries of the Solitary Walker, “that I find consolation, hope and peace of mind.” The insight, so compelling to the Romantics, is often lost on us.

Dane Co jail. ICE hold requests. Most weren’t honored

The US tariffs on the EU, including Airbus, and the counter-tariffs on the US, including Boeing, were suspended when Joe Biden became president in 2021. Both the EU and USTR representatives decided (after years of avoiding the issue) that the WTO should examine China’s state subsidies to the state-owned COMAC. COMAC developed the C919, which competes with the A320 and the 737. It’s developing the C929 to compete with the A330neo and the 787. So far, no trade complaint has been filed against China.

Startups often face the challenge of dividing their equity among co-founders and other key shareholders. This comprehensive guide provides a first-of-its-kind data report that offers a detailed approach to solving this problem.

Dysfunctional Delaware: Over the weekend, Vice Chancellor Laster took to LinkedIn to promote an 50-page article critiquing former Chancellor Chandler for his testimony in the DE legislature. After many comments, VC Laster apparently deleted (or limited access to) the post. 1/

The Peppermills of Jens Quistgaard

Farm Equipment editors visited Blue Equipment, Kinze Manufacturing’s new full-service store located on its vast manufacturing campus in Williamsburg, Iowa. Dealership Sales Manager Justin Render provides an overview and tour of the new showroom and modern repair shop for Kinze equipment sold, traded and repaired in Southeast Iowa. The store, which originated after a local dealer’s retirement, also sells Ag Leader, Martin-Till, Lundell Plastics and Yetter.

But despite efforts to help younger scientists, the share of basic NIH funding going to scientists under thirty-five continues to decline. In the 2004 fiscal year, the High-Risk, High-Reward Research program allocated about $200 million to scientists, a moderate decline since 2019. The amount was an almost negligible fraction — less than half of 1 percent — of the NIH’s annual budget for that year.

we now know it’ll be powered by a brand-new turbocharged four-cylinder petrol engine, and could arrive as early as next year.

Trend toward casual office wear nearly claims another Minneapolis business

Last month, I tried a little experiment on X/Twitter: each day, for 28 days, I posted a slide or two about the media business.  Most of these are pulled from long-form posts on The Mediator, but some are new or updated. Some are data-centric, some conceptual; most are proprietary analyses, some aren’t—but collectively they tell a story about the current and evolving state of media, especially the video business. Overall, they show an industry in upheaval, particularly for traditional media:

As 3D-printed architecture continues to mature from niche proposition to disruptive technology, housing developments are beginning to roll out worldwide. Following pioneering projects like Wolf Ranch and the Community First! Village in the US comes another in Ireland, which was printed in impressive time.

The “great man” theory of history lost favor a century ago, and for decades university faculty have found it quaint, vulgar or problematic. Like other ideas that right-thinking people long ago discarded, its disreputable status hasn’t stopped many from believing in it anyway.

Here is one way to measure the Trump administration’s priorities. Rubio’s order of meetings/phone calls
1: India
2: Australia
3: Japan
4: Philippines
5: Israel

What’s notable here is that every type of loss has gotten more expensive, mostly in relatively similar proportions. The average damage cost for wind and hail, water, theft, other property, and bodily injury have all risen by about a factor of 1.5-1.7 since 2005. Fire damage, medical payments and credit card fraud have increased in severity more, with the average payout of the first two increasing by a factor of closer to 3 and credit card fraud seeing a single huge spike.

As we know from the 1990s and early 2000s—under reform mayors like New York’s Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, Houston’s Bob Lanier, Indianapolis’s Steve Goldsmith, Philadelphia’s Ed Rendell, and Los Angeles’s Richard Riordan—good governance can restore urban vitality. Some of these mayors were nominal Democrats, others were Republicans, but all were effective in enacting regulatory reform, restraining taxes, and, most importantly, increasing public safety.

Immediately, five more airborne Huey pilots took advantage of the cleared runway to land and disembark their passengers. Assuming he would be court martialed, Chambers ordered those helicopters thrown overboard as well. He later told interviewers that since he expected to be deposed by prosecutors, he turned away from the action to avoid seeing exactly how many were pushed into the sea. In the same interview Jumper also claimed not to know how many helicopters went overboard. 

By this point, I think it’s clear that HTML elements run the gamut from content to container to logic to edge case. Some elements we can see, others not so much. Some elements are meant to combine with others. Some elements are only meant for your browser to read. Some elements had good intentions but never picked up mainstream use.As an aside, right now, you’re reading an <article></article>.If you’re getting a bit lost, <nav></nav> can help you findthewayOr maybe an <address></address> would be better?

This is the China graph.
It’s nothing, and then it’s everything. https://t.co/Mo3pvcvW8G pic.twitter.com/BrEdjWzjZK

— Balaji (@balajis) January 26, 2025

The Conservative Revolution was not merely a collection of abstract ideas but a comprehensive vision for Germany’s future, shaped by countless influential figures—too many to name here—who sought to fuse the ancestral legacy of culture and spirituality with political renewal. Mohler described the movement as uniquely “German,” rejecting the radical internationalism of the 1789 French Revolution. 

Hadid’s studio, Zaha Hadid Architects, won the international competition to replace the ageing ski jump in Innsbruck in December 1999. It was the latest in a series of high-profile competitions won by the studio.

A brand-new house in Pacific Palisades designed and built by architect Greg Chasen in summer 2024 could have easily been one of them. None of the other homes around it survived, and a car parked out front by a neighbor was the perfect vector to spread the flames.

A cursed fact of the world is that the most important life lessons you learn are the hardest to communicate to others. They always sound like clichés. In any case, these are a few things I’ve learned from experience and that I try and keep in mind.

1. Think about what makes you ‘imbalanced’ as a personality, & do things where this gives you an edge.
2. Once you are ok with people telling you ‘no’, you can ask for whatever you want. (Make reality say no to you.)
3. Fun is underrated. The best and most creative work comes from a root of joy and excitement. You can feel this in your body.

Significant price markups: The Big 3 PBMs imposed markups of hundreds and thousands of percent on numerous specialty generic drugsdispensed at their affiliated pharmacies—including drugs used to treat cancer, HIV, and other serious diseases and conditions. The Big 3 PBMs also reimbursed their affiliated pharmacies at a higher rate than they paid unaffiliated pharmacies on nearly every specialty generic drug examined.

The guiding company will be sending a group to attempt Everest this winter using Xenon gas. Whereas the fastest commercial Everest expeditions are currently around four weeks, using Xenon could speed things up to one week airport to airport. One session of xenon gas costs $5,000 per person for a 30-minute session. The tour operator said they will have four clients inhale a xenon gas blend upon arrival in Kathmandu, then fly to base camp, then climb to the summit within two hours. They would then spend three days climbing and one day descending. The climbers would not need any acclimatization. Along with the xenon gas, climbers need to pre-acclimatize before travelling to Everest in a hypoxic altitude tent and still use bottled oxygen on the climb. These expeditions also have mountain guides and use Sherpa and porter support.

Madison Just, a 32-year-old change manager for a Los Angeles design consulting firm, has both premium American Express cards that offer Delta lounge access. She’ll get 25 Sky Club visits a year. “I am worried that it’s not enough,’’ she says.



Just visits Sky Clubs on every trip. At Los Angeles International Airport on Saturday night, she stopped in for a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon, hummus, veggies and cheese and crackers. The clam chowder at the Sea

Walgreens CEO says anti-shoplifting strategy backfired: ‘When you lock things up…you don’t sell as many of them’

More than 74,000 Canadians have died on health-care wait lists since 2018: report
At least 15,474 Canadians died in 2023-24 alone before receiving various surgeries or diagnostic scans. The true number is likely double

Biden two weeks ago oligarchs.

To understand why it actually makes sense to buy Fartcoin, we turn to the wise words of Caroline Ellison, CEO of Sam Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund Alameda: “Every week or so something weirder than the previous week would happen. . . . I managed to get. away from my initial skepticism and have been embracing the mindset of going out and looking for the weirdest, dumbest thing people are talking about today.”

Of note in the poll, Virginians are unusually pleased under Youngkin. Some 49% said that the commonwealth is headed in the right direction versus 31% who said the wrong direction.

What changed between 1989, when the US was the most technologically advanced nation on earth and built roadmaps for becoming a space faring civilization and today, when people claim that the US must import its technological talent and builds roadmaps for networked panopticons?

Ecclesiastes tells us: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” Myrmikan Research applies this principle to the subject of credit bubbles.  The ancient Greeks discovered that debt could magnify wealth. The debtor feels richer from the use of the borrowed property, while the lender feels richer from the compounding interest yielded by his claim. Both indulge in consumption more freely. As long as the accumulating claims remain contingent, the bubble grows. But, eventually, someone asks to be paid, and the expanding claims on wealth must be reconciled to tangible wealth, much of which has been consumed.

SpaceX Earth to Earth Transport will enable: LOS ANGELES TO NEW YORK: 5 hours, 25 min —> 25 min

But PHEV systems have a unit-cost problem, in that they require not one but two complex power systems with a lot of code between them. One component, the battery, is particularly pricey. Legacy carmakers can be counted on to pass those costs on to consumers, who may not have any tax credits to soften the blow.

This is not well thought out. They have 2.2 billion users worldwide. Whatever they would get from the sale of US operations wouldn’t be worth disclosing their algorithm.

In 2016, I covered his campaign stops in Pennsylvania, and I noticed that Trump was visiting parts of the state that nobody else goes to. Forgotten towns like Ambridge and Wilkes-Barre and Johnstown and Butler. Nobody goes to Butler!

The development of the Prius began in 1993 with the G21 project, which focused on fuel efficiency, low emissions, and affordability. According to a Toyota article detailing the project’s history, by 1997, Toyota engineers—including Takeshi Uchiyamada, who has since become known as the “father of the Prius”—were satisfied they had met the challenge of achieving all three goals.

Ten Must-See Museums Opening Around the World in 2025: New institutions dedicated to artificial intelligence, West African art, barbeque and more are expected to welcome visitors this year

The programming language C is 75.88 times more energy efficient than Python and 71.9 times faster

Once I found my sweet spot, though, I started racking up sales. (To this day I can’t talk on the phone without lapsing into my “telemarketer voice,” which sounds like Phil Hartman on ecstasy.) I wasn’t a coaxer, a hand-holder, a persuader; I hit people with my spiel, and if they hesitated or said no, I hung up on them midsentence. On to the next one. Unlike many of my less successful colleagues, I quickly learned to take yes for an answer; though we were legally required to read a long list of mandatory disclosures to all our sales, I noticed that this often broke the spell and gave people an opening to back out or “wait and ask the wife about it.” As soon as I heard a yes, I said, “Great choice!” and transferred them to confirmation. My manager occasionally came by and reminded me that it was technically illegal to skip my disclosures, but he made commission off my commission, and his tone made it clear that I could do as I pleased as long as I kept putting up numbers. Which I did, to an almost ludicrous degree. I hit every kicker, every bonus. I won scented candles, gift cards, and countertop appliances in daily sales contests. I earned the executive parking space in the very front of the lot, even though I took the bus to work. I was pretty pleased with myself. Making $800 in 15 to 20 hours a week when your monthly rent is $300 and beers are a dollar is real wealth.

I haven’t seen Landman yet but this is an all-time speech by Jerry Jones. Probably because he’s not acting. That’s his real life.

“It’s amazing to me how much waste is consuming our daily work. It seems like 30% of everybody’s job is fixing something—either the bad quality or late product or something that shouldn’t have happened,” said Ortberg.

The 2024 “winners” of the annual Shkreli awards, given each year to perpetrators of the most egregious examples of profiteering and dysfunction within the healthcare industry, have been released from the Lown Institute, an independent healthcare thinktank. The recipients are chosen by a panel made up of health policy experts, clinicians, journalists and advocates. The awards are named after Martin Shkreli, the infamous “pharma bro” who rose to international notoriety after increasing the price of lifesaving anti-parasitic drug Daraprim 50-fold.

There’s one mistake I see more often than anything else, and it’s absolutely deadly: ignoring the rest of the codebase and just implementing your feature in the most sensible way. In other words, limiting your touch points with the existing codebase in order to keep your nice clean code uncontaminated by legacy junk. For engineers that have mainly worked on small codebases, this is very hard to resist. But you must resist it! In fact, you must sink as deeply into the legacy codebase as possible, in order to maintain consistency.

I agree that foreign billionaires should not meddle in British politics, but I strongly believe in their right to free transparent speech & that they can say whatever they want to their audience on X. Those two are separate issues. When Bill Gates has direct access to Keir Starmer & we are not allowed to know what they discussed it is much worse than open public posting on X. At least there is transparency on X.

In this century’s first decade, investors had the opportunity to participate in – and lose money due to – two spectacular bubbles. The first was the tech-media-telecom (“TMT”) bubble of the late ’90s, which began to burst in mid-2000, and the second was the housing bubble of the mid-aughts, which gave rise to (a) extending mortgages to sub-prime borrowers who couldn’t or wouldn’t document income or assets, (b) the structuring of those loans into levered, tranched mortgage-backed securities, and consequently (c) massive losses for investors in those securities, especially the financial institutions that had created them and retained some. As a result of those experiences, many people these days are on heightened alert for bubbles, and I’m often asked whether there’s a bubble surrounding the Standard & Poor’s 500 and the handful of stocks that have been leading it.

Starmer’s denunciation of Musk for ‘spreading lies and misinformation’ about Muslim child-rape gangs is an orchestra of discordant duplicity

In contrast, GPU cores are like a hundred line cooks who excel at repetitive tasks – they can chop an onion in two seconds, but they can’t effectively run the whole kitchen. If you asked a GPU to handle the constantly changing demands of a dinner service, it would struggle.

The proposed conversion to a PBC would also mean the non-profit entity will relinquish governance over OpenAI’s business and operations. One person familiar with the situation said those powers could themselves be worth billions of dollars. 

So we talk about a market of 0.0001% of the car industry, with cells with a different build-up and, therefore, with a different production. There is no way these cells’ prices can be compared with the car industry’s prices.

Despite losing hundreds of millions of dollars and control of her own company, Martha doesn’t give up and in 2015, now in her mid 70s, she creates a new image and a new career starting with, of all things, a shockingly hard-assed roast of Justin Bieber. The Bieber roast leads to a succesful colloboration with Snoop Dogg. Legendary.

Trump is now at the zenith of his power. The moment he’s sworn in on January 20, he’s just the plain, old president of the United States.

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night.

Just a reminder that Juan Merchan’s daughter, Loren, is the co-owner of a very lucrative Democratic consulting firm. Here is a list of her clients. Receipts coming:

FEC reports show Loren Merchan’s Democratic consulting firm raked in at least $7.3 million between the end of May 2024 (after Pres Trump was convicted) and Election Day. Top clients during that time include Tammy Baldwin, Gretchen Whitmer, John Tester, Cory Booker.

Still, the Apps strategy was confused between DOS, Windows, OS/2, and Macintosh. The team was not particularly organized for success as a combination of product units and job functions.

Before we talk about SpaceX, let’s talk about every single other private rocketry company ever. It’s easy to do, because they all failed (or are in the process of failing, or are likely to fail in the future). There’s an old joke in the rockets business: “How do you become a billionaire in the space industry?” “Easy, you start with two billion dollars…” Okay, I’m not actually going to talk about all of them, but here are some of my favorites. When I was young I was really into Masten Space Systems which pioneered vertical takeoff/vertical landing rockets, and won the NASA/Northrop Grumman lunar lander challenge. Now bankrupt. And then there was Armadillo Aerospace, founded by none other than John Carmack, a man who built a career in pushing hardware to its absolute limits. Seriously, read that link about the fast inverse square root algorithm (or watch a video explainer here).2 Carmack is built different. Didn’t matter. Bankrupt.

“It’s unclear when the reservoir first went offline”

Prior to that ruling, nominees typically would step down at the end of their term, the governor would nominate a replacement, that person would start serving and the Senate would vote to confirm or reject the nomination.

“I had lived through the destruction of Douglas Aircraft and I saw the same thing about to happen at Boeing,” Hart-Smith explained in a 2019 interview.

This advance is the culmination of two decades of work that has gone largely unnoticed to the outside world, according to researchers involved in the project. The electronic warfare equipment used by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is evolving rapidly. For example, the multi-band antenna used in the new phased array radar has “complex structures such as curved surfaces, multilayer dielectrics, metal conductors and thin dielectric layers”, wrote the project team led by Professor Li Bin from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in a paper published in November.

Alternatively, if you assume the $600 billion will be borne by just the world’s 100 million wealthiest and most intensive users of digital services, they or their employers would need to come up with a much larger $6,000 per year. Again, it’s not an impossible figure, but not one that can be found in next year’s budget. Meanwhile, planned capital expenditures by tech titans has continued to increase, so the required annual revenue per user keeps increasing. So, while it’s clear that AI is set to be truly transformative, it could still take a decade to justify current levels of investment. What that means is that there are two possible futures: One in which capital markets are happy to allow the hyperscalers to keep throwing money at AI in the expectation of future market leadership (and blowing out their balance sheets in the process), and one in which they are not.

• Elon’s 100,000-GPU data center in Memphis currently runs on gas:When Elon Musk rushed to get x.AI’s Memphis Supercluster up and running in record time, he brought in 14 mobile natural gas-powered generators, each of them generating 2.5MW. It seems they do not require an air quality permit, as long as they do not remain in the same location for more than 364 days.

The ONLY question in healthcare should be “How should care for people who can’t afford to pay for their care be paid?”

As one watches the videos of contractor owned and operated aircraft please realize the stark contrast in competence between teams that modify and maintain aircraft up to 60 years old flying in combat like conditions verses government bureaucrats that fail to maintain the basics of full reservoirs and fire hydrant maintenance.

Taxing these flows judiciously could raise revenue and improve the tax system, but transfer taxes have been eviscerated in recent years.

Now, I’ll finally get around to reading the NYT article. Before, I simply made assumptions based on the headline, and enlisted 2 different robots to read it for me and fill in what I thought was probably lacking, Elon Musk’s longstanding avoidance of owning a house in the normal sense of a personal domicile — what the humans call “a home.” Then I was set free to envision a movie — and brought down to earth by the utterly dull plot summaries written by robots.

we finally get Google-Facebook contract (aka Jedi Blue) alleged as bid rigging (yes, press was misled, it’s still part of the claims). /1

What a stupendous, momentous, foundational, and unpardonable con

“CBS Sunday Morning” segment from 1986 featuring #Packers PFHOF guard Jerry Kramer. Includes interviews and several rare CBS broadcast clips from “The Ice Bowl” 1967 NFL Championship — played December 31, 1967.

Tyler Send them to read the Henriad before they get started. The complicated nature of power: that the king never has the power that he needs to claim he does is quite significant. The ways in which power cannot be delegated, Shakespeare is extremely wise on. And yes, the DOGE people absolutely need to learn those lessons.

I want to also give special props to Andres Freund for discovering the xz backdoor in 2024 while working on Postgres at Microsoft. This attack was a two-year campaign to inject malicious code into an important compression library widely used in computing. Although the backdoor targeted SSH and not Postgres directly, it is another example of why database engineers are some of the best programmers in the world.

Chang throws himself into learning more about transistors and semiconductors. He begins studying William Shockley’s textbook about them, working through it one painstaking page at a time. He has a colleague who’s an expert on semiconductors, who spends every night drinking at a bar; Chang sits at the bar with him asking him questions about semiconductors, going home to study more, then going back to the bar if he has more questions.

If you were making a list of the most important companies in the world, you’d find Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, somewhere very close to the top. It’s one of a tiny handful of companies, along with Intel and Samsung, that can make the most advanced microchips, and it has a commanding lead in that market. TSMC makes the microprocessors and 5G chips for Apple’s iPhones and Macbooks. It makes chips for both Intel and AMD. And it makes the chips for Nvidia, Meta, and Amazonthat are powering the AI boom. TSMC is so important that it’s sometimes called Taiwan’s “silicon shield”, the idea being that fear of damaging TSMC might dissuade China from trying to invade Taiwan.

“With every generation in France we see the change. If the grandfather drank 300 litres of red wine per year, the father drinks 180 litres and the son, 30 litres,” said CIVB board member Jean-Pierre Durand. French red wine in sharp decline as tastes change among young drinkers

The Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan area, better known as the DFW Metroplex, is the leading U-Haul Growth Metro of 2024. Charlotte, Phoenix, Lakeland and Austin complete the top five U.S. growth metros, meaning they saw the largest net gains of U-Haul^® customers taking one-way equipment into and out of metro areas last year.

Here are the 158 Democrats who opposed the deportation of illegal immigrants for sex offenses:

There is an element of clubbiness about the T, insofar as owners must be proficient with a stick shift. It’s a vanishing skill set; only about one in five U.S. drivers know how. “sports-car autotune”

Bugsy Sailor has spent six years photographing daily sunrises over Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, capturing its beauty and building an online following.

Acceptability Threshold. The latest effort by the regulators to prevent new entrants in the industry is the ICAO emission standard that will enter into force in 2028. Think of this as the equivalent of ending ICE and imposing EV in 2040

In Britain today, first screenings of Christmas adverts are treated like film premieres. One-third of us are more excited by that year’s Christmas ads than whatever’s arriving at the movie theatre. Newspapers review and rank them. Topics trend on social media because of them. Links are forwarded, sides taken. When a dog from a John Lewis ad died, it made the news. In an age where Britons feel more divided than ever, arguing about Christmas advertising brings the nation together.

The Trieste model has fascinated the mental health care community for close to five decades. It contrasts starkly with many other parts of the world that make much greater use of psychiatric institutionalisation, even though such confinement is discouraged by the World Health Organization.

What should you read to get to grips with a new job? Employee manuals or classic management titles can be an obvious starting point. But for many professions, a more informal reading list can offer greater insight than official resources. These offbeat classics, picked by people working in key sectors, can act as spiritual guidebooks, revealing the subtler nuances in corporate culture or the artistry of the day-to-day. Crucially, they are often a joy to read, whether you are employed in the field or not.

Sheridan is fond of recalling the visceral distaste shown towards Yellowstone and its likely audience by an unnamed HBO executive who passed on the show. “[He] goes: ‘Look, it just feels so Middle America,’” Sheridan told The Hollywood Reporter in 2023. “We’re HBO, we’re avant-garde, we’re trendsetters. This feels like a step backwards. And frankly?.?.?.?I don’t think anyone should be living out there [in rural Montana]. It should be a park or something.”

Exploring Naples: it would be criminal to miss it!

The China Shock Behind the Honda-Nissan Merger Talks. Potential combination of Japanese carmakers and a $5 billion GM charge show companies dealing with fallout from new rivals

The Unlikely Ingredient That Could End U.S. Dependence on Chinese Batteries

But the math doesn’t work. In 2023, renewable energy sources amounted to only 14.6% of primary energy from all sources. Thanks to massive government subsidies, renewable energy made up a larger but still minority share of global electricity generation at 30%. But about half of this comes from hydropower dams, and this kind of renewable energy is unlikely to increase much in the future. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel share of global primary energy consumption in 2023 was 81.5%.

Here is a short thread about my visit to Anjar, a small village in the Bekaa valley just on the Lebanese side of the border with Syria. Here are the ruins of an Umayyad city from 709, some 80 years after the death of the prophet Muhammad. But Anjar itself is now Armenian. How is that possible? Interesting story:

As I learned, Stammtisch (“shtom-tish”) means “regulars’ table”. It’s an age-old German tradition where a group of like-minded people — traditionally men — meet up at a bar or a restaurant at a regular time to have drinks and chat. 

“I have become a Christian because the way it leads to a more well-rounded, fulfilling family life is so self-evident that there must be something more to it, something that can overcome our modern doubts.” A wonderfully cheering Christmas essay by @Ayaan.

Michigan Enjoyer recently got her itinerary and discovered that Big Gretch might just be the new Anthony Bourdain!

The Monreale mosaics were meant to impress, humble and inspire the visitor who walked down the central nave, following the fashion of Constantinople, the capital of the surviving Roman empire in the east. They span over 6,400 sq m and contain about 2.2kg of solid gold.

Back home in America, I’ve called for a bunch of changes to make our cities better places to live. Most importantly, we need more housing density and better transit. These are the two main goals of the YIMBY movement. I also want more commercial density— lots of shops in walkable downtown areas — which is something YIMBYs should focus on more than they do. I don’t think American cities are going to become like Tokyo — or Paris, or Singapore, etc. — anytime soon. But I think places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, Miami, and Philadelphia can move enough in that direction to make a big difference in America’s quality of life, and probably in our economic productivity as well. 

One way to make the media more honest is to make it more painful to the reporters and editors who get it wrong. When stories are proven false, corrections must be made promptly and carry as much visibility and views as the original piece. A third party, likely based on @X should build a platform tracking these inaccuracies and highlighting the reporters and editors involved. One could imagine an Academy Award style event annually highlighting the worst reporters, editors and the publications they work for.

Despite this paradigm and in the face of the prevalent sentiment, customers generally own their own data (aside from some cloud based EHRs). The challenge is not ownership. It’s access, control, and extensibility. Systems of record (in this case EHRs) haven’t invested into APIs for every possible function (choosing instead to prioritize new core functionalities). Where they have, they may have rate limits or cost tiers. RPA isn’t allowed. Direct database access is limited.

I posted my picks for core readings on permitting reform about a month ago, and a number of people have since asked for the link. This list is by no means comprehensive—but if you read through every single one of these you’ll be off to a flying start.

John faithfully produced a column every week for nearly 30 years. Sometimes he would fret over his new computer that managed to delete a column or lose the photos he had searched so diligently for. He always he prevailed and signed his emails “? Luck, John.” I felt lucky to receive every column he penned.

I think the thing I’ve changed my mind most on in politics in recent years is how destructive bad regulations can be and how seriously I take it now when I hear that regulations or rules are ill constructed.

The 0.8-mile ice skating ribbon at Boulder Junction’s Winter Park opened on Dec. 23. Modeled after a wooded skating trail at Canada’s Arrowhead Provincial Park, skaters can glide through the scenery on what had been a little-used cross-country skiing path. Organizers behind the project say they believe it’s the first rural skating ribbon in Wisconsin

Early Christian Writings is the most complete collection of Christian texts before the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. The site provides translations and commentary for these sources, including the New Testament, Apocrypha, Gnostics, Church Fathers, and some non-Christian references. 

The massive downward revisions to jobs data are set to continue: latest from PHL Fed has early benchmark indicating jobs DECLINED in Q2 of this year while the initial monthly job reports estimated gains of 653k – the labor market’s strength is a fiction…

Sales of some smaller, entry-level models, such as the HondaCivic and Nissan Sentra, have taken off this year, rising 23% or more through November, according to research firm Motor Intelligence. Those increases have far outpaced the industry’s growth, which has been in the low single digits. 

This is the last days of the long con. The first six months of the second term is going to be politics like you’ve never seen before.

Hallum is one of the organizers of the Dakota Exiles ride, a journey through frozen fields and open country covered in snow on horseback. They rode once before in 2020. They’ll meet up with another group of riders to commemorate the Dec. 26, 1862 hangings ordered by President Abraham Lincoln that led to a mass exile of Native people from Minnesota.

There, he has burnished his reputation as a cost-cutter and hard-driving boss. Davis has tended to spend more time in Las Vegas than in Bastrop, where he stays in a mobile home while in town, alongside the mobile homes of other workers. During those times, he would appear silhouetted through the window, often talking urgently into his phone until late at night while pacing around the kitchen table, according to people familiar with the company.  more.

Five years ago, the majority of assets were managed inside the agency. As of last year, 55% of assets were overseen by outside managers. External management can cost up to four times as much as internal management, auditors found in 2021.

Beyond Trump here, the fact that it’s proven that Al Sharpton was paid $500k by Kamala’s campaign, then shortly thereafter conducted a worshipful interview on his MSNBC show without disclosing that, and nobody at MSNBC addressed it, shows what a rotted partisan sewer MSNBC is.

In Wisconsin in 2024, the highest employers of immigrants using H-1B visas were:
Fiserv
Universities Of Wisconsin
Milwaukee Public Schools
Northwestern Mutual
Experis (Manpower)
Rockwell
Milwaukee Electric Tool
American Family
Medical College Of Wisconsin
GE HealthCare

always bundle a proposal with a complaint

Chinese hackers used broad telco access to geolocate millions of Americans and record phone calls. The number of telecommunication providers impacted b

I downloaded five years of H-1B data from the US DOL website (4M+ records) and spent the day crunching data. I went into this with an open mind, but, to be honest, I’m now extremely skeptical of how this program works.

Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically. I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform.