Over the past three decades, it has become arguably the most high-profile purveyor of — and flag-bearer for — architectural salvage. Today it is both a retail business and an interior design studio, headed up by Speake, that reimagines how reclaimed materials can be used. 

There are so many controls in macOS that sometimes you can’t see the wood for the trees. This can leave uncertainty over essentials, such as whether your Apple silicon Mac really is properly secure, or maybe there’s something sinister going on with it? This is a question I’m asked not infrequently, usually when someone has been spreading disinformation or FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt). So how can you check that your Mac is properly locked down and boots securely?

People threatening and throwing items at passersby, fights and other disturbances led residents and business and property owners in the area to reach out to the city to respond, Kipp Hartman, police captain for the Central District, told the Wisconsin State Journal. “We started to see some of the larger things being set up, kind of the bigger pieces of furniture, bigger things of property, tarps and stuff like that, which is kind of out of the norm,” Hartman said.

Funeral directors are increasingly asking the relatives of the deceased whether they would prefer for AI to write the obituary, rather than take on the task themselves. Josh McQueen, the vice president of marketing and product for the funeral-home management software Passare, said its AI tool has written tens of thousands of obituaries nationwide in the past few years.

Once again, we need to go back in time to understand how we got here. In the early days of computing, color was not a priority. Monitors were monochrome and most applications were text-based. The first color displays were developed in the 1970s, but they were expensive and not widely used. It wasn’t until the 1980s that color became more common, with the introduction of the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh.

A 2019 federal rule that went into effect in 2021 created a federal requirement for the prices of many hospital services to be posted but a November report from PatientRightsAdvocate.orgshowed that just 30% of Wisconsin hospitals are fully compliant with the requirements.

“It was the money magnet that attracted these people. It wasn’t a crisis—it was the money magnet that brought them here.”

Use the interactive map below to explore every one of Paul’s stops along his journey, the roads he traveled, and the stories that came about.

„Wenn Sie mich das Wort ‚Verhandlung‘ nicht haben sagen hören – das liegt daran, dass es keine war.“ Mit diesem Satz beschreibt Sabine Weyand den geopolitischen Preis, den Europa für Stabilität bezahlt hat: Die Generaldirektorin für Handel und wirtschaftliche Sicherheit in der Europäischen Kommission sprach ungewohnt offen über das neue Abkommen mit den USA – es ist ein Deal, der den USA den Zollvorteil lässt und Europa wenig zurückgibt.

Politics in the Trump era.

While the nationwide increase in massive data center projects has been seen in several other states, such developments in Wisconsin didn’t begin in earnest until July 2023, when Gov. Tony Evers signed the state’s 2023-25 budget, which included sales and use tax exemptions specifically for data center projects.

I’m now in the possibly-unique position of having (a) publicly opposed Lisa Cook’s appointment to the Fed board and (b) publicly opposed Lisa Cook’s removal from the Feb board, absent an actual finding of guilt.

The growing postal boycott of the U.S. is the latest proof that eliminating the de minimis tariff exemption on goods valued $800 or less is a shortsighted policy. As Taxpayers Protection Alliance Chief Regulatory Analyst Juan M. Londoño noted in a recent piece for The Baltimore Sun, “Under the executive order [ending the de minimis exemption], international suppliers will have two options: either pay the tariffs as a percentage of the package value or pay a simplified flat fee that starts at $80 and can go as high as $200 per package, depending on the effective tariff rate of the country of origin. Suddenly, [a] $17 bag of Colombian coffee could cost you a whopping $97. Justifiably, you go back to the lesser-quality option that you could find at the grocery store, which will also likely be ebhigher in price (and probably not from the U.S.).”

Removing human excrement was, however, a secondary purpose of Rome’s vast sewer system. There are very few examples of private latrines in Rome, which carried the risk of pipes becoming blocked, bad smells, vermin, and built-up gases causing explosions. Instead, historians have assumed that most Romans used the limited public facilities, though “there is abundant evidence showing that many people relieved themselves in streets, doorways, tombs, and even behind statues.” 

The core problem was the inability to turn abundant resources into a clear vision backed by political will. Federal dollars were funneled into a maze of state agencies and local governments with clashing priorities, vague metrics and near-zero accountability. Billions went to contractors and government consultants services such as schools, transit, health care and housing were neglected. For example, one firm, ICF International, received nearly $1 billion to administer Road Home, the oft-criticized state program to rebuild houses. More.

It’s unclear what Meta’s long-term retail strategy is as it scales its wearables business. Maybe we’ll hear more at Meta Connect 2025 in three weeks. But this much is obvious: if VR is ever going to move beyond its niche, we can’t leave the magic of the first demo to chance. Someone – Meta or otherwise – must give the right demo to hundreds of millions of people.

I was disappointed they chose to serve hot dogs over brats at the tasting, but executive chef Jacob Moss told me that hot dogs are more popular than brats at Camp Randall by a 3:2 ratio.

“When an insurance company becomes both health care provider and insurance payer, questions arise regarding potential conflict of interest,” according to a statement issued by the American Dental Association.  “From a business standpoint, dental insurance companies seek to minimize cost and maximize profit,” the statement continues. “As a result, patients may find their treatment options limited to what is most cost-effective for the insurer, not necessarily what is most effective for their oral health.”

As de Mero said: ‘The medieval streets in Salamanca, Siena and Heidelberg haven’t changed dimensions in 20 years. And [there’s no space] to make the garage bigger.’ He also pointed out that the proportion of cars under four metres built by European makers has shrunk from 50 per cent in the 1980s to five per cent now.

as usual, this post is a self-contained html file with no javascript, images, or other external resources – everything on the page is handwritten html/css, weighing in at around 49kB gzipped. it was really fun creating all the little interactive widgets and visuals this time around, i think i’ve improved in css a lot since the last time i posted.

Three Chinas, one lifetime: I imagine a Chinese family and there’s three completely different Chinas. One was about survival, the second aspiration, and the final one about prosperity.

Fun to look at property taxes in absolute dollar terms (left) and as a percentage of home prices (right).

The corruption is especially deep where employees use their access to receive both paychecks and benefit checks, a situation that was first identified during the COVID Pandemic when federal unemployment benefits were widely available and with little anti-fraud attention, according to the Ernst DOGE Caucus report.

Many of those services are still around in some form—someone who really wanted to could still launch a new blog on LiveJournal, Xanga, Blogger, or WordPress.com. But one of the field’s former giants is shutting down—and taking all of those old posts with it. TypePad announced that the service would be shutting down on September 30 and that everything hosted on it would also be going away on that date. That gives current and former users just over a month to export anything they want to save.

There are two possible explanations: Felicia is just not very smart, and allowed herself to be used by deep state con men. Or she’s in on it, and used her position to willingly participate in a literal foreign influence operation. Either way, it’s disgraceful.

How States and Cities Decimated Americans’ Lowest-Cost Housing Option is an excellent, hard-hitting piece making and extending these points and  significantly it’s not from a libertarian think tank but Pew: [more]

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution had 630,000 print subscribers in 2004. After two decades of major population growth in the region, it now has 40,000, along with 75,000 online. It just announced that it will no longer have a print edition.

And a little south in Seal Beach, a scrappy company called AstroForge aims to land a satellite on an asteroid just a football field wide and mine possibly billions in platinum riches.

3. Reversible vs. Irreversible Decisions

This one’s gold. According to Werner, good decision-making starts with this split:

• Reversible decisions (two-way doors): move fast. 70% of the info is enough.
• Irreversible decisions (one-way doors): slow down. Think deeply.

We conducted a retrospective, observational study at four endoscopy centres in Poland taking part in the ACCEPT (Artificial Intelligence in Colonoscopy for Cancer Prevention) trial. These centres introduced AI tools for polyp detection at the end of 2021, after which colonoscopies had been randomly assigned to be conducted with or without AI assistance according to the date of examination. We evaluated the quality of colonoscopy by comparing two different phases: 3 months before and 3 months after AI implementation. We included all diagnostic colonoscopies, excluding those involving intensive anticoagulant use, pregnancy, or a history of colorectal resection or inflammatory bowel disease. The primary outcome was change in adenoma detection rate (ADR) of standard, non-AI assisted colonoscopy before and after AI exposure. Multivariable logistic regression was done to identify independent factors affecting ADR.

Yet, despite adhering to a long list of requirements and city requests, they diverge on everything from the number of buildings and amount and type of housing to what they would offer the public. Those include having no more off-street parking spaces than the 270 the lot has today, benefitting public transit by increasing demand for service in the area, and returning $9 million — a “fair share of revenue” — to Metro Transit. A request for proposals issued in April also outlined a number of city goals and recommendations, like having all-electric and energy-efficient buildings, a low ratio of parking spaces to units, plenty of electric vehicle charging stations and many subsidized units. Three developers responded by the city’s July 9 deadline.

Like Napoleon, Putin needs a settlement that will bring Russia back into the Western fold. Battlefield victory means little if Ukraine becomes a forever war. Like Alexander, Trump needs to find a way to turn Western defeat in Ukraine into a victory for him (as peacemaker) and a new way ahead, in which a losing war is magically turned into a stable and bountiful new strategic relationship.

Litigation is already looming. In the US, technology worker Derek Mobley has sued Workday, alleging an algorithm in its ubiquitous candidate-screening software discriminated against him on the basis of age, race and disability, throwing out his applications for more than 100 posts at different companies since 2017. The potential implications for the whole HR technology industry as it rolls out more sophisticated tools have “got everyone scared”, according to Stacia Garr, co-founder of RedThread Research, an HR technology research consultancy. (Workday has said the suit is “without merit”.)

To figure out who will win any given technology race, just look at the rate of acceleration of innovation & growth.

We’ve now had enough electric cars on the road – and for long enough – to have a good idea of how the battery holds up over time. Here we’ll focus on a metric used to capture the battery’s “State of Health” (SoH). It’s what percentage of a battery’s initial capacity is still usable after a given number of miles or years.

The name Hamna Wakaf might mean little to many readers. The name of its reported owner, however, is much better known. Multi-billionaire London real estate mogul Asif Aziz, who controls some of London’s most iconic properties, has been making quite the name for himself, described variously as “Mr West End” (Aziz owns everything from souvenir stores to high-end hotels in the West End) and, less generously, “the meanest landlord in Britain”.

Remarkably, investigations have found that most end up in one place: Huaqiangbei market in Shenzhen. Demand in China for second-hand phones is huge; those that cannot be unlocked are broken apart and rebuilt. And there is no better place to do that than Huaqiangbei, the world’s largest electronics market. Because Shenzhen is where many of the phones were made in the first place, there is a ready supply of skilled workers. 

Hyperclay returns to a simpler model: your app is a single HTML file you (and your clients) manipulate directly. Edit the file through its visual UI and it persists its own state.

Ed Martin sends letter to Letitia James asking that she resign for “the good of the nation.”

The new FAL building is essentially a copy of the present FAL, doubling the final assembly line capacity for the 787. Boeing has reached rate seven and plans to be at rate 10 per month next year. The expansion is planned to be finished in 2028, after which Boeing will have the facilities to reach a rate of 16 787 per month.

Mark Bertolini is the CEO of Oscar Health. We cover the near-death experience that shaped so much of his life and leadership framework, how a decision to raise wages actually increased shareholder returns, and what Oscar’s strategy for disrupting the healthcare industry has in common with pirate ships.

The ultimate goal of this factory is to build one Starship rocket a day. This sounds utterly mad. For the entire Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s, NASA built 15 Saturn V rockets. Over the course of more than three decades, NASA built and flew only five different iconic Space Shuttles. SpaceX aims to build 365 vehicles, which are larger, per year. Wandering around the Starfactory, however, this ambition no longer seems undoable. The factory measures about 1 million square feet. This is two times as large as SpaceX’s main Falcon 9 factory in Hawthorne, California. It feels like the company could build a lot of Starships here if needed.

A more apt label would be cash flow before bad stuff. But suppose for argument’s sake that all of Ford’s adjustments are defensible. Ford says it aims for shareholder distributions—including dividends and share buybacks—of 40% to 50% of adjusted free cash flow. It says it determines its first-quarter supplemental dividends based on the previous year’s adjusted free cash flow, suggesting that those payments count toward the prior year’s payout ratio. Calculated this way, Ford could come close to staying within the 40% to 50% range for 2025—if it hit the top of its guidance for adjusted free cash flow, skipped share buybacks completely, and decided not to pay a supplemental dividend in the first quarter of 2026. In that scenario, if Ford kept its regular dividend unchanged, its payout ratio for 2025 would be 53%, slightly higher than its target range. Ford has said it expects adjusted free cash flow of $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion this year, after factoring in $9 billion of capital expenditures.

I’ve written it for decades now: if you’re actually a “systems camera” maker, you need to enable the ecosystem that surrounds your product. Not partially, but fully. Canon is trying to not just control but own the entire EOS ecosystem. Witness the non-licensing and apparently suit-threatening surrounding the RF mount, for instance. I’d tend to say that Canon’s approach here is contradictory to one of their long-stated goals: own the majority of the camera market in volume. 

In an email to Tesla last month, a top NHTSA official asked for more information about the size of the robotaxi fleet, whether company employees can remotely control the vehicles, and the maximum speed of the cars. The official also sought a test drive for NHTSA employees. It is unclear if one occurred. 

Total revenue that SpaceX will receive from NASA this year is ~$1B out of ~$15B total, so ~7%. Moreover, NASA is paying SpaceX for astronaut & cargo transport to the Space Station, launching research satellites and some work for returning to the Moon.

“help build a purely AI software company called Macrohard. It’s a tongue-in-cheek name, but the project is very real!”

A local reporter pressed the Executive Director of Mpls for the Many today with some simple questions about the relationship between the Minneapolis DFL and the State DFL. This came after she criticized the process of overturning Fateh’s endorsement.

Revenue per room is down year on year in all but the most expensive hotels.

Nothing more fun at the Minnesota State Fair than getting super stoned and riding the SkyGlider.

But of the three bubbles he has inhabited in his working life, Clegg said he found Westminster “the most insufferable, partly just because of the living on past glories and the pomposity of it”. “I think what they’ll learn, which I learned, is you only have one crack at it.”

Meanwhile, the war goes on, which is another way of saying the destruction of Ukraine goes on. Talk about an unnecessary catastrophe.

“Drones and smart systems are redefining the modern battlefield,” Yu explained. “Rather than clinging to expensive legacy platforms, we must invest in capabilities that reflect the future of warfare.”

Moreover, this techno-centric narrative overlooks a critical reality: that militaries do not win wars merely by acquiring new gadgets, but by developing the institutions, training regimens, logistical networks, and doctrinal concepts that enable those tools to be used effectively at scale. Technology does not exist in a vacuum; it must be embedded within a structure that can harness it to achieve strategic effects. The belief that the United States can leapfrog its adversaries through agile startups and disruptive prototypes reflects the same flawed logic that plagued earlier revolutions in military affairs. Drones and AI systems may be tactically sound, and in many cases, they are; however, they do not, by themselves, answer the questions of manpower, sustainment, strategic coherence, or political will. In elevating technology to the status of strategy, these commentators and entrepreneurs mistake innovation for “warfighting” and “disruption” for victory.

My view of the collision at sea of China Coast Guard 3104 and PLA Navy 164 in the vicinity of Bajo de Masinloc in Zambales, Philippines. Before this, the Chinese navy and coast guard ships nearly collided twice trying to outmaneuver BRP Suluan of the Philippine Coast Guard.

For SpaceX, this is great business. The company gets to flex its “anti-monopoly” credibility as well as put cash into its pockets. Because the incremental costs of flying a partially reusable Falcon 9 are so low—perhaps as low as $15 million, by some estimates—SpaceX can plow competitors’ cash into further development of Starlink or Starship.

Not anymore. BYD’s new cars are good-looking, powered by world-class batteries, and boasting better overall build quality than most automakers in the West.

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.

Farmers want California to change its autonomous tractor ban.

Kodak, Olympus and Fujifilm – The Rise and Deep Fall of the Camera Industry.

The largest deciding factor in the application process has been “technical considerations,” Kuntz said. (EV charging) sites must meet needs for accessibility, ADA compliance and lighting, and be outside of a floodplain. No mention of electricity rates….

The effort has moved quickly. Middleton applied Monday for federal Transportation Alternatives Program grant funding after the City Council voted unanimously in support of the plan Aug. 5, said Abby Attoun, the city’s director of planning and community development. If accepted, Middleton’s bid for $240,000 would help it build infrastructure for BCycle docking stations. The city would contribute $60,000 of its own money toward the project.

Ever since I first encountered the medical field, something struck me as off about their relentless focus on blood pressure. Before long, I began to notice that the blood pressures the same acquaintances (e.g., relatives or friends) shared with me varied immensely. As I was pondering this, a long-time Eastern spiritual teacher shared with me their belief that the West’s relentless focus on blood pressure was due to it being much easier to measure than blood perfusion (healthy blood flow). Then, as I became more acquainted with the medical field, I began to notice a consistent pattern—whenever a drug existed that could treat a number or statistic, as the years went by, the acceptable number kept on being narrowed, making more and more people eligible to take the drugs that treated the number.

Trader said she’s in litigation with the company in an attempt to recover some of the nearly $500,000 she said she’s sunk into the project that it “left in a really bad spot,” as well as on other costs, such as rent incurred because the home wasn’t done on time.

“Safety today is a luxury,” writes Giugiaro. “Those who can afford a new car have a better chance of making it home alive.” He goes on to say, “I owe it to the technology I’ve helped, in my own small way, to shape. If I’d been driving a car from fifteen years ago—the average age of vehicles on Italian roads—I probably wouldn’t be here telling this.”

God writes our story even when we think we have the pen in our hand.

Melting ICE

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

But in that sale, the question of public resources and private profits arose again. Delaware North demanded $51 million in compensation for Aramark continuing to use the names of several historic properties within the park, such as the Ahwahnee, a hotel, and Curry Village, another group of visitor accommodations. The company claimed those names were a part of its assets under its contract with the park service.

Realizing little had changed in Michigan, she thought about a college teammate whose parents operated a swim school and told Chris she wanted to start one in Birmingham, perhaps in their backyard. Chris suggested they tour a few swim schools around the country to make sure there’d be a market.

Then, in 2009, during efforts to mitigate the financial crisis, newly elected President Barack Obama signed the $787 billion economic stimulus bill. Part of it contained the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, also known as the HITECH Act, which budgeted $49 billion to promote health information technology and EHRs in the United States.

As a result, Tom, like most Americans, now has an electronic health record. However, many millions of Americans now have multiple electronic health records. On average, patients in the United States visit 19 different kinds of doctors throughout their lives. Further, many specialists have unique EHR systems that do not automatically communicate medical data between each other, so you must update your medical information for each one. Nevertheless, Tom now has immediate access to all his medical treatment and test information, something not readily available 20 years ago.

AOC’s attorney, David Mitrani, explained in no uncertain terms in a May 16 letter to the House Ethics Committee that Roberts is considered AOC’s “spouse” only in the context of federal campaign finance law, but NOT for financial disclosure requirements.

I had never bought a property on my own before, and I was glad to find that mortgage advisors, estate agents and solicitors just basically do it all for you (albeit at exorbitant cost). What should have been a straightforward, no-chain purchase took six months due to the complexities of leasehold properties, listed buildings and so forth; I’d made the offer in July, finally exchanged contracts in the run-up to Christmas, and completed in early January last year.

This has become the typical result at BCA, where expenses are understated on the income statement, with a sizable portion capitalized and stored in Inventory.

If, though, I were forced to select the single most revealing video clip of the last decade, it’d be when Chuck Schumer told Rachel Maddow that Trump was dumb for criticizing the CIA, because everyone in Washington knows CIA will destroy you if you do:

For Penn State, among the favorites to leapfrog the Buckeyes for this year’s championship, the cost to pry Knowles away was a contract worth $3.1 million a year. That’s not just half a million dollars higher than the salary of any other assistant in college football. It’s more than what 65 Division I head coaches are earning.

This deep dive into Ford’s Q1 results disclosed after market close yesterday.

FONOPs = mere theatrics for the dim-witted

In 1979, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration faced a problem: how do you track 100+ million vehicles across 50 states when every manufacturer uses different serial number schemes? Their solution became one of the most successful information architecture projects in history – the Vehicle Identification Number standard.

Dotted around the Scottish countryside, honesty boxes are a heartwarming tradition reflecting the trust and community spirit of rural life. These unstaffed stands offer all sorts; from fresh eggs and home-baked goods to seasonal fruits and vegetables, and even handmade crafts. This practice not only supports local farmers and artisans but also fosters a sense of integrity and mutual respect among residents and travellers. Here is a selection of the unique things you can find in and around honesty boxes across the country.

This is either the biggest tech-infrastructure project since the 1960s (since the beginning of the computer age) or the 1880s (the heyday of the railroad age).

this is what you have to go through if you want to get an api key for your gmail.

The announcement comes on the day Colorado law changes the classification of nuclear energy’s definition under state law to include it as a clean energy resource.

Are the strange 39% tariffs on Switzerland (nearly the highest in the world) a tactic to force a gold short squeeze so they can revalue their holdings and acquire a dominant BTC position?

The series will discuss the typical development cycles for an FAA Part 25 aircraft, called a transport category aircraft, and what different ideas there are to reduce the development times.

Once your data is on their computer you don’t really have full control of it anymore. If it is unencrypted then they can access it and depending on their terms of service use it for various purposes like training their AI models etc. If asked they can share your data with US law enforcement or others even if the server is physically not in the US. (Microsoft admitted under oath that it ‘cannot guarantee’ data sovereignty)

Just for the record, what actually happened: UK government officials asked for my input leading into the US President’s upcoming visit to the UK. I provided input, which was then leaked by the UK government to the FT in mutated form for reasons I can’t explain.

FAA anticipates that the operations conducted under part 108 would have a variety of operational personnel positions and therefore does not propose to require any additional operations personnel positions. All operators would be responsible for identifying the necessary operations personnel to ensure the safety of the operation, in addition to ensuring that the operations personnel have the necessary knowledge and skills for their role. In this manner, responsibility is tied to the company operating the UAS rather than an individual that has limited control of the actual operation and can be removed from their position if necessary.

The idea to write a book about everyday absurdities of the Soviet Union was given to me by my good friend Markus Hess who, although born and raised in Canada, has Estonian roots. During our conversations it became clear how difficult it is for a Western person to fully understand what really happened and what daily life was really like in the Soviet Union. Even today, the Westerner regards the vanished Soviet way of life as if from another planet and can ask odd, sometimes humourous questions. Perhaps the most shocking, but also a classical,  example of this lack of comprehension  is the question posed by a Western lady after hearing about the brutal forced mass deportations in the Soviet Union.

She asked, “But why did people let themselves be stuffed into cattle cars bound for Siberia? Why didn’t they call the police?”

Wplace.live happened. Out of the blue, a new collaborative drawing website appeared, built from scratch using OpenFreeMap.

I don’t know what it is, but the internet seems to be crazy about it. One thing is for sure: the traffic it generates is out of this 

Matt Taibbi:

Letter to Bill Grueskin, former Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, on his recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review

Mr. Grueskin,

Regarding your August 1 article, “Knowing: Still Only Half the Battle,” which lauds Charlie Savage of the New York Times for having “dissected and eviscerated” Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s claims about corruption of intelligence in the Trump-Russia investigation:

You praised Savage’s article, “New Reports on Russian Interference Don’t Show What Trump Says They Do,” as an example of the work of an “experienced beat reporter” who can distill complex stories into a “coherent, compelling whole.” Your sub-headline stressed the importance of “showing receipts” in journalism, where “most people don’t follow stories very closely,” but “they can learn a lot when an experienced beat reporter helps them sort out what’s important and what’s chaff.”

Except — and you should know this because the Columbia Journalism Review published over 20,000 words on the subject in January 2023 — Savage and his colleagues at the Times have badly miscovered this story for nearly a decade, and continue to do so. The 2018 Pulitzer Prize the paper won on the topic along with the Washington Post will go down as the same kind of “disgrace” as its 1932 Pulitzer for Walter Duranty’s breathless coverage of Stalin’s Russia. In this case, the Times drifted so far from its traditional mission that it became an animating motive for Gabbard and other investigators in Donald Trump’s administration. 

Witness FBI Director Kash Patel throwing down a gauntlet this weekend, right after your piece ran. He challenged media figures who called him a “liar” in 2018, when as an investigator in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) chaired by California’s Devin Nunes, he outed the Steele Dossier as “fictitious intelligence” used to deceive a federal judge and unlawfully spy on Trump’s campaign. Patel added, “Now I’m the FBI Director,” then hinted that he might release “more docs” so “we can see who is lying,” before ending with a reference to “bogus Pulitzers.”

Why does a fire truck cost $2 million?

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

Ban AC for DC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes. You are going into political oblivion.

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

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

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

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

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

The Big LLM Architecture Comparison

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

Maybe wait and see what Dershowitz does. 

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

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

How the diamond industry lost its sparkle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Professor Sun shares:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cost of misaligned incentives in the pharmaceutical supply chain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some example questions to ask:

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

Was this the saltiest press conference ever?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did they create? Two key innovations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Enormous Scandal, Dwarfing Watergate & The Pentagon Papers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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