Silent Running: The sci-fi that predicted modern crises

Cascend: Data Shows Wind-Power Was Chief Culprit Of Texas Grid Collapse

How Swift Achieved Dynamic Linking Where Rust Couldn’t

Transcript: Matt Pottinger on “Face the Nation,” February 21, 2021

Want To Live Longer, Be Happier, Stay Healthier? Studies Say Go To Church Regularly!

Vehicle Dependability at All-Time High, J.D. Power Finds

Do farmers have the right to repair their own equipment?

Off grid “free” land

A COVID-19 vaccine life cycle: from DNA to doses

Bloomberg New Economy: How Elon Musk Won Trump’s China Trade War

Whistleblowers: Software Bug Keeping Hundreds Of Inmates In Arizona Prisons Beyond Release Dates

Why Tech Moguls Are Obsessed With Building Utopian Cities

Swedish officials report ‘escalated’ threats and hate in coronavirus debate

Massacre in the mountains

Silicon Valley runs on Saudi

Reimagining our great political experiment may save it from terminal decline

But more than that, the study says something fascinating about how we perceive the world around us: that visual cues can effectively override our senses of taste and smell (which are, of course, pretty much the same thing.)

“Location-Based Pay” – Who Are You to Complain?

Armenia Is an Orphaned Client State

Grant Thornton ‘failed to check Patisserie Valerie cash levels’

How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

The U.S. fumbled a lot of things during this pandemic, but compared to almost every other peer nation, it is handling vaccination well.

Once again. Facebook (and Google) relies on and collects a majority of its data from *when you’re on products they don’t control and you’re not intending to interact with them.* That’s why they fear iOS privacy changes, data protection (aka privacy) laws & antitrust scrutiny. /1

Colorado City mayor resigns, responds to his controversial Facebook post

Taking a Fall

What went wrong with America’s $44 million vaccine data system?

Facebook reported revenue it ‘should have never made’, manager claimed

How Oracle Sells Repression in China

Citibank just got a $500 million lesson in the importance of UI design

The Fantasy of Opting Out

RightBooks: American Carnage

Two recent obituaries.

Darwin Ness

We frequently worshipped with Darwin Saturday evenings. Observing his drive, devotion and faith was humbling, to say the least.

David Villa

I met David – wearing a Santa tie – while we were marooned at O’hare. This occurred when United Airlines’ ORD – MSN flight performance was modeled after a random number generator (2008-2009).

Take your chances: canceled, on time or delayed. The odds grew against the paying traveler as day turned into evening.

Thus we stood at the gate, not at all surprised that our last flight of the day to Madison was cancelled.

We shared a rental car to Madison that evening, swapping family and business tales, including the recent big bank bailouts.

Our paths occasionally crossed and included lunch or tea conversations.

Life on earth is fleeting; our “time of grace”, for sure.

PS. After enduring endless ORD – MSN flight misadventures, I phoned Air Wisconsin’s VP – Operations.

I simply asked when they might stop with the random number generator? Laughing, he said that United determines where and when they fly. (Air Wisconsin continues to provide “regional jet” service to the large “mainline” airlines).

Amazon responds to Elon Musk’s accusations of impeding SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet plans

List of inventors killed by their own inventions

The Full Automation Fallacy

Build or Die! US Industrial Policy with Rob Atkinson

How The US Legalized Corruption

People are fed up with broken vaccine appointment tools — so they’re building their own

Kate Bingham: Why the UK strategy on Covid vaccines has been a great success

The year 2021 will bring DeFi into adolescence

The days are long but the decades are short

The computers rejecting your job application

Protecting your capital during a war

We’re still missing the origin story of this pandemic.

China is sitting on the answers.

REPORT ON THE 2020 PROTESTS AND CIVIL UNREST

Covid-19: Social murder, they wrote—elected, unaccountable, and unrepentant

The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired.

“Yet what we see at times is people with a Bernie Sanders sign and a ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign in their window, but they’re opposing an affordable housing project or an apartment complex down the street.”

FORMER FBI OFFICIALS TAPPED FOR AMAZON’S GROWING SECURITY APPARATUS

1/ “Covid-19: Social murder, they wrote“: “medical professionals allow(ed) themselves to be manipulated by corrupt politicians & influenced by media propaganda instead of being guided by their own ethical principles

Credit scores and internet browsing

“More Money, More Vaccines?” Here’s a Solution in a Toolkit

News outlets paid off old editorial promises with new headlines: Ponzi journalism.

In defense of interesting writing on controversial topics

Martin Luther Rewired Your Brain

Fauci.  Compare that to revisiting the Balaji thread.

The Effects of High?Information Environments on Legislative Behavior in the US House of Representatives

Wake Up, You’ve Been Asleep for 50 Years

Oral History Interviews During a Pandemic

The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election

Commentary on the Time 2020 election article.

The anti-science presidency?

From control rooms to testing, several strategies helped UP contain pandemic

Consider the Source

How the New York Times deceived Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

Today, the fate of the SpaceX Starship offers an example of how government oversight agencies can stifle innovation when they are unable to distinguish between innovation and execution and throw roadblocks in front of the single company that has transformed access to space.

Sweden: Here’s a graph they don’t want you to see

Now It’s The Democrats Turn To Destroy The Open Internet: Mark Warner’s 230 Reform Bill Is A Dumpster Fire Of Cluelessness

The Architecture of Mass Vaccine Distribution

A Curious Journey through the Story of the Passport

US Defense Intelligence Agency admits to buying citizens’ location data

Train Wreck: The Penn Central’s failure resonates today.

Moore’s Law & Cars

Yet Reuters has found new evidence that the CDC’s response to the pandemic also was marred by actions – or inaction – by the agency’s career scientists and frontline staff.

WHO advisor: COVID-19 pandemic likely started via lab leak

They believe that the role they are ostensibly to serve is as the “enlightened stewards” of society, taking the liberty of reimagining everybody else’s lives.

The High Price of Mistrust

The public’s expectations on privacy were changing, he said, and Facebook’s old approach wasn’t cutting it anymore. 

It’s clickbait, and it’s bad for you

Our Virginia regulatory state is failing us

Independent crafters get really taken for a ride by the federal government. We get taxed to the nth degree, and it wasn’t really worth it pursuing that as a business, even as a side hustle. I mostly just make them as gifts.

The difference between resistance and sedition, between protests and insurrections, is who’s in charge.

How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker

Talking about deplatforming with Yael Eisenstat

The GameStop Short Squeeze

A day in the life of your data.

Internet billionaire Reid Hoffman apologizes for funding a group tied to disinformation in Alabama race

The Case Against Anthony Fauci

America’s New Corporate Tyranny

When political parties reverse their policy stance, their supporters immediately switch their opinions too

The Trump era did indeed change America–but it was far from the apocalyptic spiraling predicted by Democrats and the media.

Lockdown ‘killed two people for every three who died of coronavirus‘ at peak of outbreak

The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming

The Unauthorized Story of Andreessen Horowitz

Exploring the Supply Chain of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines

Getting Off Big Tech Email

We Will Get to Herd Immunity in 2021…One Way or Another

SpaceX acquires former oil rigs to serve as floating Starship spaceports

‘It’s all fallen apart’: Newsom scrambles to save California — and his career

California plaintiffs sue Chinese tech giant Tencent, alleging WeChat app is censoring and surveilling them

Nucleic acid testing (NAT) technologies that use polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for detection of SARS-CoV-2

Thank you for not turning the IRS into an instrument of persecution against your political foes, the way your predecessor did.

A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear, and now arise a political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.

Where Are Wisconsin’s Missing 180,000 COVID-19 Vaccine Doses?

We are doing close to 1 million shots a day and the Joe Biden plan is to do 100 million shots in 100 days. It’s literally the same plan.

Extreme ultraviolet lithography is a foundational technology for modern semiconductor manufacturing.

“Why, for example, should it be a U.S. negotiating priority to open China’s financial system for Goldman Sachs ?”

Political Appointees, outcomes and the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.

Starting this year, all hospitals are required to list their prices for elective services. Whether you have insurance or plan to pay cash – find and compare prices below.

Search for pacemaker and several options come up, with prices that vary by thousands of bucks. There are more than a thousand charges for different types of screws used in surgeries, some costing hundreds of dollars, others in the thousands.

Even finding out the charge for a Tylenol isn’t as easy as it might seem. Piedmont’s chargemaster for its Atlanta hospital has all sorts of variations of “acetaminophen.” Some are pills that also include hyrocodone, some have codeine, and the strengths vary along with the list prices that run from about $30 to over $500.

The federal rule requiring hospital price publication.

Federal taxpayers spent $38B+ in back door electronic medical record subsidies from 2009 – 2018 (!)

Mr. Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism.

Arnold speaks.

Big Tech is the new deep state

Trump Twitter ban ‘raises regulation questions’

Twitter deletes China embassy’s Xinjiang ’emancipation’ tweet

“I have read and agree to the Terms” is the biggest lie on the web. We aim to fix that.

Ugandan Govt blocks Google Playstore, Apple AppStore, and YouTube

Two Worlds: So Much Prosperity, So Much Skepticism

How Moderna’s overnight vaccine success was 33 years in the making

The platforms have acted, raising hard questions about technology and democracy.

Airbnb canceling and blocking DC reservations during inauguration week

Was Vaccine Production Actually Delayed?

Censorship resistance

Laura Poitras open letter

Apple reportedly scrapped plans to fully secure iCloud backups after FBI intervention

But the world and US of 2008 no longer exist?

California Covid-19 Vaccine Availability

Thousands of Covid-19 vaccines wind up in the garbage because of fed, state guidelines

Assessing Mandatory Stay?at?Home and Business Closure Effects on the Spread of COVID?19

Applied Divinity Studies:

How high are rejection rates? It depends on who you ask. In ascending order:

• Kaiser Family Foundation reports a rejection rate of 27%, and 29% for healthcare workers.

• A global survey published in Nature reports 28% of people do not agree they would get a vaccine.

• The Public Policy Institute of California reports that 40% of adults and 69% of African Americans “probably or definitely” would not get the vaccine,

• The Wall Street Journal reports a National Association of Health Care Assistants survey claiming “nearly 72% of certified nursing assistants didn’t want to receive the vaccine”.

• The AP reports nurses have a rejection rate as high as 80% at some nursing homes.