12.5

Oakland police release new lead in killing of KRON4 security guard

One Target store. One huge spike in shoplifting reports. What does it mean for San Francisco?

India recently instructed citizens to refrain from signing up for SpaceX’s Starlink service.

Victor Gao Zhikai, chair professor at Soochow University and a frequent echo of Chinese government positions, two days later described USICA as a geopolitical “Tonya Harding syndrome — whacking the kneecaps of China trying to put China out of commission.” Gao warned that the blowback from USICA includes “a real possibility that down the road the China market is completely closed off for U.S. manufacturers.”

To an economist, “technology” is the efficiency in which inputs are transformed into outputs. And by that definition, we can already derive a very crude measure of technological progress in agriculture using just this data. A common measure of technology in agriculture is simply yields, which can be thought of as the rate in which one input (land) is transformed into an output (for example, bushels of corn). Technological progress is the growth rate of this efficiency, and so a transparent and simple measure of technological progress in agriculture is just the growth rate of yields. However, since agricultural output fluctuates a lot due to weather (more on that soon), we need to focus on very long-run measures of progress, where year-to-year weather effects are small relative to the overall trend. The figure below plots average US corn yields on the left and the twenty year growth rate of those yields on the right. It clearly shows there has been a dramatic slowdown in the rate of technological progress by this measure (though note progress in yield growth today remains significantly higher than the stagnation that prevailed prior to 1940).

U.S. Copyright Law has gone through many revisions and expansions since the first copyright provision was officially added to the U.S. Constitution in 1790.1 This original provision allowed authors the right to print, re-print or publish their work for 14 years, with the option to renew the copyright for another fourteen years. Today, copyrights can last well over 100 years, with the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extending copyright protection for most works to the life of the creator, plus 70 years.2

Hong Kong’s comeback queen? Carrie Lam on leadership and legacy after 2019 protests. In a wide-ranging interview with Talking Post, chief executive maintains her administration is firmly in charge of running the city.

The Flaccid Horde of Northern Virginia, gorging for decades on the largess of the American taxpayers and donor money in agencies, think tanks, panels, manels, and academia have produced nothing, progressed nowhere but the next line on their resume – intellectually vapor locked and strategically their ideas as stuck in aspic.

Of course, there is fierce debate about whether algorithms could in fact reinforce human biases rather than eliminate them. Others argue some AI products are merely digital snake oil lapped up by credulous HR departments.

Secondly, traditional auto makers, especially in the US, have a cost accounting problem. (We recognize that most people fall asleep at the mere mention of cost accounting, but bear with us, we will be brief.) Having grown up with highly vertically integrated industrial models, they care a lot about keeping factories full to maintain utilization. Apple does not have that problem. In part, because they have offloaded much of their fixed costs to Foxconn. The mantra we often hear is that companies are what they measure. Apple has demonstrated time and again that they do not measure the same things as their competitors. Apple is not going to chase market share or factory utilization, they will chase user demand in the belief that profits will flow from that.

It needs a bandwidth buffer. It can never reach 100% utilization, at risk of inducing latency. The traffic may never exceed, for example, 90% utilization. So, if the Metaverse network is at 90% utilization, no one else can enter. This needs to be managed. Somehow.

WTA suspends tournaments in China amid concern for Peng Shuai

One of Africa’s most professional and powerful militaries has been reduced to an assemblage of conscripts, militia, and remnants of his soldiery that resembles a fighting force but is disorganized and demoralized—and no match for the TDF.”

But what if we flipped startup-creation on its head? What if you start with a mission and values — not founders? For example, at my company Hustle Fund, our mission is to democratize wealth through startups. And to that end, we are furthering capital, networks, and knowledge in startup ecosystems. Even though I’m a founder of the company, it doesn’t matter if I personally work at Hustle Fund or not. It’s the mission that’s important and the people who want to work on that mission. And if no one cares about the mission, then the organization shouldn’t exist regardless of what I, as a founder, think about it. And if you start companies with missions instead of with founders, then you start to attract people who have lived and breathed that mission before. Those people really get it. And those people are also would-be customers or users. And maybe these same people are not only working on this problem together in a cooperative way but are also investors in the problem — both through work and capital.

The goal of this article wasn’t to prove how Electron is always the best choice (it isn’t), but rather, to provide a broad overview of the areas in which it is best suited. For example, you shouldn’t use it for applications with simple UIs, or if you don’t need to go cross-platform. In such cases, choosing the native frameworks will most likely be the best choice. That said, if you need to go cross-platform and your application is sufficiently complex, then Electron is really not bad at all compared to the alternatives, especially when done right. Of course, there are some very bloated Electron apps out there and I don’t like them either, but that’s mostly due to careless developers, not Electron.

The bitter joke of the story is that in San Francisco, the mother works full-time, drains her savings, but still can’t make ends meet and is forced to move away.1 Meanwhile, her daughter has lived on the streets for nine years – in an ironically carefree and stable state.

Watch billionaire investor Ray Dalio defend China’s move to disappear citizens from the public eye by likening it to being ‘a strict parent

52 things I learned in 2021