The career path of most application programmers is fairly short. In most enterprises, the majority have five years or less of real in-depth experience, and battle-scared twenty-year+ vets are rare. Mostly, these novices are struggling through early career experiences, not ready yet to deal with the unbounded, massive complexity present in a big design.

And, then there’s the blatant fraud… for which I sadly don’t expect any final accounting and punishment.

“The term [provider] should not be used to describe physicians, nor should physicians use it to describe themselves, their team members, or their trainees.”

The H-1B program lets firms hire high-skill foreign workers for a six-year term. The annual number of visas allocated to for-profit firms is capped at 85,000 and there is excess demand for those visas. The analysis merges data from the Labor Condition Application where firms attest that H-1B hires do not adversely impact natives, the I-129 Petition for a Nonimmigrant Worker where firms request to hire a specific person, and the American Community Surveys. On average, H-1B workers earn 16 percent less than comparable natives. The payroll savings suggest that firms may be willing to pay a one-time fee to obtain an H-1B visa. The data are examined using a labor demand model to simulate how a fee alters the hiring decision. Depending on the level of excess demand, the unobserved productivity gains or costs from an H-1B hire, and the rate of job separations, the revenue-maximizing fee is between $118,000 and $264,000, has little or no impact on the number of H-1Bs hired, and generates between $6.2 and $22.4 billion in revenues. The fee would also change the skill composition of the H-1B workforce, making it more skilled.

In November 2025, the EU’s trade deficit with China averaged €1.07 billion a day. EU imports from China rose 4% year on year in November 2025, while exports fell 1%. As a result, the EU’s trade deficit with China widened to €32.2 billion, up from €30.3 billion a year earlier.

Matyushev says the Kona needs $250m for development, certification, and EIS.  LNA estimates that upwards $900m is a closer figure. Matyushev says the Horizon needs $3bn to $5bn, a figure LNA estimates is significantly under-estimated. JetZero says it needs $7bn to $10bn for the Z4. LNA also believes this number is way too low.

Geely may be best placed to build cars here: Volvo Cars, which it controls, has had an auto plant up and running in South Carolina since 2018, where it builds Volvo and Polestar vehicles. (Volvo stated, “We do not have any plans to produce cars on behalf of Geely there.”) If Geely does attempt to enter the US market under its own brands, it likely won’t happen before 2029.

Yiannis Exarchos, the CEO of the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), told reporters Wednesday that 15 FPV drones are being used in Milan Cortina, with an additional 10 traditional drones aiding coverage (it takes 800 cameras in total to broadcast the Games, per the OBS media guide). The use of FPV drones, Exarchos said, helps make sense of some of the more unconventional winter sports — particularly to casual viewers who only tune in during the Olympics.

But now, the market is shifting again. We are at an inflection point. The geopolitical architecture that allowed Taiwan to become the sole foundry for global democracy is looking brittle. The “Silicon Shield” is looking less like a shield and more like a target. The world needs a backup drive. And surprisingly, the coordinates for that backup drive are pointing to a snowy plain in Northern Japan.

Starlink has grown its customer based from around 10,000 in 2021 to around 4,000,000 by October of 2024.

It’s all state-of-the-art. And it’s terrible. Light switches, which have been self-explanatory since the dawn of electric lighting, apparently now come as an unlabeled multibutton panel that literally required a tutorial session from a technician. Pressing the same button twice might turn the lights on and off, or you might have to press one button for “on” and another for “off.” “It depends” is the name of the game—which is exactly what you don’t want when you’re trying to find the bathroom in the middle of the night.

“This is due in large part to the high construction costs of smaller-scale buildings for each home created,” the report says. “However, recent changes allowing construction of small multiunit buildings in most of Madison’s residential areas may contribute to an increase in this construction type in coming years.”

Alphabet (google) has lined up banks to sell a rare 100-year bond, stepping up a borrowing spree by Big Tech companies racing to fund their vast investments in AI this year.

$1T in Medicaid provider spending data released on opendata.hhs.gov. Public should know how its money is spent! Data explorer.

A fireplace is consistently among the most-searched amenities by home buyers nationwide, according to Zillow. But while convenience leans toward the automated ease of gas, many wealthy homeowners prefer the sensory trifecta of real fire: the scent, the rhythmic crackling and the living warmth that a faux flame simply can’t mimic. “The more high-end the property is, the more the homeowner typically wants it,” says Katherine Koriakin of Wyoming’s GYDE Architects.

Last time I wrote a manifesto about how we should increase competition in the hospital sector. I got SO MANY thoughtful emails about ideas people have been thinking about, clearly I struck a chord.

The trend of construction productivity in the United States failing to improve over time is indeed concerning. “Productivity” means some measure of output, divided by some measure of input. When productivity is improving, we get more output for a given amount of input over time; if productivity is falling, we get less output for a given amount of input over time. If productivity doesn’t improve, we can’t expect construction costs to fall and things like houses, roads, and bridges to get any cheaper. Because of this, it’s worth looking deeply at what exactly the trends in US construction productivity are.

But it’s all an illusion. Artificial enchantment. Virtualized nostalgia. It may sound like you’re ripping revs from gear to gear—HHHHM, HHHuuum, Hummmmm. But the revs you hear, and therefore the reality you can faithfully report, is completely artificial. The damn thing doesn’t even have a transmission, per se.

Yes, this is all boring. No sane person should ever get excited about a blank wall, let alone read a thousand plus words on the subject. But your wall at home is a recurring reminder that most true architectural and design advancements are almost entirely invisible.

Never cared about curling until I found out Sweden set up a surveillance operation to catch Canada cheating.

I and many others had to figure out how donor-advised funds (DAFs) work, how grants are documented, and how nonprofit financial reporting actually functions. Mistakes were made, including by me. But those early errors didn’t invalidate the core finding: the shadow nonprofit government as a function of the Deep State is real.

Poland did this in 1989 under Balcerowicz. Two years of pain, then 28 consecutive years of growth. Argentina has attempted this playbook before and failed. Milei’s bet is that he can hold the political coalition together long enough for growth to materialize.

“The competitive reality is that the Chinese are the 700-pound gorilla in the EV industry,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told me in an interview last year. “There’s no real competition from Tesla, GM or Ford with what we’ve seen from China.” Even Farley, after driving a Xiaomi SU7, said he didn’t want to part with it. The company is now rebuilding its EVs, starting with a $30,000 pickup, to compete directly with what they have seen from China.

And yet, this is how a lot of modern software behaves. Not because it’s broken, but because we’ve normalized an interruption model that would be unacceptable almost anywhere else.

The Dot-com Optimists Got a Lot Right. An analysis of Mary Meeker’s late-90s internet reports suggests she was often accurate, or even too conservative.

With launches every hour carrying 200 tons per flight, Starship will deliver millions of tons to orbit and beyond per year, enabling an exciting future where humanity is out exploring amongst the stars.

As with the large number of ‘blatniks‘ in the Soviet era who made sure their factories got what they needed outside the formal state procurement process, Epstein greased the wheels for the neoliberal state. His job was governance.

Publishing industry progressives were shocked that Frederick would even consider calling the police on black people (angelic children, probably) so soon after the killing of George Floyd. She was basically murdering them. Under intense pressure, everyone who worked at the agency resigned.

The Minnesota welfare fraud story isn’t an immigration story or a story about an excessively generous welfare state. Rather, these thefts were the predictable result of a public policy decision to embed middlemen throughout our welfare system. Like many frauds that pop up all across the country and the welfare state, the Minnesota day care schemes all occurred in programs where a private provider acts as a middleman between the government and individuals.

It’s all part of the airlines’ ongoing fight for market share and access at O’Hare, where the Chicago-based United has the hometown advantage and more gates. It intends to squeeze out its rival, but American, headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, is just as determined to maintain the airport’s status as a dual hub. After all, O’Hare’s central U.S. location makes it a premier spot for domestic and international connections. “It is one of the few airports in the world that genuinely is able to be home to major airline alliances,” says John Grant, chief analyst at the travel data company OAG.

Industry analyst Robert Mann Jr. characterizes the conflict as a battle of press releases and big egos: “Mr. Kirby is attempting to essentially extend United’s lead in Chicago, and this put up a marker for [American CEO] Mr. [Robert] Isom, who has decided that he would like to even the score.”

His story shows how one developer, a handful of regional organizations, and millions in dark money built nationwide infrastructure for tracking federal law enforcement while claiming to be “grassroots.”

Now a fair and necessary taxpayer question: Can Hennepin County confirm that local property tax dollars are not funding excessive executive compensation packages at contracted nonprofits? For reference, Nexus Family Healing’s IRS Form 990s are public records and should be part of this discussion:

The report concluded that “no one knows whether there are other unknown biolabs because there is no monitoring system in place.” Now we know that there was at least one other, but we still don’t know how many more. That is why it is critical for Congress to pass my bipartisan legislation, authored with Rep. Costa and Rep. Valadao, to find these labs and shut them all down.

The lesson here is that whatever the world thought would end just ended up being vastly larger than anyone thought. And the thing that people thought would forever be replaced was not simply legacy but ended up being a key enabler.

While Thiel is fond of Britain, he believes we have made serious errors by not controlling our ‘crazy immigration’ or taking advantage of the tech-powered growth the United States has. Nonetheless, he hopes that Britain can stand up to a vengeful American administration if the Democrats are elected in 2028, perhaps even acting as a refuge for the politically persecuted. In this sense Britain is like New Zealand, where Thiel has acquired citizenship and bought land to help him establish a refuge in times of international discord.

Submitted: “Our trash removal drivers got 2 seat belt violations in downtown Minneapolis this week, in case you wanted to know what Frey’s police force is actually working on.”

“At this point, they bring nothing but baggage,” one Democratic lobbyist told the publication. The Clintons’ “continued presence is a barrier to the party’s renewal,” the lobbyist said.

“I was hired by the Washington Post in 2021 transcribe all our interview questions and give them to Joe Biden days in advance on picture post cards.”. “Today I was laid off.”

If your position at The Washington Post was recently eliminated, please consider applying to write for The Babylon Bee. We are seeking applicants experienced in writing fictional content presented in the tone and style of a legitimate news organization.

As usual, the answer is: upskill yourself and adapt. If a crusty old fart like me can do it, you can too.

The problem is that it has given me no reason to care about possessing a short understanding of where early Venice came from. “There are lots of cities out there—so what?” No matter what material the author might cover after this historical background introduction, only the most dedicated readers will make it that far.

This map shows active Coast Guard navigational beacons in the United States and parts of Canada, from the 2025 Light List.

The Signal network erupted. Using a red phone emoji to signal an all-points alert, a message blasted out: “?? easy. URGENT: observers urgently requested at glam doll donuts @ 26th & nicollet [sic]. an observer has been shot by ice, unknown condition, emts [emergency medical technicians] present, please be safe. EDIT: medics requested to join perimeter in case agents start gassing. be aware there are many agents and mpd [Minneapolis Police Department] officers present.”

One unlikely beneficiary has been the British Overseas Territory of Anguilla, which lucked into a future fortune when ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, gave the island the “.ai” top-level domain in the mid-1990s. Indeed, since ChatGPT’s launch at the end of 2022, the gold rush for websites to associate themselves with the burgeoning AI technology has seen a flood of revenue for the island of just ~15,000 people.

Vimeo stock IPO’d at $52, and within a year, lost 85% of its value, trending down to just $8.42 by the end of May 2022. As we entered 2022, many states and localities had started easing up on lockdown restrictions, which hurt not just Vimeo, but many other tech companies as well. By the end of the summer of 2022, the tech sector had entered an unspoken recession, encasing the carnage at Vimeo in a cement tomb that it’d never be able to break free from.

You can trace all the funding mechanisms you want, but at the end of the day, the trail will end at the CIA/NED/USAID’s doorstep.

What I’m trying to say is, the same way Americans need to visit the world and find meaning, we need them to come, to flood us like some contrast liquid and give us meaning.

Hillary says she has “absolutely no support” for cities that don’t listen to DHS on deportations: Regarding Kathryn Kate Steinle. More.

The jumpers will arrive Feb. 1 and stay with the family through Feb. 10. The Slovenians will return to Westby after jumping in the Norge tournament near Chicago. “They have several other tournaments in the U.S. after the Snowflake tournament, but they wanted to come right back to Westby in between and we are excited to have an extra few days with them.”

The boy who cried wolf is a cautionary tale about false alarms. But there’s another version of that story: the village that was so conditioned to ignore warnings that they didn’t notice when the wolf actually showed up. Look at the evidence. Draw your own conclusions. And if those conclusions match mine, then we have work to do—and the time to start is now.

For the adventurous, the answer is: today. Both MapLibre GL JS and MapLibre Native now support MLT sources. You can use the new encoding property on sources in your style JSON with a value of mlt for MLT vector tile sources.

Third, Christians must not be intimidated by the vitriol of our opponents. These are dark and serious times for the church in America, but we must remember that we are blessed when others revile us and when they lie about us (Matthew 5:11-12). In this life, we will have enemies because Christ Himself has enemies. Such opposition is not a sign of failure, but an invitation to greater faithfulness. The enemy’s tactics are not new, and they cannot stop the advance of Christ’s church. The darkness cannot overcome the light.

But there was one last hope to save the team. In December, a group of Buffalo businessmen, key leaders in the community, came to Sonju with a proposal: If we sell 2,000 more season tickets for the remainder of the season, will John Y. Brown promise to keep the Braves in Buffalo? Sonju asked Brown; Brown said yes. A massive 30-day blitz began, with the Buffalo bigwigs knocking on doors and holding out their hats. All they needed was 2,000 season tickets to save the Braves. They sold less than 100.

Then comes the Palisades fire and guess what? The insurance companies are now suing the Government of California because they think California should pay…not them.

The NTSB has released an animation reconstructing the final three minutes before the midair collision near Washington D.C., illustrating what each crew could—and couldn’t—see at night and why see-and-avoid measures failed.

On Jan. 5, Walz shocked the political world by suddenly — and angrily — dropping his re-election bid, connecting his decision directly to the attacks he’d sustained, starting with the recent wave of fraud coverage. According to Axios, it was actually “fellow Democrats” who applied the “mounting pressure” that forced the governor’s hand. 

Football is a purely mediated experience, even when there is no media involved. It’s not just that you can see a game better when you watch it on television. Television is the only way you can see it at all.

“DO NOT make the mistake President Biden made for not firing a grossly incompetent DHS Secretary.”

My personal favorite feature is the Pay Now button. Because I have the data of the city and the associated payment subdomain, you theoretically could pay someone’s parking ticket for them!

City of Oakland managed by clowns. Imagine in 2013: new venues for the A’s, Raiders and Warriors. 2026: Everyone left, and nobody even wants to buy the emptied out husk of land. Local elections matter. Pay attention to local elections and hold your local leaders to account.

They are also a good example of what their proponents have labelled “gentle density”, offering five or six storeys of space-efficient housing, laden with attractive and practical period features.

He was once married to a Patrice Kazmierczak. They divorced a few years ago. His ex-wife Patrice is a political activist & a big supporter of Ilhan Omar & AOC.

Rams is a documentary portrait of Dieter Rams, one of the most influential designers alive, and a rumination on consumerism, sustainability, and the future of design.

Oliver would get up before dawn and use small fish colloquially known as poagies to lure lobsters from her boat, the Virginia, which was first owned by her late husband. As she established a remarkable 97-year tenure on the waters, and word of it spread, she became the subject of documentaries, major US television networks’ news stories and children’s books, including one titled The Lobster Lady, her obituary recounted.

The New York Times writes about Jacob Savage’s viral @compactmag essay without naming Savage, mentioning Compact, or providing a link.

Let’s be clear: I left him over $8 BILLION in reserves. This is the same Mamdani who spent years attacking me for not spending enough during the migrant crisis. The only reason those reserves exist is because I ignored him and his socialist comrades who demanded we blow billions more with no guardrails. “Free” isn’t free. It’s just a bill someone else has to pay.

SpaceX has developed a novel Space Situational Awareness (SSA) system, called Stargaze ? starlink.com/stargaze

I’ve obtained a declassified US Navy comprehensive report on the Battle of Leyte Gulf from 1944 – including the Battle Off Samar.

Former Google Engineer Found Guilty of Economic Espionage and Theft of Confidential AI Technology justice.gov/opa/pr/former-…

In the aftermath of Minnesota’s Signal networks being exposed, a ripple effect has surged through activist circles, prompting rapid organization in states hungry to fortify their “defenses” against ICE. Seattle’s groups, for instance, have ramped up encrypted recruitment, drawing from MN’s exposed tactics to create tighter vetting processes and decentralized “response pods” that activate within minutes of raids. Illinois follows suit, with chats buzzing about mirrored databases for agent tracking, now layered with anonymity tools to evade scrutiny. Even in corners like Texas and California, pop-up networks echo the model, blending local intel with national coordination to disrupt deportations.

was an eyewitness as the Financial Times went woke and I couldn’t bear it. The London Stock Exchange Group has cancelled its Financial Times subscription and I can’t blame it

Delusional optimism is a secret to success. People who overestimate their chances work harder and persist longer. Even against the odds, that extra persistence turns failures into wins.

Chinese officials and automakers are eyeing German factories slated for closure and are particularly interested in Volkswagen’s sites (VOWG_p.DE), opens new tab, a person with knowledge of Chinese government thinking told Reuters. Buying a factory would allow China to build influence in Germany’s prized auto industry, home to some of the oldest and most prestigious car brands, the person said.

American bus stops are often significantly closer together than European ones. The mean stop spacing in the United States is around 313m, which is about five stops per mile. However, in older, larger American cities, stops are placed even closer. In Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, the mean spacing drops down to 223m, 214m, and 248m respectively, meaning as many as eight stops per mile. By contrast, in Europe it’s more common to see spacings of 300m to 450m, roughly four stops per mile. An additional 500 feet takes between 1.5 and 2.5 minutes to walk at the average pace of 2.5 to 4 miles per hour.

“The national interests of countries like the US and Russia won’t always match up. Most of the time, they won’t. But when they do overlap, it would be a mistake, a serious mistake, not to use that moment to agree on practical and mutually beneficial projects: in the economy, trade, investment, and so on.”And then he added: when US and Russian interests don’t align, it would be criminal to let that disagreement slide into confrontation. Especially a direct, “hot” confrontation.

The bottom line is two-fold: 1) the tag team failed to overthrow the regime in Iran, although it surely has not given up on that goal; and 2) there is good reason to think that Israel and the US did not win the12-Day war.

@SenFeinstein abused her Desert Protection Act to close down America’s most profitable Mountain Pass mine in the Mojave in 2002. Her husband Blum was exclusive importer of rare earth metals from China

Verizon has started enforcing a 365-day lock period on phones purchased through its TracFone division, one week after the Federal Communications Commission waived a requirement that Verizon unlock handsets 60 days after they are activated on its network.

In June 2007, Marc Andreessen published what became the defining essay on startup strategy. “The Only Thing That Matters” argued that of the three elements of a startup—team, product, and market—market matters most. A great market pulls the product out of the startup. The product doesn’t need to be great; it just has to basically work.

Mark Carney cannot simply return to Parliament and expect, as he has for the past year, that re-announcing projects or creating new bureaucracies will suffice to fix Canada’s woefully inadequate military, underdeveloped natural resources, and entrenched internal trade barriers. Small ball and tinkering is not going to cut it.

The state told Marin it needed to plan for 14,000+ new homes (a ~12% increase in a county with ~115K homes). The county nodded. Then it upzoned a few dead malls and commercial sites, leaving 99% of its residential land untouched

In 2018, for instance, the West Michigan Woman Brilliance Awards named her woman of the year. In 2020, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer appointed Ezeh to the executive committee of Michigan’s Early Childhood Investment Corporation. In 2021, Aquinas College honored the Nigerian fraudster with its Distinguished Service Award. The acclaim and upward mobility evidently weren’t enough for Ezeh, who decided to live a jet-set lifestyle at taxpayers’ expense. According to a 2023 whistleblower complaint, Ezeh used various interrelated organizations to funnel hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to herself as well as to friends and family members while serving as CEO of the Early Learning Neighborhood Collaborative.

“I think Ken Howery was an effective ambassador to Sweden several years back. I absolutely believe in the private-sector experience,” said Rufus Gifford, who served as President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Denmark and was a top fund-raising official on Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.

RGGI forces its member states to buy emissions credits…from RGGI. It’s a non-profit-run carbon tax system. Those credits then get charged directly to you on your electric bill. Youngkin pulled Virginia out of RGGI and saved Virginian’s nearly a billion dollars on their electric bills.

Before you go writing off Virginia know this, Abigail Spanberger has been groomed to run for President(the new Hillary). Being governor is just a stepping stone. So while everyone is distracted with Gavin she is the plan. The VA Legislature will push crazy, radical stuff&she will veto some of it to appear moderate.

Unlike other megaconstellations, including SpaceX’s Starlink, Blue Origin’s new constellation will not serve consumers or try to provide direct-to-cell communications. Rather, TeraWave will seek to serve “tens of thousands” of enterprise, data center, and government users who require reliable connectivity for critical operations.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is highlighting the worst of worst criminal aliens arrested by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Europe is pathetic at getting anything done. Strategically weak Prevaricating. Disunited. Naive. A confused gaggle of middle managers waiting for distinct leadership, all looking to one another for answers because nobody seems to have any. Clinging onto rules and treaties that are no longer fit for purpose rather than actually using instinct and confidence, as it is the only foothold the lemming-like bureaucrats have to help formulate decisions.

ICE did NOT target a child. The child was ABANDONED.

Tons of headlines from Davos. Here’s a quick run down…

A 2024 filing shows the group awarded just $158,811 in grants that year while Armstrong brought in a salary of $215,726

Bugs Apple Loves: Why else would they keep them around for so long?

Downtown Denver’s office vacancy rate grows to 38.2% as tenants reimagine the workplace

SFPark: interactive map of SF parking regulations.

Got on the Red line in Chicago. One car had guy living in his own shit, sprawled out in his filth eating Chinese take out food, and the car smelled like it. The other had two guys openly smoking joints yelling about the Bears. I chose the shit car because I didn’t want to get into an argument about Caleb’s lucky toss since that might have ended with one of us being stabbed. Thanks Chicago for such luxurious choices.

Due to massive demand, I’ve added English subtitles to the German Amelia/Maria video. Now the message can be understood worldwide

Police at my stop tell me they can’t/won’t do anything. Why give him a ticket when the judge will toss out it anyways.

The lawsuit alleges the companies accessed patient medical records and then sold them to lawyers who sifted through the files to identify potential clients. These companies are “exploiting health information exchange frameworks to fraudulently access and steal sensitive patient health information for financial gain,” the lawsuit argues.

Veterans generally understand the prevalence, presence and immediacy of danger intuitively. This is a trait they share with LE. For example, as a veteran I plan to never again enter the Minneapolis/St. Paul region, ever.

And here’s the hard truth we’ve lived, the people shouting loudest about “protecting immigrants” and hating on ICE don’t actually care about immigrants like us. They care about looking morally superior. That’s it.

Did you know that we fought an entire war in Somalia with 28,000 troops? No. How could you? For you are on the “inside” and unable to see the whole of the host. The host does not want to see itself. If it could, then it would see itself for the bloated, obese, grotesque monster that it is, a monster that has ravaged nearly every small country in the world.

Apple’s annual spend at TSMC grew from $2B in 2014 to $24B in 2025. That is 12x in 12 years. Apple went from 9% of TSMC revenue to 25% at its peak and settled to 20% in 2025. More striking is Apple’s dominance at node launches: consistently >50% since 20nm and in some cases near 100%. Apple effectively funded the yield learning curve for every major node transition since 20nm.

But there’s a small workaround that seems to work. Browsers won’t delay the loading of an image if it’s already been fetched. You can take advantage of that by conditionally preloading the image using a media query, then marking the image as lazy later. I tested it using the HTTP link header, but may also work fine with a <link rel="preload"> tag.

The Remnant: The Last Christians of Denmark is an independent documentary film exploring the lives, hopes, and challenges of traditional Christian families in one of the world’s most secular nations.

Richard Stallman’s list of protests. More.

Too often, technology becomes obsolete before the procurement cycle even finishes. The thesis of Klein and Thompson does not simply apply to FAA acquisition; it explains why so many modernization efforts languish or fail.

What I am saying is that I, nor anybody, can tell the difference between the conference coverage and a very well-executed hoax. Consider that the Great Moon Hoax was walking a very fine tightrope between giving the appearance of seriousness, while also not giving away too many details that’d let the cat out of the bag. Here, the conference rhymes.

“We don’t want to be perpetual renters of disposable crap,” she told an interviewer for the website Front Porch Republic. “We want things that last.”

Like Houellebecq and Céline, however, Obertone’s literary reputation is difficult to separate from his political positions. Houellebecq once described Islam, the faith of many French people of immigrant origin, as “the dumbest religion.” He later published a novel imagining France under the rule of a Muslim president whose title—Submission—mischievously alluded to the Arabic etymology of “Islam.” Obertone, for his part, has been highly critical of immigration’s impact on French society and has ties to “great replacement” theory. His three-volume novel, Guérilla (published between 2016 and 2022)is the story of France’s descent into civil war following an uprising of racial minorities. 

The booming second-hand luxury market and stricter anti-money-laundering regulations have intensified this scrutiny. As one sales associate at a major Paris boutique told Glitz, “Every new client is automatically a suspect.” Staff now collect and assess far more data than before, from home addresses and their perceived prestige to social media activity and online presence. Sales associates are trained to evaluate whether a client’s buying journey appears coherent.

There were 372 distinct emojis used within 4162 notes (Figure). Approximately one-quarter (1011 notes [24.3%]) contained more than 1 emoji (maximum?=?32; median?=?4). Emoji usage rates remained mostly stable at 1.4 notes with emojis per 100?000 notes from 2020 to 2024, increasing to 10.7 per 100?000 notes by quarter 3 of 2025.

Another big court win against the very corrupt Wisconsin State Attorney General Josh Kaul and his lackey Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne.
Surprise ending.

After four matches, Wisconsin silenced 11,549 at Carver-Hawkeye Arena by taking a 9-3 lead over the fourth-ranked Hawkeyes, who haven’t lost to the Badgers since 2007.

The software engineers — all white males dressed casually in sweatshirts and jackets — were soon confronted by protesters who surrounded the restaurant, shouting insults and blowing whistles in their ears as they attempted to leave, according to Lee.

We call this quality resonance. It’s the experience of encountering something that speaks to our deeper values. It’s a spark of recognition, a sense that we’re being invited to lean in, to participate. Unlike the digital junk food of the day, the more we engage with what resonates, the more we’re left feeling nourished, grateful, alive. As individuals, following the breadcrumbs of resonance helps us build meaningful lives. As communities, companies, and societies, cultivating shared resonance helps us break away from perverse incentives, and play positive-sum infinite games together.

A cold-blooded project uses boring technology. The build and test scripts don’t depend on external services that might change, break, or disappear entirely. It uses vendored dependencies.

The product development problem was structural. Donahoe reorganized Nike from sport-specific teams to general categories: Men’s, Women’s, and Kids’. This destroyed the organizational capabilities that had driven product development. The running team understood biomechanics and materials science. The basketball team understood court dynamics and performance requirements. When you collapse these into general categories, you lose the specialized knowledge that creates functional differentiation. Senior designers and executives left for competitors. The company began relying more heavily on retro basketball shoes, which worked during the pandemic. But when trends shifted toward lower-profile shoes like Adidas Sambas, Nike was left holding excess inventory. Inventory turnover deteriorated, and gross margins compressed further.

Stern hauled her aboard. With the wind at their backs, the final leg to a Caribbean island — which he declined to name, but is widely reported to be Curaçao — was mercifully smooth. A private plane was waiting to take her the rest of the way to Oslo.

So, if you’re Neon, why not try to put this movie you believe in front of as many eyeballs as possible?

Unfortunately, that is not what happened. Instead of simply de-indexing the search result, like they do for so many other items, Google refused to acknowledge that I was the author of the book. After receiving my DMCA complaint, they replied:

There were many exciting and unprecedented developments in the world of databases. Vibe coding entered the vernacular. The Wu-Tang Clan announced their time capsule project. Rather than raising one massive funding round this year instead of going public, Databricks raised two massive rounds instead of going public.

Middle-earth is guided not just by the opposing wills of good and evil but by another, providential force beyond the material. In the earliest chapters of the series, we learn that Gandalf is keenly aware of this, when he warns against the pragmatic decision of slaying Gollum:

“I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end.”

Everything makes sense when you consider the following seven immutable truths:

A Visual Guide for Canadian Voters DOTTING THE MAP FOLLOW THE MONEY! Take a peek into the complex web ensnaring Canada as we head into the election. Poke on each map below to learn more! Via Kovrig.

ICE has provided @FoxNews a list of the most egregious criminal aliens they’ve arrested during their surge in the sanctuary state of Minnesota, & it’s the most disturbing list I’ve ever seen, including numerous convicted child rapists/sodomizers & ten convicted killers, most with deportation orders going back many years. Several from Laos, Somalia, and Sudan.

“Qui tam is a legal provision that allows a private individual (known as a relator) to file a lawsuit on behalf of the government to recover funds lost to fraud. The term comes from the Latin phrase qui tam pro domino rege quam pro se ipso in hac parte sequitur, meaning “he who brings the action for the king as well as for himself.”  In California, these actions are primarily governed by the California False Claims Act (CFCA), which is modeled after the federal version but tailored to protect state and local taxpayer money.  How Qui Tam Uncovers Fraud in California:

impact on Postmarking Timing: The rule clarifies that the date displayed on a machine-applied postmark represents the “date of the first automated processing operation” performed at a processing facility, rather than the date the mail was dropped off

The British empire had largely completed its Red Line cable network by 1902. This network allowed news and messages to be delivered in a few minutes or several hours at most depending on the message queue’s length. It spanned the globe and formed a network ring so traffic could be routed in the opposite direction in case of disruption. 

A ship in the wrong place isn’t all that much better than no ship at all, so there are reasons to want numbers.

The Sermon on the Mount did not come to inspire us. It came to strip us. Then it led us to the only place hope could survive: “It is finished.”

Meet the sword-wielding man hired to kick squatters out of empty Oakland homes. A squatter removal cottage industry has grown out of California’s housing crisis, catering to property owners who don’t want to go to court.

The first recorded articulations of the West as a political identity came around the time of the 1821-1829 Greek War of Independence, Varouxakis told me. Until then, the Ottoman Empire had been Europe’s most worrying threat. So, when people wanted to talk about their collective otherness and defense against the Ottomans, they’d speak of Christendom, or of Europe.

Average family medicine wait times across major U.S. markets compared with the national average. Markets dominated by academic medical centers consistently exhibit longer waits. Markets with fragmented, independent primary care access cluster near or below the national norm.

It turned out that the real unlock of reasoning was in driving tools. Reasoning models with access to tools can plan out multi-step tasks, execute on them and continue to reason about the results such that they can update their plans to better achieve the desired goal.

Many of the convenient tools we use today (email, messaging, social media, password manager) are essential for daily life but they also yield control over to organizations (Google, Facebook, Amazon) that don’t necessarily have our best interst in mind [1][2].

My setup

Questioning how “incentives align” is a really good litmus test for most things.

Most of the following recommendations are based on my own threat model and comfort level. There will always be a compromise between effort and easy. It’s best to pick what fits your lifestyle.

As we will soon see, the typechecking step is probably the most relevant for most developers. Like most things, nothing is that simple. Different languages have differently flavored compilers, doing a wide range of things. This is not a thorough review on all things compilers, so instead, let’s take a sample of languages and see what kind of compilers they have.

On 22 Oct 1925, Julius Edgar Lilienfeld (a Polish¹ professor in Germany) patented the field-effect transistor (FET).^[LIL1] In 1928, he also patented the metal oxide semiconductor FET (MOSFET).^[LIL2] Lilienfeld’s designs worked.^{[ARN98][ROS95]} The much later point-contact transistor (Bell Labs, 1948) was a dead end: today, almost all of the billions of trillions of transistors in our computers and smartphones are FETs of the Lilienfeld type.

Readings in Database Systems (commonly known as the “Red Book”) has offered readers an opinionated take on both classic and cutting-edge research in the field of data management since 1988. Here, we present the Fifth Edition of the Red Book — the first in over ten years.

Let’s try to see what sort of picture would be taken by a sensor that is placed near the objects without any enclosure. I’ll also significantly increase the sensor’s resolution to make the pixels of the final image align with the pixels of your display. In the demonstration below the left side represents a view of the scene with the small greenish sensor present, while the right one shows the taken picture:

“When I was in grade school, the teacher, Mrs. Dow, said, ‘Who would be willing to recite the Gettysburg Address on Memorial Day in Cottage Grove?’ I was the only one who raised my hand,” he said.

The other mechanism is mostly only understood by a handful of libertarians; it is law as a violence-minimizing equilibrium among a number of roughly equal agents playing an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game. In such settings, cooperation evolves naturally and doesn’t have to be handed down by a single ruler or coalition. I’ll call this “IPD law”.

It all started when he stepped in one of the pool cars that Ford employees drove around campus. Since it wasn’t his vehicle, he didn’t know where the fuel tank was. But when the gas light turned on, so did a lightbulb over his head. After driving to the wrong side of the pump, it occurred to Moylan that a simple graphic on the dashboard could save others from his mistake. Fueled by a desire to solve real problems, he figured this information would be especially useful for rental-car customers and families with multiple cars—and Ford employees in pool cars.

I have never used this, either, I’m publishing it here because the MPAA is attempting to suppress public knowledge of it.

‘I never really enjoyed Bordeaux En Primeur. I felt like we were some sort of performing monkeys. We were just there to help them sell, which is not my favourite function. I’ve been quite vocal that I think it’s a slightly flawed process – as is now being shown.’ 

Today, I’ll cover 5 practices that are considered ‘common wisdom’, and why I think worth reconsidering them. 

1. Don’t reinvent the wheel – find a package
2. Every PR must be reviewed 
3. 2-4 week sprints are how modern teams work
4. Every code change should be behind a feature flag/gate
5. If a comment is needed, the code is too complex 

There is one takeaway this article provides that definitely holds true:

• Local models are far more capable than they’re given credit for, even for coding.

It also explains the process of setting up a local coding model and technical information about doing so which is helpful for anyone wanting to set up a local coding model. I would still recommend doing so.

This paper also examines a number of what initially appears to be unexplained anomalies, such as a patchwork of masonry styles and seemingly ‘melted’ surfaces. These have fueled a number of “alternative-history” theories surrounding the origin of this stonework. These are, however, resolved with a better understanding of the region’s history and geology. In sum, what follows is one of the most comprehensive and evidence-based accounts of Inca construction techniques ever compiled. 

I read a report on DCLife, which highlighted an interview in the Nikkei newspaper with Canon’s Canon’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Toshizo Tanak. Canon’s CFO said Canon is thinking about outsourcing camera and printer for more production for some lower?end cameras and printers. The main goal of the outsource is to boost the Return on Equity (ROE). As DCLilfe explains;

The APP petition, submitted by Mitch Sylvester, would read: “Do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state?

Kansas will own the stadium, with the Chiefs paying $7 million in rent annually. But that money doesn’t go back to the state; it goes into an account the Chiefs can use for renovations, repairs, and operational expenses. That means the Chiefs can use their own rent money to hire stadium security, parking staff, and concession vendors throughout the season. I know Kansas had to offer a great deal to get the Chiefs to leave Arrowhead, but this is worse than I expected.

Sushila’s eldest sister, Surya, rejected an arranged marriage and instead went to medical school, thereby carving a path for Sushila and her youngest sister, Sadu to become physicians as well. Their brother, Bakul, the second eldest, worked as a textile engineer and supported his sisters’ pursuits.

Top United Airlines International Destination by State in 2025.

In other words, they reflected in images a core mission of Texas Monthly: to represent the identity of our state in all its wonderful variety. On behalf of Texas Monthly‘s photo department, here’s a collection of our favorite photos from this year.

PT: The bad doors for Europe, the three doors of the future. For the future to have power as a cultural or political idea, you want it to be different. You can’t stay in this Groundhog Day, this Tory/Labour thing where we’re never doing anything new. The problem is the three actual pictures of the future. Behind door number one is Islamic sharia law. Behind door number two is the totalitarian CCP surveillance state, a hi-tech dystopia. Behind door number three is Greta with a bicycle, and then there’s no fourth door. This is why Greta’s been winning.

The Christmas Carol (1949) – Vincent Price – HD Restored – Most Complete Version

Whole-body MRI provider Prenuvo has lost its bid to limit damages in a high-profile malpractice case over one of its pricey elective scans. 

Groq’s LPU is a complete departure from the other two. It doesn’t use HBM (External Memory) at all. Instead, it uses SRAM (Static Random Access Memory), which is built directly into the silicon of the chip. The biggest differentiation from that is the Speed. SRAM is up to 100x faster than the HBM found in GPUs. Because the data is right there on the chip, there is zero “fetch time.”

In the weeks following the burglary, the raiders would discover, in Medsger’s words, “that there were two FBIs—the public, and the secret,” and that the latter “used deceptions, disinformation, and violence as tools to harass, damage, and…silence people whose political opinions the director [Hoover] opposed.” The FBI, it became clear to the burglars, had been and was engaged in “blackmail, burglary…. Agents and informers were ordered to spy on…the private lives, including sexual activities, of the nation’s highest officials.” Hundreds of thousands of Americans were targeted—or enlisted as informers—even members of various Ku Klux Klan groups. The FBI’s files included massive amounts of data, much of it supplied by untrained informers. There was an agreement with 16,700 American Legion Posts, utilizing 100,880 members, to spy on their own communities.

I think this is a very telling tale for software engineering. If your job is to translate requirements into code manually – and that’s it – you’re the generalist travel agent.

Two engineers walked into the government six months ago to drag federal retirements from an underground mine onto the Internet. They built retire.opm.gov and are poised to turn six-month waits into near-instant processing for hundreds of thousands of employees.

But the resulting contradictions are too severe to be merely discomforting. In the speech after his election victory, Mamdani said, “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.” That battle cry stands as a perfect distillation of the thinking that 23 years of Weekly Standard issues were published to refute and deride. 

The first world builds systems meant to last. The third world learns to live inside the ruins of broken ones. Assimilating people from these areas is almost impossible. Certainly not worth the risk. No reward is worth it. War veterans have so much experience with this.

Wisconsin Standard:

Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord.

The above data also only considers changes in construction productivity, and doesn’t have anything to say about absolute levels, and it seems obvious to me that, in many cases, US construction practices lag behind European ones for things like transit construction. The US has a lot to learn from other countries for how to catch up to the efficient frontier, especially for certain types of construction (ie: transit) and in certain places in the country (ie: expensive coastal metros). But this data suggests that driving that frontier forward is a much thornier problem.

The C.I.A. laid out a bold plan. A group of American alpinists working for the agency would slip into the Himalayas undetected, drag several backpacks stuffed with surveillance equipment up the slopes and install a secret sensor at the top of a mountain to intercept radio signals from Chinese missile tests. The climbers scampered down the mountain after stashing the C.I.A. gear on a ledge of ice, abandoning a nuclear device that contained nearly a third of the total amount of plutonium used in the Nagasaki bomb. It hasn’t been seen since. And that was 1965.

Former world 100m silver medallist Marvin Bracy-Williams was banned for more than three and half years last month after admitting doping offences, while fellow American Erriyon Knighton was banned for four years in September after testing positive for steroids. Women’s marathon world record holder Ruth Chepngetich was banned for three years in October after her sample showed a banned diuretic commonly used as a masking agent.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

She attributes her ability to work for Mr. Trump to growing up with an alcoholic father, the sportscaster Pat Summerall. “High-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink,” she said. “And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” While Mr. Trump does not drink, she said he has “an alcoholic’s personality” and operates with “a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”

To envision what comes next, we need to comprehend the ongoing turning point. If Trumpists are pursuing such a brutal and desperate policy, it’s because they don’t know how to respond to the country’s economic decline. Measured in purchasing power parity – meaning the real volume of goods, services, and equipment produced each year – China’s GDP surpassed that of the US in 2016. It is currently more than 30% higher and will reach double the US GDP by 2035. The reality is that the US is losing control of the world.

Robotaxi Tracker: Real-time fleet data, trip logging, and analytics for Tesla robotaxis.

This is where the situation starts to feel a little too reminiscent of past accidents. One bad press release on a Friday is often all it takes to expose a structure everyone assumed was stable. Silicon Valley Bank collapsed over a weekend because of one press release on a Friday after hours, causing confidence to evaporate all at once. In my opinion, moments like Blue Owl stepping away are exactly the kind of catalyst that can shift market psychology from complacency to reflexive risk reduction. Redemptions don’t wait for perfect information.

Former top regulator named new president of Alliant Energy’s Wisconsin utility business.

Among other things, the lawsuit accuses Epic of violating antitrust laws, based on the company’s sheer market volume; requiring employees to sign non-compete agreements limiting their ability to work for a Texas-based health system; advertising software features that hospitals cannot access; and providing software that allows health systems to restrict a parent’s access to their child’s medical records.

The accounting rules don’t define “probable” in percentage terms, but it is a higher bar than “more likely than not.” In practice, some accountants peg the threshold at 70% or higher.

Track what they do. I make a point of knowing all the meds that are being administered and the schedule when I’m there. When nurses come into administer them, I ask them exactly what they’re administering. (I have a good memory for this stuff, but it’s not a bad idea to take notes). If something new appears in the mix, ask about it — who prescribed it and why. If they don’t administer something on the list, also ask why. In my experience, they make mistakes. You may also be able to get them to back off on checking vitals multiple times in the middle of the night so that your patient can get some sleep. (And so that you can!)

If the myth of Watergate can be summed up in a phrase, it’s “the imperial presidency.” Postwar liberalism’s greatest historian, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., popularized that expression at the start of Nixon’s second term. Conceived largely to attack Nixon’s centralization of foreign policy in the executive branch, the phrase came to indicate widespread presidential abuse of power, regarding Nixon as an anti-constitutional actor who subjected the American system to its ultimate trial.

Bill Hagan felt his head push beyond the pillow and into the headboard. As he came to consciousness, he realised it was not a headboard but the reinforced plastic bulkhead of a plane. At the moment he realised he was on a plane, he remembered that he was the captain of it. His feet were pitched up at 30 degrees in the flight crew’s bunk, at twice the angle of take-off. His first thought was that his two co-pilots had pulled up the aircraft’s nose because of oncoming traffic. When the plane banked sharply to the right, he wondered whether they’d swerved to avoid space debris. For a few seconds the aircraft seemed to level, then rose again, before turning sharply to the left and beginning to fall on its side.

In case your phone gets lost, you can see who stole it and exactly where it is!

Open Shortcuts ? Automation
Tap Create Personal Automation
Choose Message ? When I receive a message
Set a trigger word (example: LOST)

Actions (in this order):

• Set Low Power Mode ? ON
• Take Photo ? Front camera (preview OFF)
• Get Current Location
• Send Message ? your number (photo + location)

Turn Ask Before Running ? OFF
Turn Notify When Run ? OFF

Anytime that keyword is sent from any phone, it runs automatically.

“We’re a program that hadn’t been .500 in 20 years or so, hadn’t had a lot of success, so by having an identity and playing fast, just got our guys in an attacking mindset going back to 2020 when we changed it,” he said. “So like, it has a lot more to do with us and how we can control what we’re doing out on the field and dictating the game.”

In the fall of 2015, Koenigsmann wrote a detailed report about SpaceX’s findings and presented it to NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration. The report concluded that “material defects” were the most probable cause for the broken rod end. This essentially put the blame on the rod end’s supplier. NASA’s own, independent findings leveled a harsher judgment more directly on SpaceX. NASA attributed the failure to a “design error” by SpaceX. The space agency also said SpaceX’s quality control process should have identified the substandard rod ends before they were installed on the rocket.

The concern isn’t theoretical. Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Karim Khan reportedly lost access to his Microsoft email after Trump sanctioned him for criticizing Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, though Microsoft denies suspending ICC services. Beyond US complications, Jestin questions whether European cloud providers have sufficient scale. “If you asked me today if we’ll find a solution, I’d say 80/20.”

Galitsky and her assistants encouraged us to play with the bioluminescence, splashing it up onto our spray skirts and kayaks and attempting to write our names. To see the most sparkles at once, we only had to run our paddles along the surface. When we dug our paddles down deep, the water looked like a galaxy.

Alas, reality rears its ugly head. Thus far, Madison residents have been treated to an onslaught of stale, consultant-coded apartment buildings multiplying faster than breeding rabbits. They invariably go by hollow names like “Chapter,” “Atmosphere,” or “Theory,” and wear their “modernist” scarlet letter with pride. With perfectly rectangular corners and sleek finishes, personality and pizzazz are left sleeping in the cold. They look mildly attractive to the naked eye, but keep staring, and feel as the inhumanity rips away part of your soul. They are slop made manifest.