This will be my first lesson to the students on Wednesday: we live in times of historically unprecedented prosperity, and, by and large, things are getting much better every year.

The robots.txt is the real story. The site itself is just window dressing; it was never really meant to be consumed by humans. It’s slop that’s designed to be ingested by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google for incorporation into their LLMs so that it gets recommended to unwitting users asking about peptides. They advertise a package for peptide providers to get featured, although naturally “sponsorship never affects moderation, Buyer Beware, or review outcomes.”

Some of us have sciatica.

Demographic Profiles.

This is a solid franchise fighting for its footing. This is a powerful dynasty that could be undone by paper.

How to tell if chocolate is high quality (and how to spot a real craft bar): Short version: turn the bar over. High-quality chocolate tells you where the cacao grew, lists cocoa butter as the only added fat, keeps the ingredient list short, and skips vanillin, PGPR and alkalised cocoa. A real craft bar names a region, farm or harvest; an industrial imitation hides behind a country-of-manufacture claim like “Belgian chocolate”. Everything below is the long version.

Without The Work Number, you may need to provide extra paperwork during the application process. With The Work Number, you typically don’t have to call around or send out requests for documents. Instead, your data is available automatically to credentialed verifiers with a permissible purpose under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).

After the second episode, I read around on the hoarding-control industry. Most experts pathologize hoarding with a certainty reminiscent of the National Institutes of Health’s Covid declarations, or the old psychoanalysts. There is scant tolerance for eccentricity. These experts claim that hoarding disorder afflicts up to 5 percent of the population. A Sacramento hospital defines five levels of hoarding, from “light clutter,” Level I, to “risk of losing home,” Level V. Hoarders of all levels get the same message: You are stuck in the past. Alas, after the big clean-out, many stay stuck. Recidivism runs high, as Randy Frost, one of the more thoughtful of the experts, points out. A few commit suicide. Many more are deported like books into the boxes of assisted living.

SpaceX is investing ~$100 Billion to build Starbase, Louisiana. Thousands of Starship launches per year. ~10,000+ jobs.

Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, said the “Starbase Louisiana” facility would become a self-sustaining spaceport with propellant production, power generation, deep-water shipping capabilities, vehicle processing facilities, and an airport on site.

When the Aspen Skiing Company wanted to raise its lift ticket prices from $10 to $12 in 1975, it had to ask the US Forest Service for permission.

When Aspen residents wanted to fight the proposed price increase, they wrote letters to their local forest supervisor.

That’s the way ski business was done half a century ago: through a federal intermediary. Most ski resorts in the western United States operate under Forest Service permits, and in the 1970s, politicians, national forest employees, skiers, and ski resort owners all recognized that the agency had a mandate to regulate the prices charged by private companies on public land.

The bonds, which are due in 2049, were structured to provide immediate cash to James and backed by a stream of future revenue tied to his earnings outside basketball, people with knowledge of the matter said.

I’m sorry we never got a chance to meet, but getting this note from Dolly really had a an impact on me. She definitely didn’t have to take the time to do it. Even for a kid who mostly listened to rap music, she was an icon. A superstar in every sense. Rest easy Dolly. And thank you for the kind words.

Do you think Shake’R Up Auto works on Maseratis?”

Meanwhile, sites are ballooning. The median mobile page is now 2.6 MiB, blowing past the size of DOOM (2.48 MiB) in April. The 75th percentile site is now larger than two copies of DOOM. P90+ sites are more than 4.5x larger, and sizes at each point have doubled over the past decade. Put another way, the median mobile page is now 70 times larger than the total storage of the computer that landed men on the moon.

Two eQ250 propulsors, each capable of up to 85 pounds of static thrust, powered the aircraft, drawing from five Electric Power Systems Epic 1.0 battery modules. The glider’s 26:1 lift-to-drag ratio means it travels 26 feet forward for every foot it descends. That efficiency keeps it aloft longer on limited battery power, giving engineers more time per flight to evaluate propulsion performance, acoustics, and handling qualities.

This is a part of the commercial surveillance business model. Over the past decade, companies built up infrastructure to harness vast amounts of consumer data, using it to target individuals with unfair price hikes. Now the concept of a price is itself degraded. Left in its place are numbers engineered for individual consumers, based not on market conditions but on the weaponization of your personal data. Policymakers should mandate that companies offer a real price — one that must be simple, public, accessible and consistent in a given market, with rules on discounts and loyalty programs to promote fairness and protect consumers and competition. No more targeted price adjustments based on surveillance. No more hidden costs or fees. No more prices that change on the fly.

The Tiramisù World Cup is preparing to welcome its biggest ever public jury, with organisers seeking 130 amateur tasters to help judge the competition’s opening rounds in the north Italian city of Treviso this October.

At Giga Texas, the joint Tesla–SpaceX Advanced Technology Chip Fab is already showing the first layers of that stack: GeoPiers, heavily reinforced pedestals, grade beams, and a foundation denser than almost anything else on the campus.

Every chain has a map on the wall at headquarters with pins in it. This is the opposite map: for twenty of America’s biggest roadside brands, we found the single longest stretch of interstate you can drive without seeing them at a single exit.

Most of the interceptors offered at the Shenzhen fair were small, 3D-printed rockets with four wings equipped with electric motors. Cameras and guidance modules were fitted in the nose. Sellers quoted Rmb10,000 to Rmb20,000 ($1,500 to $2,900) a rocket, though interceptors without automatic guidance modules went for much less.

US citizens took 23.3mn trips to Europe in 2025, up by more than 1mn in 2024, according to figures from the National Travel and Tourism Office. Tourism Economics, a research group, predicts growth of 5.1 per cent in 2026.

Oil exports from the Persian Gulf have recovered to around two-thirds of pre-war levels, limiting the Iran war’s impact on global crude prices, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Over more than a century since the league was formed in an auto dealership in Canton, Ohio, pro football has evolved into an edifice of rules that have been engineered specifically to level the playing field.

I told her that I really lost faith in the program about three year into it because I have serious doubts about the “requirements” imposed on the aircraft like the steep approach landing, the trans-Atlantic capability and the very high elevation airport operations. There were other requirements that created difficult design constraints and compromises. I do not want to enter into specifics.

One morning in late 1991, Ron Fowler stood in front of the bathroom mirror, parting his hair to the side and noting the first strands of gray at his temples. His beard was neatly trimmed, his black slacks and white dress shirt crisply pressed. He was ready. Today would be his first day at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a uranium-enrichment facility about ten miles outside Paducah, Kentucky. This was more than just a job—it was the start of a new life.

It is called Verschlimmbesserung: an attempted improvement that only makes things worse.

We have all lived through the SaaS update that moved a button, renamed a menu, and broke a workflow we relied on daily. Some product team shipped a “better experience” that solved a problem nobody had.

Eliyahu Goldratt nailed the root cause decades ago:

“Tell me how you measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way… do not complain about illogical behaviour…”

State of the Map is the annual event for all mappers and OpenStreetMap users. In 2026 the State of the Map conference will be taking place in Paris and online. It will be a three day conference packed with talks, workshops, discussion rounds and more.

The robot pizza-making business has, it’s true, been littered with sorry tales of overcooked promises and melting fortunes. Besides Picnic, other companies that have come and gone include Zume and Pazzi, which usedrobot arms to assemble pizzas, as well as Basil Street, a purveyor of pizza vending machines. Although so-called fast food might seem an easy target for automation, it’s proved harder than many expected. Plus, bringing robots into pizza restaurants could take away entry-level jobs in the hospitality sector. Is the future really filled with robotic pizza?

Blumenthal breaks the rules, walks too close to the edge, and almost gets hit by a train. ?

Bill Maher: “Trump is so mad at Canada, he renamed Lake Ontario Lake America… Liberals are very pissed at this. They say you can’t just go around renaming to suit your political agenda. Just ask any Latinx birthing person.

Occasionally teach the observing model the wrong lesson. Advertise a ruse “win” by wrong method, far and wide. A perfectly legible organization is a vulnerable organization.

Milwaukee candidates tend not to good statewide either. Milwaukee is the epicenter of crime and bad education in the state, Crowley has to answer for that. Madison is hated for their residents being nasty and hating the rest of the state, but more people will go to downtown Madison than downtown MKE. This isn’t a race thing but Milwaukee is the most segregated county in the country because the second black people move in all the white people move further out. Those voters who want to get away from Milwaukee because the crime that comes with it will not vote for the black person who is the executive of that county, I’m sorry to break it to you.

The New York State Fair will pay a $40,000 management fee to the operator, cover payroll for booth employees and provide the New York-grown potatoes, according to a document concessions manager Jack Davison sent to vendors in April. The operator must continue selling a baked potato or three salt potatoes with butter or sour cream for $1, a longtime fair tradition. In return, the booth’s rental fee is waived.

Read more about the methodology and why quantifying data terminations is so challenging in this Federation of American Scientists blogpost. To learn more about the Federal Data Terminations Tracker, register for our webinar on August 19, 2026 from 1:30PM – 2:30PM ET.

Federal regulators have given President Donald Trump’s family crypto business a conditional approval to operate like a bank. On Friday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency—led by Trump appointee Jonathan Gould—announced that World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture controlled by the Trump family, was on track to receive a banking charter. This will allow World Liberty Financial to issue its stablecoin tokens—called “USD1?—inside the United States without an intermediary.

He concluded that Americans “would understand the fugitive better than the one who stays.” The key phrase here was perhaps Bonhoeffer’s comment that Americans wished “to live out their faith for themselvesin freedom.” (emphasis added) Americans seemed to portray faith and freedom as things for themselves as individuals: the right to be left alone, to live in comfort, to have every possibility left open, to earn their way and receive their just desserts, to be thoroughly affirmed.

However, within the corridors of Washington and the innovation labs of Silicon Valley, this strategic architecture contains a catastrophic, structural blind spot. Military technology is only an effective deterrent if its operational parameters, source code, and behavioral algorithms remain secure from the adversary prior to deployment. If a rising power can utilize sophisticated economic statecraft, gray-zone collection, and corporate insider espionage to exfiltrate the software architecture of an autonomous fleet during its research and development cycle, its deterrent value drops significantly before a single unit is fielded. To survive this in the modern era of great power competition, structural International Relations (IR) theory must be reunited with a modernized doctrine of Counterintelligence (CI).

Tech has now become the whole economy, and the small niche called venture capital is being absorbed into the much larger capital pools that always sat next to it.

Epic said it used these models to search its own several-hundred-million-line codebase for vulnerabilities its own developers had missed, and told customers to expect more urgent security patches going forward, saying the old 30-day patching standard “is no longer good enough.”

In 2023, the Defense Department announced Replicator, a halfhearted effort intended to field multiple thousands of inexpensive autonomous systems across several domains by August 2025. The language was revealing: small, smart, cheap, and many. The United States had spent decades building exquisite systems. Replicator was an attempt to learn how to build mass. It flopped because of institutional inertia.

These places sometimes get described as “fusion”, but their dishes aren’t mashups — instead, they start from a base of a specific type of cuisine and then play around with it, throwing in a couple of ingredients from other cuisines. In fact, one good way to identify good restaurants in the U.S. these days is to look for places that use one or two Japanese and Korean ingredients in dishes that aren’t Japanese or Korean. 

If it were anyone but Epic, these systems would only use one AI scribe or co-pilot. But Epic’s gravitational pull means customers will always give them a chance. Don’t underestimate the incumbent’s trust.

I got the scan this past Thursday so wanted to share a review and some thoughts on it while still fresh. A quick note for my American readers: The Neko scans are available in London, UK and in Sweden but not yet in the U.S., so if you want one you’ll have to take a trip to Europe. No one knows yet what the scan will cost when the company makes its way to the States. But my hunch based on the European price point is that it will land in the $300 to $500 range per scan and visit, and I suspect it’ll start off as cash pay.

Last Friday, at least four people went to Ascension Saint Thomas Midtown in Nashville for joint replacement surgeries, and a drug mix-up led to things going horribly wrong in the operating room.

The family of a Centerville woman who was there for a knee replacement told NewsChannel 5 Investigates that she is now permanently paralyzed from the chest down. She was supposed to have had an epidural for pain, but the wrong medication was injected. She was not the only one. There were at least three others. The hospital told us in a statement, “Our hearts are with the four patients and their families impacted by this event.”

The U.S. military has quietly established a shipping corridor in and out of the Strait of Hormuz to transport millions of barrels of oil each day — a notable success even as the broader war remains at a stalemate, two U.S. officials told Axios.

We build terminal interfaces because we have to, not because we should.

In 2020 Tesla partnered with CureVac to build portable RNA microfactories, the machines that can print mRNA on demand.

Like Sullivan, Obama somehow left that out in his invocation of Churchill as a model for the United States at war. Properly understood, Churchill provides a great model. Sullivan, however, is an obstacle to understanding, as vividly demonstrated this week by President Obama following him.

plucky little Mazda continues with its icon, and still consistently sells around 1,500 of them every year in the UK across roadster and hard-top Retractable Fastback (RF) body styles. We’ve selected the purer canvas-roofed version here.? 

“You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention,” reads the text along the top of the new Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park. But I don’t think President Barack Obama meant that a future president should be loosed as Trump has been to inflict his poorly conceived designs on America. The remainder of the Obama text invokes “we” as the essential ingredient in our shared public experience and future.

LNA aerospace analyst Bjorn Fehrm explains in Part 3of his series on Airbus’ next clean-sheet aircraft that, in A350 production, a full cycle of curing wing top covers takes 24 hours, and only two covers fit inside the chamber at a time. Operating two production sites equipped with autoclaves—in Stade, Germany and Illescas, Spain—Airbus produces about 10 A350 airframes per month. It is attempting to increase that rate to a dozen A350s monthly.

Rights issues keep top-end still cameras from transitioning to video cameras to get higher frame rates. Do pro sports photographers need more than 20 fps? No. It just increases their workflow, and they can’t use the 30 fps+ output as video due to video rights being owned by others.

The Federal Trade Commission and the attorneys general of Virginia, Arizona, New York, Connecticut and Washington go to trial on August 24 in Alexandria, over the $100 million payment Zillow made to Redfin to become the exclusive provider of multifamily rental listings on Redfin’s platforms. That is the Rentals business. That is the growth engine.

So, the West was exceptional. Within it, a man was, whatever his rank, generally free from arbitrary authority, free from the ravages of anarchy, and part of an ordered social system in which one’s position was generally defined but mutable if one possessed a great deal of ability or overly much fecklessness. So wastrel lords fell from grace, new men rose in their place, and society generally prospered while they did so. Then World War I killed that. Everywhere from America to Germany saw high inflation, astoundingly high income taxes, high death taxes, and an unbelievably high loss of life that saw all of society’s best, from the top to the bottom, wiped out in an orgy of pointless bloodshed.

But the bearing is only the near cause. The hearing surfaced a deeper one. A February 2011 Boeing service letter had already named this exact failure—bearing races cracking at the same machined groove, on other airplanes, years earlier. A redesigned bearing without the offending groove existed. Its installation was recommended, not required, and the old part was never prohibited. Across the fleet the failure recurred—by the NTSB’s accounting at least 10 times since 2002, four on FedEx MD-11s alone between 2017 and 2022. The reporting scattered exactly as a broken aggregation system would predict. Of the 10 incidents, seven reached Boeing, four reached the FAA, only two reached both—and the most recent, in December 2022, reached no one at all. Pieces of the picture existed but nobody put it all together.

Adherence to the Powell Doctrine could have prevented those losses. It could also help Trump chart a way out of the extended purgatory his conduct of the war has produced. At one extreme, he could use it to justify accepting a loss. Acknowledging the lack of public or international support for and the mounting costs of the war, Trump could camouflage defeat by making the case that he achieved his most important objectives: the practical destruction of Iran’s nuclear program and the significant degradation of its conventional military.

Per a memo to staff today, Bloomberg employees now have to pay healthcare premiums. The company previously covered the costs. “Bloomberg’s approach of not asking employees to contribute to healthcare costs lasted longer than any of our peers,” the company told employees.

The forgotten wonder of being alive. It always brings forth tenderness the fact that, when a human being cannot find words to describe what is happening, they give up searching for them.

When I then attempted to ask Hong to explain what she meant with her 2021 comment that “police exist to uphold white supremacy,” she began to answer before two of her aides moved swiftly to usher her out of the spin room. As striking, if less viral, was what happened after Hong left.

For generations, canned sardines were seen as a cheap, humble pantry item. That changed recently as social media trends and a growing interest in high-protein, healthy foods turned tinned seafood into a viral food craze.

Transform any topic into peak LinkedIn cringe. Our AI-powered engine analyzes current trends and generates authentic thought leadership™ guaranteed to make your followers shudder.

Mr. Zhu, who worked under Jiang Zemin, the Communist Party leader at the time, contributed more to liberalizing the Chinese economy and making it more internationally competitive than any other recent leader except Deng Xiaoping. Mr. Zhu’s initiatives propelled rapid growth in China that lasted, with a little slowing along the way, until the housing market began to crash in 2021.

The collateral is aging more like an aircraft than a smartphone as feared.

Courtesy of KARE-11’s Lou Raguse, here is the current status of all 80 Feeding Our Future defendants.

The lab that made Europe believe it could compete at the frontier is turning into an installer of other people’s models. And the models are Chinese.

Trucking is booming again. And the drivers are still unhappy. @tracyalloway return to one of our favorite beats, with the great @lostisreed to learn why a host of supply- and demand-side factors are causing mile rates to surge once more.

Abundant humility is necessary when attempting to predict what the distribution of global power will be over the next fifty years, much less what relations among the great powers will look like. Nevertheless, this endeavor provides benchmarks that can help inform one’s thinking about where great power competition is headed.

That is the short-term case, and I believe it. But a second argument runs the other way on a longer clock: OPEC+ is raising output for the sixth month running, the UAE has walked out of the cartel, and the IEA now expects global oil demand to fall this year.

My Chart Takeout.

Recall at a time when Russia was producing upwards of 250-350k monthly shells per the West’s own estimates, pro-Ukrainian cheerleaders promised us the indomitable American MIC would easily catch up to the impoverished Russians. It turns out the US is physically incapable of course-correcting its obvious industrial decline.

This example will probably be quoted to death by every VC over the next decade, and honestly it deserves to be.

Today’s For You release is in the open-source repo.

Notable updates:

• How ranking weights actually work
• A new filter required for Brazil’s 2026 election

Any censorship required by governments is now clearly visible

The owner of the former Sears space at the Mall of America — a location with a famously cheap, $10-a-year lease that still has 65 years on its term — is putting the spot on the market.

In this way, before the age of the bureaucratic state, the market itself, operating through the distributed knowledge of depositors, standardized and broadcast the interest rate.

World War I abolished this market system. Belligerent countries forced their banks to buy war bonds at well-below-market rates forcing their banks in turn to drop the interest rate paid to depositors. Depositors would have withdrawn their gold, so the government outlawed the right of redemption to prevent bank runs (the

U.S. followed in 1933), putting the world on a fiat standard. From then on, bureaucrats set the cost of money and had to guess, based on economic activity, banking statistics, and the stock market, whether they had it right.

Despite that, it seems that SpaceXAI has finally settled into an agreement with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality. It’s if the 1.2GW power plant replacing these mobile turbines is the same one that Musk is importing from overseas, but the important part is that it’s approved under a Clean Air Act permit. Aside from that, the company also said that it’s equipping all its mobile turbines with “advanced emission control technologies,” which should reduce the environmental impact of its power sources.

The philosophy of this system stands in opposition to the Unix approach of treating everything as a file. In IBM i, the fundamental unit is the object. Whether we are talking about a program (*PGM), a data file (*FILE), or a user profile (*USRPRF), every resource has a strictly defined structure with a header and a functional part. Such a construction drastically raises the level of security through the mechanism of encapsulation. The system simply will not allow you to edit a compiled program in a text editor or execute code that has not been correctly processed. Access to the interior of an object is possible only through interfaces and commands defined by the system. Thanks to this, viruses or malicious scripts trying to overwrite executable code hit a wall at the system level.

They could hammer home that the reason Madison PD don’t have body cams is because several organizations and people who are campaigning on this recent shooting spent the last 10-15 years voting against them.

So Substack tried to solve the problem by adopting a strategy that every other tech company had already worn thin. They pivoted to adding a twitter-like function called “Notes” (which created a distinction between ““subscribers” and “followers”). Soon they incorporated video and live-streaming and encouraged posters to clip shorts into their feeds with an AI-generated clipping program.

The PTPA hired Clare Locke, a top defamation law firm known for its muscular approach to the media, to send the correspondence to the podcast. The January 7 letter even contended that PTPA co-founder Novak Djokovic left the organization because of the questions Served’s freelance reporter, Tim Rohan, was asking. Rohan was a long-time Sports Illustrated reporter. The questions revolved in part around allegations of double-dealing and that the FBI was investigating the PTPA and its financial backer, Winners Alliance.

In contrast to equatorial orbits that move from west to east, polar orbits go north to south (or vice versa) and generally pass near or over the poles. It is likely that a majority of SpaceX’s orbital data center satellites will wind up in near-polar orbits. From Louisiana, it is possible that a Starship could reach a polar orbit with only a short traverse over Mexico nearly 1,000 miles down range.

The saga of Ship 40 — as this specific Starship prototype is called — began on July 24 with the launch of SpaceX’s 13th fully integrated test flight the rocket system, which includes the upper spacecraft, or “ship,” as well as the Super Heavy rocket booster, the bottommost part of the rocket that fires the ship off the launchpad and toward space.

The pattern is clear: where the web has closed the gap, it has done so with explicit user permission, visible indicators, and no silent background operation. Native apps inherit permissions across every embedded third-party package and can operate without the user’s awareness. The browser is the security boundary. Websites operate within it. Native apps bypass it.

It was September 17, 1990, and I was in New York City. The event I had been attending finished a little early, so I decided to drop in on a friend of mine. And there, sitting stylishly on the floor, was Elise, a somewhat bashful but obviously brilliant young pure mathematician. It took me a couple of weeks to call her. But from that moment on we talked essentially every day for 36 years—until the day she died a week ago.

We live in a world of digital bloat, AI-powered fridges, myriad touchscreen menus and so much power and technology that, frankly, it can all be a bit much. Seemingly, Fiat didn’t get the memo with the return of the Panda. It’s kept things simple – and we’re sold.

The delivered cabin seating of the single-aisle segment has increased by more than a seat per year since 2010.

But those who know, know. Owned by Hi Neighbor, Trestle’s business model is unique and undeniably value-driven: It offers just one thing: four courses for $52. You can barely get an entree and a Coke at most sit-down SF restaurants for fifty bucks these days. I also like its simplicity. You choose soup or salad; an entree; pasta or risotto; and a dessert. It gives Olive Garden nostalgia, but with SF sensibilities.

During a gathering Wednesday hosted by the South Texas Builders Association and the American Business Immigration Coalition Action, industry leaders discussed possible solutions for immigrant workers. Lawmakers who don’t engage with their concerns or don’t support worker protections, the group warned, will lose their races in the November midterm elections.

One of the more revealing sections of the survey asked brokers how worried they are about the long-term viability and future of the real estate industry as we know it. On a 10-point scale, the average worry rating came in at 5.88, with 14% of respondents landing in the most worried tier and just 6% in the least worried tier. That is a broker population that leans uneasy, and their own words explain why. Why brokers are worried:

An Australian aviation crew has carried out a daring midwinter mission to rescue a US expedition member from a station in Antarctica in freezing temperatures and total darkness. Skytraders said the “extraordinary” mission took place last Friday after a request for urgent help with a medical evacuation from McMurdo Station.

“It makes everyone weak at the knees every time we think about it,” Piper said. “Tory wanted to do a version of it — it was beefsteak tomatoes with haystack potatoes and a swimming pool full of Béarnaise sauce and a Worcestershire jus. Oh my God! It’s just the height of summer.”

Great table of China’s growing retaliatory toolkit.

China’s brands must outgrow diaspora bubble to hit soft power potential. Only through commercial independence and deep localisation can Chinese firms abroad forge a durable soft power that state policy can’t produce.

In other words, NVIDIA has managed to find a way to do vendor financing without ever having to provide any, finding willing supplicants in the various backers of CoreWeave and other neoclouds that would be willing to front the money, all under the mistaken belief that they were funding the next industrial revolution.

Ryan Hassan:

After getting a law degree from Indiana University (on a full scholarship), Gerstner worked as an attorney for a few years until he decided to go into government. Then, after a stint as Indiana’s Deputy Secretary of State in the late 90s, becoming a founding principal of venture capital firm General Catalyst, cofounding and exiting two internet startups (making him an actual founder, not a Bay Area LARPer subsisting on tier-3 VC checks), and running his own book as a hedge fund portfolio manager investing in airlines — he started his own fund, Altimeter Capital. He spun it up with $3 million dollars of cash right after the financial crisis.

When Gerstner’s sons were born, he opened custodial investment accounts for the two of them. As he tells it, his son, Lincoln, asked him at dinner one night, “Why don’t other kids get to have the same thing?”

An idea was born.

Gerstner tells me, “the motivation was very simple. We needed an at-scale industrial change to the social contract if we were going to deal with two major problems: the growing wealth gap and the increasing drift away from capitalism — which less than half of Americans under the age of 40 have a positive view on.”…

Fonts in use.

And drops gems like, “At the Arnault family, apparently, we don’t argue, we conspire. We don’t deliberate, we plot. It’s novelistic… What, in an ordinary family, is simply called Sunday lunch becomes, in our case, an intrigue. It’s a matter of vocabulary.”

We study human capital in venture capital (VC) using a new dataset covering over 100,000 professionals affiliated with U.S. VC firms. Investment success is extremely concentrated: fewer than 40% of VCs with any investments are ever credited with a successful investment, and 90% of investment profits are generated by 5% of VCs. Differences in education, prior work experience, and demographics predict career progression and investment outcomes, consistent with persistent investor-specific skills. Quasi-experimental variation from marginal inclusions on the Forbes Midas List shows that achieving superstar status increases access to highly-valued startups, complementing other human capital and contributing to concentration.

Last week, a Europe-based firm, The Exploration Company, hosted an office-opening celebration in Webster, Texas. At the facility, located just a couple of miles from Johnson Space Center, founder Hélène Huby said her company was considering making Houston the base of its operations to develop a crewed spacecraft.

Among the most central of the less-famous people, for most of Ghibli’s existence, was Michiyo Yasuda. She’s far from a household name. Yet the one-of-a-kind colors of Ghibli’s animation, which shape the whole look and feel of its films, were selected mainly by her. Miyazaki once called Yasuda “three times sharper and more particular than me.”1Takahata, who worked with her on Grave of the Fireflies (1988), said glowing things about her abilities. He pointed to the worn-out pants of one character in that film:

[S]he chose a color that looked faded from many washings. Although I say ‘chose a color,’ in reality, she was choosing texture. Whether the fabric is thick or flimsy depends on the color chosen. Yasuda-san has a subtle perception that allows her to grasp such things.2

America’s Christian tradition can likewise help navigate central challenges of the digital age. As AI raises questions about the distinction between humanity and machines, Christian anthropology provides a strong foundation for understanding both our particular nature and God-given role as rulers of technology rather than passive subjects of change. As some legacy institutions and norms are disrupted, Christian ethics offer timeless principles to shape digital age successors. While Christianity has declined markedly in recent decades, this may reverse as many recognize the inability of secular norms to answer questions raised by emerging technologies.

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To understand the financial impact of listing on Zillow, Compass Chief Economist Mike Simonsen and Chief Data Officer Dave Crosby analyzed the performance of listings that did not appear on Zillow, and compared them to nearly 300,000 listings that did. The analysis proved that homes listed on Zillow sell for 1.3% less, on average, than homes that were not on Zillow. The Zillow Tax on the U.S. median existing-home sale price of $430,000  translates to a $5,590 loss.  Zillow wasn’t created to protect homeowner value – it is a lead-generation website built to make Zillow money at the expense of sellers. Zillow sells leads, not homes.

Banning surveillance pricing would be good for consumers. The FTC has found that companies will set higher prices based on personal information. “For instance,” the FTC found last year, “if a consumer is profiled as a new parent, the consumer may intentionally be shown higher-priced baby thermometers on the first page of their in-app search results, based on their residential zip code and time of purchase.” Let’s say that again: the U.S. government has found that companies may seek to use surveillance pricing to charge parents searching for a thermometer in the middle of the night more money in a time of need.

National Security Determination on the Threat Posed by Foreign-Produced Advanced Robotic Devices.

If you want to build something truly new, it requires a fight. You have to push against entrenched dogmas, and accept friction. But fighting is an asymmetric bet – pushing very hard requires having very little to lose.

VW had a vision for a battery-powered airborne vehicle. To turn it into reality, the then-82-year-old manufacturer sought Chinese design and technology that was beginning to outpace its own. The German automaker’s goal was to move fast with an in-house startup team in Beijing to produce a flying car — a moonshot challenge that had stumped its Porsche and Audi divisions. In China, for China, VW would deliver what it described internally as a “luxury futuristic” drone that would convey four wealthy passengers in style. The aim was to sell them a vehicle to fly between cities like Beijing and Tianjin in a quiet craft with noise levels half those of a helicopter.

Your personal health information is easier to share than ever. That can help save lives when seconds count, but it also means more people can peek at your detail-rich medical records. KFF Health News investigates how the Trump administration, with the help of little-known private entities, has sought unprecedented access to Americans’ health data — an effort that is reshaping health information privacy and profitability.

…Despite repeated warnings from the FBI and security industry leaders about the security and privacy risks of using these streaming devices, major e-commerce providers like Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg and others continue to sell hundreds of different models and brands that bundle unofficial versions of Google’s Android operating system and are frequently marketed (via online influencers) as a way to access a broad array of streaming services and live broadcasts without a subscription.

…Complaints? The RAV4 is to modern suburbia what porkpie hats were to ’50s dads. Everybody’s got one. Few really look cool wearing them. I tried counting all the RAV4s I saw on the way to the park, about 15 minutes away. I gave up when I hit 50 and I was nowhere near the park.

I can hardly believe one of the most popular vehicles in America is so dumb looking. The Woodland grade comes with the Split Hammerhead Grille. Grrr! says the Woodland. I’m a bear. I’m a shark. I’m a shark-bear.

The smart money is on SCOTUS siding with the DC Circuit, finding the rules aren’t “ripe” for review yet, and letting the USPS move ahead for now. Come back when you know what to actually complain about. The complication is that the 23 states are crying about having to completely “rebuild” their systems less than three months from a federal election— even though 15 red states filed briefs saying it would be no problem at all. So SCOTUS could find that we are just too close now to the midterms and it’s better to keep the status quo for now— which they often say in election-related cases. That’s what makes this so hard to handicap. “We want to have honest voting in our country,” President Trump said when he signed the Executive Order in March, “because if you don’t have honest voting, you can’t really have a nation.” Unsurprisingly, Democrats really disagreed.

What should you do if you’re young and ambitious but don’t know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along passively, assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you read biographies of people who’ve done great work, it’s remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions. [5]. When in doubt, optimize for interestingness. Fields change as you learn more about them. What mathematicians do, for example, is very different from what you do in high school math classes. So you need to give different types of work a chance to show you what they’re like. But a field should become increasinglyinteresting as you learn more about it. If it doesn’t, it’s probably not for you.

“We Spaniards still struggle to believe in ourselves,” says García. “There is a kind of modesty about our country and our culture that we have yet to overcome. The Italians produce Ferraris but they also produce Fiats. They promote the Ferrari. We have Ferraris, yet we keep promoting the Fiat.”

The data suggests, perhaps unsurprisingly, that a huge portion of longform posts on LinkedIn and X’s new article format are fully AI-generated or AI-assisted (meaning drafted, edited, or rewritten by AI with some human elements). Forty percent of longform LinkedIn posts analyzed in the data were fully AI-written; a quarter of X articles were fully AI written, but another 23 percent of X articles were AI-assisted, the company said. It intuitively makes sense that longer form content is more likely to be AI-generated, because people usually won’t bother to AI-generate a few word response or a pithy comment on a quote tweet, for example. AI is also famously verbose, meaning AI-generated content is more likely to show up in longer posts.

That moment, insignificant, was close to thirty years ago, and yet it’s one that I find myself thinking about often, muttering, “Aaah, the machinations of life” whenever I’m logistically challenged, or in an equally absurd situation of my own making. Such as two weeks ago, when I was half-way through my daily walk, carrying a backpack stuffed with books in extreme heat, to “train my body” and invest it with a sense of heroism, and I became the target for a cloud of deer-flies, so thick, so persistent to use my blood as an incubator, that I had to start running, swatting wildly at my head with my big floppy hat, hitting myself so firmly that I set my ears ringing until the next day. 

“The future I want,” Guo told me, “is not a single company with an all-powerful model that consumes society faster than we know what to do with.” It is a feeling increasingly shared. The labs raised the price of tokens this year, in some cases a hundredfold, and their customers have begun to revolt. They do not want to build on another company’s model—paying it, feeding it their data, training it, in effect, to one day build the thing they have built. Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir, went on CNBC and described his enterprise clients as livid. “The jig is up,” he said. A founder in Guo’s own portfolio put it more plainly. He didn’t want to spend his life drinking Anthropic and OpenAI’s water.

Nicaragua’s leftist president, Daniel Ortega, announced plans to officially abolish elections rather than bother to hold another sham poll – like the one he oversaw in 2021 – when elections are due next year.

…One engineer told me that the whole situation feels like the movie, The Hunger Games, when tributes are randomly selected and then removed from their environment, to something completely different.

The trial lawyers earn a huge amount litigating ordinary auto accidents: annual US auto insurance payouts (liability + PIP/MedPay) are on the order of $180–220bn and trial lawyers are very eager to retain the right to sue car manufacturers for product liability. In my view, product liability isn’t useful as a safety device in this field. Instead, the solution is simple. Every car should be required to be insured, regardless of driver. Indeed, Waymo vehicles are already insured at $5m liability coverage per vehicle, far higher levels than most human drivers are covered.

Insiders expect a new electric Q2 crossover in 2026 and the following year an all-electric A3 replacement (to be badged A2, under Audi’s new naming convention, where odd numbers have engines and evens are all electric).

One payment particularly caught my attention. Hong’s campaign paid Milwaukee creative agency Unfinished Legacy $38,000 during the first half of 2026 for media consulting. Unlike traditional political consulting firms, Unfinished Legacy built its reputation through branding, photography, creative direction and visual storytelling. Campaign finance reports don’t reveal exactly what work was produced. Perhaps it is just really stylized campaign swag. But this expenditure fits the vibe she’s building. The reports do reveal that Hong’s campaign devoted significant resources to creative branding alongside organizing infrastructure. That combination is notable. Build the technology. Build the brand. Connect every interaction. Repeat.

“To the laptop, Watson!” Turns out that the first budget in 2018 that Mayor Carter inherited from Mayor Coleman was $577 million. So, in 10 years St. Paul’s budget will have almost doubled.

Ford’s European strategy? Team up. First Volkswagen. Now Geely.

Want less opportunity? Vote Democrat in November. It’s that simple.

Tucked inside her ten separate whistleblower complaints, MPR notes, is the allegation that the team working on MAYA knew the tool had an error rate as high as 67 percent. Eto alleges that instead of flagging that horrifying number, MAYA staffers tried to hide it.

Plain and aggregated search results such as URLs, snippets, and factual index data, are publicly accessible facts and are not “works protected under the Copyright Act.” The judge dismissed these claims without leave to amend, ruling that Google cannot use copyright law to block scraping of uncopyrighted search result data.

By now, we were deep in another plague of modern Britain: the toxic, absorbing, quasi-judicial, witch-hunt-friendly HR procedure. Spurred on by her furious parents, Letby took out a grievance against the consultants. She won comprehensively. The consultants were found to have bullied her with their allegations and ordered to apologise. HR actions against the consultantswere due to begin on the day they took their concerns to Cheshire Police.

…..that public opinion does not really matter. Various speakers spoke about the importance of explaining foreign policy to Americans in order to change their views, repeating the old argument that the primary reason U.S. foreign policy is unpopular is because the people affected by it simply don’t understand.

Evan Barker raised $50m for the Democrats before abandoning them in 2024. Now she’s written a book damning the party that lost middle America.

Approximately 206 billion miles are driven in the world each week. This estimate comes from global calculations showing that roughly 1.3 billion vehicles log an estimated 10.7 trillion total miles every year.

“It’s a gain,” said Maureen Smith, the Green Bay Packers’ chief financial officer. “It is on the balance sheet — our 1/32nd share of this investment. In addition, any gains or losses of that entity flows through our non-operating income. So that would reflect the ESPN deal and any other gains or losses that happen within that investment entity.”

Among his most famous designs is “the petal house,” which the San Francisco Chronicle’s Dave Weinstein described as follows: “A petal house has a flat roof with broad overhangs that wrap around the entire house except at the corners, where the overhangs disappear,” resulting in a roof shaped like a series of petals (see Brooks’ famous Petal House in Napa). The other two forms Brooks worked with were the pyramid and the tower. In every case, Weinstein wrote in his profile on Brooks, each building was “an experiment” — but not one without an artistic commitment.

SpaceX engineers flew drones over the vehicle to inspect its heat shield, getting their best look yet at how more than 18,000 ceramic tiles insulating the ship’s stainless steel airframe weathered the trip to space and back. The tiles withstood temperatures up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius) as Starship streaked back into the atmosphere at the end of its hour-long flight from Starbase, Texas.

All of Congressman’s @RoKhanna’s financial disclosures are finally OCR’d and searchable online. He hand-filed papers instead of using the electronic system to obfuscate the data, but I indexed them all here:

This report examines how modern, open-source assessment methods could be used to produce fair, transparent, and affordable countywide reassessments.

Likewise, it’s probable that WEIRD people themselves are mistaken in how and why their own norms and institutions operate, and so may be making a grave error in undermining them.

This is the way empires die: they try to wall themselves off from competition.

Now a special edition of the board game is teaching a new lesson—about how hard it is to make things in the USA

The Corvette files.

Building and Shipping Mac and iOS Apps Without Ever Opening Xcode

This led it to create the first of the multiple ranges of pioneering hand-held pocket computers for which it is better remembered today. In 1984, Psion launched the Organizer range, and in 1986, its successor the Organizer II, which came with two slots for what were arguably the computer industry’s first replaceable SSDs. In 1989, Psion introduced all-solid-state MC laptops. Although unsuccessful, the MC’s hardware was miniaturized to create the pocket-sized Psion Series 3 in 1991, and Psion’s bespoke GUI OS became EPOC16. The machines sold in the millions, which in turn led to the Psion 5 and netBook.

……and this has become an enormous industry, with annual revenue of a trillion dollars and capex of $200 billion, but the stocks have gone nowhere, and all the value was captured by other people further up the stack

Looking good isn’t a sin—but when does self-improvement become self-worship? In this episode, we wrestle with one of the most relevant questions Christians face today: from BBLs and Botox to braces, veneers, and hair transplants, where should followers of Jesus draw the line? Join us as we explore what Scripture says about our bodies, our motives, and whether we’re pursuing God’s glory or the world’s approval.

He said “state leaders failed to act with the urgency this project demanded.”

Meet Palantir’s Head of Vibes: ‘Focus On the People Who Love You’

1. The “99.9mm” Obsession & Coincidence
The Target: When designing the lens, the team faced the classic battle of performance versus size. After building multiple mockups t[3][4]o test ergonomics on actual camera bodies, they strictly targeted a total length of “less than 100mm.”. The Result: They squeezed the final length down to exactly 99.9mm. A strange Coincidence: Matsumura points out a quirky design coincidence—the full-frame LUMIX S 24-60mm F2.8 (released in 2025, over a decade after the original 35-100mm design) also ended up measuring exactly 99.9mm in overall length.

That’s before we even get into the fact that it’s mighty hard to run a successful airline anywhere in the world.Yet even with that it mind, the comparative data suggests that African economies are leaving a whole of cash on table.

Today we have the means to capture huge amounts of information, but, just like much of our food is less nutrient-dense than before, there is less and less of it on the screen.

This is the first time Francesca Hong appears to back away – to a degree – from her past stance of calling to abolish police. She told me last month that her old “defund the police” stance was more of an aspirational future hope than a current/concrete plan.

Track every ?6,000t die casting machine ordered and installed worldwide, every vehicle model adopting the technology, and the design strategies behind each casting — updated continuously, with analytical reports that turn raw data into decisions

Grocery stores offer the rarest thing in modern travel, the uncurated ordinary. The supermarket is the one place travel cannot fully manicure itself. Hotels can lie. Brochures can lie. Restaurants, especially the ones with menus printed on thick paper, can lie beautifully. But supermarkets are hopeless at lying. They’re too busy. They’re too full of nappies and mince.

It may be a simple thing – image on one side, writing on the other – but, as the mini narratives printed here show, a postcard always tells a story. In celebration of this small but mighty form, we invite you to submit an imaginative short story, piece of text, or poem (up to 250 words) in response to a postcard image. The text need not necessarily correspond to the image on the postcard (it may even be more interesting if it doesn’t, as with many of the postcards we do send).

Coding LLMs are currently on track to produce most software in the near-future, despite being generally mediocre quality or outright insecure (with vibecoded software being especially bad). Future rewrites with coding LLMs may help, but are not guaranteed to happen or to plug as many holes as we need to be secure against pervasive cybersecurity LLM offensives. How can we avoid this? LLMs could potentially write all software in provably secure, safe ways like formally-verifiable systems, but progress in that lags behind. How far behind?

Ald. Richard Kopp, representative of the large 18th Ward on the northeast side of the city, was critical because the voters in 1960 approved a $1.8 million bond issue for east side highway work and “to date there has been no construction.”

It’s nothing short of cowardice to refuse to tell airports and small communities the hard truth. I referred to this on the last T&G but Mr. Swelbar has put the situation and the foundation of it in clear concise words: we have a very serious case of planning fright at the top – at the DOT, at the alphabet organizations that apparently are fearful of their members to speak out clearly, and the intentionally misinformed small communities that are being fed intellectual garbage instead of hard facts.

This reversal does not get much attention in accounts of current differences in the deadliness of extreme temperatures. This is unfortunate because from an early-20th century perspective, it was far from obvious at the time that this would happen. But the lack of willingness to adopt the arrival of a very useful technology (AC) was something that we (Europeans) have brought onto ourselves over many decades, and this is largely independent from recent phenomena such as rising global temperatures, inequality trends, etc. This is simply inefficient governance and lack of attention to a problem that takes the lives of many.

Because if those transistors go unused, what’s the point? It’s not about adding something and hoping somebody finds a use for it. We want those capabilities available to solve real problems. I think that’s what allows us to build better systems and ultimately better products.

A $1bn investment in PPE (plant, property, and equipment) would require a $1m margin per aircraft over 1,000 deliveries (not including financing costs). You do not make that investment unless you must.  Boeing sees a demand for a production rate of at least 12/mo and up to 14/mo. However, there is enough room in the second building to eventually accommodate a new airplane program. Demand for the 787 will inevitably taper off as it gets older. Charleston, with half the space of Boeing’s giant Everett plant, will be well-positioned for new airplane programs.

I perceived two difficult Wiesbadens.  In one, if you walk through the cheaper part of the pedestrian zone in the evening, the city seems mostly Muslim.  But if you walk around during the morning, the city seems mostly German.  I might add that some of the younger Muslim women show signs of assimilating, at least based on how they dress and present themselves.  The older women tend to stick with the headscarves.

Illegal immigrant accused of kidnapping, raping a woman in Fairfax County, VA.

Slopfix is a team of three senior engineers who refactor vibecoded codebases back to maintainability.

So, I wrote a story about all this, recounting the Texaco case and the bankruptcy it was forced to file when it lost the Getty lawsuit. I pointed out that Delta faced a similar situation; Delta might have to seek bankruptcy protection should it lose. I pointed out that Delta failed to disclose the possible “material adverse impact” of losing in its federal securities filing.

The top official in the Zohran Mamdani administration’s Office for International Affairs made plans to meet with Iran’s ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations.

Stepping into the archive today – housed, very appropriately, in a former brewery building at Schlitz Park, the office complex that occupies the former brewery that made Milwaukee famous – my jaw dropped.

To understand what went wrong, we need to learn a little bit about the economic logic of ambulances, and why ambulance services are more like option sellers than taxi companies. It’s more interesting than it sounds.

I should have included a point about distribution/ owning your own audience. That will not change, and become more valuable as it becomes more difficult and expensive to build. My miss, and completely agree.

Her parents didn’t raise her to be a tennis player. It was just one of a number of sports she did. Her father and brother were both professional soccer players. She played a little bit of everything. It wasn’t until she got older and began to have success as she got older that she had any hard knowledge of Czech women’s tennis history. She had to do some research. None of her coaches or relatives had regaled her with tales of the footsteps she was beginning to follow.

The Guangzhou documents include a presentation devoted entirely to countering Starlink. Although it is bilingual, the many obvious errors in the Russian text leave no doubt it was prepared by the Chinese side. The slideshow was delivered by two researchers from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC): Huang Hui (??) and Ren Jie (??). CASC is China’s principal state space contractor, responsible for the Changzheng (“Long March”) rocket family and much of the country’s military satellite infrastructure. The document is marked “internal” — one level above material cleared for public release.

I contend that the 21st century has seen a dramatic loss of information on screen, making for a less luxurious and less satisfying experience for the viewer, and trace how this loss was manufactured, department by department.

We are officially halfway through 2026, and ChinaTalk just surpassed 75k subscribers on Substack. To celebrate, here are the twenty most interesting things we learned so far while making ChinaTalk.

At the end of last year, Volkswagen still employed about 660,000 workers, roughly one for every 14 cars it sold. Toyota, the only company similar in scale, employed roughly 410,000 to sell 11.3 million vehicles—about 28 vehicles per employee. The Detroit Three have sales-to-staff ratios in the mid-20s.

Even four centuries later, the sinking of Vasa is an instructive affair, although it is important to draw the right lessons. A 2001 paper in The Academy of Management Executive is titled “Vasa Syndrome: Insights from a 17th-Century New-Product Disaster”, and offers various gems — for example, that the shipwrights should have clarified the customer’s goals, which would have revealed a crucial but unstated preference for a ship that floats.

SNAP-to-Cash: How food assistance vouchers were traded for cash at the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market

Waratlas.org

SLA Credit Watch monitors vendor status pages and keeps a monthly downtime ledger per service. When an outage crosses an SLA credit threshold, it shows the credit the terms entitle you to and the filing deadline.

Looking back, the Apple car project probably shouldn’t be remembered as a futile exercise. Sure, the company abandoned the vehicle. But it kept the technology that may ultimately prove far more valuable.

Texas has overtaken California to become the nation’s top producer of utility-scale solar power, capping a 25-year climb from a single darkened array in Austin to nearly one-fifth of all U.S. utility-scale solar generation, according to a July 8 analysis from Texas 2036, a nonpartisan public policy organization.

I’ve been thinking about my parents, who are in their mid-60s. During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I’ve probably seen them an average of only five times a year each, for an average of maybe two days each time. 10 days a year. About 3% of the days I spent with them each year of my childhood.

When choosing what to do with your time, choose wisely. Your library has more books than you could ever read. Your friends and family have hearts and desires the bots can never fathom. Your mind, once you remove the noise of the world at large, is still capable of imagination, creativity and flow. Find it!

This book is for programmers who are fluent in at least one other language and want to understand what MUMPS was, how it worked, and what made it historically significant. You do not need any prior MUMPS experience.

Marfa Public Radio is literally never asleep. It operates 24/7 (except when lightning strikes) and there’s so much that goes on behind the scenes to make this happen– fundraising, compliance, protocols, emergency response, maintenance…the list goes on and on. Do you lay awake wondering what FCC compliance entails? Ever wondered what NPR’s code of journalistic ethics involves for the newsroom?

“The Chinese were involved in the bidding contest at the time when Airbus ended up taking over the former C Series, so there’s certainly some resentment there. That’s ten years ago. They have long memories,” said Christian Kley, head of single-aisle market development.

Sony is contacting PlayStation Store users who bought movies from the platform that were distributed by StudioCanal—like Terminator 2, Total Recall, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind—to say that “you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library.” There’s no mention of any refunds or make-goods for the affected users. Sony simply says the films are going away “due to our content licensing agreements,” once again reaffirming the fact that you are never truly buying anything that’s digital, just temporarily renting it.

The more accurate picture is that wine consumption has dispersed rather than declined. The glass poured at a hotel wine bar, the bottle ordered at a restaurant, the flight at a downtown tasting room — these register in restaurant receipts and transient occupancy tax revenue but not in winery reservation data.

But luckily the injury hasn’t interfered with her work at all, coming just when she was about to take a few days off anyway to play tennis, and so won’t affect the many millions she earns every year, almost none of it from whacking a ball with a spaghetti strainer. Which is why, being an old-fashioned guy, I admire Emma so much: because despite having a full-time job, she manages to play lawn tennis to such a high standard in her spare time that she occasionally goes deep in major international competitions. Like Suzanne Lenglen or CB Fry or something. It’s positively Edwardian. And so, when she eventually wins Wimbledon (the ladies’ singles title, not the Uniqlo franchise), I shall cheer her to the rafters as the first amateur to do so since Billie Jean King in 1967.

Your 22-byte button now arrives in a 2-megabyte bundle, assembled by a config file you did not write and cannot read.

In this post we go through some of the link-rot studies and look at them from the perspective of the Wayback Machine to see how much of the dead Web can be rescued. Table 1 shows the status of the dead and rescued Web at a glance as sampled by a few different studies.

At the end of the day, the US and the rest of the world can play along with China, avoid its blackmail over Rare Earths and other materials, and gradually decouple from its supply chain. Despite technological progress, suppressing domestic Chinese demand could leave Chinese people poorer in a few decades. It’s hard to predict what will happen in a decade or two, but the reality in Russia should tell the Chinese that something very wrong can indeed occu….

As he points out, we’re already at a stage where, in 2025, “China surpassed the United States in the number of new investment projects in Germany.” And, given that you need new investments and new industrial projects to reindustrialize Germany, it’d be completely schizophrenic to attempt reindustrialization while simultaneously closing the door to such a major provider of new investment projects.

Xavier University men’s basketball coach Richard Pitino testified on Wednesday that his team had a spending budget of “a little over $14 million” for the upcoming season.

the blackpill was seeing the terrible quality of the software and interacting with the contractors. coming from silicon valley, i couldn’t believe how low the talent and quality bar was for selling software to the government. it’s clear, as the OG USDS people explained to me a decade ago, the primary skill these vendors have is securing government contracts. it’s a huge moat. delivery of quality product be damned.

We fired the vendor and took over the project. they’d been working on it for more than a year, and there was another year before they were going to deliver it. at first we tried to bend it to our will, to actually connect all the various data sources and get to a decent UX for case workers in the mine to use, but we soon realized we were going to have to rebuild the whole stack from scratch.

Our second oversight was, like others, not anticipating the staggering degree to which China would be able to slash its oil imports. Crude imports are 5m barrels a day lower than a year ago, despite the fall in prices. China has cut its demand and shored up supply. Its oil reserves are opaque—many barrels are hidden from satellites underground, and there is a blurred line between official reserves and corporate inventories. But they have been shown to be a powerful buffer. Perhaps a newspaper whose critics bang on about a clanger in 1999, when we wrongly predicted oil prices falling to $5 a barrel, should have known better. We woz wrong then, too. Fortunately, we can report that investors who say we are a guide to what to bet against are cherry-picking our failures. With the help of AI we analysed 7,000 of this century’s leaders. When we are moderately out-of-consensus, our record is good. Our more outlandish predictions are, unsurprisingly, more likely to be wrong.

Here Coolidge’s faith enters, and I won’t sand it off; he credits the whole lineage to the colonial clergy, and notes that Jefferson himself said his best ideas of democracy came out of church meetings. You can take the theology or leave it, but the structural claim survives either way: the idea was homegrown. Profoundly American, in his words. /11

The climb to Alpe d’Huez is one of the greatest theatres in sport thanks to its 32 appearances on the route of the Tour de France since 1952. Legends have been born and dreams dashed on its 21 hairpin bends, where race leaders part crowds of more than 600,000 screaming spectators (according to the tourist office estimate, though no one really knows because it’s free, unticketed and barely controlled chaos).

Tehran’s strategy rested on a simple asymmetry: Populations tolerate acute devastation better than chronic and increasing inconvenience. For Iran, fighting an existential war, devastation was something to be endured — martyred leaders and generals, bombed airfields, and sunk ships only hardened regime resolve. For the US, with more limited interests at stake, inconvenience became something to escape. 

Wednesday’s award compensates for lost revenue caused by Google’s preferential treatment of its own comparison-shopping service over independent price-comparison services, conduct that also drives up costs for consumers, Klarna said in a statement after the judgment.

New home battery installations reached a record 673 megawatt hours of energy storage in the first quarter of 2026, according to the US Energy Information Administration. That trend was driven by states with high electricity prices that have implemented policies to incentivize home battery installation, Bloomberg News reported.

Second, the Van der Heydens replaced the rigid spout with a long, flexible leather hose. Called a ‘snake’ (slang in Dutch), this hose could reach deeper inside buildings and aim more precisely at hot spots than the nozzled pipes of the Hautsch engine. Finally, the brothers added an air chamber so that water could be pumped out in a continuous, high-pressure flow rather than intermittently on the down stroke. This feature, they hoped, would keep the engine from freezing up in cold weather.