{"id":16661,"date":"2026-02-15T01:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-15T07:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=16661"},"modified":"2026-02-15T17:00:05","modified_gmt":"2026-02-15T23:00:05","slug":"2-15","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=16661","title":{"rendered":"2.15"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, then there\u2019s the blatant fraud<\/a>\u2026 for which I sadly don’t expect any final accounting and punishment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The term [provider]<\/a> should not be used to describe physicians, nor should physicians use it to describe themselves, their team members, or their trainees.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In November 2025, the EU\u2019s trade deficit with China<\/a> averaged \u20ac1.07 billion a day. EU imports from China rose 4% year on year in November 2025, while exports fell 1%. As a result, the EU\u2019s trade deficit with China widened to \u20ac32.2 billion, up from \u20ac30.3 billion a year earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

Geely may be best placed to build cars here<\/a>: 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, \u201cWe do not have any plans to produce cars on behalf of Geely there.\u201d) If Geely does attempt to enter the US market under its own brands, it likely won\u2019t happen before 2029.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yiannis Exarchos, the CEO of the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), told reporters Wednesday that 15 FPV<\/a> 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 \u2014 particularly to casual viewers who only tune in during the Olympics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cSilicon Shield\u201d 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Starlink has grown<\/a> its customer based from around 10,000 in 2021 to around 4,000,000 by October of 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s all state-of-the-art. And it\u2019s terrible<\/a>. 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 \u201con\u201d and another for \u201coff.\u201d \u201cIt depends\u201d is the name of the game\u2014which is exactly what you don\u2019t want when you\u2019re trying to find the bathroom in the middle of the night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is due in large part to the high construction costs of smaller-scale buildings<\/a> for each home created,\u201d the report says. \u201cHowever, recent changes<\/a> allowing construction of small multiunit buildings in most of Madison\u2019s residential areas may contribute to an increase in this construction type in coming years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

$1T in Medicaid provider<\/a> spending data released on opendata.hhs.gov. Public should know how its money is spent! Data explorer<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A fireplace is consistently among the most-searched amenities by home buyers nationwide, according<\/a> 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\u2019t mimic. \u201cThe more high-end the property is, the more the homeowner typically wants it,\u201d says Katherine Koriakin of Wyoming\u2019s GYDE Architects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

The trend of construction productivity in the United States failing to improve over time<\/a> is indeed concerning. \u201cProductivity\u201d 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\u2019t improve, we can\u2019t expect construction costs to fall and things like houses, roads, and bridges to get any cheaper. Because of this, it\u2019s worth looking deeply at what exactly the trends in US construction productivity are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it\u2019s all an illusion. Artificial enchantment<\/a>. Virtualized nostalgia. It may sound like you\u2019re ripping revs from gear to gear\u2014HHHHM, HHHuuum, Hummmmm<\/em>. But the revs you hear, and therefore the reality you can faithfully report, is completely artificial. The damn thing doesn\u2019t even have a transmission, per se.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Never cared about curling until I found out Sweden set up a surveillance operation to catch Canada cheating<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I and many others had to figure out how donor-advised funds (DAFs) work, how grants are documented, and how nonprofit financial reporting<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, I\u2019ve been relatively quiet not for lack of effort, but because I\u2019ve been hard at work automating myself using OpenClaw<\/a>. Not for the boring (and socially risky) use cases of social media or email monitoring. No, I set to build a full-fledged research assistant that has access to FEC records, 990s, and has a strict entity resolution pipeline. Every question I ask it, it gets smarter because it automatically rolls in its own discoveries to the various graph databases it has.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Reluctant case for a minivan<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

About that tippy A321<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Joy of a Morning Swim<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16661"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16661"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16693,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16661\/revisions\/16693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}