We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Well, it's a bad day all around. For you, I mean. I'm swell. You have to face the work and worry that Monday brings with it, and you have to face it without Bird Dog. He's at the vet again, so you're stuck with me, Roger de Hauteville. We get Bird Dog de-wormed every year, because we love him so, and love to take care of him. Of course we don't bring him to be de-wormed until after fishing season is over, because worms are expensive. We're not made of stone, but we're not made of money, either. On to today's links.
In the early twentieth century, a horse named Clever Hans was believed to be capable of counting and other mental tasks. The psychologist Oskar Pfungst confirmed that Clever Hans was in fact recognizing and responding to minute, unintentional postural and facial cues of his trainer or individuals in the crowd.
Do tell. File this one under: Educated persons discovering common sense by accident. Hasn't anyone in academia ever heard of the effect of a shill before? They seem to understand the concept just fine when they're disrupting televised town hall meetings. Hi, I'm just a concerned citizen...
So I designed an elaborate, weeklong wedding proposal that included a writing class, rock climbing and a party at an urban winery. After Ilse said yes, she moved into what is now our condo, bringing her cat, Dori, who became fast friends with Dusty, napping together and sharing food. My goal was to marry in June so Ilse could reclaim that month with a fond memory. I asked Dusty to be in my wedding party. “Maybe he can tie my tie,” I thought. Ilse and I registered for small appliances and dishes. Everything changed.
In case you're wondering, Dusty is a dog. The New York Times new slogan should be: All the solipsism that's fit to print.
Archaeologists have uncovered a trunk at Pompeii containing a vast variety of fascinating objects that may have been part of a 'sorcerer's treasure trove'. The objects include crystals, amber and amethyst stones, buttons made of bones, beetles from the orient, amulets, dolls, bells, fists, a tiny skull - and even miniature penises. Experts say the objects may have been used in rituals for fertility, seduction, or to seek good omens for a birth or pregnancy, although they stress that this is just a theory.
Ah, the Daily Mail. The newspaper put that last word in their headline in all caps, not me. Like a good fisherman, they know how to jiggle the bait. But I doubt that the miniature trouser snake angle will prove out in the body of the article. I've read Under the Tuscan Sun, and several other books about women with turkey necks moving to Italy, and it's not the miniature kind they're looking for, or discovering there. Try farther east.
Scientists are still analysing the data to confirm the exact size of the two objects, but initial findings indicate the very strong likelihood of a black hole enveloping a neutron star. The final results are expected to be published in scientific journals. "Scientists have never detected a black hole smaller than five solar masses or a neutron star larger than about 2.5 times the mass of our Sun," Professor Scott said. "Based on this experience, we're very confident that we've just detected a black hole gobbling up a neutron star.
I knew a man who liked to tell people that they weren't really sitting on a chair, when they sat on a chair. He'd exclaim that the matter in their body and the matter in the chair repelled each other at the atomic level, so in reality, they were actually hovering above the chair, not sitting on it. I threw an apple at his head once, to remind him that only Isaac Newton matters to regular people. I wonder if I want to throw an apple at Professor Scott?
Adding to an already ridiculously long list of complaints, now Facebook’s content moderators say a higher-up asked company-appointed counselors to share information from their sessions, according to a new report from the Intercept. Numerous investigations have described this workforce as notoriously underpaid and overworked in crappy working conditions that require them to scan through some of the most disturbing posts the internet can offer. You know, all the things it might behoove someone to see a therapist about.
At the bottom of this article, you'll find a handy Facebook tracking beacon, er, I mean share button. You know, for your convenience.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX also plans to launch a constellation of internet-beaming satellites, as does Amazon. There may eventually be more than one satellite network competing to offer broadband internet around the world this way. The impact this could have on employment is staggering.
The author is an Elon Musketeer, so I have my doubts. Especially since I understand that the intent and effect of the internet, however delivered, is to turn ten good jobs into one crappy one. Or one good job into ten crappy ones, if you're Uber. It's a fair tradeoff though, because instead of any silly benefits like a retirement fund or health insurance, there's foosball and smoothie bars in the WeWork office for the winners.
SoftBank Group is leaning on its employees, including Chief Executive Masayoshi Son, for cash as the firm rushes to raise an ambitious technology fund amid volatile markets. The Japanese company plans to lend up to $20 billion to its employees to buy stakes in its second giant venture-capital fund, people familiar with the matter said. Son may account for as much as $15 billion of that amount, some of the people said.
Hmm. This is quite the development. Why back in my day, you whippersnappers, we kept our money laundering to ourselves. Now they issue a press release.
Family members have previously revealed to DailyMail.com that Griffin has a history of drug abuse and drug addiction, and had recently been panhandling in New York to survive. Jason Griffin, his brother, explained to DailyMail.com that the 26-year-old had been homeless and mentally ill and believes his actions may have been 'a cry for help'.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. And the going is most definitely getting weird.
A majority of economists predict that the economy will lapse into a recession either next year or in 2021. In a survey set to be released Monday by the National Association for Business Economics, 38% respondents said they believe the country will face a recession in 2020 and 34% said they think the start date for a recession will be a bit later, in 2021, the Associated Press reported.
For some reason, this reminds me of the signs you once saw painted on the walls in tawdry barrooms: Free Beer Tomorrow
Twitter has caught itself in a propaganda war after it was found running ads from China’s state-backed media outlet Xinhua News attacking the Hong Kong protesters. The promoted tweets (aka ads) — which were captured on social bookmarking site Pinboard — talk about how the escalating violence in the territory has “taken a heavy toll on social order,” while some others were about Hong Kong citizens allegedly calling China is “our motherland.”
When will people learn that social media is only for fake viral propaganda, not paid propaganda. The ads are strictly reserved for selling T shirts with anti-Trump slogans. Sheesh.
Well, that's the news roundup for Monday. Don't let current events get you down. Go about your business, and have a nice day. But if I were you, I wouldn't bring any rice cookers onto the NYC subway today. The bomb sniffing dogs are bound to be getting unintentional postural and facial cues from just about everyone, not just their handlers today.
Usually, when we speak of financial news, we're referring to central bank machinations and Wall Street piracy and great big old honking government budget contortions and hedge fund rapacity and interest rate shenanigans and so forth. That's great, because talking about the monetary policy of your next door neighbors on the evening news could get boring. "Well, Stefanie, we see a period of instability in cross-border money transfers for the foreseeable future. Ms. Howard maxed out the Discover card on those super-cute Louboutins I was telling you about during the break, and Mr. Howard, oh dear, has been to the strip club again, so I don't see them going to Sandals this winter. Now the weather..."
Actually, that might be more interesting than watching the evening news to determine whether you're flush or flushed in the spondulicks department. The same news is reported as all bad or all good depending on who's in the White House. "We're seeing negative unemployment rates this month, as more Americans are retiring after successful IPOs on their javascript empires before they're old enough to get their first job, and the Fed is continuing to hold interest rates at zero because nobody needs any money. However, our Aye-Team investigative reporters have discovered that one of those buckets at the gas pump at the Sheetz in Fishkill, you know, the ones with the filthy water and the squeegee? Well, it was almost empty, and the clerk behind the counter was unsure when he'd be able to refill it. As of this moment, it's unclear how long the monster in the White House can survive after news like this gets out."
Well, I don't have time to scrape all your data from your Facebook pages to see how your personal finances are going, so going personal in the financial news isn't practical for me. And I would never peek in your windows to see how you're doing, but hey Ted, you should really tell your wife to stop undressing in front of the home security camera with the default password still on it. No reason. But let's at least take a Saturday look around the internet to see how we're doing in general, shall we?
Most economists and analysts tend to support the narrative that real income growth hasn’t increased enough for median Americans. Since the top 1% and 10% have seen their income and wealth increase, if real median incomes are flat lining, it’s a problem. As we mentioned in a previous article, if you look at real median income per person instead of per household, it looks better because households have shrunk.
My household has shrunk, too. My wife keeps wallpapering and the walls are getting closer.
The company produces frozen ready meals and since it was set up in 2014 has had just one profit-making year in 2016-17 when it made €400,000. Projected losses for year end 2019 are €2.6m and the parent company is no longer prepared to support it, the company's petition to the court states.
Oh dear. No ready meals in Ireland. This sounds vaguely familiar. The company was obviously poorly run, though. Look, they made a profit one year. Any Musk could tell you that's not how to run a company.
Unless you’re “independently wealthy,” you probably don’t have enough money to open a small press bookstore or artist-run space, which means you’ll probably have to be a non-profit, which is almost guaranteed to be a terrible idea for a number of reasons. Sure, people will get excited at first and want to give you their tax-deductible dollars. Or maybe you’ll win some big prize to help you get started. We did. We won a $10,000 community art grant.
I don't see the problem. They wanted a non-profit, and that's what they got.
Despite decades of research on materialism, there are few viable strategies for reducing materialism in younger consumers. In this paper, we present two studies conducted among over 900 adolescents that reveal a promising strategy for decreasing materialism: fostering gratitude. In Study 1, results from a nationally representative survey showed that children and adolescents with a grateful disposition were less materialistic.
Gratitude? For adolescents, Halloween now lasts for three months, while Thanksgiving consists of texting all day while your stepfather watches football and your mother orders takeout Chinese. Do the math.
A government computer system that interacts with HealthCare.gov was
hacked earlier this month, compromising the sensitive personal data of
some 75,000 people, officials said Friday. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services made the
announcement late in the afternoon ahead of a weekend, a time slot
agencies often use to release unfavorable developments.
Hmm. This article is unconcerned about HealthCare.gov data collection and an ensuing security breach, but doesn't like the timing of the announcement. Oh, and one of the squeegee buckets at the Sheetz is nearly empty.
Ride-hail giant Lyft just dropped $100,000 to fight Proposition C, the ballot measure that would tax rich corporations to house 4,000 homeless San Franciscans. Yes, you heard that right: Lyft, not Uber, is pushing back against “Our City, Our Home” in a big way, On Guard has confirmed. It’s perhaps strange for a company whose CEO bragged to TIME Magazine in 2017 that his company is “woke,” and especially odd since the often-vilified Uber, which has weathered myriad recent scandals, confirmed to On Guard they’re not planning on donating for or against Proposition C.
I hope the tax money goes to fund $10,000 community art grants to help the homeless open non-profit, small press/artist-run spaces of their own.
Four of every 10 people who will move to Nevada this year will be from California, and most of those arriving in Reno and its suburbs are from the San Francisco Bay Area. Along with that human stampede have come rising home prices and rents - as well as rising anxiety for those living on the margins."We're not worried with keeping up with the Joneses," said Dave Frazier, who lives in one of the old motor lodges. "We just want to keep a roof over our head."
If they get evicted, they can always take an Uber to San Francisco and vote for a homeless tax on Lyft.
Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon took to the decks at a top New York nightclub just three days after the suicide of his former assistant, who was accused of stealing more than $1m of fine wine from the CEO.
I once played an Aerosmith record on my mom's stereo the day after my goldfish died. I still feel pretty bad about it.
RevPAR is the product of the hotel’s average daily room rate multiplied by its occupancy rate. It’s the most important ratio in the hotel industry. The hotel workers hours worked total also appears to have hit a plateau. STR, which measures the hotel industry, pre-announced growth of 0% to -2% in September. If this cycle is consistent with the last one, the economy would already be in a recession. However, it could just be a weak month which doesn’t mean anything for the broader economy.
I had no idea things had gotten this bad. The United States is apparently running out of Patels. Gentlemen, our country can't afford a Patel gap.
Los Angeles County's typhus outbreak, which began in the summer, has expanded to as many as 92 cases, including 20 in Pasadena and a possible 18 in Long Beach, where five were still under investigation by the Long Beach Department of Health and Human Services. The average number of typhus cases the county sees in a year is 60, which itself has doubled in recent years, according to the Los Angeles County Health Department. City officials recently declared downtown's skid row — roughly 54 square blocks where more than 4,000 homeless congregate — a "typhus zone."
"So if the stock continues to go down, based on these kids that play with computers and somebody else's money, we are going to buy back stock. We are going to screw these guys so badly that I don't believe that they will be able to only resign. They will have to commit suicide. So we are going to screw these guys so badly that it will be fun to watch. That will be my first priority other than the two top priorities of finishing HBI and paying down debt."
The CEO of Cleveland-Cliffs forgot to mention the lamentations of the Goldman women, but other than that, a fine, Muskish tirade. I bet that shortselling Goldman employee won't be deejaying anytime soon after that verbal beating. In other news, Cleveland-Cliffs Initiates Dividend, Expect More Upside
I hope you have a great Saturday everyone, with very few lamentations around your hopefully typhus-free home!
The left has a pantheon of go-to authorities for this and that that I find amusing. In any setting where real work is performed, these dangerous intellectuals would be getting everyone else coffee, and getting the coffee order wrong, too. They'd be unable to give you correct change for their encore. The media takes the easy out, every time, by selecting someone from this Mount Rushmore of lamebrain notoriety to opine on the issues of the day, be it Krugman, or Bill Nye, or the knucklehead with the vendetta against Pluto, I forget his name. You know all their names if you watch TV. They once asked Krugman, the king of this empire of ill-formed opinion, what he thought of the internet. That's an accurate quote from the guy.
It's a ridiculous opinion, which is his stock in trade, I gather. It gets floated endlessly across the internet, and I saw it all over the place this week while looking for Maggie's Farm links. This opinion held him up to ridicule so badly that he got internet fellow travelers like the Snopes dissemblers to explain that he was just joking, or stirring the pot, or performing a thought experiment that the uncool couldn't grok. In short, he admitted he was wrong, without admitting he was wrong, of course.
Look, I'm not arguing that Paul Krugman isn't a rantipole, addlepated, intellectually stunted jerkwad hack, or that his mother doesn't dress him funny. I'll leave that to others. What I'm saying is that it's funny that he disowned this comment, because it's the only time he was on the right track with his opinions. The quote gets posted on the internet as prima facie evidence that Krugman is a fool, as if no further exposition is necessary. That's because the average internaut has no idea how profoundly the fax machine, and technology like it, changed the economy.
Posting this little quote is a form of begging the question. No, we don't all know reflexively that fax machines never mattered much, and the internet is everything. I stood in front of a teletype machine taking orders in the past, and slit open envelopes with mail orders from Fortune 500 purchasing agents, so believe you me, I know that fax machines transformed business. Many businesses in many parts of the world still use fax machines today as a primary form of business communication.
Google stole the Yellow Pages, Facebook stole magazine ads, Craigslist took over newspaper classifieds, Amazon got the Sears catalog, and Shopify is just a bunch of Fingerhut catalogs. Most other internet businesses are just unintentional Ponzi schemes who haven't run out of seed money or IPO cash yet. The fax machine soldiers on in the corner. So I say Krugman was almost right, for once in his life, and then immediately disowned his own comment, keeping his batting average at a thousand.
I was crawling along the bottom of the lake on my arms and knees, looking for stones to skim, when my hand and knee felt something long and hard buried in the clay and sand. I pulled it out and saw that it was different from the sticks or rocks I usually find. One end had a point, and the other had a handle, so I pointed it up to the sky, put my other hand on my hip and called out, “Daddy, I’ve found a sword!”
A charming story, but no, it doesn't make you the Queen. The guy you handed the sword to, however...
Wear Space is, for lack of a better description, like equine blinkers for humans. The strip of flexible material wraps around the back of the head and covers the side of the eyes, blocking up to 60 percent of a wearer’s peripheral vision, Panasonic says. Think of it as a sign for potential bothersome coworkers that broadcasts, “I’m busy.”
Millennials will go to any lengths to avoid admitting that they're wrong about anything, including cubicles, which were a fine way to balance privacy and office camaraderie.
In Chengdu, there is reportedly an ambitious plan afoot for replacing the city’s streetlights: boosting the glow of the real moon with that of a more powerful fake one. The south-western Chinese city plans to launch an illumination satellite in 2020. According to an account in the People’s Daily, the artificial moon is “designed to complement the moon at night”, though it would be eight times as bright.
I'm not sure if I'll trust this to replace streetlights until Paul Krugman weighs in.
Small talk outside social situations between close friends is virtually non-existent. Interactions with baristas? Limited to the name of the coffee you want to order. Sitting, walking or standing in a way that requires acknowledging a stranger’s presence? Never. (A meme featuring people standing outside a bus shelter rather than under it is an often-posted joke in Finland to illustrate this point.) If you’re a foreigner, congratulations – you’re probably the loudest person on their often (voluntarily) silent public transport.
What is it with these phlegmatic Finns? What is it with these female writers and parentheses?
SolarWinds, notably, has strong operating profit and EBITDA results but loses money on a net basis due to some exotic-ish expenses (“Unrealized net transaction gains (losses) related to remeasurement of intercompany loans”), and the cost of its debt. SolarWinds is carrying billions in debt, which drags its healthy business into a bucket of red ink.
There are parentheses inside of other parentheses in this article. What is it with these male writers always trying to one-up the girls? Oh, and that balance sheet is a mess, so I bet Krugman would love it.
At least 600 "highly skilled" roles will be added in Manchester working on software, machine learning and AWS, its cloud computing business. The company will also create 250 and 180 jobs at its development centres in Edinburgh and Cambridge respectively. Doug Gurr, Amazon's UK country manager, described the new roles as "Silicon Valley jobs in Britain".
Paul Krugman's head will explode while trying to explain this news while still blaming both Donald Trump and Brexit for all the world's ills.
Jane VC, a new venture fund based out of Cleveland and London wants entrepreneurs to cold email them. Send them your pitch, no wealthy or successful intermediary necessary. The fund, which has so far raised $2 million to invest between $25,000 and $150,000 in early-stage female-founded companies across industries, is scrapping the opaque, inaccessible model of VC that’s been less than favorable toward women.
Maybe abject discrimination against males of the species can produce another Ginni Rometty!
The growth of internet access around the world has slowed dramatically, according to new data, suggesting the digital revolution will remain a distant dream for billions of the poorest and most isolated people on the planet. The striking trend, described in an unpublished report shared with the Guardian, shows the rate at which the world is getting online has fallen sharply since 2015, with women and the rural poor substantially excluded from education, business and other opportunities the internet can provide.
As usual, women, minorities, and Paul Krugman hardest hit.
Palantir, the hyper-secretive data-mining company founded by Trump homie Peter Thiel and C.E.O. Alex Karp, is almost as mysterious as the clients it works for. Started in 2003 and with seed money from the C.I.A., Palantir has developed a suite of surveillance technologies that have reportedly been used by the military to hunt down Osama bin Laden, to avoid roadside bombs, and by police departments to predict crimes before they happen.
Well, everyone at the FBI and the CIA is too busy ghostwriting articles at the New York Times to get any work done, so they had to sub it out.
“If aliens are so likely, why have we never seen any?” That is the Fermi Paradox—named after Enrico Fermi, a physicist who posed it in 1950. Fermi’s argument ran as follows. The laws of nature supported the emergence of intelligent life on Earth. Those laws are the same throughout the universe. The universe contains zillions of stars and planets. So, even if life is unlikely to arise on any particular astronomical body, the sheer abundance of creation suggests the night sky should be full of alien civilisations. Fermi wondered why aliens had never visited Earth.
Please notice that Fermi followers never circle back to question their begged question: If aliens are so likely... Says who?
A lesser-known aspect of Sears’ 125-year history, however, is how the company revolutionized rural black southerners’ shopping patterns in the late 19th century, subverting racial hierarchies by allowing them to make purchases by mail or over the phone and avoid the blatant racism that they faced at small country stores.
That's funny. The internet shopping experience that replaced mail order catalogs lets advertisers discriminate by age, sex, and race when they decide who will see their ads. In order to promote racial equality, I demand that we immediately replace internet shopping with mail order catalogs and fax machine ordering. Who's with me? Besides Krugman, I mean.
Now fax in your comments, and have a great Friday!
If a problem is very important, then setting back the cause is very bad. If a problem is so neglected that you’re among the first focused on it, then you’ll have a disproportionate influence on the field’s reputation, how likely others are to enter it, and many early decisions that could have path-dependent effects on the field’s long-term success.
A long read but somewhat interesting. It makes one major error early: "Few people persist [in]doing actions that are obviously harmful ..." This assumes facts not in evidence, your honor. And your grammar is subtly atrocious.
The beauty of Android is that it’s easily customizable. On Apple’s iOS, one can’t even change the default browser. On Android, it’s a matter of a few clicks. Most alternative browsers work just as well as Chrome and aren’t as demanding of a device’s resources. Some are designed to keep data collection about the user to a bare minimum.
Ah, the internet. You can be Amish, or you can be famous. Take your pick.
While I have no interest in leaving my iPhone, when it comes to the computers in the house I am very interested in moving away from Apple. I am currently upgrading the home computer setup and while the MacBook will last a number of years yet, when the upgrade is eventually due I won’t be going with Apple next time around.
It's a testament to the mindset that this announcement is proffered like it's earthshaking news.
The manufacturing analysts who spent 6,600 hours inside a warehouse north of Detroit picking apart a Model 3 have good news and bad news for Tesla Inc. The company now boasts the best technology of any electric car, with potential profit margins that would be the envy of most automakers. But Tesla is squandering that edge with wasted expenses linked to poor design and bloated manufacturing.
I filed this one under: If only Comrade Stalin knew!
General Motors' self-driving vehicle unit, GM Cruise, is running neck-and-neck with Waymo, a subsidiary of Google, to be first to deploy fully autonomous cars for public use, likely as ride sharing. GM said it will do it next year. San Francisco is the proving grounds to refine the technology. But that race is facing resistance as some people fear losing the freedom of personal car ownership and want to have control of their own mobility. They distrust autonomous technology and they worry about the loss of privacy.
Who are we to argue with a generation of balding toddlers who want to ride in the back seat while playing with their speak and spell long after mom's kicked the can?
The Trump administration announced on Wednesday that the United States will be withdrawing from the U.N. agency that oversees postal rates around the world out of frustration with the discounts given to China and some other countries that allow them to ship products to America at cheaper rates than those paid by U.S. companies to ship domestically.
It's almost like the President is pro-American or something. It confuses a lot of people. Not used to it.
BEC is a sophisticated scamming technique that often makes use of the popular type of social engineering attack called phishing. In phishing attacks, a scammer disguises as a trusted entity in order to trick the victim into clicking on a malicious link usually included in an email or SMS and allow the attacker unauthorized access to sensitive data like financial and payment information.
These are always described as "sophisticated" scams. They're not. Telling a dullard clerk to click on stuff that looks vaguely like a bill is hardly Ocean's Eleven.
When Harvard University admitted several applicants tied to influential donors in 2013, including one who had promised to pay for a building, the Kennedy School dean fired off an e-mail calling the head of admissions “my hero.” “Once again you have done wonders. I am simply thrilled by all the folks you were able to admit,” David T. Ellwood, who then headed up the university’s Kennedy School of Government, wrote to William Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions.
Thornton Mellon says been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
Poland’s government has allied with Hungary, whose prime minister, Viktor Orban, has courted confrontation with Brussels as part of what he calls a “national liberation struggle” against globalisation and the liberal ideas of the EU. PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski has said Poland is following Orban’s example. Both states have railed against internationalist left-wingers and courted nationalist leaders such as Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and U.S. President Donald Trump.
Alternate title: Three millennial women wonder aloud why Poland doesn't just do whatever Germany wants it to. Yeah, it's a mystery, gals.
The U.S. beat off Singapore, Germany, Switzerland and Japan, the other top four markets, with a score of 85.6 out of 100, the report said, due to its “vibrant” entrepreneurial culture and “strong” labor market and financial system. The World Economic Forum, the same organization that runs the Davos meeting of global powerbrokers each January, bases its rankings of 140 economies on a dozen drivers of competitiveness, including a country’s institutions and the policies that help drive productivity.
Unfortunate choice of words there, Katanga. Anyway, can anyone recall some problem that appeared in 2008, that's not extant now? I'm drawing a blank, but something has changed. It's a mystery.
I am not the first to conflate drama and history. Yet Twelve O’Clock High fascinates me precisely because it looks back at a World War II past that was scarcely past when the film was made. The strategic world of the Eighth Air Force that the movie recreates—massive formations of heavy bombers fighting their way to targets—was obsolete by 1949, but the filmmakers arrived in time to achieve authenticity on a budget. The Air Force put a dozen battered but still-flying B-17s (with U.S. Air Force crews) at the disposal of 20th Century Fox. The service also supplied World War II surplus flight gear (including many sought-after A-2 leather flying jackets later reported “lost” by the actors), a technical advisor at no fee, and several hundred airmen as volunteer extras. The studio acquired a surplus B-17 for the crash scene, paying stunt pilot Paul Mantz $2,500—about $26,000 in today’s money—to execute a wheels-up emergency landing for the cameras.
They got all that stuff from the military because Hollywood wasn't unanimously anti-American yet.
Leaders within the Constantinople Patriarchate, historically the most influential center of the global Orthodox Church, recently took several administrative steps toward granting ecclesiastical independence — also known as autocephaly — to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is currently under the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church. The move comes after years of increasing tension in Ukraine over the status of its church in the wake of Russia’s occupation of Crimea.
Why, this almost sounds like a church making a political, not an ecclesiastical decision. Does Putin want to behead a couple of wives or something?
The case, Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, No. 17-702, centers on whether a private operator of a public access television network is considered a state actor, which can be sued for First Amendment violations. The case could have broader implications for social media and other media outlets. In particular, a broad ruling from the high court could open the country's largest technology companies up to First Amendment lawsuits.
I'd prefer they decided social media companies should censor their users. That way, they'd be responsible for everything on their service. Good luck with that. Speaking of which...
The advert mimicked a horror film and showed young people being menaced by a scary doll when they played a particular song. In its ruling, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said the setting and events were "particularly likely" to scare younger viewers. Spotify has been told to make sure its future adverts are fit for children to watch and are targeted appropriately.
In the SJW pantheon, Halloween is now a combination of Christmas, Easter, Ramadan, and Passover, so anything goes. It's their high holy days, and it lasts for months. I say bring back All Saints Day, and keep your candy.
Officials said an "unidentified explosive device" detonated at the technical college in Kerch, where Russia has built a bridge between the peninsula and Russia. Initial reports had suggested that the blast was some sort of gas explosion.But a Russian national guard official said the incident was a deliberate "terrorist act".
There's trouble in the Crimea? I blame the Scythians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Pontics, the Romans, the Goths, the Huns, the Bulgars, the Khazars, the Byzantine Empire, the Arabs, the Kypchaks, the Russians, the City State of Venice, the Mongols, the Turks, the Cossacks, the Russians some more, the English, the French, and Kingdom of Sardinia of all people, Germany, the Soviets, the Ukrainians, and the Russians some more. And Donald Trump, because why not.
In addition to Facebook knowing about the problem far longer than previously acknowledged, Facebook's records also show that the impact of its miscalculation was much more severe than reported. The average viewership metrics were not inflated by only 60-80 percent; they were inflated by some 150-900 percent. Facebook did not wish to draw scrutiny to its viewership figures because it knows that the majority of video ads on its platform are viewed for very short periods of time—users scroll right past.
Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The problem is I don't know which half. This is somebody's half, I imagine.
Three European countries – Malta, Monaco and Cyprus – are among those nations flagged as operating high-risk schemes that sell either residency or citizenship in a report released on Tuesday by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The Paris-based body has raised the alarm about the fast-expanding $3bn (£2.3bn) citizenship by investment industry, which has turned nationality into a marketable commodity.
Then again, if turning a particular nationality into a marketable commodity is outlawed, America will turn into a one-party state.
I know what you're thinking: there's no way broadcasters, journalists and producers will fail to realise they're interviewing the wrong guy. I get that. But I have reason to believe this will work. Whether it's the segment on Brazil's Globo TV, or the hour-long documentary on Japanese TV, every interviewer has asked me the same questions about the shed. It's not really me being interviewed; what I did has some recognition, but I don't. So, for six weeks, I'm stepping aside to see whether these superior versions of myself can excel in my place.
This fellow gamed TripAdvisor reviews to make a shed in his back yard the most highly rated restaurant in London. It worked, so he actually opened the shed up as a restaurant, and he charged big money to serve cheap microwaved food on paper plates to patrons, who dutifully raved about it on social media because they're dullards. Now the whole world wants to interview him about his exploits, so he sends an army of random people in his place. No media outlet notices. Fake news? Is there another kind?
Answer the call. Okay, duh. But, says Thompson, “a lot of people don’t even answer the phone anymore.” You can’t do that when you’re expecting a call from a potential employer. It doesn’t matter how nervous you are, or how little sense you see in having a phone call when email exists, you can’t ignore the ringing and hope that a follow-up note will solve your problem.
Get out of here with that email alternative. An email is like receiving a radioactive registered letter from the Gestapo to these kids. They won't answer that, either. The average college graduate has never spoken to a real adult about any topic, in any setting, and is terrified of answering their ringing phone. A generation of mannerless housebound agoraphobes who dress their pets in costumes for Halloween, which lasts for six months. Good jerb, social media.
Praful Tickoo, the head of people analytics at Genpact, has been working with MIT to study the communication patterns of the company’s top 650 leaders. His findings were astounding: a 74% statistical correlation between communication patterns and the highest levels of individual performance (using a 9-box performance process). What did they find? The highest performing leaders use simpler words to communicate, they respond faster, and they communicate more often. In other words, they are more engaged, more efficient, and more action-oriented.
And I'll bet they know how to answer the g*ddamned phone. Never mind all that. Let's get to the really interesting part of the story. Praful Tickoo is the greatest name I've encountered since reading about Hercules Mulligan in grade school.
Canada has become the second country after Uruguay to legalise possession and use of recreational cannabis. Medical marijuana has been legal in the country since 2001. But concerns remain, including about the readiness for police forces to tackle drug impaired driving. Information has been sent to 15m households about the new laws and there are public awareness campaigns.
Once again, Uruguay leads the way! Said no one, ever.
The base, which was built in the late 1960s, was once focused only on monitoring missile tests and other military-related activities in countries such as Russia, China, Pakistan, Japan, Korea, and India. But it is now doing “a great deal more,” said Tanter. It has shifted from “a national level of strategic intelligence, primarily to providing intelligence — actionable, time-sensitive intelligence — for American operations in [the] battlefield.”
Sort of in their job description, fellas, despite your breathless reporting style.
It sounded a little slippery last week, when Facebook announced Portal, a new voice-activated speaker and video chat gadget, and the company said that it would not use data collected through the device to target ads. It was, in fact, very slippery. Facebook just admitted that Portal is completely capable of collecting data about you and using that data to target ads. But don’t worry, Facebook probably won’t do this right away.
I'm constantly reminded of a demented form of the Lady Godiva story. Everyone simultaneously wishes to ride naked through town, sometimes forbidding everyone else to look, sometimes forbidding anyone from looking away, all the while reserving the right to be a peeping Tom, 24/7.
It's nicer in the original French, and more subtle: Chacun voit midi à sa porte. It means that everyone sees everything from their own point of view. Adam Smith understood the concept. People have a foremost interest in their own affairs, and see everything in relation to their own worldview, wants, and desires. In commerce, it leads to the generation of wealth whenever a willing buyer and a willing seller get together. In politics, it leads to harridans testifying that someone looked at them funny thirty-five years ago.
I freely acknowledge that my doorstep has a very different noon than my neighbors. When I was younger, I found eccentricity in others piquant. Now I'm the eccentric, I guess. But I can't help noticing, as I search for news stories for you fine folks here at Maggie's Farm, that it's always the same noon in every news outlet on the planet. I also can't help noticing that their noon is my midnight.
Allen ranked among the world's wealthiest individuals. As of Monday afternoon, he ranked 44th on Forbes' 2018 list of billionaires with an estimated net worth of more than $20 billion.
After the game, the pawn and the king go in the same box.
Deep into late antiquity, the Homeric epics, like the King James Bible in Georgian and Victorian England, “offered a shared language which could be activated at all levels of literate culture in the expectation that an audience would understand”. Early Byzantine subsistence farmers, who neither knew nor cared about the glories of classical Athens, still saw Homer as “the Poet” par excellence. For well over a millennium, the Iliad and Odyssey formed the basis of literate education for Greek-speakers everywhere from the Rhône to the Tigris.
The reshuffle is an attempt to steady his administration after a series of resignations, and revive a reform drive that has shown signs of flagging. Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, who has spearheaded Macron's eurozone reform push, and Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian retained their posts.
The idea would be to let customers of Walmart’s video service, Vudu, pay for additional services like HBO Now, Showtime or Starz. The discussions are still exploratory, and Walmart’s plans may change. The retail giant is trying to convert its hundreds of millions of customers into users of online services, responding to changes in how those customers watch TV.
Everyone watches TV in their pajamas, and shops at Walmart in their pajamas, so this would be a perfect fit.
Bezos was asked about his position on defense contracts after Google dropped its bid for the Pentagon cloud computing contract worth up to $10 billion because it would be inconsistent with its principles. "We are going to continue to support the DoD," he said, referring to the Defense Department. "If big tech companies are going to turn their back on the US Department of Defense this country is going to be in trouble."
You know, it tipped from opposition to insurrection on day one. Ask Steve Scalise. Bezos just like money. I guess Google figures China will pay more. Speaking of which...
The other thing I find disturbing, after all these years, is the willingness of my former colleagues to not only comply with the censorship but their enthusiasm in rationalizing it. It is not a coincidence that the rationale they give was the same one management had given them. As Blaise Pascal trenchantly observed in Pensées, *power creates opinion*. This is just as true within corporations as it is for national politics.
Ils ne sont pas des traîtres. iIs sont de l'autre côté.
The Facebook posts were not from everyday internet users. Instead, they were from Myanmar military personnel who turned the social network into a tool for ethnic cleansing, according to former military officials, researchers and civilian officials in the country.
I'm sure everyone working at Facebook will resign in protest over this dastardly use of their product, such as it is. This is my "sure" face.
In 2014, an international team of biologists estimated that, in the past 35 years, the abundance of invertebrates such as beetles and bees had decreased by 45 percent. In places where long-term insect data are available, mainly in Europe, insect numbers are plummeting. A study last year showed a 76 percent decrease in flying insects in the past few decades in German nature preserves.
Fewer bugs? Your definition of hyperalarming and mine varies considerably. Chacun voit midi à sa porte.
The surge in the price of bitcoin, and of other cryptocurrencies, which proliferated amid a craze for initial coin offerings (I.C.O.s), prompted a commensurate explosion in the number of stories and conversations about this new kind of money and, sometimes more to the point, about the blockchain technology behind it—this either revolutionary or needlessly laborious way of keeping track of transactions and data.
Last month, it was announced that a review by the Law Commission would look at whether offences driven by misogyny - dislike, contempt or ingrained prejudice against women - should be treated as hate crimes. And now it's emerged the same review will also consider the opposite - crimes motivated by misandry - hostility towards men. Ageism and hatred of certain alternative cultures, such as Goths or punks, could also be included in future.
Punks? L’habit ne fait pas le moine. I'm sure, as always, women and minorities will be hardest hit by this law. Although, isn't it cruel to be nice to goths and punks? It cheers them up. They hate that.
Well, that's Tuesday's slate. Be sure to describe the angle of the sun on your stoop in the comments.
Will Rogers was one of the most interesting men of his generation (1879-1935), which is saying something indeed. His bio says he was a "stage and motion picture actor, vaudeville performer, American cowboy, humorist, newspaper columnist, and social commentator." There are a lot of people in contemporary society who have gained notoriety trying one or two of those descriptors. Every actor is a social commentator now, for instance. However, as far as I know, Will Rogers was alive in the 1930s, but only acknowledged that Hitler was Hitler. He didn't have a laundry list of Hitlers ready for awards ceremony speeches. And he had the guy's number as early as 1933:
Papers all state Hitler is trying to copy Mussolini. Looks to me like it's the Ku Klux Klan that he is copying.
As far as newspaper columnists go these days, none have the resume of Will Rogers. I'm fairly certain George Will was never a cowboy, for instance.
There was a bedrock of observation and wisdom behind the gossamer jibes, but never any malice. I know of no comedian today that could claim that. Malice is on the marquee these days. But malice doesn't last, I think. Malice appeals to the mob, and the mob gets tired from rioting and heads on home when their torches start to smolder and their pitchforks get heavy. No one will quote Amy Schumer in the year 2100. No one quotes her now, and I don't think she'll ripen none in the interim. Anyway, I decided to see if Will Rogers wisdom still applies to the news today. I report, you decide:
Sears, the one-time titan of American retail, filed for bankruptcy ahead of a $134 million debt payment due Monday and announced that it will close 142 stores. For years, Sears has contended with the threat that it would become the latest big-name retailer to fall to online competition and crushing debt. The icon once known for its pristine catalogs, and more recently known for decrepit showrooms and a controversial chief executive, saw its stock price plunge last week after reports that it had hired an advisory firm to prepare a bankruptcy filing ahead of the Oct. 15 payment.
There are three kinds of men: The ones that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.
Called GH Lab, Amazon's new, experimental pop-up store has opened in the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. It carries merchandise recommended by Good Housekeeping, though the store has no inventory. It's more of a showroom than anything else. Each item on display has a special Amazon SmileCode, which is Amazon's version of a QR code. Using the camera function in their Amazon app to scan the SmileCode, customers can pull up the item's product detail page and add it to their Amazon cart. When the purchase is complete, Amazon handles the fulfillment/shipping process.
We are the first nation to starve to death in a storehouse that's overfilled with everything we want.
The papers from the lab of Dr. Piero Anversa, who studied cardiac stem cells, “included falsified and/or fabricated data,” according to a statement to Retraction Watch and STAT from the two institutions. Last year, the hospital agreed to a $10 million settlement with the U.S. government over allegations Anversa and two colleagues’ work had been used to fraudulently obtain federal funding. Anversa and Dr. Annarosa Leri — who have had at least one paper already retracted, and one subject to an expression of concern — had at one point sued Harvard and the Brigham unsuccessfully for alerting journals to problems in their work back in 2014.
Letting the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier than putting it back.
The modern traveler has a supercomputer in their pocket. Smartphones can help you do a whole lot more than call home or pass the time in the airport with games or videos. Travel apps for your smartphone make it easy to plan your whole trip, from tracking flights to arranging for car hire. They can also help you deal with unexpected hiccups on the fly.
When you get into trouble 5,000 miles from home, you’ve got to have been looking for it.
Dow Jones futures fell solidly Monday morning, along with S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq futures. A stock market correction began last week due to heavy selling in the major averages and leading stocks. In a stock market correction, investors should largely stay on the sidelines but remain engaged and build their watch lists. Pay attention to top stocks that are holding up well, such as Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Ulta Beauty (ULTA), UnitedHealth (UNH), Boston Scientific (BSX) and O'Reilly Automotive (ORLY).
"Don’t gamble"; take all your savings and buy some good stock, and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it.
Social Security checks will be 2.8% bigger in 2019. That's great news for retirees, but there are some important things every Social Security recipient needs to consider about the increase. These include the fact that some retirees might not see the full amount of the increase reflected in their checks, and the cause of the increase could indicate that retirees don't make any real progress toward financial security in spite of the bump-up in income.
Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
There have been months — or is it years now? — of bad news about the social network. Last month, Facebook revealed that a security vulnerability exposed up to 50 million accounts to being hijacked by hackers. Through the vulnerability, a hacker could take over your account — meaning anything you ever posted on Facebook, or even apps that you connected with using your Facebook account, could have been infiltrated.
The New York Times is only marginally better. A big banner ad for a luxury brand at the top of the page, plus two smaller ads for the same brand. And if I click through to an article, there’s a massive ad for a slipper (and I’ve seen this ad a hundred times), and several Amazon ads as I scroll down the page. But it gets worse, because those slipper ads are animated. These are the worst type of ads, the ones that distract you and make it harder to read the news you have paid for.
Advertising makes you spend money you haven't got for things you don't want.
Tuesday's laws made clear that authorities want tech companies to play their part in the surveillance, policing, and silencing of the Uighurs. Beijing justifies its crackdown in Xinjiang — also known to Uighurs as East Turkestan — as a counterterrorism measure, though it's denied UN inspectors access to the region. Google could be complicit in this persecution if its secretive plans to launch a censored search engine — codenamed "Project Dragonfly" — become a reality.
When the Judgment Day comes civilization will have an alibi, "I never took a human life, I only sold the fellow the gun to take it with."
After struggling to fix manufacturing problems at its sole auto factory in Fremont, California, Tesla has started the process of building a plant in China, the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles. The unprofitable carmaker is in the process of procuring land in Shanghai for its first manufacturing facility outside the U.S., pushing ahead with its plans after months of tumult involving Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk.
We hold the distinction of being the only nation that is goin' to the poorhouse in an automobile.
The U.S. economy is in its 10th year of economic expansion, and state government budgets are benefiting from a solid growth in tax revenues. State general fund revenues have grown 40 percent since 2010. Many of the nation’s governors have used the growing revenues to expand spending programs, whereas others have pursued reductions in taxes.
Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.
I have a headache. I have a headache that has zip codes. I have a headache that should join the circus and be exhibited. I have a headache that would make Dante buy a Spirograph and get back to work. I have a headache that can only be described with Latin nouns. I have a headache that makes the back of my eyes behave like a stripper's tits.
But I don't mind my headache, really, because somewhere in the back of my throbbing skull, there's still room for a sunny little spot that reminds me that I have never had a Facebook page.
As I made my way through the meandering hallways of Tokyo Station, I felt like a pilgrim making a monumental journey, before my actual trip. I was headed to the mecca of ekiben – beloved boxed meals created specifically for long train journeys. Like the crowds bustling around me, I had a train to catch, and my last order of business was to find myself some lunch for the ride.
I filed this essay under, "Every culture but my own is wonderful."
The woman, unnamed for security reasons, deposited 62,500 Canadian dollars into a bitcoin automated teller machine believing she owed taxes. It was a fraud. A man claiming to represent the Canada Revenue Agency called her, threatening the new immigrant with arrest and deportation for tax default.
She's new in town. She didn't know that the Canadian government only accepts Canadian Tire Money to avoid deportation.
Alerts on Da Boss’ iPhone warned that his Google Nest surveillance cameras with views into and outside the apartment had picked up movement. Outside, a full cast of law enforcement personnel from the Secret Service, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the local police department were primed to swoop in. Inside, they found piles of marijuana and multiple firearms. More intriguing, there were bundles of cash alongside fake-ID-card printers, 36 credit card blanks and reams of printouts containing American citizens’ personal data. Investigators spotted the Nest cameras and would soon make the first publicly known federal government demand for customer information and surveillance footage from Google’s smart home division.
Men who yell singsong doggerel into microphones held at a funny angle used LEO surveillance equipment to steal money from boosted credit cards, but their thermostat ratted them out. Man, I have a headache reading that.
Earlier this week, Tesla filed an application with the US Patent and Trademark Office to trademark the name for a “distilled agave liquor” and “distilled blue agave liquor,” according to a CNBC report.
Speaking of headaches, sing along with me: One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor...
In a cease-and-desist order against Voya Financial Advisors, the investment advisory unit of Voya Financial, the commission used the “Identity Theft Red Flags Rule” to censure the firm for allowing hackers to access social security numbers, account balances and even details of client investment accounts.
There's a new sheriff in town, isn't there? Exxon spills a little oil and some birds get gooey, and they get a billion dollar fine. Data loss causes a lot more damage. Start treating it like an oil spill, and these little code monkey CEOs will wise up fast.
A smaller slice of people were more heavily affected. About 400,000 people served as the hackers’ entry point to the 30 million others on Facebook. For those 400,000, the attackers could see what the users see as they look at their own profiles. That included posts on their Facebook timelines, and names of recent Facebook Messenger conversations.
You know, I can solve this online privacy problem in about ten minutes. There are stalking laws on the books, aren't there? Make them apply to the internet. One big button required on every website that says, STOP FOLLOWING ME, AND ERASE MY INFO. If they don't, prosecute them like any other creeper ex-boyfriend or jilted bunny boiler.
On the same day Facebook announced that it had carried out its biggest purge yet of American accounts peddling disinformation, the company quietly made another revelation: It had removed 66 accounts, pages and apps linked to Russian firms that build facial recognition software for the Russian government. Facebook said Thursday that it had removed any accounts associated with SocialDataHub and its sister firm, Fubutech, because the companies violated its policies by scraping data from the social network.
Please note that Facebook regards these sorts of things as an accounts receivable problem, not a security problem. If you paid them, you could do it all you want. They have an app for that, I bet.
While tackling this question, a team of Stanford researchers found a remarkable result: Simply seeding a few more people at random avoids the challenge of mapping a network’s contours and can spread information in a way that is essentially indistinguishable from cases involving careful analysis; seeding seven people randomly may result in roughly the same reach as seeding five people optimally.
Yes, but you can get into trouble for simply seeding more people at random. Ask Antonio Cromartie.
Amazon India has been told to pay Rs 10,000, besides litigation costs of Rs 2,000, to a law student for causing mental agony by retracting an offer of a laptop for Rs 190 after the complainant had placed an order for the same
If my math is good, which it's not, because I have a headache, 10,000 rupees is about 135 bucks American. I think Bezos the Clown can swing it.
Instead, this is about the Federal Aviation Administration bill that President Trump signed into law a little before 3 p.m. Friday--just before the moment when everyone else in Washington was watching a key senator's speech about Judge Brett Kavanaugh. To be clear, there's no suggestion that the White House intentionally picked a time when people weren't paying attention to sign the bill. This law had passed Congress with overwhelming support, and industry players and airline lobbyists have been watching it like hawks for a long time.
I'm a pretty fair writer, even when I have a headache, but this guy has me beat. How does he manage to write about something so mundane while twisting himself into manifold contortions like an origami, short-bus, Ida Tarbell? That's talent. Of a sort
Guten Morgen to all you farmers, and all the ships at sea. It's me, Roger de Hauteville. Bird Dog is having his teeth sharpened at the veterinarian/day spa. So you're stuck with me.
Say, do you speak German? Guten Morgen is German. Like most greetings, it says, "good morning," but really means, "Screw you, get away from the coffee pot, I've got spreadsheets to lie to."
What I find fascinating about guten Morgen, and similar greetings, is that they appear to be accusations, more or less. Now, I've declined very few German verbs, and no invitations to cocktail lounges, but just saying good morning should be guter Morgen if you're just assembling words out of the dictionary. Guten Morgen is correct, however, because it's in the accusative case. Guten Morgen is really just a truncation of a really long sentence in German (is there another kind?) that directs you to have a nice day. Like howdy, or hiya, or howyadoin, or hallo fellow well met, it's an abbreviated, handy way to express a longer thought in a short burst of syllables. It appears to my not very well-educated eye that all greetings are in the accusative case.
So, from now on, to flesh out my greetings with the appropriate sentiment, and stay within the spirit of the accusative, I'll say, "Have a nice day, or else."
Facebook said on Thursday it purged more than 800 U.S. publishers and accounts for flooding users with politically-oriented spam, reigniting accusations of political censorship and arbitrary decision-making.
I'm sure this was accomplished in their usual, even-handed, transparent, and non=partisan way.
Early measurements seemed to indicate that it was an asteroid — a dry rock much like those found orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Then by this past summer, astronomers largely came around to the conclusion that it was instead a comet — an icy body knocked out of the distant reaches of a far-off planetary system. Now a new analysis has found inconsistencies in this conclusion, suggesting that ’Oumuamua may not be a comet after all. Whether it’s actually a comet or an asteroid, one thing is clear: ’Oumuamua is not quite like anything seen before.
They named it ’Oumuamua? The name starts with an apostrophe? Okey Dokey then. Let's pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
It may seem counterintuitive, but the largest single source of demand for American stocks is the American companies that issue them. Companies are on track to repurchase more than $770 billion in their own stock this year, according to research from Goldman Sachs. That’s more than twice the size of the next largest source of demand, exchange-traded funds, which last year bought $347 billion in shares.
So, according to the Times, companies have been buying gobs of their own stock, which is bad, but they stopped for fifteen minutes to fill out some paperwork, which is also bad. I blame Trump, which I believe is conclusion I'm supposed to draw if I read anything in the Times.
More than 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci observed a particular relationship between the size of a tree’s trunk and the size of its branches. Specifically, the combined cross-sectional areas of a tree’s daughter branches are equal to the cross-sectional area of the mother branch. However, da Vinci didn’t know why tree branching followed this rule, and few explanations have been proposed since then. But now in a new study, physicist Christophe Eloy from Aix-Marseille University in Aix-en-Provence, France, has shown that this tree structure may be optimal for enabling trees to resist wind-induced stresses.
I'm not buying it until I hear from Bob Ross. He can paint trees a lot faster than da Vinci, so he must know more about it.
Electric carmaker Tesla Inc said orders for cars placed by Oct. 15 will be eligible for a full federal tax credit of $7,500 and these customers will get their cars delivered by the end of the year. Under a major tax overhaul passed by the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress late last year, incentives in the way of tax credits that lower the cost of electric vehicles are available for the first 200,000 such vehicles sold by an automaker. The tax credit is then reduced by 50 percent every six months until it phases out.
There are welfare queens, and then there's this guy.
Built in 1867, Punta Carena is one of Italy’s most important lighthouses, and is one of the last in the world to employ a full-time operator. But after being manned by a continuous line of 88 lighthouse keepers predating the dawn of Italian unification in 1871, D’Oriano is its last guardian, and these are his final months on duty.
The Italian government still pays a guy to flip a switch twice a day? Good work when you can get it. Of course Amazon Echo users shell out scads of their own cash, and surrender all their privacy, just so they can shut off the lights in the room they're in without flipping a switch. You decide which is crazier.
A consortium led by a prominent Seoul plastic surgeon purchased a controlling stake in South Korea's largest cryptocurrency exchange, reports said Friday. The hyper-wired South has emerged as one of the world's top Bitcoin markets, at one point accounting for more than 20 per cent of global bitcoin transactions - about 10 times the country's share of the global economy.
I still keep all my money in greenbacks. They're real, and they're spectacular.
Shortly after taking off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Nick Hague and Alexey Ovchinin reported a problem with the rocket's booster. The men were forced into a "ballistic descent", with their capsule landing a few hundred miles north of Baikonur. They have been picked up by rescuers.
First, picture in your mind flying in a spaceship built by the lowest bidder. Now picture flying in a spaceship built by the lowest bidder in Vladivostok.
Arts, culture and other quality of life issues were top of mind for Amazon.com Inc. officials in discussing Toronto as a possible location for its second headquarters with the city’s mayor. Housing affordability, immigration and transit were also hot topics in the talks earlier this year, Mayor John Tory said. “They spent what some people would probably find a surprising amount of time on what we’ll call, the sort of arts and culture, the general kind of life in the city,” Tory said at an interview at Bloomberg’s Toronto offices.
I'm trying to conjure up a name for someone less hip than Jeff Bezos, but I'm drawing a blank.
Gamification is the application of game elements into nongame spaces. It is the permeation of ideas and values from the sphere of play and leisure to other social spaces. It’s premised on a seductive idea: if you layer elements of games, such as rules, feedback systems, rewards and videogame-like user interfaces over reality, it will make any activity motivating, fair and (potentially) fun.
I blame Sesame Street. No, really. The minute children learned that the alphabet was supposed to get up and dance before you paid attention to it, every succeeding generation was doomed. Me, I prefer to snarl, "Good morning" to everyone at work and then scratch in my ledgers to fleece the customers and lord it over the employees. Jeez, kids these days.
Hello everybody. If the news seems pretty grim these days, don't worry too much about it. The government will fix everything. They're peculiarly suited to coming up with the answers to today's problems. After all, the surgeon who leaves a sponge, retractors, and his watch inside a patient knows where to look when they open the poor sod back up. Been there, done that.
In many cases, the buyer isn’t aware of Zelle, but they do a little googling to read up on it. They discover it’s a digital payments service that’s backed by their bank, which makes them feel more comfortable. Zelle is also found in some banks’ mobile applications themselves, which adds to that sense of trust. The buyer, now feeling that Zelle is a legit service, then transfers the money, assuming their bank will step in to help if anything goes wrong. After all, they’re sending money directly to another bank account – so surely the seller knows they could be tracked down and caught if they attempt fraud?! Unfortunately, that’s not proving to be the case.
Doesn't anyone take responsibility for their own actions anymore? That was a rhetorical question.
[W]hen defendants caused the embedded Tweets to appear on their websites, their actions violated plaintiff’s exclusive display right; the fact that the image was hosted on a server owned and operated by an unrelated third party (Twitter) does not shield them from this result.
The Internet is a woman riding the subway wearing a bustier and a thong while complaining that everyone is looking at her.
“Facebook informs us insufficiently about gathering information about us, the kind of data it collects, what it does with that data and how long it stores it,” the court said. “It also does not gain our consent to collect and store all this information.” Facebook has also been ordered to delete all data it had gathered illegally on Belgian citizens, including people who were not users of the social network.
A smart politician would tweak stalking laws in the US to include covertly tracking people across the Internet without their express written consent, with a one-button opt-opt that erases every bit of your data at any time from any web service. I don't know any smart politicians, and don't expect to meet one anytime soon.
Driverless cars are widely believed to be the silver bullet that will make ride-hailing profitable by eliminating the main cost: wages paid to human drivers. In the fourth quarter of 2017, Uber paid about $8 billion to drivers in earnings and bonuses, or about 72% of its gross revenue for the quarter. Uber lost $4.5 billion last year on $37 billion in gross revenue.
I hate to break it to you poindexters, but the Uber driver's only real job is to supply the car you ride in. Oh, and to clean the puke out of the back seat every third passenger. Getting rid of the driver is a sideways move.
College career centers around the country stress to their students the importance of gaining internship experience to apply the knowledge gained in the classroom in a real-world setting, develop and enhance professional skills, and forge relationships with industry professionals, believing that internship experiences will lead to better career outcomes. However, while research findings by NACE indicate a positive correlation between paid internships and job offers received before graduation, unpaid internships were found to have little or no impact on this measure of short-term success.
When I was young I learned about the Triangle Trade in history class. Sugar, tobacco, and cotton to England, textiles and rum to Africa, and unpaid interns to the Americas. I could have sworn they outlawed that sort of thing.
Surrounding the building, located in Cupertino, California, are 45-foot tall curved panels of safety glass. Inside are work spaces, dubbed “pods,” also made with a lot of glass. Apple staff are often glued to the iPhones they helped popularize. That’s resulted in repeated cases of distracted employees walking into the panes, according to people familiar with the incidents. Some staff started to stick Post-It notes on the glass doors to mark their presence. However, the notes were removed because they detracted from the building’s design, the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing anything related to Apple.
When I was young the kids who walked into walls a lot had their own classes, which were held outdoors quite often. They had their own bus, too. Now they have their own office building, which is nice.
A few of these search engines, including DuckDuckGo and StartPage began as normal search engines with no privacy enhancements. However, after they realized the massive risk associated with storing so much data, they decided to take a different approach.
I use Femgoplaces.com. It's a pretty cool search engine, you probably haven't heard of it. You type in your search terms, and they dispatch a girl to drive to a part of town she's not familiar with. When she gets there, she rolls down the window and asks the first person shes sees for the information she wants.
The first will use hydrogen to clean up existing diesel engines, increasing their fuel efficiency by a third and eliminating over half their air pollution, with an average nine-month payback, the company says. That’s a potentially enormous market with plenty of existing demand, which HyTech hopes will capitalize its second product, a retrofit that will transform any internal combustion vehicle into a zero-emissions vehicle (ZEV) by enabling it to run on pure hydrogen. That will primarily be targeted at large fleets. And that will tee up the third product — the one Johnson’s had his eye on from the beginning, the one that could revolutionize and decentralize the energy system — a stationary energy-storage product meant to compete with, and eventually outcompete, big batteries like Tesla’s Powerwall.
Yes, but will they shoot a tractor trailer into space? That's the true measure of technical innovation nowadays.
“Utah’s economic and political success is a model for our nation,” Romney said in a written announcement distributed Friday morning. “I am ready to fight for this great state and advocate for solutions that improve the lives of Utahns.” In his announcement, and in a video, Romney touted his leadership of the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, his tenure as Massachusetts governor, his degree from Brigham Young University and his 24 grandchildren.
If I recall correctly, Romney really cornered the Mormon vote in Massachusetts. Well, he drove his wife to the polls. Same thing. Say, are there any Mormons in Utah?
A New Zealand company is on the cusp of granting its employees the ultimate in work-life balance: four days work for five days pay. Perpetual Guardian, a trustee company, has become the first major business in the country to embark on a creating a workplace “fit for purpose for the 21st century”. New Zealanders work an average of 1,752 hours a year, making them close to average compared with their OECD peers.
When I read the headline, I assumed all the employees joined a New York City longshoreman's union, and one of their brothers was a union delegate.
I'm sorry, I was being pretending to be pleasant. As you know, I'm no good at it. Let's start over: Keerist, what drivel. But it's unexceptional drivel. No need to comment on how trite and meaningless the message is. Let's look at the spelling. I guarantee it was written, and shared quite a bit on social media, by college graduates. "You body"? Really? However, I'd like to point out that the word isn't misspelled. It's not a typo, either. The person who wrote it, and apparently a lot of people who read it, are blind to the fact that it's the wrong word. They have a condition I hereby christen Facebook Aphasia. They no longer have the mental ability to tell one word from another. It's not that they don't have the innate intellectual horsepower to learn the difference between you and your and you're. After all, they probably learned Klingon for their cosplay wedding ceremony. They're broken, not dumb.
I think, technically, I'm talking about semantic anomia, but I'm just a blowhard on the Internet, so Facebook Aphasia is good enough for me.
Semantic anomia is a disorder in which the meaning of words becomes lost. In patients with semantic anomia, a naming deficit is accompanied by a recognition deficit. Thus, unlike patients with word selection anomia, patients with semantic anomia are unable to select the correct object from a group of objects, even when provided with the name of the target object.
Of course proper doctor-type persons know you generally need brain damage from a shovel to the parietal or a tumor that makes tempura of your temporal lobe to give you a proper dose of semantic anomia. I hereby posit that a contemporary public school education followed by a trip to the academy is on par with a severe blow to the head. People have become brain damaged by a refusal to enforce abstract standards of right and wrong for grammar, or anything else for that matter. Through a continual process of calling anyone who notices you're in error a Nazi, and exposure to a continuous stream of word salad on electronic devices, there are entire generations who are literally unable to tell one word from another. They've been taught from the cradle to simply take a stab at all things grammatical. They've been conditioned to rely on hunches, and they're blissfully ignorant of where the knee-jerk reactions they call hunches are spawned.
So, welcome to the Facebook Aphasia world, where every voice is passive, every sentence starts with an adverb, and to, too, two is just the sound a Sesame Street train makes. There's no use whining about it, when wining about it works better. And dismember, never leaf anyone who touches your sole more than you body.
This means that the first time a user goes to a restricted website, they will be invited to amend the filter settings, or turn it off altogether. However, only the account holder will have the ability to do this - not necessarily a hurdle for families, but potentially a problem in shared houses of adult occupants.
The horror! Pornography will not be immediately displayed by default on your computer screen? What do I need one for, then? And remember, never leave anyone who touches your soul more than his own winkie with safe search turned off
The White House plans to stop funding the station after 2024, ending direct federal support of the orbiting laboratory. But it does not intend to abandon the orbiting laboratory altogether and is working on a transition plan that could turn the station over to the private sector, according to an internal NASA document obtained by The Washington Post.
Remember kids, Tesla's taxpayer-subsidized piece of automotive space junk is brilliant, and Donald Trump is a doodyhead for wondering if a space station could be useful to anyone. It's just a hunch you have, but you hunches is always wright.
Typically, small mammals like mice reproduce fast and die young. The oldest mouse-eared bat ever captured of the Myotis genus was 41 years old, and they regularly live past 20 or 30. While they don't live as long as the average human does, these flying creatures live extremely long considering their size—nearly 10 times longer than an animal of that size would be predicted to live.
I hereby support research that may, one day, after millions in grants, allow humans to live to be 41, too. I sleep by hanging upside down in the closet already, so I've got a head start.
We chose to highlight this study for two reasons. First, it helps illustrate a pattern that we believe is widely under-appreciated in the policy community: Most programs—even many that are thoughtfully designed and well implemented—are found not to produce the hoped-for effects when rigorously evaluated in well-conducted RCTs. (Randomized Control Trials)
I bet conditional cash transfers break the poverty cycle from the moment the recipients get the dough until the moment their boyfriends make it to the strip joint.
Using police accident reports for Tippecanoe County, Indiana, and exploiting the introduction of the augmented reality game Pokémon GO as a natural experiment, we document a disproportionate increase in crashes and associated vehicular damage, injuries, and fatalities in the vicinity of locations where users can play the game while driving. We estimate the incremental county-wide cost of users playing Pokémon GO while driving to be in the range of $5.2 to $25.5 million over the 148 days following the introduction of the game. Extrapolating these estimates to nation-wide levels yields a total ranging from $2.0 to $7.3 billion.
Hmm. Maybe brain damage from Pokemon-induced car crashes is the reason no one can spell "definitely" anymore.
Reflektive encourages customers to use more regular feedback to keep employees improving their efforts more regularly. New areas the company plans to look at include learning, compliance and training. While plenty of startups are tackling those issues on their own, such as Pluralsight in corporate training, Behera says his goal is to create a command center for a manager to see how their employees are performing and adding skills, making companies like Pluralsight more of a potential partner.
I dunno. Screaming, "No raises for anyone, NOW GET BACK TO WORK," always works great for me. I find this saves the employees the embarrassment of hearing how worthless and lazy they are during formal reviews. See, I worry about other people's feelings too much. It's a curse, really.
The poetry world is abuzz this week in the wake of a controversial essay published in PN Review by British poet Rebecca Watts, denigrating a new generation of ‘amateur’ poets. She takes aim at ‘a cohort of young female poets who are currently being lauded by the poetic establishment for their “honesty” and “accessibility” – buzzwords for the open denigration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft that characterises their work.’
In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.
Assemblyman Ed Chau (D-Monterey Park) says an increasing number of websites and apps are collecting personal information and content from young users that can be used to market brands and products. But the consent agreements that make these practices possible are often buried in general terms and conditions for use of service, and companies often allow minors to sign up with no more than a promise that they have asked their parents for permission.
By definition, a parent who wants their minor child to get a Facebook page is unfit, so wangling clear consent from them shouldn't be too difficult.
Thankfully, I am not the only investor demanding Facebook keep users safe. On Monday, two major investors in Apple sent an open letter criticizing the company for not doing enough to protect children from the negative aspects of smartphones and social media. This is a potential game changer. The players are combining two corporate governance strategies in ways that may be harder to resist than traditional strategies.
I thought Mark Zuckerberg's mentor's name was spelled "Beelzebub."
The data initially was gathered by Bongo International, a company that helped North American retailers and brands sell online to consumers in other countries, the researchers said. FedEx acquired Bongo International in 2014 and eventually changed its name to FedEx Cross-Border International. FedEx shut down the service last April. The discovery of the customer IDs and other personal information suggests that not only was the information never properly secured to begin with, but FedEx officials failed to purge the data once the service was discontinued.
Yes, I'll be glad to give a screenshot of my driver's license to "Bongo International." Sounds as buttoned-down as the Bank of England.
Everyone have a great Friday. I hope today's links touched your soul more than you body!
Try searching on the Internet for information about Thor. Good luck if you're not interested in comic book movies. The Internet is a million miles wide and 1/16" deep, and it's turtles all the way down. References to Thor, the actual Norse god of thunder, are an afterthought. The actual Thor, not the wisecracking Australian guy, seems like he was pretty important back in the day. When a day of the week is named after you, you matter.
I'm always fascinated to see who matters on the Internet, because I wandered the Earth before it existed. The Internet likes all kinds of people who seemed half a joke in their heyday to me. I think it's a totally ingrained fetish for pointless contrariness. It's a Howard Zinn world, and whatever you trot out, there must be a cranky alternative we can decide to like instead. That's why the Internet loves Tesla, a weird, mostly useless crank, and hates Edison. The daily Google Doodles are always nobodies that somebody has decided to exalt in place of people who accomplished a lot. I prefer the real deals. I have no interest in a movie about comic book Thor. The original article was interesting enough.
Speaking of original articles, How about Jack Kilby? Who's that you say? Oh, he's not Internet-famous enough to get welfare queens like Elon Musk to name their subsidized cars after him. He just more or less invented the integrated circuit by himself in 1958:
It was in a relatively deserted laboratory at TI's brand new Semiconductor Building where Jack Kilby first hit on the idea of the integrated circuit. In July 1958, when most employees left for the traditional two-week vacation period, Kilby -- as a new employee with no vacation -- stayed to man the shop. What caused Kilby to think along the lines that eventually resulted in the integrated circuit? Like many inventors, he set out to solve a problem. In this case, the problem was called "the tyranny of numbers."
Almost all of the truly useful things in the world are invented by invented by guys like Kilby, not Tony Stark wannabes. They bring lunch to work in a paper bag, wear short sleeve shirts and clip-on ties with their J. C. Penney suits, and have ink stains on their shirt pockets. The Internet's not interested in them. Then again, the Internet isn't all that useful, so it's foolish to think a Facebook world would be interested in a real god, when a comic book god is available.
The Gallivans initially found humor in their odd situation. But after months of deliveries—which turned from fun to creepy—they just want to be left alone.When Kelly and Mike contacted Amazon about the perplexing parcels, the online retailer told them everything had been paid for via gift card; the sender (or senders) remain anonymous. Presumably ruling out family or friends who might be playing some kind of sick joke on the Acton pair, experts suspect the Gallivans are the victims of a scam.
The Gallivans don't sound like Internet people. The Free Sh*t Army wouldn't have asked for the packages to be stopped.
Prices were already rising in Hungary after the war because production capacity fell due to the destruction. With no tax base to rely upon, the Hungarian government decided to stimulate the economy by printing money. It loaned money to banks at low rates who then loaned the money to companies. The government hired workers directly, they provided loans to consumers, and they gave money to people. The government literally flooded the country with money to get the economy going again.
It's interesting that post-WWII Hungary didn't bother to collect taxes, because the money was devaluing so fast. They just printed some more and spent it. Stop me when I say something that sounds unfamiliar.
Google was guilty. The European Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, made that brutally clear. “Google abused its market dominance,” Vestager declared as she announced her judgement in Brussels on June 27, 2017. She handed Google a £2.1 billion fine – the largest antitrust penalty ever handed to a single company, and gave it 90 days to change its ways.
I'm a grown man, more or less. Like I said, I don't have heroes, or go to comic book movies looking for them. But Adam and Shivaun will do in a pinch if you put a gun to my head. Slaying dragons that desolate the landscape and sleep on mountains of gold still cuts some ice with me.
So play to each platform’s strengths. Recruiters don’t want you to treat LinkedIn like Twitter and share your every thought. But don’t treat Twitter like LinkedIn, either! While you’ll want to avoid tweeting anything offensive or crude, Lopez encourages job seekers to be themselves. If you’re showing more attitude on the one social network, just make sure you’re making up the difference in aptitude on the other.
The Soviet Union used to announce they were lightening up every once in a while. Perestroika, tovarish! After a few months of letting you vent your spleen at the party meetings, they'd say, "Never mind," and anyone who opened their yap would be mining gold in Siberia with their bare hands for twenty years. Giving a recruiter access to your social media accounts is about the same idea.
Emerging evidence suggests that living near major roads might adversely affect cognition. However, little is known about its relationship with the incidence of dementia, Parkinson's disease, and multiple sclerosis. We aimed to investigate the association between residential proximity to major roadways and the incidence of these three neurological diseases in Ontario, Canada.
I'm so old I remember when "scientists" warned us that living near power lines would give us cancer, but major roads giving us dementia is almost as good. Of course since next-to-no-one lives far away from power lines or major roads, your study can be bent, folded, or mutilated to suit any agenda.
Cybersecurity experts call it “cryptojacking” — hijacking computers to produce digital currency, like Bitcoin, Litecoin and Monero that have been in the news. Infected networks or computers perform double duty, conducting normal functions (perhaps a bit more slowly) while also obeying remote commands to do calculations that generate digital currency for the criminals, or wrongdoers, who may be company insiders.
Yeah, but at least your computer is finally doing something productive. I say leave it.
On Monday, Amazon reportedly began a series of rare layoffs at its headquarters in Seattle, cutting several hundred corporate employees. But this week, something quite different is happening at the company’s warehouses and customer-service centers across the country: Amazon will politely ask its “associates”—full-time and part-time hourly employees—if they’d prefer to quit. And if they do, Amazon will pay them as much as $5,000 for walking out the door.
For $2,500 I'll promise to never work there in the first place.
When it comes to pricing, Chipotle tried to woo customers back after
its setback over food safety with low prices and promotions, but this
did not translate into a longer-term benefit. The restaurant chain needs
to try something better and permanent which it might under the new
leadership.There are speculations that additions to the menu could include breakfast options and alcohol.
Breakfast options and alcohol? That's a redundancy at my house.
This was Dark Valentine, a special event held February 9 and 10 to transform Cupid’s favorite holiday into a far more sinister and gruesome occasion. Hollywood discovered some time ago that there’s no reason to restrict horror movie releases to October, and haunters are learning the very same lesson. “There’s an audience for blood and guts all year round,” says Larry Kirchner, owner of The Darkness, celebrating its 25th year of terrifying the good people of St. Louis. The Darkness offered up Yuletide scares last December and hosted a “Scream Break” in March, but My Bloody Valentine’s is the Missouri haunt’s first foray into seasonal romance.
I think there are still four or five days on the Millennial's calendar that aren't Halloween, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Currently, SNAP benefits are delivered in the form of cash added to an electronic benefit-transfer (E.B.T.) card, and they’re spendable at almost any store that sells food. The Department of Agriculture wants to dock about half of that money and replace it with an “America’s Harvest box,” consisting of “100 percent U.S.-grown and produced food.” Not freshly harvested fruits and vegetables or meat, mind you, but processed “American” food in cans, tins, and jars.
What's for dinner tonight, mom? Cling peaches in heavy syrup, creamed corn, and cranberry sauce with indentations from the can. You know, same as last night.
Hello everybody. Roger de Hauteville here, King of Sicily. Bird Dog has asked me to sit in for him while he's away at a retreat. It's not exactly summer camp. He's in a 12-step program for toxic masculinity. He's been leaving puddles of masculinity on the floor here and there, and his minders have decided it's got to stop. So you're stuck with me again. I was available because I'm on a forced hiatus from my job, too. Damn HR harpy got me in hot water with the shareholders. She secretly recorded a marketing meeting I called. Total entrapment, in my estimation. I'll let you be the judge:
HR Harpy: Roger, I think we should stop testing our products on animals.
Roger de H: I don't.
HR Harpy: It's cruel.
Roger de H: Hey lady, it's not like I invented the practice. Cosmetics companies have been doing it for years.
HR Harpy: Yeah, but we make hammers.
See? This is why American industry is falling behind the rest of the world. No respect for old fashioned quality control.
A Denny's wedding ceremony typically costs $199, and includes extra frills like use of the photo booth, a Wedding Pancake Puppies Cake, two wedding t-shirts, and a coupon for two Grand Slams on your next visit to Denny's.
Many said they were left confused and reeling and weren’t even aware that Snapchat was planning an overhaul, they simply woke up one day to find the app looked completely different. Hundreds if not thousands of teens lost their streaks, some of which had been maintained for hundreds of days, because they were confused at how to send snaps using the new interface.
For the sane reader who's avoided Snapchat's charms, a "Streak" is an endless stream of pointless, ephemeral messages sent between two instant message accounts. They give you a little gold star if you keep it going for 3+ days. Pavlov was born too soon, I guess.
Let’s start with 1000 archers with a light bow in their hands, drawing from thirty to fifty pounds. A recent post on American Indian archery established that a champion archer could get eight arrows off before one hit the ground. Even if we reduce this to a more conservative five, a thousand archers could get 5000 arrows in the air over fifteen seconds.
Remember, if you want to test this theory, don't test it on animals if the HR lady is looking.
On a credit card, this contingency isn’t such a big deal. It’s applied against your credit line. The car rental agency just verifies that you could charge up to the amount that’s required. It doesn’t charge the whole amount at once. With a debit card, they freeze the total amount they need to cover any potential charges. That means your money will be held in your debit card account until the transaction is complete.
I didn't think this was possible. Apparently, you can rent a car with cash, too. The smart traveler always relies on carjacking only as a last resort.
After debating whether or not they felt comfortable stepping foot in a paranoid Communist state with a record of human rights abuses, Will and Sam decided that being the first foreigners to hit the slopes after they were opened to non-Koreans was too good an opportunity to pass up.
They wouldn't have debated an invitation to golf with Donald Trump.
1753 saw the arrival of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke’s Marriage Act. This was seen to be a way of banning clandestine marriages once and for all. Parental consent was required for any person wishing to marry below the age of consent, i.e. 21. The marriage had to be conducted in church during the day by a clergyman, banns had to be read or a license issued. Falsification or errors made could result in the marriage being nullified.
Now all you have to do to nullify your marriage is let your Snapchat Streak lapse.
Then, in October of that year, following Russia's space launch of Sputnik I, the American scientific community came under considerable pressure to achieve a major technological accomplishment of its own. At the University of California's Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, scientists responded by recommending to the AEC that earth excavation offered the "highest probability of early beneficial success" in the Plowshare Program. Actively supporting the proposal, Dr. Edward Teller, 'father of the hydrogen bomb' and director of the Radiation Laboratory, suggested that the AEC detonate a 2.4 megaton atomic device on the northwest coast of Alaska in the region of Cape Thompson. Such an explosion would create a deep water hole to be used as a harbor for the eventual shipment of coal, oil, and other non-renewable resources thought to exist along this part of the coast.
Mr. President, we must not allow a radioactive harbor gap!
The company was formed in 2002 for creating crowd scenes for the Hollywood movie Sea Biscuit. Their inflatable crowd have since appeared in over 80 feature films including many memorable ones like The King’s Speech, Frost/Nixon, American Gangster, Spiderman 3 and many more. These plastic men and women were featured in many TV shows and commercials as well.
Do they have styrofoam classical columns for rent, too? Those things work great. You can pay for them with untraceable foreign credit card payments, too.
US scientists have discovered a new family of antibiotics in soil samples.The natural compounds could be used to combat hard-to-treat infections, the team at Rockefeller University hopes. Tests show the compounds, called malacidins, annihilate several bacterial diseases that have become resistant to most existing antibiotics, including the superbug MRSA.
Further down the page there's a similar headline: New Macrobiotic family discovered in Whole Foods.
The discovery of a burial containing 8,000-year-old battered human skulls, including two that still have pointed wooden stakes through them, has left archaeologists baffled, according to a new study from Sweden. It's hard to make heads or tails of the finding: During the Stone Age, the grave would have sat at the bottom of a small lake, meaning that the skulls would have been placed underwater. Moreover, of the remains of at least 11 adults placed on top of the grave, only one had a jawbone, the researchers said.
It's probably part of an ancient tradition that continues to this day. You make a pilgrimage to the shrine that holds the triptych with the sacred runes of plenty scrawled all over it. There are fantastic, indecipherable signs everywhere. You beg the totem for succor, and then while you're fumbling for a sacrificial offering, a disembodied, sonorous, god-like voice booms: Do you want fries with that?
"Amazon is thinking of offering a checking account. For a fee of $5-10 a month, the service will include cell phone damage protection, ID theft protection, roadside assistance, travel insurance and product discounts." Forty-six percent of “Old Millennials” (ages 31-38) and 37 percent of “Young Millennials” (ages 22-30) say they would open that account... When the same responders were asked about a free checking account from Amazon, without the bundled services, interest in opening the account is lower.
That's nothing. Over 70 percent of Gen X-ers said they'd be willing to have their heads pounded onto a stake in a Swedish lakebottom for six months of free Netflix.
The simple answer to why barns are painted red is because red paint is cheap. The cheapest paint there is, in fact. But the reason it’s so cheap? Well, that’s the interesting part. Red ochre—Fe2O3—is a simple compound of iron and oxygen that absorbs yellow, green and blue light and appears red. It’s what makes red paint red.
Nope. Dairy barns were painted white -- with lead paint --to indicate purity. Barns are painted all colors, but most red ones were covered with red lead primer. Lead oxide, linseed oil, turpentine and Japan drier. Most outbuildings didn't merit paint, and red lead primer was the cheapest stuff you could buy. Cary Grant learned not to mix white lead primer with red lead primer in Operation Petticoat.
Lego abruptly removed its chief executive Bali Padda after just eight months on Thursday, replacing the 61-year-old Briton with a younger Danish industrialist in a battle to become the world's biggest toymaker.The Danish company said it had appointed Niels B. Christiansen, 51, who joins Lego after nine years as CEO of Danfoss where by focusing on digitalization he increased sales and turned the firm into a global leader in energy efficiency.
Consider your passion: The place of passion in doing whatever you want to do cannot be overemphasized. When you have a passion for whatever it is you are doing, it will push you when the going gets tough. There is no need sugar coating it and making it look like it would all go smoothly. There is nothing worth having that doesn’t face challenges. But when one is faced with challenges, the motivation is usually the passion they have. So you might want to consider something you have a passion for.
I was fired by Google this past Monday for a document that I wrote and circulated internally raising questions about cultural taboos and how they cloud our thinking about gender diversity at the company and in the wider tech sector.
Look at the picture. It's like these dweebs share one, big closet to go with their one, big opinion.
Nearly 50 years after the culmination of the first major race to the moon, in which the United States and the Soviet Union spent fantastic amounts of public money in a bid to land the first humans on the lunar surface, an intriguing new race to our nearest neighbor in space is unfolding—this one largely involving private capital and dramatically lower costs.
Listen, poindexters. We stopped going to the moon because there's nothing to do there. It was a stunt, to outdo the Soviet Union.
One Swedish journalist aboard the submarine who was reportedly put ashore before the boat ran into trouble has not yet been accounted for, according to Danish newspaper Berlingske. Bloomberg News reported that Madsen told a local TV station about the sinking, revealing that a problem with a ballast tank caused the crowdfunded vessel to sink.
"Crowdfunded vessel." Heh. Have you tried my Indiegogo vaccines? They're free-range.
Asked if Benchmark’s own investors might have the stomach to sue Benchmark, this person jokes that “every VC today could probably be sued by [their own institutional investors]” for their overly relaxed approached in dealing with startups. Either way, he believes that Benchmark’s lawsuit — which he calls a “misstep” — is “a completely obvious outcome of all this excess and absurdity of the recent years. It’s like when you’re a parent and you spoil your kid and he turns out not to be what you hoped. Are you going to love him or cut him off?”
This accurate description of recent investor/business relationships tells you all you need to know about the last 10 years.
That's what some Twitter users, including actor and former Barack Obama aide Kal Penn, are demanding, after President Trump tweeted Friday morning that U.S. “military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely.”
His motorcade doesn't obey the speed limit. They should revoke his driver's license, too.
Of course you still need a benchmark for floating-rate loans -- and for trillions of dollars of derivatives -- and it's not exactly clear what competing "transaction-based benchmarks" will win out. Nor is it clear how complicated it will be to transition all of those trillions of dollars of derivatives to the new benchmark. It would be easier if they'd just rebrand the new benchmark "Libor," and report it in the same places as the old Libor: Then contracts that refer to "Libor" could keep referring to "Libor." It would just be a different Libor.
The series, which begins on Sunday, takes as its jumping-off point the same book that was the basis for the 1995 movie starring John Travolta and Gene Hackman. But be advised that a title card here reads, “Based in part on the novel by Elmore Leonard,” and “in part” really ought to be highlighted somehow. This is a different story with different and reimagined characters; a point-by-point comparison of film and TV show, or TV show and novel, is even more irrelevant for “Get Shorty” than it usually is for such adaptations.
Get Shorty was a perfect movie. Get Shorty was a passable book. Get Shorty will be a terrible TV show.
Today’s fake-industry leader is Tesla, the electric car developed by subsidy entrepreneur Elon Musk, who also heads SolarCity and SpaceX, other government darlings. Musk’s genius is primarily in the subsidy-seeking realm — by 2015, U.S. governments alone had given his companies US$5 billion through direct grants, tax breaks, cut-rate loans, cashable environmental credits, tax credits and rebates to buyers of his products. Counting subsidies from Canada and Europe, the government bankroll could be double that.
This becomes a problem when the government changes hands, apparently.
Have a great Saturday, everyone! Maybe paint your barn red, and then paint the town red.
Hi everybody. It's Friday. Light the smoking lamp early. Run the cocktail flag up the mizzen before you're under sail. It's noontime somewhere. Bust out the tonsil polish while the sun rides high. Bunk off. Take a mental health day. Slack. Don't kill the job. Make up your mind to procrastinate. Indole.
The right calls the kind of people who went after Damore by the derogative term “Social Justice Warriors” (SJWs). SJWs hold progressive views on diversity and identify politics and, supposedly, find virtue in harming those with heretical beliefs. Many on the right fear SJWs.
If you've always wondered what a conservative is, and you work in hi-tech, the nice man will tell you in fourth-grade syntax about this rare but terrifying animal.
Education: Of the 90 interventions evaluated in RCTs commissioned by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) since 2002, approximately 90% were found to have weak or no positive effects.
All of them work just fine, thank you -- if you're running them. Duh.
[Beethoven’s] talent amazed me. However, unfortunately, he is an utterly untamed personality, who is not altogether in the wrong if he finds the world detestable, but he thereby does not make it more enjoyable either for himself or others.
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are all retooling their businesses around the belief that AI and machine learning are the future of the tech industry. IBM is in a more vulnerable position than all those companies. Even though IBM was an AI pioneer it has let its lead slip and damaged its reputation with overhyped marketing. There’s a rising sentiment in from tech and finance experts that, for all the idealism, Watson just can’t deliver on its promises.
IBM should get with the times and appoint a female CEO to straighten out this mess. Oh.
Two airlines have dipped their wings into the waters of two-way texting. Hawaiian Holdings Inc.’s Hawaiian Airlines is adding the feature while JetBlue Airways Corp. took a stake in a software startup that will allow its call center staff to start texting customers in the coming months.
Listen, iPhone drones. There's only one way to tell your airline you hate it. It has a steering wheel.
Bestiary texts offer animal-lore as a source of allegorical lessons for moral spiritual guidance. The earliest bestiary manuscripts date to the beginning of the 12th century. They were made throughout North-Western Europe, but the genre flourished most in England, eventually declining in popularity in the late 13th and 14th centuries.
I and Pangur Ban my cat, 'tis a like task we are at; hunting mice is his delight, hunting words I sit all night...
Much of the software that processes the transactions is decades old, and the more modern bits are written by banks, credit card companies, and financial middlemen, none of whom are exactly winning hackathons for elegant coding. In 2010, Patrick and John Collison, brothers from rural Ireland, began to debug this process. Their company, Stripe Inc., built software that businesses could plug into websites and apps to instantly connect with credit card and banking systems and receive payments.
An Irishman, late for an appointment, prays, "Lord, if you give me a parking space, I'll give up Guinness and go to Mass every Sunday." A parking space immediately opens up. The Irishman sticks his head out the window, looks up, and says, "Never mind, I found one."
Of nearly 230 North American chemical, metals and mining, paper, forest products and packaging companies, nearly a quarter are within two notches of the investment-grade/speculative-grade border as of mid-year, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to panic. Donovan writes that the sector should remains strong at least through 2018m, and he doesn’t expect any “crossings’ before 2019.
Debts backed by physical assets are so 20th Century.
In May, the expectation was that between 40 to 60 restaurants would be shuttered in fiscal 2017. No list of the affected locations has been released. Applebee’s says the expected closures will be based on several criteria, including franchisee profitability, operational results and meeting brand quality standards.
As long as Flinger's and Chotchkie's stay open, I don't care. You want to come over and watch Kung Fu?
The declaration could help unlock more support and resources to address the drug overdose epidemic, such as additional funding and expanded access to various forms of treatment, and it gives the government more flexibility in waiving rules and restrictions to expedite action.
Perhaps we should declare war on it. You know, a war on drugs.
The man - who has not been identified - was found dead around 11am when police finally stormed the home. His death ended an hours long standoff that started late Wednesday, when he showed up drunk at the 9,000-square-foot home where his estranged girlfriend lives and the two got into a fight.
It's unclear to me where Kevin Bacon fits into this.
Fed Chair Janet Yellen told lawmakers last month that "some special factors" were partly responsible for the low inflation readings. Inflation, which has remained below the U.S. central bank's 2 percent target for five years, is being watched for clues on the timing of the next interest rate increase.
Janet Yellen can't even cause inflation right. Where's Arthur F. Burns when you need him?
I forget the exact quote. I forgot who said it, too. I forget what it has to do with Thursday morning links, as well. Anyway, here goes: Good manners may require me to politely listen to you, but I am under no obligation to actually believe that your child is smart and your wife is good looking.
All the guy at Google did was mention that in a private moment, he has entertained the thought that Google's wife has bingo wings and halitosis, and Google's kid eats library paste. Some how or another, it merits a sacking, followed by the kind of attention that Leo Tolstoy used to get in Russia. I don't get it.
I hereby propose that Google's original, stupid, gilt-edged lie of a motto, Don't Be Evil, be changed to a more up-to-date, honest version: Don't Be Male. Works for me. So does Start Page.
Sundar Pichai, said portions of Damore’s 10-page memo “violate our code of conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes” despite saying in the same memo that Google employees shouldn't be afraid of speaking their minds.
For a man of systematic intelligence, Schmidt’s politics—such as I could hear from our discussion—were surprisingly conventional, even banal. He grasped structural relationships quickly, but struggled to verbalize many of them, often shoehorning geopolitical subtleties into Silicon Valley marketese or the ossified State Department microlanguage of his companions.9 He was at his best when he was speaking (perhaps without realizing it) as an engineer, breaking down complexities into their orthogonal components.
That's a lot of words to call a guy a conniving jerk.
The numbers are big. Uber has titles to nearly 40,000 vehicles through Xchange Leasing. It now has to get the cars back from its drivers and sell them in the wholesale market. It wants to do most of this by year-end. If Uber loses $9,000 per car on average on these 40,000 cars, it will add another $360 million in losses on top of the losses it has already booked.
The last eight years of "recovery" consisted entirely of lending money to dorks who can't count, but understand a little javascript. A hard rain's gonna fall eventually.
Europe is the continent with the fewest people willing to fight a war for their country. Globally, an average of 61% of respondents in 64 countries said they would. Morocco (94%), Fiji (94%), Pakistan (89%), Vietnam (89%) and Bangladesh (86%) had the highest percentage willing to fight.
I remember some inter-war poll of Oxford students who claimed they wouldn't fight for their country, either, egged on by Bloomsbury pansies. They all climbed into Spitfires when the time came. Talk is cheap, coming and going.
At first, you begin to wonder why no one in Russia ever sees danger coming. To a casual American observer, the majority of these crashes seem to happen in slow motion. You can see the cars languidly drifting into the wrong lane from a half-a-mile away. Yet somehow, no one in Russia ever notices anything.
If you've never experienced the wonder of Russian dashcam video, you're in for a treat.
On The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour -- which began as a summer replacement for The Smothers Brothers Show and featured Steve Martin and Rob Reiner as writers and “Gentle on My Mind” as its theme song -- the clean-cut Campbell engaged in comedy skits when he wasn’t performing and featured many of his friends as musical guests, including The Monkees, Neil Diamond, Linda Ronstadt, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings.
I remember that show. That was a good show. Good show all around, Glen, and RIP
Even before the race is done, organizers are reflecting on a separate challenge: how to get more women to take part in the event next year, and how to keep them in the race longer. This year was the first time that women entered as solo competitors, and neither of the two female riders, both accomplished endurance athletes, got through half of the 14 stages.
Joe Stalin knew how to get women to undertake a grueling trek halfway across Russia to Siberia, whether they wanted to or not. I guess the NYT still misses the guy.
The company is hoping to offer a wide range of videos through Watch, including live shows that feature hosts responding in real-time to users' questions and live events like Major League Baseball games. Facebook is also hoping to attract more traditional shows, like those you might see on cable or broadcast TV.
Net neutrality my keister. I wonder what the FCC fine for ten billion wardrobe malfunctions would be if cable and internet really got the same treatment.
Marijuana users had a higher risk of dying from hypertension. Compared to non-users, marijuana users had a 3.42-times higher risk of death from hypertension and a 1.04 greater risk for each year of use. There was no association between marijuana use and death from heart disease or cerebrovascular disease.
Fighting over the last Funyun is bound to send your diastolic through the roof.
After announcing intentions a year ago to produce a heavy-duty electric truck, Musk tweeted in April that the semi-truck would be revealed in September, and repeated that commitment at the company's annual shareholder meeting in June, but he has never mentioned any autonomous-driving capabilities.Tesla has been a leader in developing self-driving technology for its luxury cars, including the lower-priced Model 3, which it is beginning to manufacture.
Someone should mention to little sooper genius boy that we already have self-driving trucks. They're called rail cars.
When plaintiff Cheryl Fillekes joined the case in 2015, she claimed that because of her age, Mountain View-based Google did not hire her for an engineering position for which she was qualified, which she alleges violates the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act. In court documents, Fillelkes claimed that a recruiter told her she needed to put her dates of graduation on her resume so the company could view how old she was.
That’s what the Auralnauts discovered earlier this summer when they received word that Warner/Chappell—the global music publishing arm of Warner Music Group—had filed a monetization claim on their “Star Wars Minus Williams” video through YouTube's Content ID System. That’s right: The copyright holder was claiming ownership of something that wasn’t there.
In complex matters like these, it's much simpler to assume everyone involved, including the author of the article, is a jerk, and deserves no sympathy. Saves time and aggravation.
Well, there's the links. Have a great Thursday. And don't worry, Maggie's Farm waitstaff would never flirt with you to get a better tip. We might rifle through your belongings if you don't keep an eye on them, though.
A friend sent along this video from a recital for a music store in Los Angeles. Holy cow she's only ten years old. Double-plus good: That's her mother accompanying her on the piano. Cool choice of music, too. "Sicilienne" by Maria Teresia von Paradis. She was a blind musician and composer who had Salieri for a teacher and Mozart for a friend.
I don't know about you, but when I was ten years old, I was still eating earthworms I found in the playground, and my mother only played the radio. There's some hope for the human race yet.
USA Today said in a phone call on Sunday, Mr Trump and Moon Jae-in, his South Korean counterpart, “affirmed that North Korea poses a grave and growing direct threat to the United States, South Korea and Japan, as well as to most countries around the world”."
Little Kimmie better not work outside in the yard too often. Shame if something fell on him.
Scientists have adapted the ice cream by injecting it with polyphenol liquid extracted from strawberries. Polyphenol liquid has properties to make it difficult for water and oil to separate,” Tomihisa Ota, a professor at Kanazawa University, was quoted as saying.
Mmm. Polyphenols. If I recall my chemistry correctly (I bet I don't), Polyphenols are called "anti-nutrients." I don't go out of my way to eat anti-nutrients.
Across southern Europe, from the choked boulevards of Gaudi's Barcelona to the swarms of cruise liners disgorging passengers into Croatia's mediaeval Dubrovnik, residents are complaining that a sharp rise in tourism is making life intolerable. The backlash has sparked concerns for one of the region's biggest economic drivers and prompted authorities to act.
It appears that everyone in Europe is a French waiter now.
As wrangles over the peace treaty to officially end the war were reaching a climax in Paris, the German commander, Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, believed that his ships were about to be seized as spoils of war and divided up between the victorious Allies. He felt duty-bound not to let that happen. Von Reuter's flagship, Emden, sent out the seemingly innocuous message - "Paragraph Eleven; confirm". It was a code ordering his men to scuttle their own ships.
If you scuttle your ship, do you have to keep up the loan payments? I'm asking for a friend.
The sighting is the first living record in the area since about 1982 and the first confirmed record since 1993, when a skull was found. The pine marten arrived in Britain after the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. They made their home in the woods that covered the country and at one point were the second commonest carnivore, with an estimated population of 147,000.
The digitization project currently focuses on discs that are less likely to be commercially available--or available at all in digital form--particularly focusing on underrepresented artists and genres. Digitization will make this less commonly available music accessible to researchers in a format where it can be manipulated and studied without harming the physical artifacts.
Neato. I wonder if they have a copy of Good Old Shoe?
The company has spent more than six years planning and building Apple Park to precise specifications. From a 100,000-square-foot fitness and wellness center, to meticulously designed fire exit signs, the company spared no expense in getting the details right — except, perhaps, when it comes to employee workspaces.
The national preference for cash, then, seems to be the flip side of aversion to debt, which, in turn, can be interpreted as a sign of deep-seated doubt about the future. (German businesspeople are also notorious for their pessimism about the future.) And fear of the future, of course, is rooted in the past.
I would have answered, "Because, unlike Greeks, they have some."
CEO Bob Iger told CNBC's Julia Boorstin Disney had a "good relationship" with Netflix, but decided to exercise an option to move its content off the platform. Movies to be removed include Disney as well as Pixar's titles, according to Iger. Netflix said Disney movies will be available through the end of 2018 on its platform. Marvel TV shows will remain.
I love the term "cord cutters." People who used to pay one cable TV bill and a small internet bill will now pay seventeen streaming service bills and a giant internet bill for bandwidth. You know, to save aggravation and money.
‘There is but one way to defend Samoa,’ he lectured them. ‘Hear it before it is too late. It is to make roads, and gardens, and care for your trees, and, in one word, to occupy and use your country … If you do not others will.’
Bannon’s basic argument, as he has outlined it to people who’ve spoken with him, is that Facebook and Google have become effectively a necessity in contemporary life. Indeed, there may be something about an online social network or a search engine that lends itself to becoming a natural monopoly, much like a cable company, a water and sewer system, or a railroad.
I think they misunderstood him. I think he was just referring to hanging them all on telephone poles.
"Resting and vesting" is when an employee, typically an engineer, has an easy workload (if any job responsibilities at all) and hangs out on the company's payroll collecting full pay and stock. Stock is often the bigger chunk of total compensation for a senior engineer than salary. Once the engineer was in rest-and-vest mode, this person spent the days attending tech conferences, working on pet coding projects, networking with friends, and planning the next career move.
Harrumph. Back in my day, sonny, we just married the boss's daughter.
Well, there are the links for today. I hope you're all ready for another grueling day of resting and vesting, or being henpecked, or maybe even working if you can't avoid it.
The project attracted Blanchett and Sorkin two years ago. “Lucy and Desi” will center on Ball’s 20-year marriage to Desi Arnaz. She eloped with the Cuban bandleader in 1940, and the two created the massively successful sitcom “I Love Lucy” in 1951 through their Desilu Productions. She won four Emmys for the role.
Lucille Ball? That Lucille Ball? Cate Blanchett is pretty enough to play Ethel Mertz. Maybe
The fish, a variety of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar), is engineered to grow faster than its non-genetically modified counterpart, reaching market size in roughly half the time — about 18 months. AquaBounty sold its first commercial batch at market price: US$5.30 per pound ($11.70 per kilogram), says Ron Stotish, the company’s chief executive. He would not disclose who bought it.
UBS estimates the industry could save $35 billion and pass the savings along to passengers through lower fares if airlines could operate pilotless planes. The technology to do so could be developed by 2025, according to the report.
"And pass the savings along to passengers." Pull the other one. It has bells on
Richard and Tatu argues that differences in national income are correlated with differences in the average national intelligence quotient (IQ). They further argue that differences in average national IQs constitute one important factor, but not the only one, contributing to differences in national wealth and rates of economic growth.
No one brings the potato salad to the Mensa meetings in Equatorial Guinea
So email doesn't necessarily support social patterns, group patterns, although it can. Ditto a weblog. If I'm Glenn Reynolds, and I'm publishing something with Comments Off and reaching a million users a month, that's really broadcast. It's interesting that I can do it as a single individual, but the pattern is closer to MSNBC than it is to a conversation.
Poor Glenn. What did he ever do to this guy to get compared to MSNBC? Shoot his dog?
This video compilation is awesome. The awesome screen capture on this awesome video is awesome, but not nearly as awesome as the awesome video clip it’s so awesomely standing in for.
I remember the good old days when we called it "gnarly" instead of "awesome"
If you’re heading east on the 105 freeway to go from LAX to Pasadena, it’s just a few miles to the Beach Boys Historic Landmark in Hawthorne, California. It’s near the freeway at 3701 W. 119th Street. The monument marks the site of the childhood home of Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson, the core members of the Beach Boys.
I remember the good old days when surfing was gnarly
France is world famous for its nudist beaches and its topless sunbathers but there are some rules or customs you need to abide by when it comes to taking your clothes off this summer. Here's what you need to know about dropping your top (or bottoms) on French beaches.
I think I'm supposed to warn you there's some naked people if you follow the hyperlink. The way the internet is going, pretty soon we'll have to warn you when there aren't naked people at the link
Swedish-Turkish writer Hamza Yalcin, 59, was arrested while holidaying in Spain, after Turkey accused him of plotting terror acts against the country, according to reports.
You have to admit, that headline is right up there with Headless Body In Topless Bar.
The ordinances (called visitationszoner in Danish) allow police to stop anyone within a predetermined area and search them for weapons without having probable cause. Copenhagen Police’s zone, set up last month, covered areas of Nørrebro, Husum, Brønshøj and Tingbjerg, where several shootings and stabbings have occurred in recent weeks.
Wow. That kind of fascist policing wouldn't fly in an enlightened country like the USA. And shootings and stabbings in Denmark? Must be fake news
The premise is familiar: Six young strangers live in a house—the first one’s located in Tokyo—and interact as relationships form. That’s where comparisons to American reality TV basically end. Terrace House is different from other reality shows in almost every way.
Who could have predicted that Japanese youngsters would be better behaved than Americans?
The results of the research showed that on average German firms had 26 employees per supervisor. In Switzerland this ratio was 13.6 to one, in the UK it was 10.3 to one, and US firms had 7.1 workers for every superior.
Baylor played for the Orioles, Athletics, Angels, Yankees, Red Sox and Twins over a 19-year career. He was an All-Star and the MVP winner with the Angels in 1979, when he led the majors in RBIs and runs and also set career highs in home runs and hits.
Don Baylor was a blast to watch. He'd stand in one batters box and lean over the other one. RIP, big fella
Bird Dog has gone fishing for the week. His Raja Isteri figured his audience would bridle at seven full days without a little touch of Bird Dog in the night, so she kindly sent me a picture of him up to his old angling tricks. Bird Dog isn't much of a fisherman, truth be told. Just between you and me, he jacklights great whites. He even tried a salt lick once, but it didn't work all that well. I'm not sure why. Anyway, as you can see, Bird Dog is just another square old man who wears his shoes when he goes swimming.
The invention suggests employing a super tall chimney to facilitate heat exchange in the atmosphere as a remedy to Global Warming. Calculations show that if we can construct a chimney 5 kilometers (3 mile) tall and 20 meters in diameter out of flexible fabric material. Such Chimney will be sturdy enough to stand upright and withstand side winds. We will need as many 25,000 of such chimneys to stop global warming.
Little-known fact: The best jokes are unintentional
It had been a hectic news day. In one of the shrillest moments in
America’s infamous anti-communism “red scare,” husband and wife Julius
and Ethel Rosenberg were both found guilty of conspiracy to commit
espionage.
Apparently little-known fact to some people: The USSR is no longer operative. We've read their files. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were guilty, guilty, guilty
The report suggests new types of leadership will emerge. Rather than aiming to become a professional manager (“to take expert bricklayers, so to speak, and make them managers of other bricklayers”), top talent would shift to contribute directly to a company’s service or product and communicate directly with each other rather than through managers (they should be”guilds of bricklayers”).
Little-known fact: You can hire bad writers who shotgun quotation marks and parentheses into everything to pretend to be impartially reporting on a newsworthy trend just to get a link back to the company that hired them, because the FTC isn't paying attention to the internet. Yet
Little-known fact: My parents produced an emotionally intelligent machine using nothing but a bottle of Mateus, a Bobby Darin record, and some private school tuition
There is no such thing as EQ. Let me repeat that: "There is NO SUCH THING AS EQ." The idea was popularized by a journalist, Daniel Goleman, not a psychologist. You can't just invent a trait. You have to define it and measure it and distinguish it from other traits and use it to predict the important ways that people vary.
Little-known fact: You can't mention this at Google, either
Have a great Monday, everyone. If you can manage it, you should go fishin'.
Hello again. Roger here. Bird Dog's off to get wormed, or get his nails clipped, or something, so you're stuck with me. I can't do nearly as good a job as Bird Dog when it comes to assembling links for you fine people. My lips get really tired reading all those stories. However, he's started me off on Saturday. It's a smart strategy. Nothing much happens on the weekends, so I can't get into too much trouble. Of course George III is reported to have written "Nothing of importance happened today," in his diary on July 4th, 1776, so maybe I better scan the papers for you just in case. On to the links!
France is nominally secular, but just like Britain and #ourNHS the French have a state religion - its famously strict labour market. Gallic politicians of left and right are cursed the second they touch the subject of reforms but it looks possible that is about to be confounded. President Macron won his landslide victory earlier this year while advocating far-reaching reforms of labour laws, against the protectionist and dirigiste Mme Le Pen. And on Tuesday the Assemblie Nationale voted through a bill allowing the government to fast-track changes to the labour code.
Dirigiste? My French is rusty. She's not that fat, is she?
Thus the authors’ fatuous pronouncement that: “In recognizing the central role that the medical profession can play in reducing firearm injuries, the court’s ruling highlights the opportunity that physicians have to reduce firearm violence.”
Just plug the holes, doc, and mind yer own business.
The new Doctor Who is a woman. “All the cool humans are thrilled,” cooed Mashable; “Pissboys Are Melting Down,” added Dorkly (when did nerds start talking like bitter drag queens?). The Telegraph was slightly more sober and wrote off the whole thing with “Who cares?” It doesn’t matter to the establishment left because we’ve already established that men are exactly the same as women—especially when it comes to fiction. They see nothing wrong with female superheroes and action stars.
You know, you could turn it off. It sounds crazy, I know, but you could. Smart people never looked at it in the first place.
I need a funny quote about Saturday. I have to paste something in here. You fine readers deserve more than just a few links to digital fishwrap. You merit inspiration. You're worthy of something stimulating. The day itself warrants an attaboy.
Quotes about Saturday are thin on the ground, however. It's the day of rest of days. Saturday is for putting on go to hell pants and painting the fence. Mucking out plugged gutters off rickety stepladders. Going to the dump. Wags and deep thinkers alike have given Saturday a pass. The Saturday sojourn of sol across the firmament just doesn't move the apothegmatic meter.
I say no! Saturday must get its due. Let's see what we can find to tickle our Saturday intellect, and send us to the transfer station with a spring in our step:
Most of the time you're too busy to think about it. But every now and then you say, "I work at 'Saturday Night Live,' and that is so cool. -- Tina Fey
No, it isn't.
Satire is what closes on Saturday night. -- George S. Kaufman
See: Fey, Tina.
I'm blessed by the fact I only need five hours of sleep on a daily basis. I do tend to regard Saturday and Sunday as work days. -- David Rubinstein
David strikes me as the kind of person who mentions his SAT scores to everyone he meets, even though he's 54. I don't know about you, but I'm not inspired by this quote. I don't want to add any weekend toil to the good, solid, fourteen hours of work I perform during the week. Let's move on.
Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath. -- Lyndon Johnson
Oh, dear. Old Lyndon Baines wasn't exactly Cicero, was he? I get the impression that this quote is an adulteration of a quote from Lady Bird Johnson, "Lyndon, every man has a need for a Saturday night bath, whether he's president or not."
I enjoy Saturday night racing. -- Dale Earnhardt
Sorry Dale, but by Friday afternoon, I feel as though I've hit a wall.
Wait, that came out wrong. Never mind. Forget the whole thing. Here are the Saturday links. You're on your own for inspiration:
More good dad goodness. Now that I think of it, Saturday is a dad kind of day. I can guarantee that this dad gets comped at Disney five times over. The video is more viral than the doorknob at an Ebola clinic.
A worthy topic, and the article isn't entirely fanciful or stupid. There's no way the surveys aren't skewed to the boneheaded side of the ledger. This fellow seems to think Generation Z are all Bernie supporters, face painters, and sign holders. Not hardly. Let me sum up the generational divide from my personal experience. Millennials have wasted their useful working and reproductive lives with childish agitation and untenable social and work situations. They're already toast if they haven't cashed out their failed startup stock options. Generation Z has learned to be circumspect, won't answer surveys, don't like Millennials, and will make Eisenhower look leftist.
Anecdata: I was in the phone store on Wednesday. I had to choose a phone to go along with my new plan. I said, "Anything but Apple." Clerk said, "Everyone says that now."
By gad that webpage is a nightmare. Self-playing video that follows you around. Sidebar picture of a woman who got her makeup done at a funeral parlor hectoring you to change three sentences on your LinkedIn page to go from dumpster diving to six figures, and Jeff Bezos smiling or having a stroke, I can't tell the difference with him. You have to wade ten paragraphs in to find out anything important:
Those considered out of the labor force declined by 170,000 to 94.8 million while the labor force increased by 361,000 to 160.1 million.
People who have been shut out of the labor market since Nancy Pelosi hove into view are getting jobs again. It makes me happy to hear of it.
Everyone pretends to be angry at the airlines, but it's the TSA they hate, but don't have the nerve to confront. Making people who fight with flight crews and police into celebrities encourages more of that sort of thing. This guy probably thinks he'll be on Oprah next week, sitting next to Gloria Allred, and clutching big checks from the airline and the company that makes Ambien. I have my doubts.
DeVry University has agreed to a $100 million settlement in connection to ads federal officials said misled students about their job and earning prospects.
Oklahoma City Police Department reports show that Whyte and another man were in the living room of an apartment in the 1400 block of NW 16 Street when they began arguing if Star Wars or Star Trek was better. The victim told police he became frustrated and stated "You're just a trick" before walking back to his room.
Surprisingly, the combatants weren't pasty, obese neckbeards wearing trilbys and My Little Pony tee shirts.
The Maggie's Farm editor ate my homework. It does that once out of every five tries or so. It keeps me guessing in the most piquant fashion. The Maggie's Farm computer console is hooked up by a leather strop to the hub of Bird Dog's Farmall, and sometimes, if the humidity is high, the belt slips. Oh well. You'll have to skip my scintillating insights for today, and just read the boring old newspapers:
But aren’t there any supercomputers that don’t require this much energy to run? Indeed there are: The human brain is a great example – its processing power is estimated at about 38 petaflops, about two-fifths of that of TaihuLight. But all it needs to operate is about 20 watts of energy. Watts, not megawatts! And yet it performs tasks that – at least up until now – no machine has ever been able to execute.
Your brain is 2/5ths as powerful as the most powerful computer ever built. It's not your brain's fault you use it to watch pro wrestling and worry about vaccines and autism. You could be doing something useful with it.
This is an instance not of judicial activism, but of judicial populism. It is, albeit in clotted legal language, a pandering to popular, or at least very common, notions of causation, such that where two notable events take place in close temporal proximity, it stands to reason that the first must have caused the second. We are not far from the Azande belief that no death is natural, and each death is caused by malign witchcraft.
Theodore Dalrymple is one of maybe five intelligent persons currently writing for the internet.
The GPS measurements in the Taupo volcanic zone reveal that it is widening east-west at a rate of 6-15 millimetres per year - in other words, the region, overall, is expanding, as we anticipated from our previous geological understanding. But it was surprising to discover that, at least for the past 15 years, a roughly 70-kilometre stretch is undergoing strong horizontal contraction and is also rapidly subsiding, quite the opposite of what one might anticipate.
Real scientists observe things and ask questions. Fake scientists make pronouncements and ask for edicts. This is real science.
In the interview Eno confesses that “Roxy Music was an aberration in my life” and also intriguingly asserts that he has never owned a copy of the Velvet Underground’s third album because he does not want to spoil it by overplaying it. But the most startling portion of the interview comes towards the end, when he describes an illicit art adventure he experienced three years earlier, in 1990, when he decided to pee in Marcel Duchamp’s famous “ready-made” from 1917, a urinal with the title “Fountain” bestowed upon it.
So he stopped his car, pulled out his medium-format camera, and took a few photos using color Fujifilm. Those brilliant greens and pure blues were totally unedited when O’Rear uploaded them to Corbis, a stock photo and image licensing site founded by Bill Gates. A few years later, he got a call from Microsoft asking to use his shot of Sonoma County as the default background for its newest operating system.
How a grape blight resulted in the most famous photograph of all time.
High-end consumers are shifting toward fresher items with fewer processed ingredients while cost-conscious shoppers are buying inexpensive store brands. The makers of staples including Chef Boyardee canned pasta and Hamburger Helper meal kits failed to spot the threat and didn’t innovate in time.
Got that? Hamburger Helper is too hoity toity for poor people now.
Dramatic photos showed helmeted officers battling to keep order after 100,000 protesters poured into the city for their 'Welcome To Hell' protest against the meeting of world leaders. Police say they repeatedly asked a group of demonstrators to remove their masks and hoods but instead officers were hit with bottles and bricks - breaking the window of a riot van.
It's agitprop. Posing. The police pretend to police while the rioters wreck stuff. The world has raised an entire generation of Wild Ones: What are you protesting? What have you got?
The Hawaii Attorney General's Office noted after the ruling that the district court did not address the substance of either party's arguments and instead focused on the procedural question about which court is the appropriate forum to decide the issue.
The nonsensical rulings are over. Not because the judges have gotten religion. They just know they'll be overturned and they'll look like fools. To paraphrase Jennifer Cavalleri, Gorsuch means never having to say you're sorry.
Called the Panda Power Plant, it will be able to produce 3.2 billion kilowatt-hours of solar energy in 25 years, according to the company. That will eliminate approximately million tons of coal that would have been used to produce electricity, reducing carbon emissions by 2.74 million tons.
Goofy projects deserve a goofy design, I guess. If arithmetic isn't your strong suit, coal costs maybe $40 a ton. It cost 55 million dollars to build a solar array to avoid buying 40 million dollars-worth of coal.
She said: "When you use antibiotics to treat infections like a normal sore throat, this mixes with the Neisseria species in your throat and this results in resistance." Thrusting gonorrhoea bacteria into this environment through oral sex can lead to super-gonorrhoea.
Super Gonorrhoea? They'll probably make him into a Marvel superhero in the next edition.
After making contact with the woman, Devine loaded the scooter in his patrol car and gave her a ride home. Vehicles such as Amigos cannot operate on the expressway safely since they are unable to maintain the minimum speed limit of 45 mph. Most mobility scooters cannot travel faster than 5 miles per hour.
It was kind to help her out instead of citing her.
The four teenagers “will not be arraigned for at least six months,” Judge Robert Welsh III said on Wednesday. He agreed to delay the arraignments while the four attend a program for first-time offenders.
First-time offenders? What does that mean? They were all virgins? There's a program? Back in my day my friends just slapped me on the back and said attaboy.
The world is moving strongly into a period of hostile takeovers.
For the purposes of our discussion, a hostile takeover is the subversion of an existing power structure from its current owners without shooting. I'll skip questions of merit. Deserve's got nothing to do with it, according to William Munny, the famous philosopher. Of course that line is a hostile takeover itself, from Lawrence of Arabia:
Lawrence: Tell the politicians to burn their paper now.
Allenby: Fair enough.
Lawrence: Fair? What's fair got to do with it? It's going to happen.
Sexual harassment lawsuits in the tech industry are a minor form of hostile takeover, for instance. Tech businesses were founded on circumventing established laws and customs by simply putting an http in front of your name. It worked for a while. They created nothing. They were hostile takeovers of existing power structures. They ignored laws and customs to get between the customer and the providers of goods and services they desire, as surely as Paulie in Goodfellas did to the restaurant and the patrons. Tech titans don't understand business much. That's why they're in charge of great affairs, but still sitting through TED talks about the productivity gains they'll enjoy by sorting their intellectual crayons by color. Their businesses are now big and established enough to be pillaged in turn, however, and the lady lawyers will have them, easy. They looked at my client funny, your honor. Make her CEO. You wouldn't look at Joe Pesci funny, and he's a walk in the park compared to any given woman in an office setting. I don't care. Uber run by Yahoo management doesn't bother me.
On a larger scale, shooting wars don't accomplish much anymore. Assad fights because he's weak, not because he's strong, for instance. If you order your affairs correctly, opportunities for plunder fall in your lap. People who are fighting are generally proxies of obscure power syndicates. For the most part, the world is a being ruled by syndicates. Gangster states. China is a syndicate. Russia is a syndicate. Their outward forms do not reveal their inner power structure. You simply watch what they do to identify what they're driving at. Russia wants a port on the Black Sea. They will keep the Crimea. That's not fair, say the Ukrainians. Fair? What's fair got to do with it? It's going to happen.
It appears that America is being run by a syndicate. There was a hostile takeover by an outsider who understood a proxy battle. The in crowd is attempting to put humpty dumpty back together again by any means they can muster. Looking for a head for this hydra is a waste of time. They do not need marching orders. They simply understand, as a group, that power is slipping away from them, so they might as well go all in, because if they don't, they'll be on the outside. You know, in the dreaded private sector.
They believe they deserve to run the United States, and signal their merit to rule by a series of categorical blandishments they swap with each other. They're a fraternity without Greek letters on the front. They don't think it's fair that they devoted their lives to the nomenklatura career track, only to have their skillset made superfluous by an outsider.
What's fair got to do with it? It's either going to happen, or it isn't.
The article's author inexpertly tries to flip the script back to: No one went to Trump's inauguration. He's not popular. There's 2500 words of foot stamping, and then a very interesting item I'd missed:
A White House official confirmed on Tuesday that part of Trump's globally televised speech will focus on energy issues, a reference to the Three SeAs Initiative meant to unite a dozen central European countries in a north-south economic alliance that will weaken Russia's regional power.
If that map at the top of this page looks like a nothingburger to you, you're not paying attention. I have found myself, completely by accident, doing business with businesses in three of the green countries, and the Ukraine, too. That's where the action is. Trump knows where the action is. His wife is Slovenian, after all, and she looks like she's still ready for action.
I think it is telling that most psychologists don’t seem to be able to recognize data patterns that are too large to be caused by psychological mechanisms. There are simply no plausible psychological effects that are strong enough to cause the data pattern in the hungry judges study. Implausibility is not a reason to completely dismiss empirical findings, but impossibility is.
Ah, statistics. Did you know that 94.73 percent of statistics are made up on the spot?
An empire like Byzantium does not last for a thousand years without its own share of political intrigue. Here are three accounts of murder told by medieval chroniclers in vivid detail, in which the plot did not go as smoothly as the conspirators hoped, but in end resulted with a new emperor on the throne.
Kathy Griffin and James Comey seen furiously taking notes.
Independent analysts told History the photo appears legitimate and undoctored. Shawn Henry, former executive assistant director for the FBI and an NBC News analyst, has studied the photo and feels confident it shows the famed pilot and her navigator.
Ooh. Independent analysts. I love those. They're better than anonymous sources. Did they prove that Amelia refused to show up for her physical in the Texas Air National Guard, too? I'm asking for a friend. Alright, alright, I'm asking for Dan Rather.
Davila said that plaintiffs could have taken steps to keep their browsing histories private, for example by using the Digital Advertising Alliance’s opt-out tool or using “incognito mode”, and failed to show that Facebook illegally “intercepted” or eavesdropped on their communications. “Facebook’s intrusion could have easily been blocked, but plaintiffs chose not to do so,” said Davila, who dismissed an earlier version of the five-year-old case in October 2015.
"Can" is not le mot juste. Does, and will be allowed to continue to do so, is more like it. The judge's reasoning is piquant: Did you see the way the plaintiff was dressed online? They were asking for it.
Volvo will only offer electrified powertrains in models that it launches starting in 2019, a move that signals its intention to phase out the internal combustion engine from its lineup, the automaker said Wednesday.
Younger people increasingly want more egalitarian relationships in which men and women can both pursue their careers and share household duties. But career pursuits have won the battle for the last decade or so, while starting or growing families has taken a backseat on a mass scale.
I see the kamikaze ethos is alive and well in the land of the rising sun.
“They’re not hard to pick out at the end stage,” Dr. Zabel said. “They have a vacant stare, they have a stumbling gait, their heads are drooping, their ears are down, you can see thick saliva dripping from their mouths. It’s like a true zombie disease.”
I could never figure out if Christopher Plummer was any good. He's been a fixture in movies I like to watch for a long time. He wouldn't get carved into any cinematic Mount Rushmores or anything, but he was always hanging around. He's more important than a That Guy in the movies, but I have trouble picturing people plunking down the shekels because his name was above the fine print on the poster.
He was Kipling and Arthur Wellesley and Rommel to good effect. He flounced around as Commodus pretty well in The Fall of the Roman Empire. The Sound of Music was approximately the most successful movie ever made, so it looks good on a resume, but he was just a bright moon in Julie Andrews' orbit in that one. The Battle of Britain is movie worth rewatching, but he's hardly the star of it. And no one pays any attention to anyone else when Peter Sellers is eating the scenery, so his turn in the Pink Panther series is also a secondary one. He and Cato have to fight it out for second place.
I got the impression he takes himself pretty seriously. Or, perhaps, wants us to take him seriously. That can be deadly. It leads to Charlton Heston trying to do Julius Caesar (shudder). Plummer has also declaims Shakespeare, but only in places where Canadian pigeons act as critics, so I have no idea to what effect. He's Canadian himself, and they ladle awards and titles all over him, but I don't know if that matters. They give statues out at random these days, based on a virtue-signalling order I can't bother to figure out.
So I get this movie Barrymore. It's a more-or-less one-man-play set to celluloid. Plummer is John Barrymore, a famous actor you never heard of if you're under the age of 93. Anyway, it's Barrymore ten minutes before his liver became an insuperable sea anchor. Washed up, bank account hoovered by Hoover and alimony. A man who made a bundle in bad movies, got serious about his work, and became a formidable Shakespearean stage actor. The movie is just Barrymore, wandering an empty stage with a reader offstage to give him cues. He wants to do Richard III, one last time, but he has to prove to some backers that he can still find the lines in the fog of his alcoholism. He still needs the work, every which way.
So Plummer plays Barrymore, a man born to a stage family, who works in Hollywood for dough and entree to the high life, but who wants to be taken seriously. Plummer has a chair or two, a drinks cart, a rack of costumes, and a basket of swords and flyswatters to work with, and a man in the canyon of the curtains to yell something back when he yells LINE! That's it. Plummer has to conjure up a man, bigger than life, then make him small, and somehow resurrect the greatness in fits and starts. He has to cook envy and pity for the audience on a hobo stove while they wait.
Identity thieves don't honor HIPAA rules? And an obese clerk with Mary Tyler Moore clothes and Post-It notes all over her monitor isn't good at safeguarding your medical records? I'm shocked. This is my shocked face.
I have no desire to mock our British brethren on Independence Day. They are required by their circumstances to live on a pile of rocks and peat in the North Atlantic. We got the amber waves of grain. No sense rubbing it in. I'm not sure they'd acknowledge the slight. I imagine the reaction in Old Blighty at the occasion of the original Brexit was a shrug. The who, with the what now, where, has declared independence? Does that mean Lord Cornwallis will be back for the season in London? Jolly good!
The very idea that the United States would hold a grudge against England over the War of Independence seems odd to the modern American. There are plenty of European countries in line for mockery before we skip on down to the Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Scots-Irish-Welsh-Cornish-Manx-Chav conglomerate. Personally, I'd heap derision on, oh, I don't know -- Luxembourg -- before I'd mention Merry Olde. I mean, honestly, Luxembourg is a zip code, not a country. Their navy is a joke. Britain's navy has never been a joke. England expects that every man will do his duty, and they know how to get it out of him. In Luxembourg, mentioning Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash just means that Claus von Bulow is invited to your cocktail party.
Canada burned down the White House back in the day. Forgive and forget, I say. England shot Congreve rockets at Andrew Jackson. Water under the bridge, if you ask me. The Welsh may be swearing at us, but there's no way to tell by listening to them, so it's pointless to take offense. Australians do punch Americans with amazing regularity. But they punch everybody, so nobody takes umbrage. The United States is celebrating its 241st birthday today, and in the spirit of a guy who landed on his feet, I hereby invite the nation-state version of our crazy ex-wives, ne'er-do-well brothers in law, and illegitimate children to the barbecue. Happy Independence Day to one and all!
Watch a hyperlapse of the world's oldest commissioned warship the USS Constitution "Old Ironsides" entering dry dock for a planned multi-year restoration. The critical restoration work will allow her to continue her mission for years to come.
The USS Constitution is interesting as all get-out. It's made more interesting by the fact that it's basically a Ship of Theseus at this point. The United States is a Ship of Theseus. All the parts have been replaced a few times, but it's still basically the same thing.
Using a combination of traditional and modern tools and techniques in keeping with the ship’s original construction, Mystic Seaport’s shipwrights are helping to preserve the art of shipbuilding.
I've been on that boat. It's basically a studio apartment with wood paneling you can drown in. People used to be brave.
The “legendary” Moshulu is indeed the world’s oldest and largest square rigged sailing vessel still afloat. She is in fact the one and only restaurant venue on a Tall Ship today in the World. Built by William Hamilton & Co., Port of Glasgow, Scotland in 1904 for the G.J.H Siemers Co. of Hamburg, Germany as the four-masted barque Kurt. This “state-of-the-art” sailing ship was the finest and latest of man’s achievement in the world’s shipbuilding industry for the construction of bulk or packaged cargo sailing ships.
All male humans know the Moshulu is the boat packed with immigrants that cruises past the Statue of Liberty in The Godfather Part II. We also know that Han shot first. We don't know much else.
The U.S.S. Massachusetts was the worst battleship ever made. That has a lot to do with why it has spent the last 95 years rusting on the seafloor just outside the mouth of Pensacola Bay. Today, the ship is an Underwater Archaeological Preserve managed by the state of Florida. The rusting hulk is considered the oldest battleship still in existence. Scuba diving among the fish swarming over the steam-era wreck provides a portal to another time, when the nation's fledgling Navy was first beginning to flex its muscles.
Oh, THAT USS Massachusetts. The one they have in Fall River, Massachusetts is easier to visit, but it's just as rusty, I think. They have a submarine, too. It's basically a studio apartment with metal wallpaper you can drown in.
As the numbers dwindled of those who actively fought, focus turned toward others who had some sort of connection to or memory of the war. In 1868, the Anderson Intelligencer reported on an African-American man known as Old Father Robinson living in Detroit. Robinson had been born on the plantation of a Colonel in 1753 in Maryland. When the Colonel went to serve in the Revolutionary War, Robinson served alongside him as his bodyguard and was present for Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown which ended the war.
One of the Founding Fathers, John Adams, predicted that Independence Day would become America’s greatest holiday. This is what he wrote to his wife Abigail on July 3rd 1776: “(This) the Second Day of July 1776 will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Adams got the day wrong, though. Congress voted for independence on July 2nd 1776, but didn’t approve the text of the declaration until the Fourth.
Men who fought in a real, live shooting war weren't afraid of sparklers.
Don’t put accelerants on bonfires? Says who? You’re not my real dad. You’re not my supervisor. Who died and put you in charge? Yeah, well, you and whose army is going to stop me?
As Sam Adams used to say, "Hold my brandy smash and watch this!"
Due to their lust for drink, early Americans came up with a baffling variety of proto-cocktails from their slim culinary arsenal of rum, cider, ale, cream, sugar, molasses, eggs, spices and citrus. Some of the drinks they consumed—such as shrubs and hard cider—are again on the ascendance behind the bar; others, such as Whistle-Belly Vengeance (bits of stale bread dropped into warm, sour beer, then sweetened with molasses) might deserve to stay lost to history.
Goes to show what I know. I thought "Whistle-Belly Vengeance" was a reference to the Taco Bell drive thru. Silly me.
The Department of Historic Foodways was created in 1983, with the purpose of researching and recreating the foods of the 18th century. The department currently operates daily in the Governor’s Palace kitchen and the Armoury Kitchen.
Pro Tip- Don't stick your knife in the salt cellar. Old Muttonhead gets sore if you do. Viz:
As a young schoolboy in Virginia, George Washington took his first steps toward greatness by copying out by hand a list of 110 'Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.' Based on a 16th-century set of precepts compiled for young gentlemen by Jesuit instructors, the Rules of Civility were one of the earliest and most powerful forces to shape America's first president, says historian Richard Brookhiser.
George Washington is the greatest man who ever lived. I mean it. He refused to become the king of America, though it was offered to him. When he turned over the reins of government to John Adams, it was the first peaceful transfer of real power by election in the history of the world. Many of his rules of civility still are intelligent, actionable advice for today's world. For instance:
Utter not base and frivolous things among grave and learned men, nor
very difficult questions or subjects among the ignorant, or things hard
to be believed; stuff not your discourse with sentences among your
betters nor equals.
Apparently, the internet needs to be abolished. George said so.
Happy Independence Day to Maggie's Farm readers, and all the ships at sea!
