News gathered 2024-04-11
(date: 2024-04-11 07:48:11)
Physical modelling of unreinforced masonry walls using a sand-based 3D printer
date: 2024-04-15, from: ETH Zurich, recently added
Del Giudice, Lorenzo; Katsamakas, Antonios; Liu, Bowen; Sarhosis, Vasilis; Vassiliou, Michalis F.
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/661336
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-04-11, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I was closing tabs this morning and came across this sweet little test app I did when I was working on tabs. I wish there were a practical use for something like this.
http://scripting.com/2024/04/11.html#a143824
Once Highway 1 stabilized at Rocky Creek, traffic can return to Big Sur
date: 2024-04-11, from: San Jose Mercury News
Work on the slip-out which occurred March 30 includes Caltrans’ conducting vital geotech assessments which have allowed the convoys and implementing a traffic management system for the corridor including signage advising of the closures on Highway 1.
Instagram Will Automatically Blur Nudes in Direct Messages
date: 2024-04-11, from: 404 Media Group
This will also apply to end-to-end encrypted messages, because the processing is done on device, according to Meta.
https://www.404media.co/instagram-will-automatically-blur-nudes-in-direct-messages/
The Pyramids of Giza, Shrouded in Mist
date: 2024-04-11, updated: 2024-04-11, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/04/the-pyramids-of-giza-shrouded-in-mist
Is California still the world’s 5th largest economy?
date: 2024-04-11, from: San Jose Mercury News
Fast-growth India could surpass the state’s GDP in 2024.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/11/is-california-still-the-worlds-5th-largest-economy/
Saratoga cancels Blossom Festival due to inclement weather
date: 2024-04-11, from: San Jose Mercury News
Event may be rescheduled.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/11/saratoga-cancels-blossom-festival-due-to-inclement-weather/
Purdue, Cummins partner on in-road, in-motion charging for electric semi trucks
date: 2024-04-11, from: Electrek Feed
Indiana’s Department of Transportation is teaming up with Purdue University and legendary equipment brand Cummins to test in-road, in-motion charging for electric vehicles.
UC Berkeley dean who defends free speech laments antisemitic attack
date: 2024-04-11, from: San Jose Mercury News
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley’s School of Law and an ardent supporter of free speech, rebuked a group of students for staging a pro-Palestinian protest at his home as the fallout from Israel’s war in Gaza continues to roil US campuses.
NASA’s SERT II: ‘A Genuine Space Success Story’
date: 2024-04-11, from: NASA breaking news
“A genuine space success story,” is how Experiments Manager William Kerslake described NASA’s second Space Electric Rocket Test (SERT II), the first long-duration operation of ion thrusters in space. SERT II provided researchers with data for years beyond its expected lifetime and was a rare example of an entire mission – including the launch, propulsion […]
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/glenn/nasas-sert-ii-a-genuine-space-success-story/
We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners
date: 2024-04-11, updated: 2024-04-11, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Complainants smack back after hardware giant moves to dismiss lawsuit
HP “sought to take advantage of customers’ sunk costs,” printer owners claimed this week in a class action lawsuit against the hardware giant.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/11/hp_inc_ink_filing/
Capricious social media algorithms are modern-day Greek gods: “Oh my crops failed…
date: 2024-04-11, updated: 2024-04-11, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/04/0044373-capricious-social-media-a
‘Robust’ US has helped improve global economic outlook, IMF chief says
date: 2024-04-11, from: VOA News USA
Washington — Strong growth in the United States has helped to lift the outlook for the world economy, but more needs to be done to stem a slide in productivity, the head of the IMF said Thursday.
“Global growth is marginally stronger on account of robust activity in the United States and in many emerging markets economies,” International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told reporters in prepared remarks.
The U.S. economy grew by 2.5 percent last year, according to the U.S. Commerce Department, far outstripping most other advanced economies.
“Robust household consumption and business investment, and an easing of supply chain problems helped,” Georgieva added. “And inflation is going down, somewhat faster than previously expected.”
She spoke just a few days before the IMF-World Bank spring meetings of world financial leaders in Washington, one of two such gatherings hosted each year by the international financial institutions.
Her remarks suggest the IMF now expects the world economy to grow faster than it predicted in January, when it forecast global growth to rise by 3.1 percent in 2024, and 3.2 percent in 2025.
“It is tempting to breathe a sigh of relief. We have avoided a global recession and a period of stagflation — as some had predicted,” Georgieva said. “But there are still plenty of things to worry about.”
Among the challenges, Georgieva mentioned rising geopolitical tension, which, she said, is increasing the risks of fragmentation of the global economy.
She also highlighted the challenges of growing public debt and a “broad-based slowdown in productivity.”
Because of this, the IMF expects growth to remain at just above 3 percent over the medium term — below its historical average.
To help the global economy to heal and fix the productivity challenge, Georgieva laid out a series of steps to bring global inflation and public debt back down to sustainable levels, and also called for steps to eliminate “constraints to economic activity” and boost productivity.
“In short, if there is a market failure that is being addressed — such as accelerating innovation to address the existential threat of climate change — there is a case for government intervention, including through industrial policy,” she said.
“If there is no market failure, there is a need for caution,” she added.
Dollar stores are shutting down across America. They did this to themselves
date: 2024-04-11, from: San Jose Mercury News
Years of strategic mistakes and underinvestment have plagued Family Dollar and 99 Cents Only, retail analysts say. Both brands were acquired by other companies and faltered under their new owners.
7 terrific Bay Area things to do this weekend, April 12-14
date: 2024-04-11, from: San Jose Mercury News
Got your weekend plans? Here are some cool ideas from one of the best movies of 2024 to great shows and concerts and more fabulous French fries.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/11/7-terrific-bay-area-things-to-do-this-weekend-april-12-14/
Big rig overturns on connector to I-880, commute a mess
date: 2024-04-11, from: San Jose Mercury News
Nobody was reported to be injured in the crash, which happened on the northbound Interstate 238 connector to southbound Interstate 880.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/11/big-rig-overturns-on-connector-to-i-880-commute-a-mess/
“Men who say they are pro-life and want to reduce or eliminate…
date: 2024-04-11, updated: 2024-04-11, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/04/0044370-men-who-say-they-are
Can Information Escape a Black Hole?
date: 2024-04-11, from: Quanta Magazine
Black holes are inescapable traps for most of what falls into them — but there can be exceptions. The theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind speaks with co-host Janna Levin about the black hole information paradox and how it has propelled modern physics.The post Can Information Escape a Black Hole? first appeared on Quanta Magazine
https://www.quantamagazine.org/can-information-escape-a-black-hole-20240411/
Juanita Fitzgerald | Stop Pretending Saugus Doesn’t Exist
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Signal
I have been following the stories on the sale of Santa Clarita Elementary School, its closing and all of the meetings and committees to be formed. I have lived in Saugus for a long time (53 years) and I remember the rumored misdeeds of the sale of Saugus Elementary School years ago. I hope this […]
The post Juanita Fitzgerald | Stop Pretending Saugus Doesn’t Exist appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/juanita-fitzgerald-stop-pretending-saugus-doesnt-exist/
How Hackers Can Hijack 2FA Calls with Sneaky Call Forwarding
date: 2024-04-11, from: 404 Media Group
In a crude but potentially effective attack, a hacker sends a malicious link which quickly sets up call forwarding for a target’s phone number. The result is the interception of 2FA calls, including for Gmail.
https://www.404media.co/how-hackers-can-hijack-2fa-calls-with-sneaky-call-forwarding/
Fiat North America’s Future Models Will Come Into View On July 11
date: 2024-04-11, from: Inside EVs News
Fiat’s North American head, Aamir Ahmed says that we’ll have a better idea of upcoming Fiat North America’s next models very soon.
https://insideevs.com/news/715652/fiat-new-models-soon-july/
Michael Douglas has a knack for unforgettable roles — here are 7 of the best
date: 2024-04-11, from: San Jose Mercury News
From ‘Streets of San Francisco’ to ‘Fatal Attraction’ and ‘Wall Street’ – here’s where to see the actor’s famed screen performances.
FAFSA nightmare holds Bay Area universities hostage as college acceptance deadline nears
date: 2024-04-11, from: San Jose Mercury News
“I have not seen numbers this low in years – even during the pandemic we had higher numbers of applicants,” says one Cal State East Bay official. “It’s not looking good right now, all across the universities.”
The 2024 Honda CB125R Gets A TFT Display And Four New Colors
date: 2024-04-11, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
Euro 5+ emissions compliance also comes standard on the updated bike.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/715169/2024-honda-cb125r-updates-euro5plus/
Steve Petzold | Board President Oversteps
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Signal
The following is a copy of a letter sent to Linda Storli, president of the governing board of the William S. Hart Union High School District. I am deeply concerned about your continuing disregard for board policy while executing your privilege as a board member and president. Your (letter) to The Signal on April 6 […]
The post Steve Petzold | Board President Oversteps appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/steve-petzold-board-president-oversteps/
Jim Blumel | Hyperfocused on Abortion
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Signal
It is a very sad commentary on today’s Democrat party that their No. 1 issue in this presidential campaign is abortion. Here is a major political party, a once-great institution that was home to leaders such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, and now it has sunk to such a disgraceful low. Democrats […]
The post Jim Blumel | Hyperfocused on Abortion appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/jim-blumel-hyperfocused-on-abortion/
AWS must pay $525M to cloud storage patent holder, says jury
date: 2024-04-11, updated: 2024-04-11, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Computing giant will appeal ruling, which found infringement was not ‘willful’
A jury has ordered Amazon Web Services to pay $525 million for infringing distributed data storage patents in a case brought by a technology outfit called Kove IO.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/11/aws_lawsuit_kove_io/
Tara VanDerveer built Stanford basketball up so it can withstand her departure
date: 2024-04-11, from: San Jose Mercury News
Things will be different around Maples Pavilion without Tara VanDerveer, but don’t expect the winning ways to end
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/11/tara-vanderveer-stanford-retirement-kate-paye-future/
PumpkinOS carves out a FOSS PalmOS-compatible runtime environment
date: 2024-04-11, updated: 2024-04-11, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
And rePalm may yet bring real PalmOS to new hardware … even the Raspberry Pi
PumpkinOS is a somewhat usable runtime environment that can run some Palm apps on top of Windows or Linux, without using or needing real PalmOS.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/11/pumpkin_os_foss_palmos/
Canada’s 2023 Wildfire Season Was Horrible. This Year’s Could Be Worse.
date: 2024-04-11, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: A searing heatwave in Thailand means even nighttime temperatures won’t go below 86 degrees Fahrenheit for all of April • The streets of New Orleans flooded yesterday • Severe weather in Georgia delayed the start of The Masters golf tournament.
THE TOP FIVE
- Canada expects another ‘catastrophic’ wildfire season
Canada is preparing for this year’s wildfire season to be “catastrophic,” following a warm and dry winter. “The temperature trends are very concerning,” said Harjit Sajjan, the country’s minister for emergency preparedness. “With the heat and dryness across the country we can expect that the wildfire season will start sooner and end later and potentially be more explosive.” Last year’s wildfire season was the worst ever: More than 37 million acres burned, 230,000 people were evacuated, and wildfire smoke drifted across large parts of the U.S.
- Panama plans alternative cargo route as drought hits Panama Canal
Panama will create a new “special customs jurisdiction” to serve as a “dry” transport alternative to the Panama Canal. The canal serves as a key shipping channel between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and typically moves about $270 billion worth of cargo every year, but has had to limit its capacity due to severe drought in the region. Yesterday Panama unveiled plans for the Multimodal Dry Canal project, which will use existing infrastructure like roadways, railways, and ports to move cargo and relieve the shipping bottleneck. As AFP pointed out, Panama’s neighbors, including Mexico and Honduras, have seen opportunity in the canal’s plight and proposed transport alternatives.
- AI data centers expected to drive huge growth in U.S. power demand
America’s utility companies think data centers will cause electricity demand to surge, Reuters reported. Nine out of 10 of the country’s top utilities said the centers, which power technologies like generative AI, are a main driver of customer growth. Power use from data centers is expected to triple globally this year, according to Morgan Stanley research. The question is whether utility companies can keep up. Growing electricity demand will “stress utility company balance sheets as capital spending escalates to upgrade the infrastructure and integrate renewable energy resources,” Morningstar analysts said recently. This week the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said the country’s power consumption was expected to grow to record highs in the next two years, and that renewables would make up 24% of the energy mix in 2024, up 3% from last year.
- Musk eyes India expansion for Tesla
Tesla CEO Elon Musk yesterday teased an upcoming trip to India to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The BBC reported the meeting is scheduled for the end of April in New Delhi. Two sources told Reuters Musk plans to announce a factory in the country and major investment. Earlier this week Musk posted on X that “India should have electric cars like every other country has electric cars. It’s a natural progression to provide Tesla electric vehicles in India.” EVs make up about 2% of sales in India but the government wants to grow that to 30% by 2030. Tesla’s potential push into the country comes as EV growth slows in the U.S. and Tesla is struggling to meet expectations on sales and deliveries.
- UN climate chief calls for ‘quantum leap’ in climate finance
The United Nations climate chief yesterday urged the leaders of G20 nations to abandon “business as usual” and take “bold climate action” before it’s too late. “For those who say that climate change is only one of many priorities, like ending poverty, ending hunger, ending pandemics, or improving education, I simply say this: none of these crucial tasks … will be possible unless we get the climate crisis under control,” Simon Stiell, who heads up the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, told a crowd in London. He called for a “quantum leap” in climate finance commitments at this year’s COP29. “Sidelining climate isn’t a solution to a crisis that will decimate every G20 economy and has already started to hurt,” he said. Stiell finished the speech by urging “people everywhere” to raise their voices for climate action.
THE KICKER
Last month, Texas generated more electricity from solar than from coal for the first time ever.
Institute
for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis
https://heatmap.news/climate/canada-wildfire-season-panama-canal
Meta trials a new feature to protect teens
date: 2024-04-11, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Meta’s latest answer to protecting kids on Instagram is automatically blurring images that may contain nudity. The company says it will test this on the platform’s direct messaging feature. We’ll parse the details. Plus, the FCC is requiring large internet providers to post “broadband nutrition labels” that provide a snapshot of charges and performance data. Will they impact consumers’ internet diet? And a recent survey finds that CEOs are feeling pretty optimistic.
This little “firewall appliance” is a mini PC with Intel N100 and 6 x 2 5 GbE LAN ports
date: 2024-04-11, from: Liliputing
A few years ago we wrote about a “Firewall Micro Appliance” that was basically a small, fanless computer that combined a 10-watt Intel Celeron J4125 quad-core processor with six 2.5 GbE LAN ports. Now it looks like Chinese PC makers have updated the design with new models sporting 6-watt Intel N100 chips and DDR5 memory. […]
The post This little “firewall appliance” is a mini PC with Intel N100 and 6 x 2 5 GbE LAN ports appeared first on Liliputing.
China sanctions 2 US defense companies and says they support arms sales to Taiwan
date: 2024-04-11, from: VOA News USA
Beijing — China on Thursday announced rare sanctions against two U.S. defense companies over what it said is their support for arms sales to Taiwan, the self-governing island democracy Beijing claims as its own territory to be recovered by force if necessary.
The announcement freezes the assets of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems and General Dynamics Land Systems held within China. It also bars the companies’ management from entering the country.
Filings show General Dynamics operates a half-dozen Gulfstream and jet aviation services operations in China, which remains heavily reliant on foreign aerospace technology even as it attempts to build its own presence in the field.
The company helps make the Abrams tank being purchased by Taiwan to replace outdated armor intended to deter or resist an invasion from China.
General Atomics produces the Predator and Reaper drones used by the U.S. military. Chinese authorities did not go into details on the company’s alleged involvement with supplying arms to Taiwan.
Beijing has long threatened such sanctions, but has rarely issued them as its economy reels from the COVID-19 pandemic, high unemployment and a sharp decline in foreign investment.
“The continued U.S. arms sales to China’s Taiwan region seriously violate the one-China principle and the provisions of the three China-U.S. joint communiqués, interfere in China’s internal affairs, and undermine China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. It insists that the mainland and the island to which Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces fled amid civil war in 1949 remain part of a single Chinese nation.
Sanctions were leveled under Beijing’s recently enacted Law of the People’s Republic of China on Countering Foreign Sanctions.
General Dynamics fully owned entities are registered in Hong Kong, the southern Chinese semi-autonomous city over which Beijing has steadily been increasing its political and economic control to the point that it faces no vocal opposition and has seen its critics silenced, imprisoned or forced into exile.
Despite their lack of formal diplomatic ties — a concession Washington made to Beijing when they established relations in 1979 — the U.S. remains Taiwan’s most important source of diplomatic support and supplier of military hardware from fighter jets to air defense systems.
Taiwan has also been investing heavily in its own defense industry, producing sophisticated missiles and submarines.
China had 14 warplanes and six navy ships operating around Taiwan on Wednesday and Thursday, with six of the aircraft crossing into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone — a tactic to test Taiwan’s defenses, wear down its capabilities and intimidate the population.
So far, that has had little effect, with the vast majority of the island’s 23 million people opposing political unification with China.
A death sentence for one of the biggest bank frauds in history
date: 2024-04-11, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: A Vietnamese court sentenced property developer Truong My Lan to death after she was convicted of taking $44 billion from one of Vietnam’s largest banks. Also, South Korea’s liberal opposition party won in a landslide majority in the country’s general election. And paralympian Stef Reid is asking sportswear companies who use amputee athletes in their marketing why it’s not possible to buy single shoes.
MPs ask: Why is it so freakin’ hard to get AI giants to pay copyright holders?
date: 2024-04-11, updated: 2024-04-11, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Agreement on consent and compensation has failed to materialize
UK lawmakers have slammed the government for its lack of action in protecting copyright holders against the infringement of their intellectual property by developers of artificial intelligence technologies.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/11/mp_committee_ai_copyright/
China is exporting so many EVs that it needs more ships – a lot more
date: 2024-04-11, from: Electrek Feed
Chinese automakers are looking to export electric vehicles by the hundreds of thousands around the globe, but they need a lot more car-carrying vessels to make that happen. Demand is so high that the country is on track to amass what will be the world’s fourth-largest fleet in a few short years, with new trade routes being created especially for Chinese cars.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/11/china-is-exporting-so-many-evs-that-it-needs-more-ships-a-lot-more/
Backdoor in XZ Utils That Almost Happened
date: 2024-04-11, updated: 2024-04-10, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Last week, the internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention—but it should. There’s an important moral to the story of the attack and its discovery: The security of the global internet depends on countless obscure pieces of software written and maintained by even more obscure unpaid, distractible, and sometimes vulnerable volunteers. It’s an untenable situation, and one that is being exploited by malicious actors. Yet precious little is being done to remedy it…
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/04/backdoor-in-xz-utils-that-almost-happened.html
We Should Bring back Iconic Dash Designs in the TFT Era
date: 2024-04-11, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
Most OEMs love to pay homage to their histories, as they should. Why not bring TFTs into the mix?
https://www.rideapart.com/news/715673/retro-motorcycle-dash-design-tft/
Celebrating the community: Arno & Timo
date: 2024-04-11, from: Raspberry Pi (.org)
We love hearing from members of the community and sharing the stories of amazing young people, volunteers, and educators who are using their passion for technology to create positive change in the world around them. In our latest story, we’re heading to Alkmaar, the Netherlands, to meet Arno and Timo, CoderDojo enthusiasts who have transitioned…
The post Celebrating the community: Arno & Timo appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/celebrating-the-community-arno-timo/
Fancy building a replacement for Post Office’s disastrous Horizon system?
date: 2024-04-11, updated: 2024-04-11, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
£75 million in the offing in government tender
The Post Office, the UK government-owned retail organization for post and banking, has kicked off procurement to help build the system replacing Horizon, the disastrous EPOS and back office system at the heart of one of the country’s greatest miscarriages of justice.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/11/uk_post_office_epos_procurement/
DIY in-car entertainment display
date: 2024-04-11, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
You don’t need a swanky vehicle to get the in-car entertainment screen experience. You build a DIY system with Raspberry Pi instead.
The post DIY in-car entertainment display appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/diy-in-car-entertainment-display/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-04-11, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
So this ticking time bomb was sitting there all the time the journalists were talking about how Biden is too old to win the election with Trump. Biden was never the issue, the issue was the freaking supreme freaking court.
https://bsky.app/profile/washingtonpost.com/post/3kpsfk3vtau2w
Decarbonization Won’t Pay — at Least Not on Its Own
date: 2024-04-11, from: Heatmap News
When I was an analyst at the U.S. Treasury, my team’s work centered around promising private investors that we would make it easier for them to invest in renewable energy projects across the Global South. I kept hearing that our job was ultimately to make these projects “bankable.” As the logic went, “there is a sizeable universe of good projects that fall just below many private investors’ desired rate of return,” and therefore lowering the risks of investing in these “good projects” would put them within reach of private investors’ return expectations. To make decarbonization possible, we had to make decarbonization profitable.
This claim cuts straight through Brett Christophers’ latest book, The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet, which argues that the cost of developing and generating renewable energy is not what will determine the speed or scale of its uptake. It might finally be cheaper to build solar panels and wind farms than a coal or gas plant, that’s for sure. But given the structure of our energy markets today, it does not follow that assets that are cheap to build are necessarily profitable enough to provide adequate returns to investors.
My old colleagues might have already been aware of this fact, but as Christophers highlights, it’s certainly not intuitive, even to many analysts. Nor are its implications: Decarbonization won’t happen if it’s not profitable enough ― and it’s not profitable enough.
Christophers is a professor at Sweden’s Uppsala University in its “department of human geography,” whose research focuses on how capitalism and the modern financial system shape our lives; in this book, that also includes our energy systems. To make his case, he highlights the vicious feedback loop affecting renewables endemic to today’s energy markets. Government support to build renewable energy drives down its marginal cost, but because there’s now more renewable energy available at any given moment, the falling costs cut into developers’ expected returns, requiring more government support to keep investors and developers interested in the sector.
Combine this dynamic with technical features endemic to renewable energy generation, including its intermittency, and the result is a wholesale electricity market with perennially unstable prices. This volatility throttles the expected returns on any investment in renewable energy. No matter how cheap it is to build renewable energy, private investors and developers won’t decarbonize our globe at the speed or scale we deserve ― not under these financial conditions, at least.
Christophers leans on two theoretical guideposts here. First, Andreas Malm, whose assessment of how the profit motive, not relative costs, drove Britain’s first energy transition from water-wheels to coal and steam is an unmistakable conceptual parallel to today’s transition. Second, Karl Polanyi, whose theory of “fictitious commodities” — referring to land, labor, and money, each of which the state and society must painstakingly regulate into fungible market-friendly products ― Christophers aptly applies to electricity and the artificial markets created around it.
But rather than hew to theory to justify why the energy system needs to be socialized to achieve decarbonization ― which is definitely true, by the way; the profit motive is supremely unhelpful here ― Christophers embraces a holistic understanding of the economy as a set of financial relationships, supply chains, planned markets, and legal institutions connecting various public and private entities with different motives.
That means interviewing investors, who tell him things like: “Low returns and volatility don’t go. No bank in the world will take power price risk at low returns.” Christophers also produces a detailed and data-rich breakdown of the interlocking global energy crises in 2021 and 2022, jumping between Texas, China, India, Australia, and across Europe, to make a larger point about energy markets. These crises were “not taken to be evidence of the failings of markets, or even a reason to question their role as the pre-eminent mechanism of coordination to the state’s electricity sector,” he writes; “the market was regarded as the very means to manage the crisis.” But the markets aren’t working. Something has to give.
He ends the book with a call for socialized power, inspired by the Green New Deal and New York’s Build Public Renewables Act, championed by the state’s democratic socialists on the explicit grounds that, because delivering on the state’s emissions targets is not profitable enough for the private sector to do alone, the public sector must get the job done. With the force of the whole book’s arguments and evidence behind it, this policy prescription hardly appears radical.
How to Intervene in an Energy Market
Public developers can accept lower profitability thresholds, and public finance institutions can provide debt on more forgiving terms; under the public aegis, rates of return and costs of capital become policy choices. Christophers admits in his introduction that he is more focused on unearthing the fragile relationships among actors across the renewable energy industry than on describing the ways a New York-inspired socialized power sector could function. Given how much there is to unearth, it’s a reasonable choice, but it leaves readers without a working heuristic for the different ways states can intervene in the business of energy.
Here’s my attempt: Energy must be financed, generated, distributed, and consumed. Government intervention in favor of decarbonization looks distinct at each step.
Governments can provide consumption support by shielding ratepayers from the higher electricity bills that come from potential utility investments into renewable energy procurement and decarbonization-related grid management, backstopping utility investments through a demand guarantee. Consumption support is equitable, but it’s also indirect and incomplete — it might provide a utility with more financial breathing room to procure or develop renewables, but if renewables are not available to procure on the grid or are not easy to develop, this demand guarantee likely just pads the utility’s bottom line.
Governments can provide distribution support by encouraging utilities to purchase renewable energy. Distribution support most often takes the form of regulatory nudges: In the United States, mandates like Renewable Portfolio Standards force utilities to increase their clean energy procurement, guaranteeing purchase demand for clean electricity and Renewable Energy Certificates, which companies might buy to clean up their own energy portfolios.
These demand-guarantee interventions have helped speed up renewable energy development nationwide, but with limits. In particular, utility power purchase agreements don’t provide developers with adequate price stability because utilities fix the quantity of energy they purchase rather than the price; corporate PPAs, meanwhile, cannot be relied on at scale because there aren’t enough large creditworthy corporations like Google and Amazon willing to commit to buying energy from new projects at a fixed price. For these reasons and more, supporting utilities’ efforts to decarbonize will not call forth adequate renewable energy generation sources into existence.
Generation support is what most governments already do. Whether through feed-in tariffs, production tax credits, or contracts for difference, generation support entails propping up generators’ profitability, ensuring that the sale price of their energy is never too low. Christophers explains why this mechanism — that is, a revenue guarantee rather than a demand guarantee — is deeply necessary: Renewable energy sources and the energy markets they’re plugged into are both structurally volatile, so, no matter how much energy they generate, they never generate all that much profit. Withdrawing generation support would be, in no uncertain terms, a death knell for renewables development.
And, finally, financing support targets renewable energy sources as capital-intensive assets requiring huge amounts of upfront debt. Whether through the investment tax credit, viability gap funding, concessional financing, or other forms of cost-share plans, financing support is another form of direct price support for generation companies; by lowering a project’s cost of capital, it helps lower its developer’s threshold for project profitability, meaning that generators pay less debt service and keep more of their revenues. High interest rates have lately forced up the cost of debt for renewable energy projects to unsustainable levels, far above private developers’ prospective rates of return. Financing support is a must-have these days ― and it’s all the more necessary across the Global South, where the costs of capital are far higher.
None of this is to say that socializing generation and finance solves every problem ― as far as the United States is concerned, non-financial barriers abound, such as regulations and interconnection queues ― but within the existing structure of energy markets, public ownership does solve a lot.
What does direct government intervention into energy consumption and distribution look like? Public ownership of local distribution utilities is a start. Unlike private utility companies, they don’t need to promise ten percent returns to shareholders, and can use the financial breathing room that comes from lower profitability thresholds to tamp down rate hikes and, perhaps more importantly, rate volatility. Public utilities will not drive decarbonization, but they could potentially help advance transmission reform and better integrate distributed energy resources into the grid.
Christophers all but argues that the best thing governments can do for all four support categories is to redesign energy markets. Beyond simply incentivizing the deployment of clean firm and battery technologies to complement renewables, policymakers’ biggest task is to build an energy system where volatile wholesale energy prices ― which even publicly owned renewable energy developers will have to face for the foreseeable future ― are not the reason that a project fails to get built. That would be a policy failure, and we don’t have time for those.
https://heatmap.news/economy/decarbonization-wont-pay-at-least-not-on-its-own
Global taxi software vendor exposes details of nearly 300K across UK and Ireland
date: 2024-04-11, updated: 2024-04-11, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
High-profile individuals including MPs said to be caught up in leak
Exclusive Taxi software biz iCabbi recently fixed an issue that exposed the personal information of nearly 300,000 individuals via an unprotected database.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/11/icabbi_database_exposure/
China’s Chery to set up shop in Europe
date: 2024-04-11, from: Electrek Feed
Chinese automaker Chery is planning to make cars in Spain, where the EV market is at just 12%, half that of Portugal and France. This would be Chery’s first manufacturing site in Europe.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/11/chinas-chery-to-set-up-shop-in-europe/
Money, money, money
date: 2024-04-11, from: Enlightenment Economics
Money has always seemed mysterious to me, and so I’ve always carefully avoided monetary economics as too difficult (which makes it ironic that when I returned from my US PhD programme to a job in the UK Treasury in 1985 … Continue reading
http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.php/2024/04/money-money-money-2/
Digital Realty ditches diesel for salad dressing in US to cut datacenter emissions
date: 2024-04-11, updated: 2024-04-11, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Hydrotreated vegetable oil to power bit barns stateside after successful Euro trial
Datacenter operator Digital Realty is replacing diesel with hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) at sites in the US in a bid to reduce carbon dioxide emissions following a successful trial in Europe.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/11/digital_realty_datacenter_biofuel/
Jason Gibbs | Explore the World at Celebrate!
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Signal
Have you ever wanted to journey to another country to experience an array of new and unique cultures and customs? Well, you can do that and more by simply traveling to the Canyon Country Community Center (18410 Sierra Highway) for the anticipated return of the Celebrate event series. From 6 to 9 p.m. on […]
The post Jason Gibbs | Explore the World at Celebrate! appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/jason-gibbs-explore-the-world-at-celebrate/
Why I draw
date: 2024-04-11, from: Robert Reich on Substack
Drawings and ideas flow together
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/why-i-draw
Classifieds – April 11, 2024
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The Daily Trojan features Classified advertising in each day’s edition. Here you can read, search, and even print out each day’s edition of the Classifieds.
The post Classifieds – April 11, 2024 appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/11/classifieds-april-11-2024/
Boffins deem Google DeepMind’s material discoveries rather shallow
date: 2024-04-11, updated: 2024-04-11, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Web titan rejects criticisms, insists AI-found compounds are legit
AI on its own may not be as useful for discovering new materials as Google’s DeepMind team has suggested.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/11/google_deepmind_material_study/
The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring
date: 2024-04-11, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Superblooms have enchanted us over the years.
The post The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/11/the-flowers-that-bloom-in-the-spring/
Today in SCV History (April 11)
date: 2024-04-11, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1987 – Ramona Chapel and Red Schoolhouse relocated to Santa Clarita History Center in Hart Park. [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-april-11/
The greatest guitarist you don’t know
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Kirk Hammett hid his heritage for decades because of rock’s racism.
The post The greatest guitarist you don’t know appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/11/the-greatest-guitarist-you-dont-know/
Showcase features Armenian culture
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The event included performances of Armenian art, poetry, dance and song.
The post Showcase features Armenian culture appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/11/armenian-students-celebrate-armenian-heritage-month/
Health fair raises sexual assault awareness
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
SAAMLAND, facilitated by Student Health, included poems, music and stickers.
The post Health fair raises sexual assault awareness appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/11/saamland-sexual-assault-awareness/
Beyond theory: liberal arts and ethics
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Consider morals and ethics when extending academic knowledge to your career.
The post Beyond theory: liberal arts and ethics appeared first on Daily Trojan.
Women’s golf shines at Augusta event
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The Trojans excelled during the fifth Annual Augusta National Women’s Amateur.
The post Women’s golf shines at Augusta event appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/11/womens-golf-shines-at-augusta-event/
Commencement speakers for more schools revealed
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The speakers include actors, entrepreneurs and a CEO, all with school connections.
The post Commencement speakers for more schools revealed appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/11/2024-satellite-commencement/
Celebrate Armenian History Month with these musicians
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Michel Legrand and Bei Ru lead this crop of talented artists to honor this April.
The post Celebrate Armenian History Month with these musicians appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/11/celebrate-armenian-history-month-with-these-musicians/
Baseball aims to extend winning streak with Oregon series
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
USC moved back to a .500 record following a weekday win over No. 12 UC Irvine.
The post Baseball aims to extend winning streak with Oregon series appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/11/baseball-aims-to-extend-winning-streak-with-oregon-series/
It doesn’t take a college education to hate the Electoral College
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Between swing states and diluted voting power, the Electoral College makes our presidential elections less equitable.
The post It doesn’t take a college education to hate the Electoral College appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/11/it-doesnt-take-a-college-education-to-hate-the-electoral-college/
Netherlands arm of KPMG fined $25M for cheating in exams
date: 2024-04-11, updated: 2024-04-11, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Staff followed US lead and shared answers after move to online testing
KPMG Accountants NV, the Netherlands-based arm of the global professional services firm, has been fined $25 million (€23 million, £20 million) by the US’s Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) for failing to prevent its financial auditors from cheating on exams.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/11/kpmg_netherlands_cheating/
April 10, 2024 (Wednesday)
date: 2024-04-11, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Prime minister Fumio Kishida of Japan and his wife, Yuko Kishida, are in Washington, D.C., tonight at a state dinner hosted by President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden. The dinner is part of a state visit, the fifth for this administration. Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have worked to strengthen ties to countries in the Indo-Pacific to weaken the influence of China in the region, and Japan is the key nation in that partnership. “We celebrate the flourishing friendship between the United States and Japan,” Dr. Biden said Tuesday. “Our nations are partners in building a world where we choose creation over destruction, peace over bloodshed, and democracy over autocracy.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-10-2024-wednesday
Samsung strikes trouble as unions threaten walkouts, regulator swoops
date: 2024-04-11, updated: 2024-04-11, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Oh great – another potential kink in the silicon supply chain
Samsung Electronics has struck trouble at home, potentially threatening the supply of semiconductors and smartphones.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/11/samsung_strike_retail_sanctions/
Scientists struggle to protect infant corals from hungry fish
date: 2024-04-11, from: VOA News USA
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — South Florida researchers trying to prevent predatory fish from devouring laboratory-grown coral are grasping at biodegradable straws in an effort to restore what some call the rainforest of the sea.
Scientists around the world have been working for years to address the decline of coral reef populations. Just last summer, reef rescue groups in South Florida and the Florida Keys were trying to save coral from rising ocean temperatures. Besides working to keep existing coral alive, researchers have also been growing new coral in labs and then placing them in the ocean.
But protecting the underwater ecosystem that maintains more than 25% of all marine species is not easy. Even more challenging is making sure that coral grown in a laboratory and placed into the ocean doesn’t become expensive fish food.
Marine researcher Kyle Pisano said one problem is that predators like parrot fish attempt to bite and destroy the newly transplanted coral in areas like South Florida, leaving them with less than a 40% survival rate. With projects calling for thousands of coral to be planted over the next year and tens of thousands of coral to be planted over the next decade, the losses add up when coral pieces can cost more than $100 each.
Pisano and his partner, Kirk Dotson, have developed the Coral Fort, claiming the small biodegradable cage that’s made in part with drinking straws boosts the survival rate of transplanted coral to over 90%.
“Parrot fish on the reef really, really enjoy biting a newly transplanted coral,” Pisano said. “They treat it kind of like popcorn.”
Fortunately the fish eventually lose interest in the coral as it matures, but scientists need to protect the coral in the meantime. Stainless steel and PVC pipe barriers have been set up around transplanted coral in the past, but those barriers needed to be cleaned of algae growth and eventually removed.
Pisano had the idea of creating a protective barrier that would eventually dissolve, eliminating the need to maintain or remove it. He began conducting offshore experiments with biodegradable coral cages as part of a master’s degree program at Nova Southeastern University. He used a substance called polyhydroxyalkanoate, a biopolymer derived from the fermentation of canola oil. PHA biodegrades in ocean, leaving only water and carbon dioxide. His findings were published last year.
The coral cage consists of a limestone disc surrounded by eight vertical phade brand drinking straws, made by Atlanta-based WinCup Inc. The device doesn’t have a top, Pisano said, because the juvenile coral needs sunlight and the parrot fish don’t generally want to position themselves facing downward to eat.
Dotson, a retired aerospace engineer, met Pisano through his professor at Nova Southeastern, and the two formed Reef Fortify Inc. to further develop and market the patent-pending Coral Fort. The first batch of cages were priced at $12 each, but Pisano and Dotson believe that could change as production scales up.
Early prototypes of the cage made from phade’s standard drinking straws were able to protect the coral for about two months before dissolving in the ocean, but that wasn’t quite long enough to outlast the interest of parrot fish. When Pisano and Dotson reached out to phade for help, the company assured them that it could make virtually any custom shape from its biodegradable PHA material.
“But it’s turning out that the boba straws, straight out of the box, work just fine,” Dotson said.
Boba straws are wider and thicker than normal drinking straws. They’re used for a tea-based drink that includes tapioca balls at the bottom of the cup. For Pisano and Dotson, that extra thickness means the straws last just long enough to protect the growing coral before harmlessly disappearing.
Reef Fortify is hoping to work with reef restoration projects all over the world. The Coral Forts already already being used by researchers at Nova Southeastern and the University of Miami, as well as Hawaii’s Division of Aquatic Resources.
Rich Karp, a coral researcher at the University of Miami, said they’ve been using the Coral Forts for about a month. He pointed out that doing any work underwater takes a great deal of time and effort, so having a protective cage that dissolves when it’s no longer needed basically cuts their work in half.
“Simply caging corals and then removing the cages later, that’s two times the amount of work, two times the amount of bottom time,” Karp said. “And it’s not really scalable.”
Experts say coral reefs are a significant part of the oceanic ecosystem. They occupy less than 1% of the ocean worldwide but provide food and shelter to nearly 25 percent of sea life. Coral reefs also help to protect humans and their homes along the coastline from storm surges during hurricanes.
Google plunks down $1 billion for extra Japan-US submarine cable
date: 2024-04-11, updated: 2024-04-11, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Adds Hawaii stopover for another planned link
Google announced on Wednesday it will invest $1 billion in two submarine cables to create new routes between the US and Japan.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/11/google_japan_cables/
Cars for the ages
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Round Up (Peirce College Student Paper)
Grandparents, parents, kids, grandkids—most all generations find their way to Supercar Sunday at Pierce College. Sunday’s event in Lot 7 was Ferrari Day sponsored by
The post Cars for the ages appeared first on .
Daily EV Recap: Gigafactory India might be in the works
date: 2024-04-11, from: Electrek Feed
Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from Electrek. Quick Charge is now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn and…
https://electrek.co/2024/04/10/daily-ev-recap-gigafactory-india-might-be-in-the-works/
Granada Grandeur, Celebrating 100 Years
date: 2024-04-11, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The mighty milestone Centennial Festival Weekend includes the Santa Barbara debut of the ambitious Pacific Jazz Orchestra.
The post Granada Grandeur, Celebrating 100 Years appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/10/granada-grandeur-celebrating-100-years/
US destroys 11 Houthi drones
date: 2024-04-11, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-destroys-11-houthi-drones-/7565500.html
Pierce students win at National Hillel Basketball Tournament
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Round Up (Peirce College Student Paper)
A group of Pierce College students beating out teams from the University of Texas and UCLA at a collegiate basketball tournament? Yes, it happened. Brahmas
The post Pierce students win at National Hillel Basketball Tournament appeared first on .
Multiple CSUN organizations come together to hold vigil for Palestine
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
As the conflict in the Middle East continues, a vigil for Palestine was held Wednesday, April 3 in front of the University Library Lawn. The vigil was held on the…
West Ranch golf takes second league match
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Signal
The Foothill League race heated up on Tuesday after boys’ golf met for their second match of the season. West Ranch brought home the win with 402 strokes on the day at the Oaks Club at Valencia and was led by Tyler Sonnenberg and Kai Willen with 76 strokes (+4). While nearly every golfer’s stroke […]
The post <strong>West Ranch golf takes second league match</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/west-ranch-golf-takes-second-league-match/
US ‘considering’ end to Assange prosecution bid
date: 2024-04-11, updated: 2024-04-11, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Cryptic Biden hint came ahead of April 16 deadline for next step in extradition case
The Biden Administration is contemplating Australia’s request to end its bid to prosecute WikiLeaker-in-Chief Julian Assange, an Australian citizen.…
Lately
date: 2024-04-11, from: Rachel Kwon blog
I’ve been a little less online lately, but not to worry, I have just been living my life :) Several weeks ago, I gave notice at work and left. Some people in my life were surprised, because it was a good job at a good company, I generally enjoyed it, I got to work with wonderful people, and I was paid money to do it. The younger version of me who hadn’t yet figured out a career direction would be curious (and more than a little skeptical) about why I would quit such an objectively good job.
https://kwon.nyc/notes/lately/
Call for Art and Upcoming Arts Exhibitions
date: 2024-04-11, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The city of Santa Clarita hosting several art exhibits, as well as seeking artists for an upcoming gallery
https://scvnews.com/call-for-art-and-upcoming-arts-exhibitions/
Biden, Kishida bolster defense ties in Japanese PM’s official US visit
date: 2024-04-11, from: VOA News USA
The United States and Japan celebrated their decades-long alliance Wednesday night as President Joe Biden hosts Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the White House for a state dinner. The Japanese leader’s visit marks a significant strengthening in defense and technology ties. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
Fire: One person transported via helicopter after motorcycle injury
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Signal
A person was transported from Saugus on Wednesday afternoon to a hospital via a helicopter following a reported motorcycle injury, according to Los Angeles County Fire Department officials. The initial report to the Fire Department came at 5:11 p.m. for an injury sustained while riding a motorcycle near the intersection of Avocado Place and White […]
The post Fire: One person transported via helicopter after motorcycle injury appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/fire-one-person-transported-via-helicopter-after-motorcycle-injury/
COVID Isolation Expert Sign On Letter
date: 2024-04-11, from: Peoples CDC blog
This is an open letter to the Director of The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was written by volunteers with The People’s CDC, a CDC watchdog and public health advocacy and health justice group. We’re asking medical, public health, and scientific professionals (defined broadly as having credentials and/or professional/technical experience in related fields)… Continue reading COVID Isolation Expert Sign On Letter
https://peoplescdc.org/2024/04/10/covid-isolation-expert-sign-on-letter/
Man charged in alleged pool cue assault, shooting of elderly man
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Signal
An Agua Dulce man appeared in a Lancaster courthouse Wednesday to answer to five charges in connection with the shooting of a 79-year-old neighbor after an assault with a pool cue, according to a criminal complaint. The five-count complaint accuses Alejandro “Alex” Rodriguez, 36, of shooting his neighbor after an alleged attack that happened near […]
The post Man charged in alleged pool cue assault, shooting of elderly man appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/man-charged-in-alleged-pool-cue-assault-shooting-of-elderly-man/
India’s Uber clone Ola Cabs hails ride out of the international market
date: 2024-04-11, updated: 2024-04-11, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Australian drivers given two days’ notice, UK and New Zealand services also shuttered
Indian ride-sharing outfit Ola Cabs is shuttering operations in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK as the company shifts focus to its domestic business.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/11/ola_exits_international_markets/
Forecast calls for another weekend of rain
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Signal
Those making plans for the great outdoors Friday through Sunday might be disappointed to learn that the Santa Clarita Valley is, in fact, once again receiving rain that’s making an appearance just in time for the weekend. The SCV could get up to about an inch in the lower altitudes and 1 to 2 inches […]
The post Forecast calls for another weekend of rain appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/forecast-calls-for-another-weekend-of-rain/
Deputies arrest 2 after investigation, fight with deputy
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Signal
Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station deputies arrested a man and a woman after investigating a report of a possible burglary in Newhall. “The call came in as a possible burglary to vehicle,” according to Sgt. Joanna Warren of the SCV Sheriff’s Station, which was reported shortly after noon in the 23500 block of Lyons Avenue. […]
The post Deputies arrest 2 after investigation, fight with deputy appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/deputies-arrest-2-after-investigation-fight-with-deputy/
At least 3 shot during Eid al-Fitr celebration in US
date: 2024-04-11, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/at-least-3-shot-during-eid-al-fitr-celebration-in-us/7565426.html
Ocean Water Warning for April 10
date: 2024-04-11, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health cautions residents who are planning to visit the below Los Angeles County beaches to avoid swimming, surfing, and playing in ocean waters
https://scvnews.com/ocean-water-warning-for-april-10/
One person transported following medical emergency on McBean Parkway
date: 2024-04-11, from: The Signal
One person was transported to the hospital following a medical emergency that occurred near the intersection of McBean Parkway and Magic Mountain Parkway on Wednesday afternoon, according to the Los Angeles County Fire Department. “We got a dispatch time of 3:59 p.m. and an on-scene time of 4:07 p.m.,” said Fire Department spokesman Geovanni Sanchez. […]
The post One person transported following medical emergency on McBean Parkway appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/one-person-transported-following-medical-emergency-on-mcbean-parkway/
New York appeals court rejects Donald Trump’s third request to delay Monday’s hush money trial
date: 2024-04-11, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — Donald Trump is now 0 for 3 in last-minute attempts to get a New York appeals court to delay his looming hush money criminal trial. An appeals court judge Wednesday swiftly rejected the latest salvo from the former president’s lawyers, who argued he should be on the campaign trail rather than “in a courtroom defending himself” starting next week.
Trump’s lawyers had asked the state’s mid-level appeals court to halt the case indefinitely while they fight to remove the trial judge and challenge several of his pretrial rulings, which they argue have seriously hindered the presumptive Republican nominee’s defense.
Justice Ellen Gesmer’s ruling, after a third straight day of emergency hearings on Trump’s delay requests, was yet another loss for Trump, who has tried repeatedly to get the trial postponed. Barring further court action, the ruling clears the way for jury selection to begin next Monday.
“We’re here for this stay because there are restrictions in place that cannot operate in a constitutional way in a trial environment,” Trump lawyer Emil Bove argued at the hearing, which was held in a court basement lobby because the regular courtroom was in use.
“It’s an incredibly important trial. It’s a historic, unprecedented proceeding,” Bove said, adding: “This can only be done once, and it must be done right.”
Trump’s hush-money case is the first of his four criminal indictments slated to go to trial and would be the first criminal trial ever of a former president.
Adding to a litany of complaints registered this week with the appeals court, Bove argued that trial Judge Juan Merchan “exceeded his authority” in refusing to postpone the case until the Supreme Court rules on an immunity claim Trump raised in another of his criminal cases. Trump’s lawyers argue some evidence in the hush-money case could be excluded if the Supreme Court rules in his favor.
Merchan last week declared that request untimely, ruling that Trump’s lawyers had “myriad opportunities” to raise the immunity issue before they finally did so in March, well after a deadline for pretrial motions had passed.
Steven Wu, the appellate chief for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, echoed that sentiment at Wednesday’s emergency hearing. He argued that Trump’s lawyers had months to raise immunity and other issues and should not be rewarded with a delay at the eleventh hour.
“Staying the trial at this point would be incredibly disruptive,” Wu said. “The court, the people, witnesses have made extraordinary efforts to make sure this trial can take place on Monday.”
“There’s a powerful public interest to ensure this criminal trial goes forward,” he added.
Gesmer presided over the emergency hearing from an armchair, facing a hodgepodge of wooden seats, a collapsable table and a restroom.
Trump is accused of falsifying his company’s records to hide the nature of payments to his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, who helped Trump bury negative stories during his 2016 campaign. Cohen’s activities included paying porn actor Stormy Daniels $130,000 to suppress her claims of an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump years earlier.
Trump pleaded not guilty last year to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels. His lawyers argue the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses.
Trump already struck out twice this week with the appeals court. One appeals court judge Monday rejected his bid to delay the trial while he seeks to move it out of Manhattan. A different judge on Tuesday denied a request, framed as part of a lawsuit against Merchan, that the trial be delayed while Trump fights a gag order imposed on him in recent weeks.
Trump’s lawyers had asked Merchan last month to adjourn the New York trial indefinitely until Trump’s immunity claim in his Washington, D.C., election interference case is resolved.
Trump contends he is immune from prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office. His lawyers have not raised that as a defense in the hush-money case, but they argued that some evidence — including Trump’s social media posts about former lawyer Cohen — is from his time as president and should be excluded from the trial because of his immunity protections.
The Supreme Court is to hear arguments in that matter on April 25.
“This is a situation where a judge has exceeded his authority under circumstances with very, very serious federalism implications,” Bove argued at Wednesday’s emergency hearing.
Trump’s lawyers also renewed their argument that Merchan should step aside from the case. They’ve accused him of bias and a conflict of interest, citing his daughter’s work as the head of a firm whose clients have included President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats.
Trump’s lawyers filed a formal recusal request with Merchan last week. The judge rejected a similar request in August and has not ruled on Trump’s pending request. The judge has also yet to rule on another defense delay request, which claims that Trump won’t get a fair trial because of “prejudicial media coverage.”
“Their recusal arguments are completely meritless,” Wu argued.
Trump’s lawyers also took issue with a protocol Merchan put in place last month to manage a flood of last-minute court filings. And they revisited their complaints — aired at an emergency hearing Tuesday — about the gag order Merchan imposed on Trump last month that bars him from making public comments about witnesses, jurors and others regarding their connections to the case.
Trump’s ability to campaign “is something that’s protected under the First Amendment, for President Trump and the American people,” Bove argued.
Courage, not Bluster
date: 2024-04-10, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
An unexpected blessing of the January 6 hearings is that it gave young people two shining examples of political courage, Senator Liz Cheney who co-chaired the Committee and White House Assistant Cassidy Hutchinson, age 27, who testified before it.
The post Courage, not Bluster appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/10/courage-not-bluster/
Once a swing state, Ohio now seems to lean more conservative
date: 2024-04-10, from: VOA News USA
For years, the U.S. state of Ohio was a solid indicator of American political opinion, choosing the winning presidential candidate in every election from 1964 to 2016. VOA Correspondent Scott Stearns reports that Ohio now appears more conservative, presenting a challenge for a Democratic Party trying to re-elect President Joe Biden and keep control of the U.S. Senate.
https://www.voanews.com/a/once-a-swing-state-ohio-now-seems-to-lean-more-conservative/7565029.html
April 11: Spring into Savings with 40 Cents Off Gas at Circle K
date: 2024-04-10, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Circle K will offer 40 cents off per gallon of fuel between 4 and 7 p.m. local time Thursday, April 11 during Circle K Fuel Day Pop-Up and 50% off on car washes all day at over 200 participating Circle K locations including Los Angeles
https://scvnews.com/april-11-spring-into-savings-with-40-cents-off-gas-at-circle-k/
County Releases Data on Arts and Culture Workforce
date: 2024-04-10, from: SCV New (TV Station)
This third study by SMU DataArts analyzing the demographic makeup of the arts and cultural workforce in L.A. County finds a significant shift toward greater racial and ethnic diversity since 2019, particularly at the leadership level.
https://scvnews.com/county-releases-data-on-arts-and-culture-workforce/
Scriptnotes, Episode 633: Reviving a Dormant Project, Transcript
date: 2024-04-10, from: John August blog
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it. Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 633 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 633: Reviving a Dormant Project, Transcript first appeared on John August.
https://johnaugust.com/2024/scriptnotes-episode-633-reviving-a-dormant-project-transcript
US Air Force secretary so confident in AI-controlled F-16s, he’ll fly in one
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-11, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
With a pilot as backup of course – VENOM is still emerging tech
The US Air Force is rapidly scaling up its plans to automate some of its fleet, and the civilian boss of the service says he’s planning to fly in one of the robo-planes this northern spring.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/usaf_ai_f16_tests/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-04-10, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
In retrospect, without the new @Observation macro in SwiftUI, it would have been pointless to try to rewrite the Godot UI in Swift.
Not only does it prevent you from drowning in bullshit details that you need to get right, but leads to a set of idioms that are just so convenient.
Will blog as soon as I come down from this progress high.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112249464845057389
What Support Do Community College Students Need To Transfer?
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The LAist
Across the country, transfer rates remain bleak. Here’s how UCLA’s Scholars Program is working to change that.
Juiced unveils new folding e-bike that may be the fastest and most powerful ever
date: 2024-04-10, from: Electrek Feed
Juiced Bikes has never shied away from offering riders more speed and power. And with today’s unveiling of its new Juiced JetCurrent Pro, the brand is offering up more speed and power than ever in a brand new e-bike form factor.
Me and FSD
date: 2024-04-10, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
Check out my political preamble on Tesla, X and Musk.
One more disclaimer: I love my Tesla Model Y. Best car ever. I’ve been driving a Tesla since late 2021, and I still feel privileged to drive the car every time I do. It’s the Macintosh of cars.
I don’t generally use FSD, even though I paid for it and have had it available all the time I’ve driven a Tesla.
They say you should always be fully attentive when using FSD. I am always soooo ready to take over for it. I don’t trust it. And I also don’t feel that when I’m in white-knuckle mode when it’s driving, that my reflexes are anywhere near as good as the reflexes I have when I’m driving, with fifty years of experience, and maybe a few hours of experience supervising a FSD car. I don’t have a sense of how to work with it. So I err on the side of turning it off whenever I feel like even slightly scared.
I
also don’t like
roller
coasters, but if I did, I’d recognize that this is different. A
roller coaster is designed to give the exact same experience to every
user every time. It’s designed to give the impression that your life is
about to end, using gravity and eyesight and all that evolution trained
you to be scared of. It fools you into being scared, when you’re
actually safe. Every so often you read about someone dying on a
rollercoaster. That probably improves the fun for thrill-seekers, and
gives people like me justification for staying away. People also
bungee jump
knowing there’s a chance the chord could break, but they know it’s not
going to.
None of that is true for the Tesla. It’s making it up as it goes along. And it definitely encounters situations it can’t handle, or it misinterprets a set of obvious facts, or even worse it hallucinates just like ChatGPT.
Yesterday, I was driving from Lake Katrine to Woodstock with FSD, and it was doing really well, up to a point. First I was on Route 28, a four-lane road, for about five miles, it turned onto 375 which is a curvy two-lane road. I was starting to feel slightly comfortable. Then we come up to 212, where 375 ends. A busy intersection. Traffic coming from the left and right, and many are turning onto the road I’m on. I watched in awe as FSD tried to find a way to make a left turn in this complicated situation, starting, stopping, it tried, found itself out in traffic, and got stuck there. I had enough and took over. Luckily the car waiting behind us had left a little room. I’ve dealt with this intersection probably a few hundred times in the last few years. I know the crazy things the other drivers do here, and I know to watch out for them. The Tesla didn’t know.
http://scripting.com/2024/04/10/230303.html?title=meAndFsd
Nicole Jolicoeur Selected As 2024/25 Hart District Teacher of the Year
date: 2024-04-10, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The William S. Hart Union High School District is proud to announce that Nicole Jolicoeur, Rio Norte Junior High School Special Education Teacher, has been selected as the 2024/25 Hart District Teacher of the Year
https://scvnews.com/nicole-jolicoeur-selected-as-2024-25-hart-district-teacher-of-the-year/
How does the classic Win32 ListView handle incremental searching?
date: 2024-04-10, from: OS News
The classic Win32 ListView supports incremental search: You can start typing the name of an item to search for it. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. ↫ Raymond Chen Gather ’round, children, Mr Chen is telling a story.
The Function of Colour in Factories, Schools & Hospitals (1930)
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/04/the-function-of-colour-in-factories-schools-hospitals-1930
April 16: SCV Aerospace & Defense Forum to host ITT Aerospace Tour
date: 2024-04-10, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The SCV Aerospace & Defense Forum is partnering with ITT Aerospace to hold a networking breakfast and site tour of their Valencia facility
https://scvnews.com/april-16-scv-aerospace-defense-forum-to-host-itt-aerospace-tour/
World Wide Climate Justice Education Week: A week of gardens, community and education
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
April 2 through April 5 was World Wide Climate Justice Education Week at CSUN. With spring in full gear and Earth Day on the 22nd of the month, it’s the…
Why are we still suffering inflation? Monopoly power!
date: 2024-04-10, from: Robert Reich on Substack
Friends, We learned today that the Consumer Price Index climbed 3.5 percent in March from a year earlier, up from 3.2 percent in February, and faster than most economists anticipated. This poses a conundrum for central bankers who have made it clear that they want to see further evidence that inflation is cooling before they cut interest rates.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/why-are-we-still-suffering-inflation
The native app install experience
date: 2024-04-10, from: Dave Rupert blog
At the end of each MSNBC YouTube video right now they have a 30 second post-roll of Ali Velshi explaining the 5-step process on how to install the new MSNBC app.
- Tap on the App Store on your phone
- Hit “Search” on the bottom right corner
- Type in “MSNBC”
- Click on the MSNBC app
- Click on “Get” or the cloud icon
There’s an implied sixth step where you need to actually open the newly installed app. Opening the app for the first time you swipe through a little slideshow that has two more (optional) steps: give your email and turn on notifications. Standard engagement economy tactics.
Hearing the 5-step native app install process a few times a day makes me think we lost something along the way. Remember when the call to action was to visit a URL? Not only is “Visit msnbc.com” more succinct, catchier, private, less prone to user error, and immune to competitive advertisements but it also doesn’t require a paid presenter to coach you through it. Once upon a time users might have needed Ali Velshi’s help getting to a website, but in my experience visiting a website is one of the first computing skills my kids learned without my direct involvement. The URL isn’t a foreign concept anymore.
I know I’m making a mountain out of a “We just want to promote our new app, maaan” molehill here, but even saying “Visit msnbc.com/mobile” with a redirect to their actual app download page would be easier. It boggles my mind why you’d push a clunky app store install flow over a five-letter domain name. I’d even bet $5 that the “native app” is actually a bunch of web views in a trench coat. In an even wilder twist, that app download page isn’t linked anywhere on the website! Ughck. I’m 0% invested on what’s happening over at MSNBC but I’m already getting whiffs of misaligned goals, interdepartmental strife, and poorly designed content management systems.
Anyways, websites. They’re old tech but still work great from time to time.
https://daverupert.com/2024/04/download-our-native-app/
Children with disabilities need inclusion in classroom settings
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
Growing up, I was always taught to be inclusive to everyone, especially my classmates who I would see every day. My godbrother has autism, and being inclusive has always been…
EU’s new tech laws are working; small mobile browsers gain market share
date: 2024-04-10, from: OS News
Independent browser companies in the European Union are seeing a spike in users in the first month after EU legislation forced Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft and Apple to make it easier for users to switch to rivals, according to data provided to Reuters by six companies. The early results come after the EU’s sweeping Digital Markets Act, which aims to remove unfair competition, took effect on March 7, forcing big tech companies to offer mobile users the ability to select from a list of available web browsers from a “choice screen.” ↫ Supantha Mukherjee and Foo Yun Chee I can’t believe this is even remotely surprising. A lot of especially Apple fans and people from outside of the European Union complained left, right, and centre about the choice screen and how it was ugly, unnecessary, and would just confuse users. These are interesting claims, considering the fact that setting up a modern smartphone such as the iPhone takes the user through 40-50 setup screens chockful of confusing choices to make, so adding one more surely wouldn’t make a difference. Of course giving users the option to choose a different default browser would lead to an increase in browsers other than Safari (iOS) or Chrome (Android) being set as the default. I’m pretty sure quite a few users learned, through the choice screen, for the first time, that there even are different browsers to choose from, and that some of those might offer features and benefits they didn’t even know they could enjoy. That’s the whole point of this endeavour: informing users that they have a choice, something Apple, Google, and others would rather you either do not have, or at least not know about. It’s far too early to tell if these spikes are a one-off thing, or if the rise in browsers other than Safari on iOS and Chrome on Android is more structural. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the latter, and even if the numbers remain in the single digits or low double digits, it will still lead to an increase in competition, and a more vibrant mobile browser market. Good news, regardless.
National Politics Have Become Local
date: 2024-04-10, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
A Third Party candidate for POTUS has never won an election. In 2024 they would be votes for Trump.
The post National Politics Have Become Local appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/10/national-politics-have-become-local/
A sandwich so good I nearly wept
date: 2024-04-10, from: Matt Haughey blog
I'm a big fan of food and I'm always looking out for new places to eat, especially in Portland, Oregon where lots of new food places regularly spring up in food carts and restaurant pop-ups.
Over the past few years I've also grown fond
https://a.wholelottanothing.org/a-sandwich-so-good-i-nearly-wept/
House lawmakers reject renewal of key US intelligence program
date: 2024-04-10, from: VOA News USA
washington — U.S. House lawmakers rejected an attempt to reform a controversial foreign intelligence program Wednesday, the latest blow in Speaker Mike Johnson’s effort to lead a narrow Republican majority.
A renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, failed to advance, 228-193, following a warning from former President Donald Trump on TruthSocial.
Trump said that FISA “was illegally used against me, and many others. They spied on my campaign!!” he wrote, using all capital letters.
A Justice Department investigation found in 2019 that surveillance of Trump campaign aide Carter Page continued for months after it should have ended.
The law — also referred to as Section 702 — allows U.S. intelligence agencies to collect data on foreigners overseas without obtaining a warrant. But it has received the most criticism for so-called “backdoor searches” that allow collection of U.S. citizens’ data. An attempted reform would have required the FBI to secure a warrant before collecting data.
“We’re enacting sweeping changes — 50 reforms, 56 to be exact — to the program that are in the base text that will stop the abuse of politicized FBI queries and prevent another Russia hoax debacle, among many other important reforms,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday morning. “No more of the intelligence community relying on fake news reports to order a FISA order, no more collusion.”
But Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene — who has filed a procedural motion to remove Johnson from the speakership — said those reforms were not enough.
“It’s like asking the deep state to hold itself accountable,” Greene told reporters Wednesday. “The FBI is abusing American people’s trust. The [Justice Department] has abused the American people’s trust. So, this doesn’t give me confidence that it will stop it.”
Nineteen House Republicans voted against the bill. Democrats said Wednesday that the proposed FISA reforms had not secured their votes.
“Whatever the vote count is, or whatever happens to that, it’s because the speaker has chosen not to advance this issue in a single standalone process. If he chooses to go a different route, then we’ll reassess,” Representative Pete Aguilar, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said Wednesday morning.
An attempt to pass surveillance laws failed in December when House leadership pulled a vote amid internal Republican divisions.
Johnson argued to colleagues in a letter on Friday that the law would “establish new procedures to rein in the FBI, increase accountability at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISC, impose penalties for wrongdoing, and institute unprecedented transparency across the FISA process so we no longer have to wait years to uncover potential abuses.”
Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, warned against some of the proposed changes in a speech Tuesday to the American Bar Association.
“Bottom line, a warrant requirement would be the equivalent of rebuilding the pre-9/11 intelligence ‘wall,’” he said in his prepared remarks. “As the threats to our homeland continue to evolve, the agility and effectiveness of 702 will be essential to the FBI’s ability — and really our mandate from the American people — to keep them safe for years to come.”
Unless Congress acts, authorization for the program expires on April 19.
Jeff Seldin contributed to this report.
https://www.voanews.com/a/house-lawmakers-reject-renewal-of-key-us-intelligence-program/7564967.html
Microsoft details new features coming in Windows Server 2025
date: 2024-04-10, from: OS News
Microsoft recently held a streaming event in which it detailed a lot of the new features and changes coming in Windows server 2025, and has now followed that up with a blog post, as well. There’s a lot to go over here, and I’m anything but a Windows Server specialist, so I’ll highlight some of the thing I’m certain will be welcomed by Windows Server administrators. First and foremost, the biggest improvement: hot-patching. Security updates can be installed without having to reboot, because Server 2025 will modify code in memory without restarting the processes in question. Quarterly updates, however, will still require reboots. Hot-patching will be free on all versions of Server 2025. Microsoft also promises a massive performance boost for NVMe drives – the company claims a 70% improvement going from Server 2022 to Server 2025. Microsoft’s other file system, ReFS, is also seeing improvements, and Storage Replica’s compression will be available in all editions of Windows Server 2025. A major improvement in Hyper-V is the ability to partition GPUs, so you can use one GPU to power multiple virtual machines. As far as licensing goes, the most important news here is that you’ll still be able to buy a normal, regular, run-of-the-mill perpetual license for Windows Server 2025, so even though there’s various more ‘modern’ options, you can also just opt for the way it’s always been.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139236/microsoft-details-new-features-coming-in-windows-server-2025/
Kia to launch new Carens EV, two other mass-market EVs in India
date: 2024-04-10, from: Electrek Feed
With EV electric vehicle sales surging in India, several automakers are looking to grab their share. Kia recently revealed plans to launch three new EVs in the region, including a new Carens EV.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/10/kia-launch-new-carens-ev-two-other-mass-market-evs-india/
CSUN women’s water polo rallies for comeback win on Senior Day
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
No. 25 CSUN Water Polo (17-14, 1-5 Big West) showcased their unwavering fight in a thrilling last minute of a game on a highly emotional Senior Day. Defender Anna Pal…
We Check Out The Highest Powered EV Charging Station In The U.S.
date: 2024-04-10, from: Inside EVs News
Featuring 24 chargers that can each deliver up to 500 kW, Gravity has a unique solution for high-speed urban EV charging.
https://insideevs.com/news/715496/gravity-charging-highest-power-station/
Congratulations!
date: 2024-04-10, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
I’d like to send my sincere congratulations and my utmost respect to Ben Romo and his attorney Will Beale in the successful venture to retain the News-Press online archives.
The post Congratulations! appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/10/congratulations/
See a Restored Ancient Roman Helmet—and Two Shiny New Replicas
date: 2024-04-10, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The 2,000-year-old Hallaton Helmet is now on permanent display at the Harborough Museum in England
Next-gen Meta AI chip serves up ads while sipping power
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Fresh silicon won’t curb Zuck’s appetite for GPUs just yet
After teasing its second-gen AI accelerator in February, Meta is ready to spill the beans on this homegrown silicon, which is already said to be powering ad recommendations in 16 regions.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/meta_mtia_chip/
Carpinteria Politics
date: 2024-04-10, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
I live on Shepard Mesa and I smell the odor of weed every time I drive to Carpinteria.
The post Carpinteria Politics appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/10/carpinteria-politics/
SCVEDC Releases Economic Snapshot for Q4 2023
date: 2024-04-10, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Santa Clarita Valley Economic Development Corporation has released their Q4 2023 Economic Snapshot.
https://scvnews.com/scvedc-releases-economic-snapshot-for-q4-2023/
It’s 2024 and Intel silicon is still haunted by data-spilling Spectre
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Go, go InSpectre Gadget
Intel CPU cores remain vulnerable to Spectre data-leaking attacks, say academics at VU Amsterdam.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/intel_cpus_native_spectre_attacks/
Santa Barbara County Behavioral Wellness Invites the Community to Light Up Green
date: 2024-04-10, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
(SANTA BARBARA, Calif.) – Santa Barbara County is once again inviting the community to join the County of Santa Barbara as
The post Santa Barbara County Behavioral Wellness Invites the Community to Light Up Green appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Undiagnosed Autism in Teens and Adults Can Lead to Mental Health Issues
date: 2024-04-10, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SANTA BARBARA – Teens and adults who have undiagnosed autism (autism spectrum disorder/ASD) and are unaware they have the disorder
The post Undiagnosed Autism in Teens and Adults Can Lead to Mental Health Issues appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Eleven Finalists to Compete at 2024 Performing Arts Scholarship Foundation Contest
date: 2024-04-10, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SANTA BARBARA, California – Eleven instrumentalists and vocalists will compete for thousands of dollars in scholarships on April 28 after being
The post Eleven Finalists to Compete at 2024 Performing Arts Scholarship Foundation Contest appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
The Marshall Star for April 10, 2024
date: 2024-04-10, from: NASA breaking news
NASA, Marshall Help Viewers Celebrate Total Solar Eclipse in Arkansas A group of Marshall and agency team members traveled to Russellville, Arkansas, to help viewers experience the April 8 total solar eclipse through the eyes of NASA. Science and communication experts from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Stennis Space Center, Kennedy Space Center, and NASA […]
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/marshall/the-marshall-star-for-april-10-2024/
Avangrid just broke ground on its first solar farm in California
date: 2024-04-10, from: Electrek Feed
Avangrid (NYSE: AGR), one of the US’s largest clean energy operators, has begun construction on its first solar farm in California.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/10/avangrid-first-solar-farm-california/
Take a Guided Tour of Ellwood Open Space on May 6
date: 2024-04-10, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
GOLETA, CA, April 9, 2024 – Mark your calendar for Monday, May 6 to participate in Ellwood Now: A Guided Tour of
The post Take a Guided Tour of Ellwood Open Space on May 6 appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/10/take-a-guided-tour-of-ellwood-open-space-on-may-6/
Adam Moss and the Creative Process
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/04/adam-moss-and-the-creative-process
Lilbits: MINISFORUM’s portable 144 Hz touchscreen display sells for under $200
date: 2024-04-10, from: Liliputing
This year Chinese mini PC maker MINISFORUM has started branching out into other product categories. The MINISFORUM V3 tablet with an AMD Ryzen 7 8840U processor is coming soon. And now the company is taking orders for its first portable display. The MINISFORUM MSS-A156 is a thin, reasonably lightweight portable monitor that you can connect to a […]
The post Lilbits: MINISFORUM’s portable 144 Hz touchscreen display sells for under $200 appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/lilbits-minisforums-portable-144-hz-touchscreen-display-sells-for-under-200/
Carrots, Sticks, and Sermons Are Not Enough: Productivity in the UK’s Public Sector
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: RAND blog
Productivity improvement across the UK public sector has stalled in recent years. There are two main ways to address this productivity puzzle: Reducing costs, and innovative system change focussed on delivering more value with the same inputs.
When Are the Next Solar Eclipses? 2026 Promises Totality in Europe, While Much of America Has a Decades-Long Wait
date: 2024-04-10, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The next total solar eclipse visible from the contiguous U.S. won’t take place until August 23, 2044—but eclipse chasers will have other opportunities to experience totality before that
April 17: Golden Valley Presents ‘Little Shop of Horrors’
date: 2024-04-10, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Golden Valley High School Performing Arts Department presents cult favorite Little Shop of Horrors, a musical about a flower shop in a rough and rundown neighborhood that is taken over by a flesh-eating plant from outer space
https://scvnews.com/april-17-golden-valley-presents-little-shop-of-horrors/
NASA, Japan Advance Space Cooperation, Sign Agreement for Lunar Rover
date: 2024-04-10, from: NASA breaking news
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Japan’s Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) Masahito Moriyama have signed an agreement to advance sustainable human exploration of the Moon. Japan will design, develop, and operate a pressurized rover for crewed and uncrewed exploration on the Moon. NASA will provide the launch and delivery of the […]
If someone in your house drives a Tesla, you get $10k off a 2023 Ford Mustang Mach-E lease
date: 2024-04-10, from: Electrek Feed
If you or someone in your household owns or leases a Tesla, you can get up to $10,000 off a new 2023 Ford Mustang Mach-E lease.
More Than 36,000 Volunteers Helped Do NASA Eclipse Science
date: 2024-04-10, from: NASA breaking news
Thank you for helping us out! Over 36,000 people helped do NASA Science during Monday’s total solar eclipse. Together, these volunteers submitted more than 60,000 vital pieces of eclipse data to NASA science projects. More than 30,000 volunteers with the SunSketcher project pointed their smartphones toward the Sun and recorded pictures of Bailey’s beads, flashes of Sunlight […]
A map of the “foreign” origins of our global diet. “You cannot…
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/04/0044367-a-map-of-the-foreign
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-04-10, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Texas is replacing thousands of human exam graders with AI.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/10/24126206/texas-staar-exam-graders-ai-automated-scoring-engine
Think diplomacy is tough? Try a White House state dinner
date: 2024-04-10, from: VOA News USA
the white house — Preparations take months. No detail is overlooked, for this is perhaps the most evolved form of diplomacy: the state dinner.
As first lady Jill Biden prepared Wednesday to host her fifth state dinner, for Japan’s leader, she made sure that every aesthetic detail — the crystal on the tables, the food on the White House china, the decor in the State Dining Room, the music and the fashion — dripped with diplomatic significance. This dinner, she said in her preview of the event, would make frequent reference to Washington’s famous cherry trees, a gift from Japan more than a century ago.
“As guests sit among the field of flowers, glass and silk butterflies from both our countries will dance over the tables, their graceful flight a reminder that as our nations navigate the winds of change, we do so together as partners in peace and prosperity,” she said.
The White House Historical Association laid out the high stakes, saying a state dinner “showcases global power and influence and sets the tone for the continuation of dialogue between the president and the visiting head of state.”
Roxanne Roberts, a style writer for The Washington Post who has covered state dinners for more than 30 years, likens them to “the frosting on an already-baked cake.”
“The state dinner is the least important part of a state visit, but it’s the thing that gets the most attention,” she told VOA. “And it sends a signal to not only the government of that country but the people of that country that you’re important to us. We care about you.”
That’s reflected in the numbers. Records that journalists requested from the State Department, which foots the bill, show that Obama-era dinners cost U.S. taxpayers more than half a million dollars each. More recent dinner tabs have not been released.
The food!
Imagine, Roberts said, a lavish wedding.
“It’s as if there was a marriage between the two countries, and this is the wedding reception,” she said.
The most obvious manifestation of that is on the plate.
White House executive chef Cristeta Comerford said this menu took her “a couple of months” to design and field test. Over three courses, guests took a tour through her Japan-influenced creations, starting with a nod to the beloved American twist on sushi, the California roll. Her version was rendered as a salad of house-cured salmon with avocado, grapefruit, watermelon radish, cucumber and shiso leaf fritters.
Beef has been a fixture of past Biden dinners — the exception, of course, being the menu for the 2023 state dinner for Indian leader Narendra Modi, a strict vegetarian. Guests at this year’s dinner, accordingly, moved on to a dry-aged rib-eye steak with blistered shishito pepper butter; a fricassee of fava beans, morels and cipollini mushrooms; and a sesame oil sabayon.
And for dessert: a salted caramel pistachio cake with matcha tea ganache, cherry ice cream and a drizzle of raspberry coulis.
“We wanted to bring a little bit of the cherry blossoms that are here on the Tidal Basin right here to our dessert, in order for everyone to enjoy the cherry blossoms that we enjoy every year,” said White House executive pastry chef Susie Morrison.
The wines, as is now custom, will be American.
“The days when only French wines were served at state dinners are long gone,” Roberts said. “Primarily because there were a lot of American vineyards who basically said, ‘Whoa, what about us? We’re cool.’”
The fripperies!
A temporary installation in the White House’s Cross Hall featured swimming koi – “symbols of friendship, peace, luck and perseverance,” Biden said.
In the Bookseller’s Hall arrival area, a massive vinyl floor decal with images of cherry blossoms, butterflies and koi was laid over the marble flooring, as guests strolled in — including former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gold-medal figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi, Biden family members and actor Robert DeNiro. Dresses bore floral motifs, lace and long hems. One guest wore a formal montsuki, a version of a kimono.
Musical entertainment featured Paul Simon, a favorite of the first lady. And the first couples exchanged gifts that included a three-legged black walnut table made by a Japanese-American-owned company, a set of records autographed by American singer Billy Joel, and, as a personal touch, a framed painting of the Yoshino cherry tree that Jill Biden planted with Japan’s first lady, Yuko Kishida, on the South Lawn last spring.
The fashion!
Yuko Kishida had garnered rave reviews for her choice to don India’s most culturally and technically fraught of garments, the sari, by draping and meticulously pleating 5 meters of green Kanjeevaram silk around her body for a summit of global leaders last year in New Delhi.
As she landed in Washington for her first state visit on Tuesday — but her second trip to meet the Bidens — she greeted the couple in a flowing dress of autumn-toned watercolor florals. President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida wore suits, while the U.S. first lady donned a black dress with a deep keyhole neckline and razor-sharp tailoring.
For the main event, the first ladies coordinated in shades of deep, purple-toned blue, with Biden in a long-sleeved floor-length beaded gown in what the White House described as “sapphire ombre” made by the house of Dominican-born American designer Oscar de la Renta.
The Japanese first lady donned a silky blue gown with exaggerated shoulders and black beaded floral embellishments along the neckline. The dress was cinched with a black belt, evoking the sash traditionally used to secure a kimono.
These decisions, Roberts said, are “more than just going off to the store and going, ‘Oh, that’s pretty. I think I’ll wear that.’”
And the pressure, she said, falls disproportionately on the leaders’ spouses, who are traditionally women.
“They’re ambassadors for the clothing that they wear, the look that they have,” she said. “And so, all of those, all of those elements play into all of these choices. You know, the guys have it easy — just throw on the tuxedo.”
… And finally, the faux pas!
What could possibly go wrong?
Surprisingly, not a lot, Roberts said, adding, “The truth of the matter is that these state dinners tend to go off without a hitch, because the planning is done so well.”
But, she said, mistakes sometimes happen.
She described a long-ago dinner for Mexico’s leader that featured “an elaborate dessert that had a guy with a sombrero sleeping as a decorative piece.”
“It was meant to be charming and kind of fun, and it just hit wrong,” she said.
Another memorable slip, she said, was at a 2009 state dinner for India, where two uninvited reality stars crashed the event.
“The fact that two people were able to get in who were not supposed to be there was, in fact, a scandal,” she said.
The East Wing, in its preview, chose to focus instead on the positive, with White House social secretary Carlos Elizondo homing in on the theme while raising the stakes of this impossibly complex event.
“That’s what we hope to capture,” he said. “The magic of spring in our lasting friendship, each detail chosen to create a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/think-diplomacy-is-tough-try-a-white-house-state-dinner/7564746.html
Little Rock Nine and Paul McCartney React to Beyoncé’s ‘Blackbird’ Cover
date: 2024-04-10, from: Smithsonian Magazine
McCartney was inspired to write the song after hearing about the battle to integrate Little Rock Central High School in 1957
A Langley Intern Traveled 1,340 Miles to View a Total Solar Eclipse. Here’s What She Saw.
date: 2024-04-10, from: NASA breaking news
Emma Friedman, an Office of Communications intern at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, understood that the total solar eclipse on April 8th, 2024, was an out-of-this-world opportunity she couldn’t miss. Equipped with the proper eye protection, I traveled over one thousand miles to Dallas, Texas, to be in the eclipse’s path of totality. […]
Paper-Crumpling Study About the Nature of Anger Is the Best Thing I’ve Read in a Long Time
date: 2024-04-10, from: 404 Media Group
Science has found that writing down your feelings and performatively disposing of them can make you less angry.
Run-time Polymorphism in Swift
date: 2024-04-10, from: Michael Tsai
Jordan Rose (Mastodon): There are only three ways to get run-time polymorphism in Swift. Well, three and a half. […] Calling a function value (closure) Calling a class member Calling a protocol requirement Manually testing the type of a value […] Generics are a powerful and flexible tool, but in general they don’t result in […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/04/10/run-time-polymorphism-in-swift/
Universal macappstore: Links
date: 2024-04-10, from: Michael Tsai
Jeff Johnson: The App Store app on macOS is the default handler of URLs with the macappstore: scheme. App Store preview web pages automatically open the App Store app by setting the location of an HTML <iframe> element to a macappstore: URL. My free open source app Stop The Mac App Store registers itself as […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/04/10/universal-macappstore-links/
Facebook Blocking Links to Kansas Reflector
date: 2024-04-10, from: Michael Tsai
Nick Heer: Earlier this week, Dave Kendall of documentary production company Prairie Hollow and formerly of a Topeka, Kansas PBS station, wrote in the Kansas Reflector an article criticizing Meta. Kendall says he tried to promote posts on Facebook for a screening of “Hot Times in the Heartland” but was prevented from doing so. A […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/04/10/facebook-blocking-links-to-kansas-reflector/
Google Search Changes Hurt Independent Sites
date: 2024-04-10, from: Michael Tsai
Brandon Saltalamacchia (Hacker News, Dennis): The main source of our traffic was through Google Search. Whenever you searched for something retro gaming-related, our hope was that you would stumble across our website for advice, as we have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into expert journalists to provide you with answers to your retro gaming […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/04/10/google-search-changes-hurt-independent-sites/
How do you become successful?
date: 2024-04-10, from: Interesting, a blog on writing
And what does that even mean?
https://inneresting.substack.com/p/how-do-you-become-successful
VW and Porsche’s electric car sales dipped, but the new Macan EV and ID.4 spark hope
date: 2024-04-10, from: Electrek Feed
Volkswagen Group, including Porsche, saw EV sales dip in the first three months of the year as the company prepares to launch new electric models. With the new VW ID.4 and upcoming Porsche Macan EV rolling out in 2024, Volkswagen is already seeing things turn around.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/10/vw-porsches-ev-sales-dip-new-macan-ev-id-4-spark-hope/
April 24: Supes Proclaim Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day
date: 2024-04-10, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a motion introduced by Supervisor Kathryn Barger and co-authored by Supervisor Hilda L. Solis to commemorate the 109th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide by proclaiming April 24, 2024 as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.
https://scvnews.com/l-a-county-supervisors-proclaim-armenian-genocide-remembrance-day/
Title IX website changes
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
Title IX website changes CSUN is seeking to enhance its Office of Equity and Compliance website to improve student awareness regarding campus safety, as well as protections against sexual misconduct…
https://sundial.csun.edu/180150/news/title-ix-website-changes/
Radxa NIO 12L is single-board PC with a MediaTek Genio 1200 for $99 and up
date: 2024-04-10, from: Liliputing
The Radxa NIO 12L is a single-board computer that’s about the size of a small smartphone, but it has far more ports than you’re likely to find on any phone. Powered by a MediaTek Genio 1200 octa-core processor, the little board supports up to 16GB of RAM, featured an integrated NPU for hardware-accelerated AI features, […]
The post Radxa NIO 12L is single-board PC with a MediaTek Genio 1200 for $99 and up appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/radxa-nio-12l-is-single-board-pc-with-a-mediatek-genio-1200-for-99-and-up/
CSUN Hip-Hop prepares for Kinesis performance
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
The CSUN Hip-Hop club recently finished a practice video for its second choreography. The rehearsal was held on March 11. The group of dancers are now deciding what to do…
https://sundial.csun.edu/180178/news/csun-hip-hop-prepares-for-kinesis-performance/
The Moscow Terror Attack Shows the Limits of the Russia-Iran Partnership
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: RAND blog
Growing military and economic ties between Russia and Iran pose a threat to U.S. and Western interests. But their relationship remains largely transactional. The Ukraine war has incentivized them to paper over their disputes for now, but has not erased significant differences which make it more difficult for Moscow and Tehran to forge a true strategic partnership.
AMA US Hard Enduro Series Teams Up With onX Offroad To Go Further
date: 2024-04-10, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
onX Offroad will serve as the official mapping partner of the 2024 USHE.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/715556/2024-ama-ushe-onx-offroad-partnership/
Toyota bZ4X, Subaru Solterra Top Doug DeMuro’s List Of Worst New Cars On Sale
date: 2024-04-10, from: Inside EVs News
The Audi Q4 Sportback E-tron is also in the top 5.
The saga of the Coyote vs. Acme movie and what it says…
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/04/0044365-the-saga-of-the-coyote
Updated 2025 Mercedes-Benz EQS Tones Down Looks And Goes Farther
date: 2024-04-10, from: Inside EVs News
Flush-mounted chrome bars on the front of the EQS usher in a traditional look for the radically-styled sedan.
https://insideevs.com/news/715669/2025-eqs-update-mercedes-benz/
Top US general warns Ukraine on brink of being overrun by Russia
date: 2024-04-10, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — The tenacity of Ukrainian troops will soon be no match for Russia’s manpower and missiles should U.S. lawmakers fail to approve additional security assistance for Ukraine, the top American general in Europe told lawmakers, part of a stark warning about the direction of the more than two-year-old conflict.
U.S. military officials have warned repeatedly in recent weeks that Russian forces have been able to make incremental gains in Ukraine and that without renewed U.S. backing, Ukraine’s forces will eventually falter.
Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday, the commander of U.S. European Command described the battlefield in blunt terms.
“If we do not continue to support Ukraine, Ukraine will run out of artillery shells and will run out of air defense interceptors in fairly short order,” said General Christopher Cavoli, explaining that Kyiv is dependent on the United States for those key munitions.
“I can’t predict the future, but I can do simple math,” he said. “Based on my experience in 37-plus years in the U.S. military, if one side can shoot and the other side can’t shoot back, the side that can’t shoot back loses.”
Cavoli also said the failure of U.S. lawmakers to approve a $60 billion supplemental security package is already giving Russia a significant advantage.
“They [Ukraine] are now being outshot by the Russian side 5-to-1,” he told lawmakers. “That will immediately go to 10-to-1 in a matter of weeks.
“We are not talking about months. We are not talking hypothetically,” Cavoli said.
Multiple U.S. officials have warned that Ukraine’s military has been forced to ration artillery and air defense capabilities as Kyiv waits for U.S. lawmakers to approve the supplemental assistance.
“We are already seeing the effects of the failure to pass the supplemental,” Assistant Secretary of Defense Celeste Wallander told the panel, testifying alongside U.S. European Command’s Cavoli.
“We don’t need to imagine,” she said, blaming the lack of U.S. provided artillery for why “the Russian attacks are getting through.”
That supplemental defense package passed in the U.S. Senate back in February, but leadership in the House of Representatives has so far refused to bring the legislation to the floor for a vote.
During a press conference on Capitol Hill Wednesday, Republican House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson said lawmakers were continuing to “actively discuss our options on a path forward.”
“It’s a very complicated matter at a very complicated time. The clock is ticking on it, and everyone here feels the urgency of that,” Johnson said. “But what’s required is that you reach consensus on it, and that’s what we’re working on.”
House Democrats, however, have voiced frustration with Johnson’s refusal to call a vote.
“The House has waited months now to approve the security package to help protect Ukraine,” said Representative Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. “Weeks ago, we were too late. And now every day is at an extreme cost to our ability to deter Russia.”
Another Democrat on the committee, Representative Elissa Slotkin, scolded Johnson, saying he needs to call a vote despite opposition from a small group of House Republicans.
“We do need to get it over the finish line,” she said. “I accept that he’s at risk of losing his job over that choice, but that’s what leadership is — it’s the big boy pants and making tough choices.”
Some Republicans, though, chastised Democratic lawmakers for what they described as misguided priorities.
“We’ve got hundreds of thousands of Americans who are dying, fentanyl overdoses, child and human sex trafficking, not to mention 178-plus countries that are crossing our border,” said Republican Representative Cory Mills.
“But, oh wait, that’s not the priority. Let’s secure Ukraine’s borders,” he said.
VOA’s Katherine Gypson contributed to this report.
A weighted vest
date: 2024-04-10, from: Dave Rupert blog
I bought a 40 pound weighted vest for $40 dollars on Amazon. The workout term for this is “rucking” and has connotations with being outdoorsy and/or in the military. Load up a backpack full of weights (or in my case, a vest full of sand bags) and head outdoors. The marketing benefits of rucking sound great:
- It is simple and anyone can do it
- Gets you outside
- Active Resistance Training™️
- Burns up to 3x more calories than walking
- Good for your back and improves your posture
- Good for your mental health
A neighbor friend of mine (that’s also a physical therapist) has one and she recommended it. My body is adept at carrying heavy objects1, so this seems like an easy way to squeeze out some gains from my regular walks. Bonus points that it gets me outside and gets rid of my developer hunch. After a handful of walks, I’m enjoying the vest and –as expected– my body handles the weight fine but it’s sweatier and hills knock the wind out of me a bit more.
There’s an army fetish around rucking. It’s hard to tell if that’s fragile male ego in workout culture or if it’s because an armored plate carrier is a well-tested and efficient way to carry weight. My vest doesn’t look that masculine and looks more like I duct taped C4 to my chest. With my uni-bomber glasses, long hair, beard, and resting scowl I don’t need more help looking like a disgruntled domestic terrorist but I suppose this completes the look. If I can sustain the $40 fix, then I’ll upgrade to the $200 plate vest solution.
The cynical side of me wonders if this is more skinny people shit. As I dawn the weighted vest, the irony is not lost on me I used to be about the same amount of weight heavier. Being heavy never helped me lose weight. No one gives you an approving head nod for walking while fat, but velcro a little vest to your torso and people give you the “good for you” pity eyes.
Putting my optimist hat back on, it might work this time. Maybe this is the one weird trick my body needs to activate dormant caveman genetics that will unleash my inner Adonis. Walking in hard mode seems sustainable for the time-being and I can already feel my ass morphing into a perfect badonkadonk.
-
I cried during the Luisa’s song “Surface Pressure” in Encanto ↩︎
https://daverupert.com/2024/04/a-weighted-vest/
Solar to displace natural gas in the daytime + in summer on the Texas grid
date: 2024-04-10, from: Electrek Feed
Solar is forecast to displace natural gas in the middle of the day and in the summer on the Texas grid, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).
Lenovo Tab P12 with Matte Display coming soon (A tablet made for reading)
date: 2024-04-10, from: Liliputing
Most modern tablets have glossy touchscreen displays which respond well to touch and generally look good indoors. But take them outside or put them under a bright light bulb and they have a habit of turning into mirrors unless you crank the brightness all the way up (assuming they even have screens that can get bright […]
The post Lenovo Tab P12 with Matte Display coming soon (A tablet made for reading) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/lenovo-tab-p12-with-matte-display-could-be-a-tablet-made-for-readers-leaks/
Putin’s Cordon Sanitaire in Ukraine
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: RAND blog
Moscow is signaling a renewed Russian lunge into northern Ukraine to create a buffer zone and seize Kharkiv. Any Russian escalation in northern Ukraine deserves to be met with the full force of Ukraine’s own arms and those from the West.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/04/putins-cordon-sanitaire-in-ukraine.html
US House mulls forcing AI makers to reveal use of copyrighted training data
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Proposed law doesn’t include any ban on use of such stuff to build models, mind you
A bill introduced in the US House of Representatives would require those training AI models to disclose any and all copyrighted works used, and it would apply retroactively.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/congressional_bill_would_require_ai/
Trump says Arizona’s abortion ban goes ‘too far,’ defends overturning of Roe v. Wade
date: 2024-04-10, from: VOA News USA
ATLANTA — Donald Trump said Wednesday that an Arizona law that criminalizes nearly all abortions goes too far and called on Arizona lawmakers to change it, while also defending the overturning of Roe v. Wade that cleared states to ban the procedure.
“It’ll be straightened out and as you know, it’s all about states’ rights,” the former president told supporters and journalists after landing in Atlanta for a fundraiser. “It’ll be straightened out, and I’m sure that the governor and everybody else are going to bring it back into reason and that’ll be taken care of, I think, very quickly.”
Though Trump has waffled on whether he supports abortion rights, he appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and ended a federally guaranteed right to abortion. Now facing growing political backlash as Democrats notch victories around the nation by campaigning on abortion rights, Trump increasingly has been put on the defensive and urged Republicans to avoid supporting bans that are unpopular with many Americans.
Trump issued a video statement this week declining to endorse a national abortion ban and saying he believes limits should be left to the states. His statement angered some religious conservatives and energized allies of President Joe Biden who see abortion rights as one of Trump’s weaknesses.
The Arizona Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday cleared the way for the enforcement of an 1864 law that bans abortion at all stages of pregnancy with no exceptions for rape or incest and allows abortions only if the mother’s life is in jeopardy.
Biden called the 1864 Arizona law cruel.
“Millions of Arizonans will soon live under an even more extreme and dangerous abortion ban, which fails to protect women even when their health is at risk or in tragic cases of rape or incest,” he said in a statement. “Vice President Harris and I stand with the vast majority of Americans who support a woman’s right to choose. We will continue to fight to protect reproductive rights and call on Congress to pass a law restoring the protections of Roe v. Wade.”
The decision drastically altered Arizona’s legal landscape for terminating pregnancies. The court suggested doctors can be prosecuted under the Civil War-era law, though the opinion written by the court’s majority did not say that.
Trump maintains he is proud that the three Supreme Court justices he nominated voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, saying states will have different restrictions. He supports three exceptions in cases of rape, incest and when the life of the mother is at risk.
He also spoke about a Florida law that bans abortions after six weeks, saying that “is probably maybe going to change also.” Last week, the state Supreme Court upheld the state’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy and the ruling also clears the way for the state to ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
“For 52 years, people have wanted to end Roe v. Wade, to get it back to the states. We did that. It was an incredible thing, an incredible achievement,” he said. “Now the states have it, and the states are putting out what they want. It’s the will of the people. So Florida is probably going to change.”
Trump ignored questions about how he plans to vote himself on Florida’s pending state constitutional amendment that would enshrine abortion access as a right of his home state’s residents. He did not elaborate on what he thinks the level of restrictions and access should be in Arizona or any other state.
The First Issue of Superman Just Became the Most Valuable Comic Book in the World
date: 2024-04-10, from: Smithsonian Magazine
An original copy of 1938’s “Action Comics No. 1” sold for a record-breaking $6 million at auction
Tesla reveals humanoid robot technology through new patents
date: 2024-04-10, from: Electrek Feed
Tesla has revealed some of its humanoid robot technology through filings for several new patents related to its Optimus robot program.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/10/tesla-reveals-humanoid-robot-technology-new-patents/
I loved reading through this social history of restaurants in NYC —…
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/04/0044366-i-loved-reading-through-t
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-04-10, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I’ve
been trying to pay my NY State income tax and estimated tax for hours. I
finally managed to log in, but that doesn’t help. They have all kinds of
links that say click here to pay the thing you want to pay, and that
just takes me to a login page where it says someone with that email
address already has an account, which I knew because I’m already logged
in using that account. The IRS site was a comparative breeze, even
though it had its own mysteries to solve and a certain amount of luck
was required to be allowed to pay my freaking taxes. I think when Reagan
said the government was the problem this is one of the times he was
right about that.
http://scripting.com/2024/04/10.html#a180809
A Secretive Experiment Released Salt Crystals Over San Francisco Bay—Could It Help Curb Warming?
date: 2024-04-10, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The technology could make clouds reflect more sunlight, cooling the Earth below. But even the scientists leading the study say letting go of fossil fuels is a much-preferred response to climate change
You Might Be Able To Lease A Tesla Model Y RWD For Around $300 A Month
date: 2024-04-10, from: Inside EVs News
Tesla is still applying the full $7,500 tax rebate to leases on top of already steep discounts. But check the final terms carefully.
https://insideevs.com/news/715545/model-y-deals-lease-april/
Lectric XPedition e-bike bundle hits $1,599 ($2,311 value), WORX trimmer and edger $45, and more
date: 2024-04-10, from: Electrek Feed
With spring in full bloom and summer on the horizon, outdoor excursions and explorations alike have officially begun, with today’s green deals being led by the Lectric XPedition Dual-Battery Cargo e-bike for $1,599 – and it also comes with $306 in free gear. It is joined by a 1-day discount on the WORX 5.5A 15-inch Electric Grass Trimmer and Edger at $45, as well as the EcoSmart 3.5kW Electric Tankless Water Heater for $161. Plus, you’ll find all of the other day’s other best Green Deals below.
Head below for other New Green Deals we’ve found today and, of course, Electrek’s best EV buying and leasing deals. Also, check out the new Electrek Tesla Shop for the best deals on Tesla accessories.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/10/lectric-xpedition-cargo-e-bike-worx-trimmer-more/
Writing and Rhetoric Department becomes “College Writing Program”
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Occidental News (Occidental College Student Newspaper)
As students and faculty perused the Course Counts website during course registration, the attentive browser might have noticed a change: the disappearance of the Writing and Rhetoric Department (WRD). If they looked further, they might have even seen the appearance of a new subject, titled “College Writing Program.” These changes are no programming errors. Writing […]
The post Writing and Rhetoric Department becomes “College Writing Program” appeared first on The Occidental.
Mercedes updates 2025 EQS sedan with better range, new grille, and a standing star emblem
date: 2024-04-10, from: Electrek Feed
Mercedes-Benz has unveiled the 2025 model year version of its flagship EQS sedan. The all-electric luxury vehicle, now entering its fourth model year, is touting some notable improvements inside and out. The updated Mercedes-Benz model now includes a larger battery, offering future customers even more range.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/10/mercedes-updates-2025-eqs-sedan-better-range-new-grille-star-emblem/
What Happens If We Do Nothing About the Climate Crisis?
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/04/what-happens-if-we-do-nothing-about-the-climate-crisis
Meet the new Alfa Romeo Milano, the sporty Italian SUV goes electric as brand’s first EV
date: 2024-04-10, from: Electrek Feed
The fully electric Italian crossover SUV we’ve been waiting for is finally here. Alfa Romeo revealed the new Milano, its first 100% electric production car, as it kicks off a new EV era.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/10/alfa-romeo-reveals-first-ev-sporty-milano-suv-electric/
Global Plug-In Car Sales Increased 3% In February 2024
date: 2024-04-10, from: Inside EVs News
The slow growth rate is mainly linked to China.
https://insideevs.com/news/715605/global-plugin-car-sales-february2024/
US broadband internet: Now with mandatory ‘nutrition’ labels
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
ISPs are just going to have to swallow it
The FCC’s “nutrition labels” for broadband internet services are now a required part of doing business for American ISPs.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/us_broadband_nutrition_labels/
Media Invited to Learn About NASA’s New Solar Sail Technology
date: 2024-04-10, from: NASA breaking news
Media are invited to learn about NASA’s next-generation solar sail technology – known as the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System – that could enable ambitious lower-cost missions to expand our understanding of the Sun and solar system. The event will occur from 10-11 a.m. on Tuesday, April 16, at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/media-invited-to-learn-about-nasas-new-solar-sail-technology/
Maldives 2024
date: 2024-04-10, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
Maldives 2024
The biosphere as we know it is ending and I’m spending two weeks in the Maldives with my wife for her 50th birthday. I feel conflicted.
The trip to get here was long. Zurich Doha by plane, Doha Male by plane, Male Kurudu by water-plane, Kurudu Komandoo by speedboat. I felt like sleeping for 20h when we finally got here. And all the anxiety before leaving was terrible, too.
With that, I think we have all out must-see locations before the end. We went to the Great Barrier Reef in 2017, to the Galapagos in 2020 and now to the Maldives.
2024-04-06. The last leg of the journey – our water-plane was delayed because of the bad weather.
Looking out from the porch the ocean is blue, the sky is blue and the reef begins a few meters in.
We go snorkeling every day. Our last two trips showed me that we need an underwater camera. Oh to have videos of Reef Number Nine in Australia or the penguins and sea lions in the Galapagos! I bought a GoPro Hero 10 before we left.
This cowtail stingray (?) we keep seeing is about 2m long and likes to hide in the sand.
There’s sea grass sprouting right now and sea turtles grazing.
Black tipped reef sharks… harmless! At a later point we did see it attack something hidden in the rocks and it was scary to see!
Most corals look dreary! It’s certainly not as colourful and busy as in Australia or the Galapagos. This purple giant is cool, though.
There are still plenty of colourful fish.
Whenever we’re away on a trip, we play games. The most popular tropical island game is Race for the Galaxy.
Yesterday we also played Petition by @klaatu.
2024-04-10. More pictures.
We saw our first hermit crabs in Costa Rica where we spent our honey moon. We love these little ones. Maybe because they’re slow and easily scared and therefore obviously harmless.
The parrot fish have super sharp teeth and gnaw on the corals. And when you’re snorkeling, you can hear them. Kchrrr! Kchhhrrk!
I also love those lone corals harbouring a small school of tiny fearful fish that retreat and hide in the coral as somebody approaches.
When you swim past the nearby reef the bottom drops out and the deep blue begins. I am always afraid some huge fish will show up.
There is a strange tourism industry, here. The islands are either uninhabited, inhabited by locals, or reserved for tourism. Tourists can stay on the “local islands” since 2007. Natives are only allowed to work on the tourist islands.
The capital city is one of the densest urban areas on the planet. Just look at the image of Malé on Wikipedia.
I would lament this urban sprawl, the land reclamation, the garbage problem, the democracy deficit, the dependence on tourism – but I know what my friend Peter would say, pointing at the Factfulness book. Check out these stats from the German Wikipedia page on the Maldives: In 2020, the Maldives had 541000 inhabitants. In 1950, they had about 74000 inhabitants. At the time, a woman had about 7.5 children on average in 1980 but these days they are so much better off that the growth rate has dropped to 1.8% in 2020 and a woman has about 1.8 children on average. Life expectancy rose from 34.5 years in 1950 to 81 for women and 77.8 for men in 2020. An amazing improvement from the point of view of the locals.
From my green perspective, though… let’s not forget the garbage island Thilafushi. The picked an island and use it as a garbage dump because they don’t know what to do with all the garbage. Sure, every island needs a garbage incinerator now, but in the nineties, there was just garbage and it had to go somewhere. And some of the stuff starts leaking. It accumulates in the the fish. People eat the fish. It’s easy to feel grim about this. I need to remind myself that life expectancy was less than 35 years just a generation or two ago (I was born in the seventies). Poverty is much, much worse than pollution and we tend to forget it.
If you’re wondering why I’m basically skimming, reading and finally summarizing Wikipedia articles on my blog, I guess the answer is that this is how I try to deal with it all. To not close my eyes. Not to look away.
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-04-06-maledives
Tesla Model 2 Demise Won’t Matter, Affordable EVs Are Already Here: Analyst
date: 2024-04-10, from: Inside EVs News
More than half of used EV listings are priced under $30,000, Recurrent found.
https://insideevs.com/news/715580/tesla-model-2-demise-analyst-affordable-evs/
LattePanda Mu is a $139 computer-on-a-module with Intel N100
date: 2024-04-10, from: Liliputing
The LattePanda Mu is a 70 x 60mm (2.8″ x 2.4″) compute module with an Intel Processor N100 chip, 8GB of RAM, 64GB of onboard storage, 9 PCIe 3.0 lanes, and support for up to three displays, two SATA drives, or other hardware. Available from DFRobot with a list price of $139, the LattePanda Mu will […]
The post LattePanda Mu is a $139 computer-on-a-module with Intel N100 appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/lattepanda-mu-is-a-139-computer-on-a-module-with-intel-n100/
Watch Hard Enduro Dirt Bikers Jump a Creek and Fail Spectacularly
date: 2024-04-10, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
We’re not saying we could do any better.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/715666/hard-enduro-dirt-bike-jump-fail-video/
A new “less competitive” version of Scrabble is coming soon. “Younger people,…
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/04/0044364-a-new-less-competitive-ve
These Songs Are Still Legal in Chechnya
date: 2024-04-10, from: 404 Media Group
Making 80 to 116 BPM music illegal won’t stop stomp-clap or ska.
https://www.404media.co/these-songs-are-still-legal-in-chechnya/
Healthcare AI won’t take jobs – it’ll make nursing easier, says process automation founder
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Something’s gotta give in short-staffed, overworked healthcare industry, reckons Thoughtful cofounder and CPO
Interview Companies are sticking AI everywhere they can right now - including injecting it into frontline healthcare. The benefits of healthcare AI are still up for debate, but Dan Parsons, cofounder and chief product officer at process automation firm Thoughtful, believes healthcare is the perfect place to start trialing new uses of the tech. …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/healthcare_ai_interview/
Hyundai IONIQ 5 N to compete at Pikes Peak hoping to set record SUV crossover climb times
date: 2024-04-10, from: Electrek Feed
Just over a month after announcing intentions to chase records at this year’s Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in four separate vehicles, Hyundai has confirmed one of its entrants. This summer, drivers in the IONIQ 5 N will navigate to the elevated summit in hopes of setting a new record for the segment.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/10/hyundai-ioniq-5-n-to-compete-pikes-peakto-set-record-climb-times/
Sometimes Getting the Perfect Picture Really Is Rocket Science
date: 2024-04-10, from: NASA breaking news
NASA Engineer Cindy Fuentes Rosal waves goodbye to a Black Brant IX sounding rocket launching from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia during the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. The rocket was part of a series of three launches for the Atmospheric Perturbations around Eclipse Path (APEP) mission to study the disturbances in […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/sometimes-getting-the-perfect-picture-really-is-rocket-science/
everyone knows
date: 2024-04-10, from: Ayjay blog
Reading this Jessica Grose piece — so similar to ten thousand other reports made in recent yers — on the miseries induced or exacerbated by digital technologies in the classroom, I think: Everyone knows all this. Everyone knows that living on screens is making children miserable in a dozen different ways, contributing to ever-increasing rates […]
https://blog.ayjay.org/everyone-knows/
MAF EAP – Upcoming NASA-Wide EAP Programs (April 2024)
date: 2024-04-10, from: NASA breaking news
Raising Awareness of Substance Use Disorder April 11, 2024 Join us for an enlightening webinar on raising awareness of Substance Use Disorder (SUD). In this informative session, we’ll delve into the complexities of SUD, exploring its prevalence, impact, and the importance of early detection and intervention. We will discuss effective strategies for recognizing signs of […]
Self-proclaimed “Loud Woman” Lindy West ’04 to deliver 2024 commencement address
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Occidental News (Occidental College Student Newspaper)
Before the eyes of hundreds of capped students, decorated with leis and colorful cords, a speaker stands. In 2019, it was the 42nd Mayor of LA, Eric Garcetti. In 2022, California Senator María Elena Durazo. Just last year, in 2023, author Isabel Wilkerson stood before the graduating class in the Remsen Bird Theatre. As graduation […]
The post Self-proclaimed “Loud Woman” Lindy West ’04 to deliver 2024 commencement address appeared first on The Occidental.
There’s one simple answer to just about everyone’s worries about electric bicycles
date: 2024-04-10, from: Electrek Feed
Electric bicycles continue to surge in popularity across the United States, bringing with them a host of benefits but also, inevitably, a few concerns. Despite e-bikes racking up points from new commuters across the country for being lower-cost car alternatives that turn commutes and errand running into joyrides, these powerful new transportation tools aren’t without their detractors, too.
Concerns among some members of the public have ranged from safety issues of sharing roads with cars to the risk of battery fires. However, there exists a straightforward solution that could alleviate nearly any worry anyone has about electric bikes: investing in better cycling infrastructure.
FreeDOS videos on YouTube
date: 2024-04-10, from: FreeDOS News
Did you know FreeDOS has a YouTube channel? The latest videos are about getting people interested in programming, like a program to make a Cylon “eye” move back and forth on the screen, and how to write a simple file viewer. We hadn’t posted videos in a while, but previous videos from before the break included a comparison of Quattro Pro with a modern spreadsheet, a demonstration of video resolutions on DOS, how to use VIM on FreeDOS, and how to install Borland TurboC++ on FreeDOS. The channel also sometimes covers more general “retrocomputing” topics like a history of tech writing with ed and nroff, a look back at original style C, and using Linux like original Unix. For more, subscribe to the FreeDOS YouTube channel.
https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/news/2024/04/freedos-videos-on-youtube/
Media Invited to NASA’s Student Launch Challenge in Alabama
date: 2024-04-10, from: NASA breaking news
NASA’s 2024 Student Launch challenge will bring students from colleges, universities, high schools, middle schools, and informal education groups to launch amateur rockets and payloads Saturday, April 13, starting at 8:30 a.m. CDT at Bragg Farms in Toney, Alabama, near NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. Live streaming will begin at 8:20 a.m. CDT […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/media-invited-to-nasas-student-launch-challenge-in-alabama/
Donald Trump’s historic criminal trial set to begin in New York City
date: 2024-04-10, from: VOA News USA
Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump faces multiple criminal charges in a hush money payment case in New York City. After several attempts by the former president’s lawyers to delay the trial, it is scheduled to begin April 15. Aron Ranen reports.
US restricts trade with companies tied to drones used by Russia, Houthis
date: 2024-04-10, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — The United States restricted trade with five companies on Wednesday that it said help produce and procure drones for use by Russia in Ukraine and by Iran-backed Houthis in Red Sea shipping attacks.
The companies from Russia and China were among 11 additions to the Commerce Department’s Entity List, which means suppliers need licenses before shipping goods and technology to them.
Russia has intensified its drone and missile strikes against Ukrainian energy facilities in recent weeks, causing significant damage and threatening a repeat of the blackouts experienced in the first year after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
The Commerce Department added a Chinese entity, Jiangxi Xintuo Enterprise Company, for supporting Russia’s military through the procurement, development and proliferation of Russian drones, it said.
Shenzhen Jiasibo Technology Company of China was cited for being part of a network procuring aerospace components, including drone applications, for an aircraft company in Iran. Three Russian entities — Aerosila JSC SPE, Delta-Aero LLC, and JSC ODK-Star — were added for being part of the network.
“These components are used to develop and produce Shahed-series UAVs which have been used by Iran to attack oil tankers in the Middle East and by Russia in Ukraine,” the Federal Register notice said, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles.
Attacks on ships, including oil tankers, by Iranian-backed Houthis have disrupted global shipping through the Red Sea. Yemen’s Houthi militia say they are retaliating against Israel’s war against Palestinian Hamas militants in Gaza.
Companies are added to the U.S. Entity List when Washington deems them a threat to U.S. national security or foreign policy. Suppliers must then be granted licenses, which are likely to be denied, before shipping goods to entities on the list.
The two United Arab Emirates citations, Khalaj Trading LLC and Mahdi Khalaj Amirhosseini, were added for apparently violating Iran sanctions by exporting or trying to export items from the United States to Iran through UAE, according to the posting.
Four Chinese entities were cited for acquiring U.S. items to support China’s military modernization efforts, it said. They are LINKZOL (Beijing) Technology Company, Xi’an Like Innovative Information Technology Company, Beijing Anwise Technology Company and Sitonholy (Tianjin) Company.
U.S.-Chinese military contacts resumed late last year, but tensions continue due to fundamental differences over Taiwan and the South China Sea that remain dangerous potential flashpoints.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has pumped billions into buying and developing equipment as part of his modernizing efforts to build a “world-class” military by 2050, with Beijing’s outsized defense budget growing at a faster pace than the economy for some years.
New Japanese anger management technique just dropped: “Writing down your reaction to…
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/04/0044362-new-japanese-anger-manage
US Internet Service Providers now display FCC-mandated “nutrition labels,” or “Broadband Facts”
date: 2024-04-10, from: Liliputing
The largest ISPs (Internet Service Providers) in the United States are now showing broadband “nutrition labels” that make it easier to compare plans. The move comes a year and a half after the US Federal Communications Commission adopted rules requiring major ISPs to add these labels by April 10, 2024. Basically, these new boxes list […]
The post US Internet Service Providers now display FCC-mandated “nutrition labels,” or “Broadband Facts” appeared first on Liliputing.
SharePoint logs are easily circumvented and Microsoft is dragging its heels
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Now is the perfect time to review those permissions
SharePoint users should beware since audit logs on the platform have proved relatively simple to circumvent, meaning malicious actors could exfiltrate your data without tipping off your security team.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/microsoft_sharepoint_logs/
Exxon Declares War On Its Dissenters
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Lever News
The fossil fuel giant is suing investors to intimidate them from ever trying to influence corporate decisions.
https://www.levernews.com/exxon-declares-war-on-its-dissenters/
You Can Now Use Plug & Charge With Over 50 EVs At EVgo’s DC Fast Chargers
date: 2024-04-10, from: Inside EVs News
The feature, which is called Autocharge+ by EVgo, also works with Tesla EVs.
https://insideevs.com/news/715603/evgo-plug-and-charge-expansion/
America’s Best Friend in Asia
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: RAND blog
Many describe NATO as the United States’ indispensable alliance—and it remains a top priority. But with a growing slate of traditional and nontraditional security issues, many of which center on China, the United States’ new go-to ally is Japan.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/04/americas-best-friend-in-asia.html
NASA Next-Generation Solar Sail Boom Technology Ready for Launch
date: 2024-04-10, from: NASA breaking news
Sailing through space might sound like something out of science fiction, but the concept is no longer limited to books or the big screen. In April, a next-generation solar sail technology – known as the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System – will launch aboard Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket from the company’s Launch Complex 1 in […]
https://www.nasa.gov/general/nasa-next-generation-solar-sail-boom-technology-ready-for-launch/
Classic rock icons announce rescheduled farewell tour dates
date: 2024-04-10, from: San Jose Mercury News
Get tickets to see the Aerosmith Peace Out Tour at SAP Center in San Jose, Chase Center in San Francisco, Kia Forum in Inglewood.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/10/classic-rock-icons-announce-rescheduled-farewell-tour-dates/
Ford trims F-150 Lightning price by up to $5,500 in latest effort to boost EV demand
date: 2024-04-10, from: Electrek Feed
After starting 2024 off strong, with EV sales climbing 86% in the first quarter, Ford looks to boost momentum. Ford is trimming prices on the 2024 F-150 Lightning by up to $5,500 as the American automaker looks to fend off incoming competition.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/10/ford-cuts-f-150-lightning-ev-pickup-price-5500/
Tesla’s Supercharging Network Set To Rake In Piles Of Cash
date: 2024-04-10, from: Inside EVs News
Plus, a court voted to uphold the EPA’s approval of California’s EV rules, and 87% of Tesla owners say they’ll buy another Tesla.
https://insideevs.com/news/715644/tesla-supercharger-network-revenue/
TSMC sees semiconductor bounce as Q1 revenues rise 16.5%
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Early figures post a $18.44B haul for industry bellwether
Semiconductor giant TSMC looks to have rebounded from last year’s doldrums with revenue up 16.5 percent for the first quarter of this year, compared with the same period in 2023.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/tsmc_sees_semiconductor_bounce_with/
April 9, 2024
date: 2024-04-10, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-9-2024-827
Evicted — electric tractor company Solectrac hasn’t made rent in months
date: 2024-04-10, from: Electrek Feed
Ideanomics-backed electric farm tractor builders Solectrac offered farmers quiet, clean, and reliable operation with mountains of torque – but the latest news out of California is all bad as the company faces eviction and its dealers abandon the brand.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/10/evicted-electric-tractor-company-solectrac-hasnt-made-rent-in-months/
Elon Musk is rumored to go to India, sparking speculation of Tesla factory announcement
date: 2024-04-10, from: Electrek Feed
Elon Musk is rumored to be going to India this month, which is sparking speculation of an announcement about building a Tesla factory in the country.
Long Live the B’s
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2024/04/10/long-live-the-bs/
Colorado reporter’s expulsion from Republican gathering causes uproar
date: 2024-04-10, from: VOA News USA
DENVER, COLORADO — Politicians and news outlets in Colorado expressed anger over the expulsion from a Republican gathering this past weekend of an experienced politics reporter who was told that the state party chairman “believes current reporting to be very unfair.”
Journalists and prominent politicians, including the former chair of the Colorado Republican Party, came to the defense of Colorado Sun reporter Sandra Fish and against current state Republican Chairman Dave Williams, who said he had “no apologies” for ejecting Fish.
The controversy follows the contours of attacks on the press nationally, partly brought on by former President Donald Trump with the popularization of the term “fake news.” The ejection also appears to have influenced an endorsement Monday in the Republican primary race.
The state Republican Party announced on the social media platform X that it was endorsing U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert over one of her primary opponent, Deborah Flora, in the state’s 4th Congressional District race, partly because “Deb Flora lied about participating in the CD4 Assembly process, & now she’s boot licking fake journalists who only help Democrats.”
The post was a direct reply to Flora’s post on X defending Fish, in which Flora said the expulsion was “wrong and a violation of the First Amendment.”
The chair, who introduces himself on the party’s website as “Dave ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ Williams,” is seeking the nomination to run for the 5th District seat held by Republican U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, who is retiring from Congress.
In a text, Williams said he had no apologies for kicking Fish out of the assembly in Pueblo on Saturday and accused her of being a “fake journalist” and The Colorado Sun of being biased. When asked by text for examples, Williams did not respond. The Colorado Sun is an independent, nonprofit and nonpartisan news outlet that covers Colorado.
“I invite anyone to share any example of The Colorado Sun or Sandra Fish being unfair or inaccurate. So far I have heard nothing,” said Larry Ryckman, editor of the news outlet. “The Founding Fathers weren’t any big fans of newspapers back in the day. But they understood that a healthy democracy demands free, unfettered press.”
The assembly, held about two hours south of Denver, was partly to select representatives to the Republican National Committee and to work on a party platform for the election.
“There are 900,000 Republicans in the state of Colorado and a lot of unaffiliated voters who are interested in what happens at this assembly. And how they find out is via reporters like me being there to cover it,” Fish told The Associated Press by phone Monday.
“I am, as one person on Twitter noted, a little old lady and I’ve been in this business for a long time, and I just don’t think it’s right to eject a reporter from a meeting like this,” said Fish, who has covered politics since 1982.
Fish said she heard rumors prior to the event that she’d be barred from attending, and she asked event organizer, Eric Grossman, who texted her Thursday that he’d get back to her.
“Thanks. I’ve been covering these assemblies for at least seven cycles and have never had issues before,” Fish texted back. Ryckman attempted to reach Williams on Thursday night to discuss but said Williams never responded.
Before dawn on Saturday, Grossman texted Fish saying she wouldn’t be included on the press list and that “the state chairman believes current reporting to be very unfair.”
“I went anyway because, come on, this should be an open event,” said Fish, who was checked in and given press credentials that she wore around her neck along with a Colorado Sun nametag.
About an hour later, security asked her to leave. Fish showed her press credentials, then Grossman arrived and soon a sheriff’s deputy was called. Fish left with the deputy.
“We make no apologies for kicking out a fake journalist, who actually snuck into our event,” Williams said in a text. “Her publication is just an extension of the Democrat Party’s PR efforts, and the only backlash we see is from the fake news media, radical Democrats, and establishment RINOs who hate our conservative base.”
Grossman, in a text, said Fish’s actions were “a selfish political stunt.”
Republican state Senator Barbara Kirkmeyer defended the reporter, writing in a post on X: “Sandra Fish is a fair; honest and respected reporter, as a Republican I’m embarrassed by the GOP chair.”
Former Colorado Republican Party chair Kristi Burton Brown also chimed in on X, describing Fish as “hard-hitting but fair. … This is a dangerous take by the current (Colorado GOP). … Transparency is necessary for our nation.”
Among other stories, Fish has reported on how the Colorado Republican Party under Williams’ leadership paid for mailers that subtly attacked one of Williams’ primary opponents, and that fundraising slowed under his chairmanship.
Trump ex-deputy Weisselberg sentenced to five months for perjury
date: 2024-04-10, from: VOA News USA
New York — Former Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg was sentenced on Wednesday to five months in jail after pleading guilty last month to perjury charges for lying to investigators and a judge about Donald Trump’s finances.
Judge Laurie Peterson handed down the sentence at a hearing in Manhattan criminal court. The sentence was in line with the punishment the judge said she would impose at Weisselberg’s March 4 plea hearing.
Court officers led Weisselberg out of the courtroom in handcuffs following a brief hearing.
The sentence marks the second stint behind bars for the former U.S. president’s longtime loyal deputy.
Weisselberg, 76, spent around three months in New York’s Rikers Island jail in 2023 after pleading guilty to participating in a 15-year tax fraud scheme at the Trump Organization.
The perjury charges stem from Weisselberg’s testimony at a civil fraud case New York state Attorney General Letitia James brought against Trump, Weisselberg and other executives at Trump’s family real estate company for manipulating property values to dupe lenders and insurers.
Weisselberg testified at the trial on Oct. 10 that he was not involved in an incorrect valuation of Trump’s Manhattan townhouse. Trump’s 2015 and 2016 financial statements valued the unit at $327 million based on its stated size of more than 30,000 square feet, nearly three times the actual size.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, which brought the charges against Weisselberg, said the former CFO’s emails showed he was in fact paying close attention to the apartment.
Weisselberg also admitted to lying about his role in Trump’s financial statements during two earlier depositions with James’ office. James’ investigation culminated in a $454 million penalty imposed on Trump for fraudulently valuing properties. Trump is appealing the order by Justice Arthur Engoron.
Engoron also ordered Weisselberg to pay $1.1 million including interest.
Weisselberg worked for the former president’s family for half a century. His written plea agreement did not indicate if he would be cooperating with Bragg’s office.
Trump is set to go on trial starting on Monday on criminal charges of covering up $130,000 in hush money his former lawyer Michael Cohen paid porn star Stormy Daniels for her silence before the 2016 election about a sexual encounter she says she had with Trump in 2006.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records and denies any such encounter with Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.
The case, also brought by Bragg, is poised to be the first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. president. Trump also faces three other indictments, which stem from his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss and his handling of sensitive government documents. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Microsoft may want to add a dedicated Windows 11 button for ads and promos
date: 2024-04-10, from: OS News
The company is seemingly contemplating on whether to add a new “Recommended” button on the Taskbar. Interestingly, it is unfinished at the moment, or perhaps Microsoft is just not sure if it should proceed with this button at all. ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Hailo’s latest AI chip shows up integrated NPUs and sips power like fine wine
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
All your PC needs for 40 TOPS is an M.2 slot
Today, users who want to interface with AI usually do so through a cloud-based service like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, rather than locally.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/hailo_10h_ai_chip/
“Why does part of the Windows 98 Setup program look older than the rest?”
date: 2024-04-10, from: OS News
Well, this is something I never knew. Over on the retrocomputing section of StackExchange, someone asked why the second phase of the Windows 98 installation looked decidedly different from the third phase, even though they’re both graphical phases (the first phase is textual). The answer turns out to be both surprising, and entirely predictable. The first phase is a DOS program called DOSSETUP.BIN, which is the infamous blue part of the installation. The second part, however, is what we’re interested in here, and if the first phase is DOS, and the third phase is Windows 98 itself… What do you think the second phase is running? Yeah, exactly. Basically, because it is running under Windows 3.1 at that point. The second uses this minimal Windows 3.1 to run a Windows 3 program, W98SETUP.BIN (specified as the “shell” in SYSTEM.INI). This starts by copying more files to support all the information-gathering during setup, and various other niceties including the 3D look shown in your screenshot (the contents of the PRECOPY CABs); it ends by copying most of Windows 98, setting the system up so that it will boot Windows 98 from the target drive, and rebooting. ↫ Stephen Kitt So, in order to install Windows 98, you first run DOS, followed by Windows 3.1, ending in Windows 98. I have no idea why this is so funny to me, especially since it fits entirely within expectations of how Microsoft does things.
Someone Paid $262,500 For This Tesla Cybertruck At Auction
date: 2024-04-10, from: Inside EVs News
Granted, it was a tri-motor Foundation Series model, but that’s still more than double the sticker price.
https://insideevs.com/news/715550/tesla-cybertruck-cyberbeast-auction-double-sticker-price/
COVID-19’s class of 2024 spent their first year of college online; eleven seniors said they took it in stride
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Occidental News (Occidental College Student Newspaper)
Occidental’s class of 2024 may be graduating together in May, but just over four years ago, they were dispersed around the world individually, celebrating what seemed to be a one to two-week extension of spring break. Kyle Ahn (senior), from Rancho Palos Verdes, CA, remembered his high school sent the fateful email March 12, 2020 […]
The post COVID-19’s class of 2024 spent their first year of college online; eleven seniors said they took it in stride appeared first on The Occidental.
La Reconquista (the regaining)
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Occidental News (Occidental College Student Newspaper)
Everything changes, yet, everything stays the same. It’s that the final days of the world are also the first of the new life. That’s how everything is, different, but the same; the beach and the sea; the sun and the moon; my face and yours. But it’s not that the night and the day are […]
The post La Reconquista (the regaining) appeared first on The Occidental.
https://theoccidentalnews.com/media/2024/04/10/la-reconquista-the-regaining/2912324
Inherited style: family heirlooms as fashion
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Occidental News (Occidental College Student Newspaper)
In a world full of fast fashion, family heirlooms inspire one to look beyond the next season and to the next century, redefining what “trendy” looks like. Occidental College students discuss what their family heirlooms mean to them, including how the items are a source of connection and memory. Leila Anzalone Leila Anzalone (senior) has […]
The post Inherited style: family heirlooms as fashion appeared first on The Occidental.
https://theoccidentalnews.com/culture/2024/04/10/inherited-style-family-heirlooms-as-fashion/2912372
Outside Occidental: Gamble House showcases Craftsman-style architecture, preserves the artistic identity of Southern California
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Occidental News (Occidental College Student Newspaper)
In March of 1908, ground was broken at 4 Westmoreland Place, Pasadena, CA, to begin construction on a house for the Gamble family, of the cleaning goods company Procter & Gamble. Two years later, the house was completed, and it still stands in the same location today. Its façade is wide and layered. Plants and […]
The post Outside Occidental: Gamble House showcases Craftsman-style architecture, preserves the artistic identity of Southern California appeared first on The Occidental.
Lessons Learned: College may not have been the ‘best four years’ of my life, but it forged me into a warrior
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Occidental News (Occidental College Student Newspaper)
They say college is supposed to be the best four years of your life. As a 17-year-old who was having a hard time in high school because of severe mental health issues, I felt hope. Four years later, I ask myself, who actually believes that? To think this is as good as it gets? College […]
The post Lessons Learned: College may not have been the ‘best four years’ of my life, but it forged me into a warrior appeared first on The Occidental.
In loving memory: Robert Torres
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Occidental News (Occidental College Student Newspaper)
I don’t exactly remember meeting Robert Torres. But during my first summer on campus and my sophomore year — a difficult time — I quickly came to learn that, if I walked into the Tiger Cooler around 4 p.m., there was a man behind the counter who would look at me and ask how I […]
The post In loving memory: Robert Torres appeared first on The Occidental.
https://theoccidentalnews.com/news/2024/04/10/in-loving-memory-robert-torres/2912309
A spectrum of clothing available at Shades of Grey
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Occidental News (Occidental College Student Newspaper)
Opened Feb. 10 on York Boulevard, the glassy outer wall of the Highland Park boutique for fashion label Shades of Grey opens to a selection of ready-to-wear pants, shirts, sweaters and jackets. According to brand creator Micah Cohen, he has been interested in clothes since at least the age of 5 but decided to enter […]
The post A spectrum of clothing available at Shades of Grey appeared first on The Occidental.
Changeist: changing the hearts and minds of youth
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Occidental News (Occidental College Student Newspaper)
Growing up in San Jose, Changeist CEO Mario Fedelin said that the impacts of drugs and violence were prevalent in his early life. A nomination from his brother’s English teacher landed Fedelin at a sleep-away camp in Santa Cruz that introduced him to camp counselor John, who Fedelin said he connected with. Later in his […]
The post Changeist: changing the hearts and minds of youth appeared first on The Occidental.
ROSE, college responds to FAQ on student union drive
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Occidental News (Occidental College Student Newspaper)
In advance of an impending election for the Rising Occidental Student Employees (ROSE) to form a union at the college, The Occidental asked questions to a ROSE representative, Noah Weitzner (junior), and the college administration via the director of communications Rachel Warecki regarding the next steps of forming the union. According to the Information for […]
The post ROSE, college responds to FAQ on student union drive appeared first on The Occidental.
Sophomore Cecilia Grané wins ASOC presidential election after eventful race
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Occidental News (Occidental College Student Newspaper)
Ballots closed April 6 for this year’s Associated Students of Occidental College (ASOC) elections. According to elections chair Sarah Titcombe (junior), the student body voted for candidates in a variety of positions for the 2024–2025 school year. ASOC announced Monday, April 8 that Cecilia Grané (sophomore) won the presidential race with 209 votes. ASOC, Occidental’s […]
The post Sophomore Cecilia Grané wins ASOC presidential election after eventful race appeared first on The Occidental.
That’s Definitely One Way to Transport a New Motorcycle Tire
date: 2024-04-10, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
Gives new meaning to a “spare tire.”
https://www.rideapart.com/news/715359/motorcyclist-transports-new-tire-around-waist/
Eclipse COMPLAINTS?
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/04/eclipse-complaints
Stray dog found in Eureka stars in ‘Arthur the King’
date: 2024-04-10, from: San Jose Mercury News
His quick move to the home of a Hollywood trainer was largely due to his resemblance to another canine actor.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/10/stray-dog-found-in-eureka-stars-in-movie-arthur-the-king/
Interest rates are not coming down any time soon
date: 2024-04-10, from: Marketplace Morning Report
That’s the conclusion of many investors this morning, following the release of the consumer price index. Consumer inflation clocked in at 3.5% annually, while central bankers are looking for a figure closer to 2%. We’ll talk through the data. Plus, a European court ruled that two Russian oligarchs were wrongly sanctioned following Russia’a invasion of Ukraine. And the Congressional Budget Office found that immigration means gains for U.S. economy.
Kobo’s first color eReaders are coming April 30th for $150 and up
date: 2024-04-10, from: Liliputing
E Ink has been making paper-like displays for decades, but up until a few years ago most of the company’s screens have been black and white displays that support 16 shades of grey, but no color. That started to change in 2020 when the first eReaders and eNote devices with E Ink Kaleido displays started […]
The post Kobo’s first color eReaders are coming April 30th for $150 and up appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/kobos-first-color-ereaders-are-coming-april-30th-for-150-and-up/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-04-10, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The explanation of "podping" fails to mention rssCloud, which predates all of this stuff.
https://podcastguru.io/news/so-wtf-is-podping/
Valley Water drains Vasona Lake for routine maintenance
date: 2024-04-10, from: San Jose Mercury News
Project expected to be finished by April 11.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/10/valley-water-drains-vasona-lake-for-routine-maintenance/
Suspect arrested in Hayward hit-and-run that killed bicyclist
date: 2024-04-10, from: San Jose Mercury News
The collision on Sept. 6, 2023, killed 55-year-old Hayward resident Christopher Pena
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/10/suspect-in-a-fatal-2023-hayward-hit-and-run-arrested/
Nix is a better Docker image builder than Docker’s image builder
date: 2024-04-10, from: Ze Iaso’s blog
https://xeiaso.net/talks/2024/nix-docker-build/
As the Stanford-born Marriage Pact takes off, some students find lasting love
date: 2024-04-10, from: San Jose Mercury News
“The idea is, if you think about everybody who goes to your college, surely there’s someone who is a good backup plan for you.”
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/10/marriage-pact-stanford-questionnaire-matching-students/
The Climate Charts Are Not Okay. “The charts are hilariously underpowered attempts…
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/04/0044356-the-climate-charts-are-no
BMW just hit a major EV milestone as Q1 electric vehicle sales surge, outpacing rivals
date: 2024-04-10, from: Electrek Feed
BMW just hit a milestone after reaching the one million EV delivery mark as sales surged in the first quarter of 2024. With EV sales climbing in all major regions, BMW outpaced the competition in Q1.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/10/bmw-hits-major-milestone-q1-ev-sales-outpace-rivals/
Peter Higgs, daddy of the Higgs boson, dies at 94
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The particle bearing his name lives on
Obituary In a world dominated by instant gratification, Peter Higgs, who died earlier this week, had to wait more than half of his 94-year lifetime to see his theoretical predictions confirmed, thereby changing our understanding of the universe.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/peter_higgs_obituary/
Tesla Cybertruck Teardown Finds A Lot Of Unused Space Inside Battery Pack
date: 2024-04-10, from: Inside EVs News
It appears as if the Cybertruck’s battery pack was designed to fit taller cells, but then Tesla picked shorter cells instead.
https://insideevs.com/news/715634/tesla-cybertruck-battery-pack-half-empty/
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-04-10, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
For me, using FSD in my Tesla is like riding a roller coaster. I don’t trust the car not to kill me though. I spend most of my working life dealing with bugs in software. It’s very easy for me to imagine what could go wrong. I don’t understand how people can trust a computer with their lives this way. It’s also disconcerting that the car coming at me in the other direction could be computer-driven. And nowadays when I see the other car is a Tesla, esp this month when everyone’s getting a free demo of FSD, it’s somewhat likely the OP is a computer.
http://scripting.com/2024/04/10.html#a135000
San Jose: Excessive force trial for racist text cop on hold pending 9th Circuit appeal
date: 2024-04-10, from: San Jose Mercury News
Ex-SJPD officer Mark McNamara wants an appellate court to grant him qualified immunity, and is also seeking to move a prospective trial out of the Bay Area.
Chorizo and potato empanadas make an easy, enticing spring meal
date: 2024-04-10, from: San Jose Mercury News
Chorizo, Yukon Gold potatoes and chile peppers combine to make these easy, flavorful empanadas.
Oakland B’s hustle to get new Raimondi Park stadium ready before first game
date: 2024-04-10, from: San Jose Mercury News
Come the first week of June, Oakland’s newest baseball team hopes to greet fans with a site worthy of their attendance.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/10/oakland-bs-first-game-raimondi-park/
Rust rustles up fix for 10/10 critical command injection bug on Windows
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
BatBadBut hits Erlang, Go, Python, Ruby as well
Programmers are being urged to update their Rust versions after the security experts working on the language addressed a critical vulnerability that could lead to malicious command injections on Windows machines.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/rust_critical_vulnerability_windows/
Inside the ‘Com World War’: Robberies, Brickings, and ‘Drama’
date: 2024-04-10, from: 404 Media Group
A wave of robberies and other violent acts has swept across the nebulous crime culture known as Com. I watched it all unfold in real time.
https://www.404media.co/inside-the-com-world-war-robberies-brickings-and-drama/
Disneyland threatens lifetime ban for disability cheats
date: 2024-04-10, from: San Jose Mercury News
Tales of Disability Access Service abuse and tips for cheating the system are rampant on social media.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/10/disneyland-threatens-lifetime-ban-for-disability-cheats/
Half Of All Tesla EVs Are Made In China
date: 2024-04-10, from: Inside EVs News
The Shanghai factory consistently builds more EVs than the three other sites—California, Texas, and Germany—combined.
https://insideevs.com/news/715427/tesla-ev-production-shanghai-vs-global/
Podcast: The Wild World of Fake AI Influencers
date: 2024-04-10, from: 404 Media Group
We introduce our new 404 Media fellow Jules Roscoe; go long on fake AI Instagram influencers; talk about the couple making porn for the Apple Vision Pro; and the bizarre sight at a particular New York City chicken shop.
https://www.404media.co/404-media-podcast-week-33-ai-instagram-apple-vision-pro/
Kurtenbach: The Warriors are surging towards a best-case scenario
date: 2024-04-10, from: San Jose Mercury News
The Warriors picked the right time to play good basketball.
Biden hosts Kishida in official visit as US, Japan bolster defense ties
date: 2024-04-10, from: VOA News USA
Notes on git’s error messages
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: Julia Evans
https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/04/10/notes-on-git-error-messages/
Wooden internet kitchen radio powered by Raspberry Pi 4 and a DigiAMP+ HAT
date: 2024-04-10, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
Redditor OracleDude33 built this wooden Raspberry Pi 4-powered internet kitchen radio with an impossibly smooth finish.
The post Wooden internet kitchen radio powered by Raspberry Pi 4 and a DigiAMP+ HAT appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Virtually and actually, LXC 6 and Incus 6 are here – both LTS versions
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
There’s a new version of Canonical’s LXD too, but its community fork seems to be thriving
The community fork of what is now Canonical’s in-house virtualization tool seems to be doing well, with major new releases of Incus, LXC and associated tools.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/lxc_6_and_incus_6/
Biden administration imposes first-ever national drinking water limits on toxic PFAS
date: 2024-04-10, from: VOA News USA
The EPA is Cracking Down on Forever Chemicals in Drinking Water
date: 2024-04-10, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: More than 100,000 people have been evacuated in Kazakhstan and Russia due to the worst flooding in decades • The U.K. is expecting a “mini heatwave” • Multiple tornado warnings have been issued in southern Louisiana.
THE TOP FIVE
- EPA will require utilities to remove ‘forever chemicals’ from
drinking water
In an “ extraordinary” move, the Environmental Protection Agency today announced limits on “forever chemicals” in drinking water. The rule means municipal water systems will have to monitor for six types of PFAS chemicals and remove them. “This is historic and monumental,” Emily Donovan, co-founder of advocacy group Clean Cape Fear, told NPR. “I didn’t think [the EPA] would ever do it.”
There are more than 12,000 known PFAS, and they are just about everywhere, including in nearly half the tap water in the U.S. PFAS exposure in humans has been linked to health problems including decreased fertility, developmental delays, metabolic disorders, and increased risk of some cancers. Utilities have five years to comply with the rule, which will cost them about $1.5 billion annually. Some money from the bipartisan infrastructure law will go toward helping states with rolling out the monitoring and filtration systems.
If you are wondering what any of this has to do with climate change, note that “these synthetic organic chemicals are typically fossil fuel derivatives,” Elsie Sunderland, an environmental chemist at Harvard, explained to Vox. “We talk about climate change and chemical exposure as two separate issues, but we should start thinking about them together. As we move away from fossil fuel combustion and towards renewable energy, the industry is going to turn their products into plastics and synthetic chemicals.”
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
- Climate scientists ‘increasingly concerned’ about rate of warming
Scientists have been digesting yesterday’s report from the European Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which said that last month was the warmest March ever recorded and that temperatures have been at record highs for 10 months straight. The bleak data has some researchers worried the rate of warming is increasing and that we’re in “uncharted territory.” It’s worth compiling some of their thoughts here:
- “Myself and other climate scientists are asking whether this year is a blip, a phase change, whether the climate system is broken and behaving in a different way to what we expect.” – Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S.
- “Things seem to be happening slightly faster [than expected].” –Mark Maslin, professor of earth system science at University College London.
- “One year could possibly, may be an extreme outlier but the data we are witnessing already in 2024 are pretty disturbing. They hint at feedbacks in the climate system that are stronger than the models predict and are making me and many of my colleagues increasingly concerned about the pace and rate of climate breakdown.” –Jonathan Bamber, director of the Bristol Glaciology Centre at the University of Bristol.
- “If the anomaly does not stabilise by August – a reasonable expectation based on previous El Niño events – then the world will be in uncharted territory. It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated.” –Gavin Schmidt, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Not all experts agree the rate of warming has increased. “The world is warming AS FAST as we predicted,” said climate scientist Michael E. Mann, “and that’s bad enough.”
- Fire officials ramp up staffing to take on growing risks
America’s federal wildfire officials are changing how they recruit, hire, and assign firefighting crews in response to growing wildfire threats, according to The Associated Press. The change is “the biggest shift in wildfire management in decades.” It involves creating more leadership teams – the top-level crewmembers who take on the biggest and most complex fires – and recruiting a lot of new wildland firefighters. The Forest Service aims to hire around 11,300 firefighters this year, AP reports. While in the past many firefighting jobs were seasonal, a longer season calls for more permanent positions. Fire season is already underway. More than 2,669 square miles burned in the first three months of 2024, more than half of last year’s total.
- Survey finds Tesla buyers are extremely loyal to the brand
There are more electric vehicles coming onto the American market every year, but Tesla owners can’t be lured away. A recent survey from Bloomberg Intelligence finds 87% of Tesla drivers in the U.S. say they’ll stick with the brand for their next vehicle purchase, the highest retention rate among the brands in the survey. The second-highest was for Lexus at 68%, followed by 54% for Toyota. At the bottom end was Kia at 33%. About 81% of potential Tesla drivers are switching from other EV brands. Overall, the survey found that 42% of respondents were thinking of buying an EV for their next car.
- EPA cracks down on toxic chemical pollution
The Biden administration yesterday issued its final rule limiting dangerous air pollution from chemical plants. The new EPA regulations will require more than 200 plants to reduce emissions of several toxic chemicals, but focus heavily on two in particular that are very likely carcinogenic: ethylene oxide (used as a sterilizer) and chloroprene (used to make rubber). Manufacturers will now have to monitor their operations for emissions of these two substances and stop any leaks they find. They’ll also have to submit quarterly data from their monitoring efforts, which will be made public, The New York Times reported. The rule is expected to reduce ethylene oxide and chloroprene emissions by 80%, and cut more than 6,200 tons of toxic air pollution every year, “dramatically reducing the number of people with elevated cancer risk,” the EPA said.
THE KICKER
Coal power could account for less than 10% of the total U.S. electricity mix in the coming weeks, a record low.
https://heatmap.news/climate/epa-forever-chemicals-drinking-water
How LA’s Streetlights Serve As Beacons To The City’s Past
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The LAist
Los Angeles has the most diversity in street light design of any American city.
https://laist.com/news/la-history/los-angeles-street-lights-history-electric-moons
How LA’s Streetlights Serve As Beacons To The City’s Past
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The LAist
Los Angeles has the most diversity in street light design of any American city.
https://laist.com/news/how-to-la/los-angeles-street-lights-history-electric-moons
Undocumented Indian migrants chart new path to US via Canada
date: 2024-04-10, from: VOA News USA
washington — In recent years, the United States has seen an unprecedented surge in undocumented migrants from India, most slipping in through Mexico. But as the U.S.-Mexico border faces growing pressure, many are turning to a less conventional path: crossing the expansive and lightly guarded border with Canada.
In fiscal year 2023, U.S. border agents encountered nearly 97,000 undocumented Indian migrants nationwide, including more than 30,000 at the northern border, according to data from the Customs and Border Patrol or CBP.
Encounters include apprehensions and expulsions. In fiscal year 2019, more than 16,000 Indian migrants were encountered nationwide, CBP data shows.
In recent months, the numbers have continued largely unabated. Between October 2023 and February 2024, nearly 14,000 Indians were encountered at the U.S.-Canada border.
The record influx is part of a migration rush through Canada that has overwhelmed border security officials and unsettled communities in northern U.S. states. CBP data show that there were nearly 190,000 encounters at the Canadian border in 2023, more than six times the number in 2021.
A spokesperson for the Indian embassy in Washington said the “extent of illegal immigration from India to the United States is unclear.”
“We have been constantly engaged with the United States authorities including through dialogues such as the India- U.S. Consular Dialogue and the Homeland Security Dialogue to enhance cooperation and strengthen people to people ties and to facilitate legal mobility and migration and to check illegal immigration and human trafficking,” the spokesperson said in a statement to VOA.
Indians drawn to US asylum process
The end of the COVID-19 pandemic has spawned a rise in global migration. While people migrate for different reasons, experts say many Indian migrants are drawn to the U.S. by the Biden administration’s perceived openness to asylum-seekers.
“Overall, people are looking to come to the U.S. because they’ve heard about the asylum process here,” said Chirag Patel, a Maryland-based immigration lawyer who handles Indian asylum cases.
Patel and other experts say the flow of asylum-seekers to the border will likely keep up as they anticipate potential policy changes with the November U.S. presidential election.
“People are trying to get a lot of things in before November, but also obviously before January, if November ends up being in favor of Trump,” Patel said.
‘From all over the globe’
Once a trickle, the flood of Indian asylum-seekers entering the country shows the changing face of unauthorized migration to the U.S.
“They’re coming from all over the globe, literally all over the globe,” said Muzaffar Chishti, senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.
The rise in unauthorized Indian migration has made Indians the third-largest group of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. There were about 725,000 undocumented Indians in the U.S. in 2021, more than from any other country outside the Western Hemisphere, according to a recent Pew Research Center report.
Though many have genuine claims of persecution, experts say Indian asylum-seekers are predominantly economic migrants, drawn by the prospect of a better life in the U.S.
“Very few of these are the professionals,” said Devesh Kapur, Starr Foundation professor of South Asian studies at Johns Hopkins University. “Because these youths are not very well-educated, their economic opportunities in India are pretty limited.”
Most are relatively well off by Indian standards and hail from Punjab and Gujarat, two of India’s more prosperous states with a long history of immigration to the United States.
“One of the mistakes we make is to think it’s the poor that migrate,” Kapur said. “The poor in South Asia simply cannot afford to take a flight.”
But those who can often lack a legal pathway into the United States. U.S. student visas are hard to come by, and because of a massive backlog of immigration cases, an immigrant visa can take up to 20 years to secure.
That leaves the “donkey route” as the only option for many Indians anxious to reach America. The sometimes-dangerous journey across several continents, widely publicized on social media, is facilitated for a hefty fee by global human trafficking networks.
The cost of getting to the U.S. can exceed $50,000, but even a small-scale landlord in Punjab can afford it. An acre of agricultural land in the fertile state can command the same price, Kapur noted.
While Indian migrants often take the donkey route to Mexico, many find Canada a quicker and safer option, according to experts.
Political scientist Shinder Purewal said the current Canadian government’s push to attract international students has made it easier for Indians to obtain visas.
“It’s easier to get a visa to Canada than to Pakistan,” said Purewal, who teaches at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, British Columbia.
Until recently, Indians often moved from Canada to the U.S. when they couldn’t get Canadian residency, Purewal said.
“Now, more and more people are just entering Canada so they can just go straight to the U.S. because the economy is better, job prospects are better there,” Purewal said.
In a statement, Canada’s immigration agency said all study permits are reviewed “holistically” to ensure applicants “respect Canada’s immigration laws and regulations.”
“Canada’s visa policy decisions are made in an effort to support travel and people-to-people connections, while preserving the integrity of our immigration system,” the agency said. “We continuously monitor the impacts of our visa policy for both visa-exempt and visa-required countries and consider objective criteria when deciding whether to lift or impose a visa requirement. And new developments would be communicated publicly.”
But economic prospects are not the only reason Indian migrants choose the U.S. Support from established Indian communities in the U.S. also influence their decision.
A smuggling network recently uncovered by U.S. investigators ferried Gujarati migrants from the Canadian border to Gujarati American-owned business establishments in the Chicago area.
“People who come have a way of coming,” said Pawan Dhingra, an associate provost and associate dean of the faculty at Amherst College who teaches immigration studies. “They have a connection to the country. If it was just escaping India, they could just go anywhere in the world.”
Not all cross border safely
Despite its reputation for safety, crossing the Canadian border has occasionally proven fatal for Indian migrants.
In January 2022, an Indian family of four was found frozen to death in Manitoba just meters from the U.S. border. In March 2023, the bodies of eight migrants, including four Indians, were recovered from the St. Lawrence River.
Maureen Silcoff, a Canadian refugee and immigration lawyer, said the extreme risks migrants take show their dire need to flee hardship.
“People don’t simply pick up and leave their homes, their communities, their families, their jobs out of a sense of wanting a thrilling adventure,” Silcoff said in an interview. “People become desperate, and sometimes people are subject to very serious human rights abuses, and they try to alleviate those kinds of problems and other hardships by relocating to another country.”
VOA immigration reporter Aline Barros contributed to this article.
https://www.voanews.com/a/undocumented-indian-migrants-chart-new-path-to-us-via-canada/7564143.html
I mean, it’s one home. What could it cost? A million dollars?
date: 2024-04-10, from: Marketplace Morning Report
The value of a typical home has reached $1 million or more in 550 U.S. cities, according to Zillow. That’s a record high, and those not-so-affordable homes are proliferating well beyond the usual high-cost metro areas like New York, San Francisco and LA. Also on the program: what to expect from today’s consumer price index report and how a cocktail with roots in wartime propaganda manages to stay relevant.
AI boom is boosting demand even for HDDs, raising prices by up to 20% since Q3
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
No computer part, even spinning rust, is safe from the hype cycle
Hard drives are now being sold at elevated prices and the sector is even experiencing shortages thanks to AI-driven demand, which has similarly boosted prices for SSDs and GPUs.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/ai_boom_is_boosting_demand/
In Memoriam: Ross Anderson, 1956-2024
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Last week I posted a short memorial of Ross Anderson. The Communications of the ACM asked me to expand it. Here’s the longer version.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/04/in-memoriam-ross-anderson-1956-2024.html
Recall: Accessory Side Case May Detach From the 2024 BMW R 1300 GS
date: 2024-04-10, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
The issue is related to 2024 models fitted with dealer accessory side cases.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/714693/bmw-r1300gs-side-case-recall/
SCV Water welcomes federal help with PFAS costs
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Signal
The federal Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday a new “legally enforceable” standard for “forever chemicals” that have plagued the Santa Clarita Valley’s water supply for decades. It was not immediately clear how the announcement of a federal standard and $1 billion to support the standard would impact the yearslong effort underway by Santa Clarita Valley […]
The post SCV Water welcomes federal help with PFAS costs appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/scv-water-welcomes-federal-help-with-pfas-costs/
The Inventors Behind America’s Favorite Pastime
date: 2024-04-10, from: National Archives, Pieces of History blog
Today’s post comes from Saba Samy, an intern at the National Archives in Washington, DC. On April 15, 1947, Jack Roosevelt (“Jackie”) Robinson made his debut in Major League Baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers. That year, Robinson also won the Rookie of the Year Award, making his entrance into the major league unforgettable as the … Continue reading The Inventors Behind America’s Favorite Pastime
https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2024/04/10/the-inventors-behind-americas-favorite-pastime/
South Korea goes to the polls
date: 2024-04-10, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Rising food prices, strikes and paying for an aging population were familiar themes as South Koreans voted today. Then, Spain has become the latest country to scrap so-called “golden visas,” where foreign nationals are granted residency rights in exchange for investments. And later, we hear about the aviation industry’s race against time to produce enough sustainable aviation fuel to meet the industry’s growing demands.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/south-korea-goes-to-the-polls
X fixes URL blunder that could enable convincing social media phishing campaigns
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Poorly implemented rule allowed miscreants to deceive users with trusted URLs
Elon Musk’s X has apparently fixed an embarrassing issue implemented earlier in the week that royally bungled URLs on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/x_fixes_url_blunder/
SAP transformation program a ‘euphemism’ for job cuts, claims European Works Council
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
8,000 roles affected worldwide, but Germany will bear heaviest losses
A SAP transformation program has been slammed by the European Works Council as a mask for making job cuts.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/sap_job_cuts/
Is This a New Era of ‘Climate Capitalism’?
date: 2024-04-10, from: Heatmap News
Can capitalism solve climate change? Wrong question, argues the author and journalist Akshat Rathi: In fact, you can’t solve climate change without capitalism. Look around the world, as Rathi does in his new book Climate Capitalism, and he says you’ll find companies and leaders who are proving that cutting carbon emissions is not just possible, but also profitable.
The venture capitalist Sophie Purdom, the founder of Planeteer Capital, spends her days looking for those profitable climate companies. She says that a newer, smarter generation of climate startups is on the way.
In this week’s episode, recorded earlier this month live at Princeton University, Rob and Jesse host a special in-person conversation with Rathi and Purdom. They talk about the rise of Chinese EVs, what interest rates mean for the energy transition, and the proper role of policy in decarbonizing. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton professor of energy systems engineering.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I guess a question I’d have, maybe, for both of you is, how much of this is a China story? How much of the amount of progress that we’ve been able to do is actually because of Chinese industrial policies — the sheer scale of the Chinese market and the different incentives that exist on the demand side there to bring down the cost of solar, or batteries, or any of these technologies that are now the main engines of decarbonization?
Sophie Purdom: I think so much about the supply side of the market, right? Those solutions and the innovation, which then kind of ideally ports over, if you succeed, into deployment, which has its own set of challenges and concerns and capital levers and policy integrations. I’d argue that the U. S. overall sits further on the supply versus demand side, relative to a global positioning, and that China’s been playing the demand side of the game much better.
Akshat Rathi: The beauty of wanting to do this book was, to me, watching these lessons. So if you look at the solar story: invented in America; really scaled up in Europe, when Germany and Spain were providing a ton of subsidies for solar manufacturers to put rooftop solar in the early 2000s; and then really scaled up in China when they made a ton more capital available and just flooded the market, so to speak.
Take the electric vehicle story, a very different one because the new energy vehicle policy that made China the biggest maker and consumer — and now exporter — of electric cars actually takes inspiration from California’s zero emissions policy. It’s a vehicle mandate, right? So you have this policy that kind of worked in one state, forced the rest of America to think about it, but China just applied it nationwide and ran with it. So you can apply lessons from one country to another and have policies — one of those beautiful things, which, it can translate if you can tweak it to work in that political economy where it needs to operate.
Jesse Jenkins: Let’s talk a little bit more about the particular form of climate capitalism with Chinese characteristics, how this sort of worked out. There’s a couple of case studies in the book of CATL and BYD and how they have come about. One of the things I want to underscore is, we’ve talked about how American-centric we often are. We sort of think, well, we got to drive all of this. But China increasingly is the world’s biggest market for all of these solutions, right? For EVs, for solar PV. They’re also, in many cases, the world’s largest manufacturer. And the scales are just staggering.
Now, I mean, we in the U.S. deployed just shy of 40 gigawatts of solar last year, something like 36 to 38 gigawatts. China deployed 280 gigawatts. More than half of the global market for solar was in China last year. So it’s not … They started off selling to Spain and Germany, but now, their domestic market is enormous. You can tell a very similar story about EVs, where more than half of the market for EVs is in China — increasingly, more than half of the manufacturing, and now, rapidly, exports too. So what is the flavor of the capitalism story there?
Because many of these companies are state-owned enterprises, at least partially, there’s a strong hand of industrial policy guiding where investment occurs and making it cheaper, and giving free land, and all kinds of different things there. But of course, at the end of the day, there is a lot of … it is in many ways capitalism. There’s a lot of financial motivation that has led these companies to scale and grow.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by…
KORE Power provides the commercial, industrial, and utility markets with functional solutions that advance the clean energy transition worldwide. KORE Power’s technology and manufacturing capabilities provide direct access to next generation battery cells, energy storage systems that scale to grid+, EV power & infrastructure, and intuitive asset management to unlock energy strategies across a myriad of applications. Explore more at korepower.com.
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
https://heatmap.news/podcast/shift-key-episode-11-climate-capitalism
Carbon Removal’s $100 Billion Conundrum
date: 2024-04-10, from: Heatmap News
Money seems to be pouring into the field of carbon removal from every direction. Every other week there’s an announcement about a new project. Multimillion dollar carbon removal procurement deals are on the rise. The Department of Energy is rolling out grants as part of its $3.5 billion “direct air capture” hubs program and also funding research and development. Some carbon removal companies can even start claiming a $130 tax credit for every ton of CO2 they suck up and store underground.
The federal government alone spends just under $1 billion per year on carbon removal research, development, and deployment. According to a new report from the Rhodium Group, however, the U.S. is going to have to spend a lot more — roughly $100 billion per year by 2050 — if carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, is ever going to become a viable climate solution.
“The current level of policy support is nowhere near what’s needed for CDR to play the role that people say it needs to play in solving climate change,” Jonathan Larsen, one of the authors, told me. “We wanted to reset the policy conversation with that in mind.”
Carbon removal is what’s implied by the “net” in net-zero — a way to compensate for whatever polluting activities are going to take longer to replace with clean solutions. It will be impossible to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, either at the national or global level, without removing carbon from the atmosphere. But how much carbon removal will we need, and how do we make sure we’re ready to deploy it?
These questions are, in a sense, unique to the field. When we talk about cutting carbon emissions from buildings or transportation, experts are relatively confident in the set of solutions and the scale of the task — they know how many buildings and cars there are and can make reasonable estimates of growth rates.
But carbon removal is a moving target. We know how much we’re removing today — roughly 5 million metric tons, mostly from nature-based solutions like planting trees. Based on current policies, Rhodium estimates we could scale that up to about 50 million metric tons by 2035. But figuring out how much we need depends entirely on how successful we are at decarbonizing everything else. Even if we know we need to electrify all our cars, for example, no one can say whether that will happen by 2050, or at least not with any meaningful degree of certainty.
The Rhodium Group report attempts to narrow the range of this uncertainty so that policymakers can better attack the problem. The authors looked at a handful of different decarbonization roadmaps for the U.S. and found that the minimum amount of carbon removal needed to compensate for residual emissions in 2050 is 1 gigaton, which is the same as one billion metric tons, or a 20x increase from where current policies will get us. It’s also equal to about 20% of the carbon that the U.S. emitted last year. “There’s a very likely scenario where we need a lot more than that,” said Larsen. “There’s scenarios where we need less. But most of the studies out there say at least a gigaton.”
Even if it’s only a rough estimate, landing on a number is useful, he told me. Rhodium Group spends a lot of time answering questions about, for example, what some new policy means for achieving Biden’s goal of cutting emissions in half by 2030. “I don’t know if we’d get those questions if there wasn’t a 50% target to shoot for,” he said. “So I think this way, people can be like, what does this next wave of policy support for CDR do for getting the U.S. on track for a gigaton?”
The level of investment it will take to get there is also highly uncertain. The authors did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation to land on $100 billion by 2050: We need to be removing a minimum of one billion tons by then, and the Department of Energy has a goal to bring the cost of carbon removal down to $100 per ton.
The meat of the new report focuses on how to bridge the gap between the roughly $1 billion we spend today and $100 billion, which starts, according to the authors, with treating carbon removal as a public service. It’s not like other climate solutions such as wind turbines or heat pumps, they write, which can rely on private markets to provide predictable demand or to stimulate innovation. “There are very few pathways one can envision where the private sector is going to both scale and deliver those tons,” Larsen told me. Voluntary carbon removal purchases by companies could play a role, he said, but it will not be big enough to get to a gigaton.
Rhodium recommends expanding and extending many of the federal policy programs that already exist — by, for example, providing more R&D funding, doing more government procurement, handing out more loan guarantees, and creating more “hubs” centered on other approaches besides direct air capture, like enhanced weathering or biomass burial. Right now, the tax credit for capturing carbon from the air and burying it underground can only be claimed for 12 years, and projects have to start construction by 2032. The authors call for extending the claim period and moving up the construction start deadline. They also recommend expanding the program to apply to a wider range of carbon removal methods.
A common criticism of government support for carbon removal is that policy makers will over-rely on it. If we aim to do 1 gigaton of carbon removal, does that mean we won’t cut emissions as much as we could have? What happens if, for whatever reason, we can’t achieve the 1 gigaton?
Larsen disagreed with that framing. For one, it’s easy to turn it around: If we don’t scale up the capacity to remove carbon, and we also don’t eliminate emissions by mid-century, we’re not even going to have the option to halt climate change at that point.
But also, decarbonization shouldn’t stop in 2050, he said. If we can achieve that 1 gigaton of annual removal and then keep cutting emissions from remaining sources, we could eventually get to net-negative emissions — even without more CDR. In other words, if we reach a point where we’re removing more than we’re emitting, we could start to reverse global warming, not just stop it.
“I know that’s, like, sci-fi,” he told me. “But that’s ultimately where we as a species have to go and that’s why setting a target here of at least a gigaton, to me, does not take away the need to reduce elsewhere.”
https://heatmap.news/climate/carbon-removal-100-billion-rhodium
Avi Wigderson, Complexity Theory Pioneer, Wins Turing Award
date: 2024-04-10, from: Quanta Magazine
The prolific researcher found deep connections between randomness and computation and spent a career influencing cryptographers, complexity researchers and more.The post Avi Wigderson, Complexity Theory Pioneer, Wins Turing Award first appeared on Quanta Magazine
https://www.quantamagazine.org/avi-wigderson-complexity-theory-pioneer-wins-turing-award-20240410/
The Savvy Senior | Recommended Vaccines for Medicare Recipients
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Signal
Dear Savvy Senior, My husband and I recently turned 65 and would like to find out which vaccines are recommended and covered by Medicare? — New Beneficiaries Dear New, All recommended vaccines for adults, age 65 and older, should be covered by either Medicare Part B or Part D, but there are […]
The post The Savvy Senior | Recommended Vaccines for Medicare Recipients appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/the-savvy-senior-recommended-vaccines-for-medicare-recipients/
Intel CEO suggests AI can help to create a one-person Unicorn
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
And possibly replace entire business units too
Intel Vision In his Intel Vision Keynote on Tuesday CEO Pat Gelsinger outlined a scenario in which AI will eventually automate entire offices – or potentially even whole businesses.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/intel_ceo_ai_automation/
USG announces budget cut plan for 2024-25
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Nine of the undergraduate programming assemblies will experience budget cuts.
The post USG announces budget cut plan for 2024-25 appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/10/usg-announces-budget-cut-plan-for-2024-25/
Office Hours: Should parents be criminally responsible for a child who kills?
date: 2024-04-10, from: Robert Reich on Substack
Friends, I’m the father of two young men of whom I couldn’t be prouder. But I don’t take the credit. They also had a terrific mother, loving grandparents, great teachers and mentors, and supportive friends. And they were fortunate to grow up with most of the resources they needed.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/office-hours-what-responsibility
Gary Horton | The Solution to Screen Addiction? Just Do Things
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Signal
Apple has an interesting feature on its cell phones. The operating system tells the phone owner how much “screen time” they’ve used each day and how their screen use time is trending. It even suggests whether your screen time is healthy … Now, this is an interesting 2024 artifact. Imagine: We live in a day […]
The post Gary Horton | The Solution to Screen Addiction? Just Do Things appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/gary-horton-the-solution-to-screen-addiction-just-do-things/
Annette Lucas | Questioning the Wiley Assumption
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Signal
Since the implementation of the One Valley One Vision and the adoption of the Circulation Element in 2011, numerous housing units have been approved in both the city and county in the Santa Clarita Valley. More developments are in the planning process, plus more annexation is a possibility. Considering that the Circulation Element was an […]
The post Annette Lucas | Questioning the Wiley Assumption appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/annette-lucas-questioning-the-wiley-assumption/
Harry Fischer | Remember Their Sacrifice
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Signal
As I read today’s Signal, Saturday, April 6, I see no mention of the heroic act that took the lives of four brave California Highway Patrol officers at a horrible shootout (next to) J’s Coffee Shop at Castaic Junction on April 6, 1970. The incident is known as “The Newhall Incident” and forever changed how […]
The post Harry Fischer | Remember Their Sacrifice appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/harry-fischer-remember-their-sacrifice/
Verified curl
date: 2024-04-10, from: Daniel Stenberg Blog
Don’t trust. Verify. Here follows a brief description on how you can detect if the curl package would ever make an xz. xz (and its library liblzma) was presumably selected as a target because it is an often used component and by extension via systemd it often used by openssh in several Linux distros. libcurl … Continue reading Verified curl
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/04/10/verified-curl/
Jeff Solomon | We Do Need Good News
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Signal
In response to Ron Perry’s question (letters, April 2) about where John Krasinski is: The answer is counting his money from the lucrative deal he made with CBS Viacom after what one trade publication dubbed “a massive bidding war.” I, too, loved the feel-good nature of “Some Good News” during the pandemic when we needed […]
The post Jeff Solomon | We Do Need Good News appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/jeff-solomon-we-do-need-good-news/
Classifieds – April 10, 2024
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The Daily Trojan features Classified advertising in each day’s edition. Here you can read, search, and even print out each day’s edition of the Classifieds.
The post Classifieds – April 10, 2024 appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/10/classifieds-april-10-2024/
US-EAST-1 region is not the cloudy crock it’s made out to be, claims AWS EC2 boss
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-11, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
It’s the region where stuff gets stressed at scale first, says Dave Brown, as he plots variants of Amazon’s Outposts
Amazon Web Services’ US-EAST-1 region is not a problem child – it’s the region where the cloudy colossus often runs things at bigger scale than elsewhere and therefore stresses services the most, according to Dave Brown, global veep for compute and networking.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/aws_dave_brown_ec2_futures/
Today in SCV History (April 10)
date: 2024-04-10, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1909 – Oil Pioneer Wallace L. Hardison killed in collision with train. [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-april-10/
San Marcos Boys Volleyball Holds Off Dos Pueblos in Five-Set Thriller
date: 2024-04-10, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
With the victory San Marcos improves to 24-2 overall this season.
The post San Marcos Boys Volleyball Holds Off Dos Pueblos in Five-Set Thriller appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
UConn tops a dramatic men’s March Madness
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The Huskies wrapped up their second consecutive title in dominant fashion.
The post UConn tops a dramatic men’s March Madness appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/10/breaking-down-a-dramatic-march-madness/
Shadowed fears during presidential elections
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
With election season imminent, so is stress for the undocumented community.
The post Shadowed fears during presidential elections appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/10/shadowed-fears-during-presidential-elections/
Elevator repairs inconvenience Parkside residents
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Two elevators are currently being modernized to meet all new safety regulations.
The post Elevator repairs inconvenience Parkside residents appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/10/elevator-repairs-inconvenience-parkside-residents/
Indie film returns with Los Angeles Festival of Movies
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The festival takes a personal, multimedia approach to new independent cinema.
The post Indie film returns with Los Angeles Festival of Movies appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/10/indie-film-returns-with-los-angeles-festival-of-movies/
All in a summer’s bloom
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
In the world of music, how do the outfits of performers and fans translate into the development of personal style?
The post All in a summer’s bloom appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/10/all-in-a-summers-bloom/
SDA hath taken upon itself ‘Richard III’
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Students showcased their craft in Second Stage’s take on Shakespeare’s classic.
The post SDA hath taken upon itself ‘Richard III’ appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/10/sda-hath-taken-upon-itself-richard-iii/
The California Ice Cowboy
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Chase De Leo’s unique hockey journey endears him to fellow Southern Californians.
The post The California Ice Cowboy appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/10/the-california-ice-cowboy/
To tip or not to tip, that is the question
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Tipping culture is toxic and it controls us, but we can learn to tip purposefully.
The post To tip or not to tip, that is the question appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/10/to-tip-or-not-to-tip-that-is-the-question/
On video podcasts
date: 2024-04-10, from: Manu - I write blog
<p><a href="https://robhope.com/">Rob</a> has a <a href="https://yo.fm/">podcast</a>. It started way back in 2019—damn time flies—and season 3 just started. If you’re into tech/design give it a listen. But Rob’s podcast is just the excuse I needed to complain about something I find quite annoying: video podcasts.</p>Season 3 of Yo! is “video first”. Podcasts switching to video to be on YouTube ranks quite high on the list of things that I find annoying. I get why they’re doing it. I’m not an idiot. Yet I still find it annoying. Especially because podcasts that were audio-only would start referencing and talking about things that are “on the screen right now” and now I’m missing out on parts of the conversation because I’m listening to a podcast while I’m driving.
Video podcasts are the worst of both worlds. They’re not as good as actual video content designed to be consumed exclusively as video and they’re inferior to audio-only podcasts. And if you disagree let me know why.
<hr>
<h2>Get in touch</h2> <p>Have something to share? Want me as your <a href="https://manuelmoreale.com/i-ll-read-it">first reader</a>? Get in touch. My inbox is always open.</p> <a href="mailto:hello@manuelmoreale.com">Connect</a> —
<a href="https://manuelmoreale.com/guestbook">Guestbook</a>
<hr>
<h2>One a month</h2> <p>That's how little it takes to help with my <a href="https://manuelmoreale.com/on-dreams-and-goals">goal</a>. If you feel generous, consider supporting what I do.</p> <a href="https://ko-fi.com/manuelmoreale">Donate</a> —
<a href="https://manuelmoreale.com/supporters">Supporters</a>
<hr>
<h2>People and Blogs</h2> <p>I ask people to talk about themselves and their blogs. <a href="https://peopleandblogs.com/">Learn more</a> or subscribe.</p> <a href="https://manuelmoreale.com/feed/peopleandblogs">RSS</a> —
<a href="https://buttondown.email/peopleandblogs">Email</a>
https://manuelmoreale.com/@/page/L1Bow5RZitODaVOx
Chrome Enterprise Premium promises extra security – for a fee
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Paying for browsers is no longer a memory from the 1990s
Cloud Next Hoping to upsell freeloading corporate users of its Chrome browser, Google has announced Chrome Enterprise Premium – which comes with a dash of AI security sauce for just $6 per user per month.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/chrome_enterprise_premium_security/
‘Santa Barbara News-Press’ Website Goes to ‘Local Kids’
date: 2024-04-10, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Group fronted by Ben Romo makes winning auction bid of $285,000.
The post ‘Santa Barbara News-Press’ Website Goes to ‘Local Kids’ appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/09/santa-barbara-news-press-website-goes-to-local-kids/
Santa Barbara City Council Supports Cap of 20 Cruise Ships a Year
date: 2024-04-10, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Council moves forward with recommendations to scale back the city’s cruise ship program.
The post Santa Barbara City Council Supports Cap of 20 Cruise Ships a Year appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
‘Do Something,’ Santa Barbara Sheriff Challenges Board of Supervisors
date: 2024-04-10, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
“We already have,” board replies during heated budget workshop.
The post ‘Do Something,’ Santa Barbara Sheriff Challenges Board of Supervisors appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
April 9, 2024
date: 2024-04-10, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Yesterday, former president Trump released a video celebrating state control over abortion; today, a judicial decision in Arizona illuminated just what such state control means. With the federal recognition of the constitutional right to abortion gone since the Supreme Court overturned
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-9-2024
Microsoft brings World of Warcraft and other Blizzard titles back to China
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Battle with NetEase ends, peace deal will see games cross the Great Firewall - in both directions
Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard has produced an unexpected dividend: the developer’s signature games will once again be playable in China.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/microsoft_brings_wow_to_china/
Was that a big wildfire?
date: 2024-04-10, from: Hannah Richie at Substack
Tracking global data on the scale of wildfires across the world.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/wildfire-data
US, Israel ‘ready’ for cease-fire but say Hamas must free hostages
date: 2024-04-10, from: VOA News USA
The White House blames militant group Hamas for the failure to reach a cease-fire with Israel before the end of Ramadan, as Washington prepares for a high-level meeting on Israel’s plans to invade Rafah and faces lingering questions over the killing of aid workers by Israeli forces. VOA White House correspondent Anita Powell reports from Washington.
City takes action in Canyon Country neighborhood
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Signal
A pair of homes on a Canyon Country cul-de-sac on a hillside have drawn the ire of the city’s code enforcement, city officials confirmed Tuesday. In closed session Tuesday, the Santa Clarita City Council unanimously approved a nuisance abatement proceeding against the owner of the property at 27952 Oakgale Ave. in Canyon Country. City attorney […]
The post City takes action in Canyon Country neighborhood appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/city-takes-action-in-canyon-country-neighborhood/
Generals: Proposal to move guardsmen into Space Force would ‘jeopardize’ national security
date: 2024-04-10, from: VOA News USA
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-04-10, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
This is what it feels like to let Tesla FSD do the driving for you.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1104268214267434
Parents of teenage school shooter sentenced
date: 2024-04-10, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/parents-of-teenage-school-shooter-sentenced/7563937.html
Gritty monochrome photograph
date: 2024-04-10, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
Via ChatGPT, and a prompt written by Brad Pettit: “Gritty monochrome photograph, midwestern family, juxtapose common legal vices.”
http://scripting.com/2024/04/09/030033.html?title=grittyMonochromePhotograph
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-04-10, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
This is a post on my test Ghost site.
https://daves-test-ghost-site.ghost.io/i-am-writing-a-post-now/
Blinken, Cameron implore Republican lawmakers to unblock aid to Ukraine
date: 2024-04-10, from: VOA News USA
British Foreign Secretary David Cameron met with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington to help push for a new aid package for Ukraine. He also met with former President Donald Trump in Florida, as VOA’s Senior Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine reports from the State Department.
TSMC Will Build Third Arizona Fab After Winning $6.6B in CHIPS Funding
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: Daring Fireball
From the Annals of Underpromising and Overdelivering: Apple’s Timing for the Mac’s Transition to Apple Silicon
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: Daring Fireball
https://daringfireball.net/2015/11/the_ipad_pro
Huawei Cloud reveals the dynamic traffic allocation system it uses to cut bandwidth bills
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Created during COVID to handle video boom and sliced bandwidth costs by 30 percent
Huawei has released details of how it manages its own cloud with a dynamic traffic allocation system optimized by machine learning and developed in response to surging demand for its services during the COVID-19 pandemic.…
Local tennis camp brings the game to all
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Signal
Tennis can be a difficult sport to start up with coaches, gear and courts being not easily accessible or affordable for everyone. That thought, and a passion for the sport, brought the idea of “Love All” to Golden Valley junior Andrew Yoon. “I started playing tennis when I was really young and, over time, I […]
The post <strong>Local tennis camp brings the game to all</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/local-tennis-camp-brings-the-game-to-all/
House to delay sending Mayorkas impeachment articles to Senate
date: 2024-04-10, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — Speaker Mike Johnson will delay sending the House’s articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate this week as planned after Republican senators requested more time Tuesday to build support for holding a full trial.
The sudden change of plans cast fresh doubts on the proceedings, the historic first impeachment of a Cabinet secretary in roughly 150 years. Seeking to rebuke the Biden administration’s handling of the southern border, House Republicans impeached Mayorkas in February but delayed sending the articles while they finished work on government funding legislation.
Johnson had planned to send the impeachment charges to the Senate on Wednesday evening. But as it became clear that Democrats, who hold the majority of the chamber, had the votes to quickly dismiss them, Senate Republicans requested that Johnson delay until next week. They hoped the tactic would prolong the process.
While Republicans argued Tuesday that forgoing a full Senate trial would break precedent, most Senate Republicans voted to do just that when Donald Trump, the former president, was impeached a second time on charges he incited an insurrection in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Their effort to halt the proceedings failed. Trump was ultimately acquitted in the Senate trial.
“Our members want to have an opportunity not only to debate but also to have some votes on issues they want to raise,” said South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the second-ranking Republican Senate leader. Under procedural rules, senators are required to convene as jurors the day after the articles of impeachment are transmitted for a trial.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. D-N.Y., who has decried the impeachment push as a sham, suggested Democrats still plan to deal with the charges quickly.
“We’re ready to go whenever they are. We are sticking with our plan. We’re going to move this as expeditiously as possible,” Schumer said.
“Impeachment should never be used to settle policy disagreements,” he told reporters earlier Tuesday.
House Republicans charged in two articles of impeachment that Mayorkas has not only refused to enforce existing law but also breached the public trust by lying to Congress and saying the border was secure.
Democrats — and a few Republicans — say the charges amount to a policy dispute, not the Constitution’s bar of high crimes and misdemeanors.
“Ultimately, I think it’s virtually certain that there will not be the conviction of someone when the constitutional test has not been met,” said Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah.
Still, with elections approaching, Republicans want to force Congress to grapple with the Biden administration’s handling of the southern border as long as possible.
“I think there are a lot of Democrats who really want to avoid the vote. I don’t blame them. I mean, this is the number one issue on the minds of Americans,” Thune said.
Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat who is facing a tough reelection bid in Ohio, pointed to Republican senators rejecting a bipartisan deal aimed at tamping down the number of illegal border crossings from Mexico.
“Instead of doing this impeachment — the first one in 100 years — why are we not doing a bipartisan border deal?” Brown said.
Before Mayorkas, only one U.S. Cabinet official had ever been impeached. Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876. A House investigation found evidence that he had received kickback payments while administering government contracts.
CHIPS Act hangover sees most US science agency budgets cut for 2024
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
2025 unlikely to see more money flow as Congress turns off the tap
An increase in federal spending for the sciences in the US was short-lived, as the 2024 budget has seen significant cuts for many agencies – and 2025 looks to be on a similar track.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/us_science_funding_falls/
Heart Destruct back with show April 19
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Signal
The Heart Destruct Music Festival is back with a new show for residents of all ages, “Tryx¡ Pt 2,” on April 19 at 20880 Centre Pointe Parkway, right above the Santa Clarita Aquatics Center. Doors will open at 5:30 p.m. and music will start at 6 p.m. Student bands that are playing include Minute County, […]
The post Heart Destruct back with show April 19 appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/heart-destruct-back-with-show-april-19/
Man detained on suspicion of carrying concealed weapon
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Signal
Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station deputies detained a man on suspicion of carrying a concealed weapon Sunday night after they responded to a petty theft call at the 26000 block of Carl Boyer Drive, according to Deputy Kabrina Borbon, spokeswoman for the station. According to Borbon, deputies responded to the call at 9:40 p.m. of […]
The post <strong>Man detained on suspicion of carrying concealed weapon</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/man-detained-on-suspicion-of-carrying-concealed-weapon/
Microsoft Preparing New Push for ARM-Powered Windows Laptops
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: Daring Fireball
Taiwan’s Navy leaders seek cooperation with US at annual exposition
date: 2024-04-10, from: VOA News USA
washington — Taiwan Navy Commander Admiral Tang Hua said during a trip to Maryland that the self-governing island wants more cooperation with the U.S. and other countries amid military pressure from China.
But as to whether or not he would hold direct talks with U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti, as reported by Reuters, Tang said he would not comment so as to avoid China’s protest causing trouble to the U.S. side.
Speaking to VOA on Monday at this year’s Sea-Air-Space Conference hosted by the Navy League of the U.S. at National Harbor, outside of Washington, Tang said he would meet with navy personnel from the U.S. and other countries.
“I think the People’s Liberation Army’s problem with Taiwan is not just about Taiwan,” he said. “It may be in the East China Sea or the South China Sea. It is a global issue, not an issue specifically targeting Taiwan.”
Taiwan split from China in 1949 after the nationalists lost to the communists and fled to the island, where they established a government that eventually became a democracy.
China claims Taiwan is a breakaway province that must one day reunite with the mainland, by force if necessary.
China also has territorial disputes with Japan in the East China Sea and claims most of the South China Sea as its own, putting it in conflict with Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam.
The U.S. supports a “One China” policy that Beijing is the only recognized government of China while maintaining non-diplomatic relations with Taiwan and vowing to defend its right to self-governance.
In response to a Reuters question at a briefing March 29 about the Taiwan Navy chief’s trip to the U.S., Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said China firmly opposes “military collusion between the U.S. and Taiwan.”
He urged the U.S. to “immediately stop official interactions and military contact with Taiwan, and refrain from sending any wrong message to ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces.”
Tang said other countries’ navies at the conference were also looking to partner up.
“Not only are the U.S. military, but also the navies of various countries here. In fact, regarding much of our current cooperation, you just heard them talk about many things, including manpower issues, shipbuilding issues, and demand and cooperation, so I think on these occasions, everyone is seeking opportunities for cooperation and integration,” he said.
Tang, along with Rear Admiral Chung-Hsing Wei, defense attache with the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the U.S., and the visiting Taiwan delegation attended meetings and speeches of naval leaders from the U.S. and other countries.
He also visited the booths of major U.S. military manufacturers at the exhibition, including Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, and inquired about weapons and equipment with companies that have procurement projects with Taiwan.
This included General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, which produced four MQ-9B “SkyGuardian” drones for Taipei.
A senior official from the company also told him that he will join a U.S. Taiwan Business Council delegation to visit Taiwan in early June.
Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
Google Expands in-House Chip Efforts for AI Data Centers
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.wsj.com/tech/google-expands-in-house-chip-efforts-in-costly-ai-battle-3121c852
Students protest for University action on Palestine
date: 2024-04-10, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The die-in, organized by Trojans for Palestine, lasted approximately one hour.
The post Students protest for University action on Palestine appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/09/students-protest-for-university-action-on-palestine/
US pushes back at Russia’s protest over South Korean sanctions
date: 2024-04-10, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — The United States is welcoming South Korean sanctions imposed on Russian vessels suspected of transporting weapons from North Korea, despite Russian protests.
“We applaud the recent actions taken by the ROK to disrupt and expose arms transfers between the DPRK and Russia – including the sanctions … on two Russian vessels involved in arms transfers to Russia,” a State Department spokesperson said.
“It is important for the international community to send a strong, unified message that the DPRK must halt its irresponsible behavior, abide by its obligations under U.N. Security Council resolutions, and engage in serious and sustained diplomacy,” the spokesperson said Friday via email to the VOA Korean Service.
South Korea on April 2 unilaterally sanctioned two Russian vessels involved in delivering military supplies from North Korea to Russia.
The next day at a press briefing, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova called Seoul’s move “an unfriendly step” that “leads only to escalation of tensions” and “will affect South Korea-Russia relations in a negative way.”
She said Moscow would respond to the sanctions but did not specify how.
On Friday, Russia said it had summoned South Korea’s ambassador.
The South Korean sanctions followed Russia’s veto of a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for the annual extension of the U.N. experts panel that monitors sanctions on North Korea. The panel’s mandate ends at the end of April.
The ties between Pyongyang and Moscow have been growing since a summit in September. Since then, North Korea has been providing munitions that Russia needs to fight its war in Ukraine.
“The ROK government getting involved in applying sanctions, seizures, and other active counterproliferation authorities and capabilities against the North is a huge step forward in joint cooperation to counter, protect and contain the DPRK regime’s weapons exports,” said David Asher, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Asher worked on disrupting North Korea’s illicit financial, trading and weapons of mass destruction networks under the George W. Bush administration.
In an email to VOA on Monday, Asher added, “I fully expect ROK-U.S.-Japan cooperation to expand in counterproliferation, including the identification and targeting of weapons supply networks using intelligence operations, law enforcement, and sanctions.”
A day after announcing the sanctions, Seoul said it had seized a vessel that was suspected of violating U.N. sanctions on North Korea. South Korea said it was investigating the DEYI, a cargo ship that was en route to Russia from North Korea via China, after seizing it in waters off the South Korean port city of Yeosu.
“This reinforces that countries can implement U.N. sanctions, on their own, as they have responsibility to do so,” especially after Russia blocked the U.N. experts panel’s mandate, said Anthony Ruggiero, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Ruggiero has over 19 years working on financial sanctions and proliferation issues, including ones involving North Korea.
There is a broad international and domestic set of legal authorities that countries like South Korea could rely on to go after illicit exports and maritime activities by North Korea, but it is a matter of “whether countries are willing to stop” vessels making illegal actions, Ruggiero said during a telephone interview on Monday.
A U.N. Security Council resolution passed in 2017 authorizes member states to seize, inspect, freeze and impound vessels in their territorial waters found to be conducting illicit activities with Pyongyang and carrying banned goods from North Korea.
A State Department spokesperson told VOA’s Korean Service on Thursday that the U.S. is “coordinating closely with the ROK in its investigation of this ship in connection with U.N. sanctions violations.”
“Despite Russia’s veto of the 1718 Committee Panel of Experts mandate in order to bury reporting on its violation of U.S. Security Council resolutions, U.N. sanctions on the DPRK remain in place, and all U.N. member states are still required to implement them,” the spokesperson said.
Nate Evans, the spokesperson for the U.S. Mission to the U.N., said Monday that U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield will travel to South Korea and Japan next week to discuss ways to monitor international sanctions on North Korea.
South Korea estimated in March that North Korea has shipped about 7,000 containers full of munitions to Russia since last year. The U.S. assessed the same month the number of containers to be 10,000.
Joshua Stanton, an attorney based in Washington who helped draft the Sanctions and Policy Enforcement Act in 2016, told VOA on Monday via email that Seoul could seize ships carrying weapons from North Korea to Russia if certain criteria are met.
Seoul could do so “if South Korea has reasonable cause to believe that the vessel is engaged in sanctions evasion, and if one of the following conditions is also met: the [vessel’s] flag state consents, the vessel is stateless, or the ship enters a South Korean port.”
Intel over the Moon as Lunar Lake’s NPU performance TOPS Meteor Lake
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Pat Gelsinger claims 3x performance in next-gen silicon for AI PCs
Intel Vision Intel claims its forthcoming Lunar Lake CPUs will have over 100 Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS) of AI performance – 45 of them from its neural processing unit (NPU).…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/intel_lunar_lake_npu/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-04-10, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Matt Mullenweg on Beeper and Texts.
https://ma.tt/2024/04/beeper-texts/
Sherwood has a really interesting & bloggy front page for a news…
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/04/0044357-sherwood-has-a-really-int
Microsoft squashes SmartScreen security bypass bug exploited in the wild
date: 2024-04-10, updated: 2024-04-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Plus: Adobe, SAP, Fortinet, VMware, Cisco issue pressing updates
Patch Tuesday Microsoft fixed 149 security flaws in its own products this week, and while Redmond acknowledged one of those vulnerabilities is being actively exploited, we’ve been told another hole is under attack, too.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/april_patch_tuesday/
Deep Bug
date: 2024-04-10, from: Marginallia log
The project has been haunted by a mysterious bug since sometime February. It relates to the code that constructs the index, particularly the code that merges partial indices. In short the search engine constucts the reverse index through successive merging of smaller indices, which reduces the overall memory requirement. You can conceptualize the revese index itself as two files, one with offset pointers into another file, which has sorted numbers. This code runs after each partition finishes crawling and processing its data, and has a run time of about 4 hours.