Unlucky
AT&T, Verizon subscribers hit by US outage
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
If you’re wondering why connectivity seems toast at the moment
Developing Some AT&T subscribers at least are
experiencing an outage right now that’s seemingly largely on the east
coast of the United States though said to be nationwide.…
Motorola
Edge 2024 launches June 20 for $550 (Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 and a 144 Hz
display)
date: 2024-06-04, from: Liliputing
The Motorola Edge 2024 is a smartphone with a 6.6 inch, 2400 x 1080
pixel pOLED display with a 144 Hz screen refresh rate and 360 Hz touch
sampling rate, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 processor, 8GB of LPDDR4x
memory, 256GB of storage, IP68 water resistance, and support for 68W
fast charging and 15W wireless […]
Paleontologists
Uncover Rare Skull of 500-Pound ‘Thunder Bird’ in Australia
date: 2024-06-04, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The most complete skull of the extinct, flightless bird ever found
has revealed adaptations that might have made the creature well-adapted
for a life near water
NASA to
Change How It Points Hubble Space Telescope
date: 2024-06-04, from: NASA breaking news
After completing a series of tests and carefully considering the
options, NASA announced Tuesday work is underway to transition its
Hubble Space Telescope to operate using only one gyroscope (gyro). While
the telescope went into safe mode May 24, where it now remains until
work is complete, this change will enable Hubble to continue exploring
[…]
Temperatures
expected to surge past 110 F/43.3 C during US heat wave
date: 2024-06-04, from: VOA News USA
phoenix, arizona — The first heat wave of the season is bringing
triple-digit temperatures earlier than usual to much of the southwestern
United States, where forecasters warned residents Tuesday to brace for
“dangerously hot conditions” with highs expected to top 110 degrees
Fahrenheit (43.3 Celsius) in the days ahead in Las Vegas, Nevada, and
Phoenix, Arizona.
By Wednesday, most of an area stretching from southeastern California
to central Arizona will see “easily their hottest” weather since last
September and record daily highs will be in jeopardy throughout the
region, the National Weather Service said.
Excessive heat warnings have been issued from 10 a.m. Wednesday to 8
p.m. Friday for parts of southern Nevada and Arizona. The unseasonably
hot weather is expected to make its way into parts of the Pacific
Northwest by the end of the week.
“We’re looking at high temperatures well in the 90s and 100s,
temperatures well above average for the time of year — some spots as
much as 10 to 20 degrees above average,” National Weather Service
meteorologist Marc Chenard said on Tuesday.
Southeastern California, southern Nevada and much of Arizona will be
affected most, he said.
“As we go through the week, some of those higher temperatures are
also going to spread north, potentially getting into portions of the
Pacific Northwest as well,” Chenard said.
“We do have several days where these temperatures will persist, and
that usually adds to the impact. If there is just one day, it doesn’t
tend to have as much of an impact,” he said. “But when you start getting
two, three or four days, this heat and then even warm temperatures at
night, you start to see the impact increase.”
The unseasonably hot weather already has taken a toll in some areas.
The U.S. Border Patrol reported on Monday that four migrants died last
weekend from heat-related causes while attempting to cross the border in
southeastern New Mexico, near El Paso, Texas.
Border Patrol El Paso Sector Chief Anthony Good urged migrants not to
try to cross the border in the extreme heat.
“The desert environment is extremely unforgiving, especially during
the summer months,” Good said. “We urge anyone considering crossing
illegally to understand the severe risks involved.”
Fire crews will be on high alert, especially in Arizona, where fire
restrictions went into effect before Memorial Day in some areas and will
be ordered by Thursday across most of the western and south-central
parts of the state, authorities said.
Fire forecasters at the Southwest Coordination Center in Albuquerque,
New Mexico, said weather in the region doesn’t typically become so hot
until mid- or late June.
“It does seem like Mother Nature is turning up the heat on us a
little sooner than usual,” Tiffany Davila, spokesperson for the Arizona
Department of Forestry and Fire Management, said Monday evening.
“We can’t back down from a fire just because it’s pushing 113 degrees
outside. But we do keep a close eye on everybody in the field. Make sure
they are keeping hydrated and taking more breaks than they normally
would,” she told The Associated Press.
Highs on Monday reached 110 F (43.3 C) at Death Valley National Park
in California near the Nevada line.
In Las Vegas, Nevada, where the high topped out at 103 F (39.4 C) on
Monday, temperatures will soar to 10 to 15 degrees above normal during
the second half of the week — peaking at 111 (43.8 C) on Thursday.
A high of 120 F (48.8 C) is forecast for Thursday at Furnace Creek in
Death Valley.
The current forecast of 113 F (45 C) for Phoenix on Thursday would
break the daily record high of 111 F (43.8 C) set in 2016.
Last summer, Phoenix saw a record 31 straight days of at least 110
degrees F (43.3 C), stretching from the last day of June through the
entire month of July. At least 400 of the 645 heat-related deaths that
occurred last year were during that monthlong period.
date: 2024-06-04, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Avoid the dumpster fire: MarBorg and City of Santa Barbara sponsor
hazardous waste disposal event Saturday, June 8, for city residents at
City College.
Alec
and Hilaria Baldwin accused of potentially exploiting their kids for new
reality TV show
date: 2024-06-04, from: San Jose Mercury News
By allowing cameras to regularly film their children for reality TV,
Alec and Hilaria Baldwin are putting them into an entertainment milieu
with a troubled history.
NASA
Astronauts Practice Next Giant Leap for Artemis
date: 2024-06-04, from: NASA breaking news
The physics remain the same, but the rockets, spacecraft, landers,
and spacesuits are new as NASA and its industry partners prepare for
Artemis astronauts to walk on the Moon for the first time since 1972.
NASA astronaut Doug “Wheels” Wheelock and Axiom Space astronaut Peggy
Whitson put on spacesuits, developed by Axiom Space, to interact […]
Cooler
Master Mini X is an Intel meteor Lake mini PC
date: 2024-06-04, from: Liliputing
Cooler Master is best known for making PC accessories, usually aimed at
gamers. But the company also sells some first-party gaming desktops. And
Cooler master is brancing out into the mini PC space. The company is
showing off a small desktop called the Cooler Master Mini X at Computex
this week. It’s a mini PC […]
Retired
Santa Barbara Teacher Unveils Comedy Musical ‘TEACHER’ Amid Heated Labor
Negotiations
date: 2024-06-04, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The former Santa Barbara High School English teacher, Paul Forster,
hopes the show will make local teachers feel “seen and appreciated”
during this “really tough time for teachers.”
Feds
hunt for woman who tried to bribe juror in fraud case
date: 2024-06-04, from: San Jose Mercury News
The juror called police right after she got home and gave them the
bag of cash. It held $100, $50 and $20 bills totaling around $120,000.
The FBI took the bag from Spring Lake Park police on Monday morning and
interviewed the juror.
Moon
Tree Planted at U.S. Capitol Marks Enduring NASA, Artemis Legacy
date: 2024-06-04, from: NASA breaking news
NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman provides remarks
at a Moon Tree dedication ceremony Tuesday, June 4, at the U.S. Capitol
in Washington. The American Sweetgum tree was grown from a seed that
flew around the Moon during the agency’s Artemis I mission in 2022. In
April, NASA announced the agency selected organizations […]
@Dave Winer’s
linkblog (date: 2024-06-04, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
When ChatGPT can read my blog. This is what I've wanted since long
before ChatGPT existed. I can't imagine what the privacy concerns are.
Everything on my blog is by definition public.
Command
senior chief busted for secretly setting up Wi-Fi on US Navy combat
ship
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
In the Navy, no, you cannot have an unauthorized WLAN. In the Navy, no,
that’s not a good plan
The US Navy has cracked down on an illicit Wi-Fi network installed on a
combat ship by demoting the senior enlisted leader who ordered it to be
set up.…
By Bill Pan Contributing Writer InfoWars host Owen Shroyer on Monday
lost the bid for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn his misdemeanor
conviction, which he claimed was largely based on […]
By Tom Ozimek Contributing Writer In his first congressional testimony
since leaving government, Dr. Anthony Fauci on Monday defended every
single federal COVID-19 response that he once advocated for, including
business […]
The
more women followed this diet, the longer they lived
date: 2024-06-04, from: San Jose Mercury News
A new study that tracked more than 25,000 women for a quarter century
found that the more their eating patterns were in sync with the
Mediterranean diet, the less likely they were to die during that
period.
Contrary
to its fine print, Google says it won’t confiscate repair returns that
have unapproved parts
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
‘We are updating our terms to clarify this’ Pixel giant tells The
Reg
Google has disavowed language in its terms’n’conditions that says the
Pixel and Chromebook giant will confiscate devices sent in for repairs
that contain unapproved parts.…
Asus
Project Dali is a concept laptop with a E Ink color display on the
lid
date: 2024-06-04, from: Liliputing
Asus is showing off a concept laptop called at Computex 2024 featuring a
12-inch, 1600 x 1200 pixel E Ink Spectra 6 full color display on the
lid. It’s called Project Dali, and the idea is to let you customize the
look of a computer without covering the top with stickers. Just keep in
mind that […]
CBRE
Announces Construction of Santa Clarita Commerce Center
date: 2024-06-04, from: SCV New (TV Station)
CBRE announces that construction has commenced on the Santa Clarita
Commerce Center, a leading-edge industrial business park within the City
of Santa Clarita. Developer, Covington Group, Inc., a privately held,
Dallas based real estate development and investment company, named CBRE
as the exclusive leasing and marketing agent for the project which broke
ground on May 30.
Adam Engst: Typically, Mac firmware is updated whenever a new version
of macOS is installed, but if something goes wrong in the process, the
Mac can be left with outdated firmware. When automatic firmware updates
fail, the solution is to “revive” or “restore” the Mac using another Mac
running macOS 12 Monterey or later and […]
Patrick Breyer (via Hacker News): The highly controversial
indiscriminate child sexual abuse regulation (so-called chat control)
could still be endorsed by EU governments after all, as France could
give up its previous veto. This is reported by Euractiv and confirmed by
internal documents. France considers the new “upload moderation”
proposal in principle as a viable […]
Basic Apple Guy: 10 Years Ago: Apple Announced Swift Brian Webster:
10 year anniversary of Swift being announced at WWDC. Chris Lattner: Wow
that’s right. This was a big day and Swift has come a long way in the
intervening decade: Congrats to everyone who has driven it forward to
support such an amazing tech […]
Helge Heß: Ugh, inverse SwiftData relationship updates do not seem to
trigger Observation, that feels like a biggie 😳 […] This feels really
bad, because the relationships are the thing which make an ORM
worthwhile. I.e. you’d usually have a network of many objects being
displayed in distinct views (not just the simple demo). Those […]
Pentagon
‘doubling down’ on Microsoft despite ‘massive hack,’ senators
complain
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Meanwhile Mr Smith goes to Washington to testify before Congress
The Pentagon is “doubling down” on its investment in Microsoft products
despite the serious failings at the IT giant that put America’s national
security at risk, say two US senators.…
Ames
Science Directorate’s Stars of the Month, June 2024
date: 2024-06-04, from: NASA breaking news
The NASA Ames Science Directorate recognizes the outstanding
contributions of (pictured left to right) Amy Gresser, Mary Beth
Wilhelm, Taylor Bell, and Liane Guild. Their commitment to the NASA
mission represents the talent, camaraderie, and vision needed to explore
this world and beyond. Space Biosciences Star: Amy Gresser Dr. Amy
Gresser is the Space Biology […]
date: 2024-06-04, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
There may be, as a recent article in the Independent says, “no question”
there is a lack of affordable rental housing, but there is rarely an
effort to put numbers on this sort of statement.
California
Credit Union Foundation Awards Scholarships to SCV Students
date: 2024-06-04, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The California Credit Union Foundation has awarded scholarships to
two Santa Clarita Valley students as part of its 2024 College
Scholarship Program, recognizing exceptional students from Saugus High
School in Saugus and West Ranch High School in Stevenson Ranch for their
school and community activities
Intel
CEO says sanctions on China squanders opportunity for US chipmakers like
Intel
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
When the Middle Kingdom starts making its own processors, it won’t buy
ones made by me!
Computex Further US export restrictions on China may
force the country to develop its own advanced semiconductors and
significantly compete against US chipmakers, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger
cautions.…
Treasury
official says budget assistance designed to help Ukraine anti-corruption
efforts
date: 2024-06-04, from: Associated Press, World News
Just back from a visit to Ukraine, a U.S. Treasury official is
describing a country whose wartime economy has proven resilient in the
face of Russia’s invasion, and he says U.S. and allied budget assistance
is designed to help Ukraine combat corruption and increase
transparency.
Charges
filed in Wisconsin against attorneys, aide who worked for Trump in
2020
date: 2024-06-04, from: VOA News USA
Madison, Wisconsin — Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul filed
felony forgery charges Tuesday against two attorneys and an aide who
helped submit paperwork falsely saying that former President Donald
Trump had won the battleground state in 2020.
The charges were filed against attorneys Kenneth Chesebro, 62, and
Jim Troupis, 70, and former Trump aide Mike Roman, 51, who allegedly
delivered Wisconsin’s fake elector paperwork to a Pennsylvania
congressman’s staffer in order to get them to then-Vice President Mike
Pence on Jan. 6, 2021.
All three are due in Dane County Circuit Court on Sept. 19, according
to court records. They each face one felony count punishable by up to
six years in prison and fines of up to $10,000.
Troupis and Chesebro did not return voicemail messages left Tuesday.
Roman did not have an attorney listed in court records.
Kaul, a Democrat, has faced pressure to bring action against the 10
fake electors, who have yet to be charged with any criminal wrongdoing.
He has previously suggested that he was relying on federal investigators
while also not ruling out a state probe.
Kaul didn’t rule out filing more charges, saying that the
investigation is ongoing.
“Our approach has been focusing on following the facts where they
lead,” he said at a news conference.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers offered a one-word response to news of the
charges being filed: “Good.”
Electors are people appointed to represent voters in presidential
elections. The winner of the popular vote in each state determines which
party’s electors are sent to the Electoral College, which meets in
December after the election to certify the outcome.
The fake elector efforts are central to an August federal indictment
filed against Trump alleging he tried to overturn results of the 2020
election. Federal prosecutors, investigating his conduct related to the
Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, have also said the scheme originated in
Wisconsin. Trump also faces charges in Georgia and has denied
wrongdoing.
Michigan and Nevada have also criminally charged fake electors.
Chesebro and Roman were among the 18 people indicted along with Trump
in August in a sprawling racketeering indictment in Georgia. They’re
accused of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally overturn
the 2020 election in that state.
Chesebro in October pleaded guilty to one felony charge of conspiracy
to commit filing false documents after reaching a deal with Georgia
prosecutors. Roman has pleaded not guilty to racketeering and conspiracy
charges related to a plan to have Republican electors meet and cast
Electoral College votes for Trump even though Biden had won Georgia.
The 10 Wisconsin electors, Chesebro and Troupis, who was Trump’s
attorney in Wisconsin, all settled a civil lawsuit that was brought
against them last year.
Documents released as part of those settlements showed that the
strategy in Wisconsin replicated moves in six other swing states.
The complaint goes into detail largely citing those documents,
interviews and testimony given to Congress about how the fake elector
scheme was hatched.
The complaint details how Chesebro emailed a memo on Nov. 18, 2020,
to Troupis and others arguing that electors representing Trump should
meet on Dec. 14, 2020, to preserve the Trump-Pence electoral slate in
case a court or Legislature would determine them to be the winners.
Chesebro argued in a subsequent memo that the Trump electors could be
counted by Congress if court challenges to his loss were still pending.
Troupis sent both memos to the Trump White House, according to the
complaint.
On Dec. 9, 2020, Chesebro emailed Troupis a memo with instructions
for the Dec. 14, 2020, elector meetings. Two days later, Chesebro
emailed Trump aide Roman details of the plan, the complaint said.
During or around the time of the Dec. 14, 2020, meeting, Chesebro
sent a message to Troupis and Roman that said, “WI meeting of the ‘real’
electors is a go!!!,” the complaint said. Troupis responded with a
“thumbs up” emoji, the complaint said.
The complaint also details how the fake elector slate was delivered
to Chesebro from Wisconsin to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 5, 2021, by
Alesha Guenther, a law student working part-time at the Republican Party
of Wisconsin. Roman told Guenther to deliver the paperwork only to
Chesebro.
“5 mins until I make the drop,” Guenther texted at one point,
according to the complaint. “I feel like a drug dealer.”
Once Chesebro was given the documents, he emailed Roman to let him
know he had them.
Roman then arranged for a congressional staff member to meet Chesebro
and take the document. Chesebro sent Roman a message confirming that it
had been done, the complaint said.
Trump lost Wisconsin to Biden, a Democrat, by fewer than 21,000
votes. Trump carried Wisconsin by a similar margin in 2016.
Government and outside investigations have uniformly found there was
no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could have swung the 2020
election. But Trump has continued to spread falsehoods about the
election, particularly in Wisconsin.
ADATA
XPG Nia handheld gaming PC will have upgradeable LPCAMM2 memory, a
display that tilts upward, and a focus on the modding community
date: 2024-06-04, from: Liliputing
ADATA is showing off an early prototype of a handheld gaming PC with a
few feature that make it unique in the space (so far). From the outside,
the first things you may notice about the ADATA XPG Nia are that it has
a front-facing webcam and a display that can tilt upward, allowing you
[…]
California
Department of Water Resources Releases Long-term Drought Plan
date: 2024-06-04, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The California Department of Water Resources has finalized its first
comprehensive, Long-term Drought Plan for the State Water Project as
part of an expanded effort to prepare for future droughts and extreme
dry conditions
West
Ranch alum prepares for first NCAA championship meet
date: 2024-06-04, from: The Signal
Former West Ranch thrower Danny Bryant has come a long way since
injuring his wrist two years ago. Bryant, a BYU thrower, has bounced
back since the injury that ended […]
It’s not easy to build a wind project. Many of the best spots for
generating wind power are already occupied by turbines. Even if you do
find a good one, then comes everything else — inflation in the supply
chain, convincing a local community that they want a wind farm near
them, leasing the land, and so on and so forth. The whole process
can
take as long as five years.
But what about just making an existing wind farm … better.
This option, known as repowering, is becoming more attractive to wind
developers and operators as existing wind assets age — operators get a
more efficient wind farm, and developers get to avoid the many headaches
of starting from scratch. The topic came up Tuesday, in fact, at the
American Council on Renewable Energy’s 2024 Finance Forum. There are
“some real opportunities for repower,” said David Giordano, BlackRock’s
global head of climate infrastructure, on a panel about scaling capital
to meet demand growth for renewables.
“When you repower a project, oftentimes you can utilize some of the
existing infrastructure. And that means that you can add new equipment
without the full cost of a greenfield development,” Eric Lantz, director
of the Wind Energy Technologies Office at the Department of Energy,
explained to me. When you install more modern equipment, he said, “you
have higher hub heights, you have larger rotors — you can capture more
energy from that site.”
Even if you tear down everything and rebuild from the ground up, Lantz
told me, repowering still means you can use the existing transmission
and interconnection, meaning developers can get more generation without
having to deal with infamously long interconnection queues, which can
impose yet more years on the energy development timeline.
Lantz
collaborated
on a 2020 research paper with a trio of Danish wind researchers
(Denmark has one of the largest and most advanced wind power industries
in the world) and found that from 2012 to 2019, 38% of all wind energy
development projects in the country involved replacing old equipment as
opposed to building on new sites. Repowering can be attractive to both
developers and local communities, the researchers explained, because
larger and more efficient turbines can actually reduce the net number of
turbines on a given site while generating the same or even more power,
with less visual disruption and less maintenance required.
Last year, Wood Mackenzie estimated that repowering onshore
wind assets would lead to more installed capacity than new
offshore wind in 2025 and 2026. In 2022, the U.S. repowered 1.7
gigawatts of wind plants, mostly by upgrading rotors (blades) and
nacelle components like gearboxes and generators,
upping
their total capacity to 1.8 gigawatts, according to the
Department of Energy. Average rotor diameter increased from 93 meters to
112 meters, adding on about the length of an 18-wheeler to the typical
rotor.
Repowering has been a favored strategy of some of the
biggest renewable developers, who have large and aging fleets of wind
turbines that often already occupy prime spots. At the massive Shepherds
Flat site in Oregon, for instance, Brookfield Renewable Partners
replaced more than 300 turbines — i.e. over 900 blades — with new ones
that were about
90
feet longer, upping the site’s total generation
by
some 20%.
At a proposed repowering in Southern California, Brookfield wants to
replace around 450 turbines with
just
eight, while a New York repowering increased generation by almost
30% “while maintaining the same number of units to minimize ground
disturbance,”
the
company said.
The rationale for repowering, like everything in energy, is a mixture of
mechanical and financial. Over time, wind turbines tend to degrade, with
actual power generation falling off. Even just by restoring a wind
farm’s initial generating capacity, repowering can increase output, with
newer, more advanced equipment, capacity can notably increase.
And when renewable developers have to answer to investors, that
cheaper generation can look quite attractive.
The energy developer NextEra plans to repower 1.4 gigawatts of its wind
projects through 2026, the company’s chief financial officer said in an
April earning call, and in January said that it had repowered a quarter
of its existing 24 megawatts of wind. At that time, NextEra chief
executive John Ketchum told analysts that the cost had been “roughly 50%
to 80% of the cost of a new build and starting a new 10 years of
production tax credits, resulting in attractive returns for
shareholders.”
“With over a decade to potentially qualify for repowering,” he added,
“it represents a great opportunity set.”
Looking at wind projects from before and after 2012, Scott Wilmot, an
executive vice president at Enverus Intelligence Research, calculated
that average capacity factor increased from around 30% to around 40%.
“Swapping new equipment right off the bat, you can get a plus-10
percentage point gain on capacity factor,” he told me.
And then there’s the tax incentives. Repowering “resets” the production
tax credit that’s the lifeblood of the wind industry, allowing owners
and developers to claim it for another 10 years. When Enverus looked at
a hypothetical project that had been operational since 2011 and
repowered in 2023, it was possible that its production tax credit for an
additional 10 years could increase from $22 per megawatt to almost $28.
“It really does make the economics look quite attractive,” he told me.
“If you can get close to 10 percentage point capacity factor gain, you
blow pretty much any greenfield, new build project out of the water.”
The Samta Clarita Artists Assocation has announced the SCAA summer
July Workshop. The Mindful Mixed Media & Collage Workshop with Kathy
Leader will be held on Saturday, July 20, 10 a.m.-3:30 p.m. at the
Stevenson Ranch Library Community Room
Zotac
GAMING ZONE is a Ryzen 7 8840U handheld gaming PC with an AMOLED screen
and a webcam
date: 2024-06-04, from: Liliputing
Zotac’s first handheld gaming PC is a system that seems kind of familiar
at first glance, but the ZOTAC GAMING ZONE handheld has a few features
that help it stand out. Powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 8840U processor, the
handheld computer has a 7 inch FHD AMOLED display with a 120 Hz refresh
rate, a pair […]
LAFC SCV will send two of its local Santa Clarita teams to represent the
youth soccer club at Nationals this July. For LAFC SCV G 2008, it’s a
shot at […]
Ken
Striplin | Dive Into Summer Fun at the Aquatic Center
date: 2024-06-04, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Beat the summer heat this year by heading to the Santa Clarita
Aquatic Center, presented by Kaiser Permanente,. Here, you’ll discover a
range of programs tailored to the interests of Santa Clarita
residents
From the first lunar footsteps of Apollo to the threshold of
humanity’s return aboard the Artemis missions, Ted Michalek has been
part of the fabric of Goddard for 55 years — and counting! Name:
Theodore “Ted” MichalekTitle: Chief technical engineer (retired), now
consultantFormal Job Classification: Thermal engineerOrganization:
Thermal Engineering Branch (Code 545), Mechanical Division (Code […]
ACEMAGIC’s
dual-screen laptop is on display at Computex
date: 2024-06-04, from: Liliputing
ACEMAGIC is a Chinese company that’s best known for making small desktop
computers, sometimes with unusual designs (and sometimes with Malware
pre-installed, although the company says that’s a thing of the past).
But this week the company is showing off something a little different at
the Computex trade show in Taiwan: a laptop with a […]
Aug. 2:
Laughs for a Cause Celebrates 50th for Soroptimist Int’l of
Valencia
date: 2024-06-04, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Soroptimist International of Valencia has announced “Laughs for a
Cause,” a special event celebrating the 50th anniversary of Soroptimist
of Valencia. The philanthropic club was chartered in the Santa Clarita
Valley in December of
55
Years Ago: Star Trek Final Episode Airs, Relationship with NASA
Endures
date: 2024-06-04, from: NASA breaking news
The voyages of the Starship Enterprise came to a sudden and premature
end on June 3, 1969, with the airing of the final episode of the Star
Trek original television series. Ironically, the show’s cancellation
came just six weeks before humanity embarked on its first voyage to land
on another celestial body. Although the show […]
“OpenAI
Insiders Warn of a ‘Reckless’ Race for Dominance”
date: 2024-06-04, from: Gary Marcus blog
Passing along this scoop from Kevin Roose: Roose supplied a gift
link: https://x.com/kevinroose/status/1797992577255518480?s=61 The
letter itself, cosigned by Bengio, Hinton, and Russell, can be found
here https://righttowarn.ai. I fully endorse its four
recommendations:
“Blood
and Determination and Then Victory” – Digitized Operations Reports
Related to D-Day
date: 2024-06-04, from: National Archives, Text Message blog
Today’s post is by Rachael Salyer, Archivist in the Textual Reference
Branch at the National Archives in College Park, MD. The Textual
Reference Branch at the National Archives in College Park, MD (Archives
II) has custody of numerous records that document U.S. Army operations
during World War II. One of the largest series of those …
Continue
reading “Blood and Determination and
Then Victory” – Digitized Operations Reports Related to
D-Day
GPD
Duo is a dual-screen laptop with two 13.3 inch OLED displays that unfold
vertically
date: 2024-06-04, from: Liliputing
The GPD DUO is an upcoming laptop with a 35-watt processor, a 13.3 inch
OLED display, and a second 13.3 inch OLED display that can be extended
upward to give you more screen space when you need it. GPD says it’s
like having a tall display that measures 18 inches diagonally. GPD’s
upcoming laptop is powered by […]
John welcomes Meredith Scardino (Girls5eva) and Jen Statsky (Hacks)
to discuss the highs and lows of writing the third season of a hit
comedy. But how do you push a series forward without violating the
premise or retreading familiar terrain? Are the shows still the shows
they pitched? How has streaming changed since their shows […] The post
The Third
Season first appeared on John
August.
A new point release in the FreeBSD 14 series – the first one, in
fact, not counting 14.0. FreeBSD 14.1 adds SIMD implementations of
string and memory operations on amd64 in the C library to improve
performance, improvements to the sound system, such as device hotplug
support, and the latest versions of OpenZFS, clang/llvm, and OpenSSH.
FreeBSD 14.0 users can just upgrade to FreeBSD 14.1, or you can do a
fresh install, of course.
“Eghbariah’s paper for the Columbia Law Review, or CLR, was published on
its website in the early hours of Monday morning. The journal’s board of
directors responded by pulling the entire website offline. […] According
to Eghbariah, he worked with editors at the Columbia Law Review for over
five months on the 100-plus-page text.”
Regardless of your perspective on the ongoing crisis in Israel and
Palestine, this seems like a remarkable action: removing a
heavily-reviewed, 100+ page legal analysis because it discusses the
Nakba, the mass-displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Palestine
war.
The right thing to do would be to publish it - as the editors tried to
do - and allow legal discussion to ensue. Instead, the board of
directors chose to simply pull the plug on the website.
As one Columbia professor put it:
“When Columbia Law Professor Herbert Weschler published his important
article questioning the underlying justification for Brown v. Board of
Education in 1959 it was regarded by many as blasphemous, but is now
regarded as canonical. This is what legal scholarship should do at its
best, challenge us to think hard about hard things, even when it is
uncomfortable doing so.”
If nothing else, this is a reflection of how sensitive these issues are
in the current era, whose voices are allowed to be heard, and the
conflicts between different ideologies, even on university campuses.
The
$70 Raspberry Pi AI Kit ads 13 TOPS of AI performance to a RPI 5
date: 2024-06-04, from: Liliputing
The Raspberry Pi 5 is a small, affordable single-board computer that can
be used for a wide range of activities using nothing but the built-in
hardware (plus a power supply and a microSD card for storage). But it’s
also the first member of the Raspberry Pi family with support for PCIe
accessories, which opens the […]
‘Building
AI co-workers going to be largest opportunity of tech in our
lifetime’
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Or so this Thomson Reuters bot boss claims
Jake Heller, head of product for CoCounsel – an AI bot from
multinational information conglomerate Thomson Reuters – has a tip for
anyone selling AI software: Don’t sell software.…
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
It’s the ‘biggest tech opportunity of our lifetimes!’
Jake Heller, head of product for CoCounsel – an AI bot from
multinational information conglomerate Thomson Reuters – has a tip for
anyone selling AI software: Don’t sell software.…
Direct air capture is leveling up. In a surprise move on Tuesday,
Climeworks unveiled new “generation 3” technology that it said can suck
up twice as much carbon from the atmosphere using half the amount of
energy as its previous designs.
The Swiss carbon removal company will premiere the new design in the
U.S. at its Department of Energy-funded
direct
air capture “hub” in Louisiana, with construction to start in
2026.
Climeworks already operates the two largest direct air capture plants in
the world, both in Iceland. Its
first
commercial-scale plant, Orca, was designed to capture 4,000 tons
of CO2 per year. Just last month, the company
turned
on its second plant, Mammoth, which at full capacity is supposed
to capture 36,000 tons per year. Now, Climeworks’ third generation
breakthrough paves the way for it to build a plant capable of capturing
one million tons per year, the company said — a nearly 28x increase.
Over the past five years, while Climeworks was building Orca and
Mammoth, it had also been stealthily developing the next generation tech
at its labs in Zurich and Basel with a 50-person team. Like the earlier
designs, the new system uses a specially engineered material called a
solid sorbent that attracts carbon dioxide molecules when air passes
through it. But the company has overhauled both the chemistry of the
sorbent and its structure. The new design has more surface area,
enabling it to grab twice as much CO2 from the air. The company also
said it expects the new sorbents to last three times as long as the
previous material.
In addition to a new sorbent, the gen 3 tech will also feature an
updated architecture described as “sleek modular cubes” that “increase
capture efficiency, reduce costs, and boost robustness.” The new cubes
will make the plants more compact, taking up half the footprint of an
older plant with similar capacity. Renderings feature seemingly taller,
boxier facilities compared to the earlier, more horizontally-oriented
design.
Courtesy
of Climeworks
Climeworks has already tested a full-scale model of its new cubes and
says it has “confirmed the anticipated breakthrough in efficiency and
performance.” It’s hard to know what that means, since the company has
never shared its previous tech’s efficiency or performance. But halving
its energy use would be a big deal, as that’s one of the most expensive
parts of the process. Carbon is extremely dilute in the air, and these
machines consume massive amounts of electricity and heat to extract it.
The company said the breakthrough puts it on track to achieve the cost
reductions it has previously promised, with a goal of removing CO2 for
$400 to $600 per ton by 2030. (The price range accounts for potential
variations in the cost of electricity and CO2 storage in different
locations.) That’s about half the amount Climeworks charges today, but
it’s still expensive. Some carbon removal companies, like Lithos Carbon,
which does enhanced rock weathering, and Vaulted Deep, which buries
carbon-rich waste, have already sold credits for less than $400, so
Climeworks already faces steep competition to bring its costs down.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect clarification
from Climeworks on its 2030 price estimate per ton of carbon.
date: 2024-06-04, from: The California Tech (Caltech student
paper)
We, the students of Caltech, are writing a petition to request that
Dean Jahner and the Caltech administration reinstate Professor Murphy
and recognize the importance of Black studies at Caltech.
date: 2024-06-04, from: The California Tech (Caltech student
paper)
What is it about Ge 136 that tempts so many worn down undergraduates
to forfeit a restful weekend for such discomfort? Professor Joe
Kirschvink is the man behind the madness.
Beautiful,
Unrealistic Solutions (Lessons in Chemistry Review #4)
date: 2024-06-04, from: The California Tech (Caltech student
paper)
Well readers, an entire term has gone by and I did not continue my
column on the Apple TV+ series, Lessons In Chemistry, in a timely
manner. Apologies. I know you all were dying for more of my ramblings on
this very mid show.
EAS’
Cultural Facelift: Introducing the Graduate Student Advisory Board
date: 2024-06-04, from: The California Tech (Caltech student
paper)
I am excited to introduce the EAS Graduate Student Advisory Board
(GSAB), a proactive initiative aimed at bridging these gaps and
cultivating a unified EAS community culture which will enhance the
educational experience for all its members.
Graduate
Student and Postdoc Workers Share Goals for a Better Workplace as Union
Bargaining Begins
date: 2024-06-04, from: The California Tech (Caltech student
paper)
On May 29, Caltech GSWs and postdocs began bargaining our first union
contract to guarantee legally enforceable workplace rights including
wages, benefits, and protections against abuse, discrimination, and
unsafe workplaces…
date: 2024-06-04, from: The California Tech (Caltech student
paper)
As part of an ongoing effort to make the voices of Red Door staff
heard in The California Tech, the following interview was conducted with
Deveon Howard, the Assistant Manager of Red Door.
date: 2024-06-04, from: The California Tech (Caltech student
paper)
Whether you’re having a bonfire at the beach, or camping in the
woods, s’mores season is officially here, and with it, a playlist to
absolutely scorch your ’mallows to.
Staging
Earth Data in TACIT’s Earth Data: The Musical
date: 2024-06-04, from: The California Tech (Caltech student
paper)
Last April, Theater Arts at Caltech (TACIT) staged the part one beta
version of Earth Data: The Musical, an original musical inspired by
real-life research at JPL…
The
Decision-Making Process for Reinstating Standardized Testing in
Admissions
date: 2024-06-04, from: The California Tech (Caltech student
paper)
In an email to faculty on January 30, 2024, President Rosenbaum wrote
that, “Two questions that have arisen in recent campus conversations
concern the value of standardized testing, and the appropriate role of
extracurricular activities, in admissions decisions”…
We
are the engine of research at Caltech. But who is providing the fuel,
and who is driving?
date: 2024-06-04, from: The California Tech (Caltech student
paper)
Caltech and JPL are enmeshed financially, politically, and
scientifically with Raytheon Technologies, a major weapons manufacturer
which sells large amounts of weapons to the Israeli Defence Force.
date: 2024-06-04, from: The California Tech (Caltech student
paper)
The Tech is not simply a broadcaster of all opinions that happen to
come from Caltech students. All opinions are not created equal, and they
should not be treated as such.
Lawyers
begin opening statements in Hunter Biden’s federal firearms case
date: 2024-06-04, from: VOA News USA
Wilmington, Delaware — Lawyers are making opening statements Tuesday
in the federal gun case against President Joe Biden’s son Hunter in a
trial that is expected to feature testimony from his exes and highly
personal details about his struggle with addiction.
Hunter Biden has been charged with three felonies stemming from a
2018 firearm purchase when he was, according to his memoir, in the
throes of a crack addiction. He has been accused of lying to a federally
licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on the application by saying
he was not a drug user and illegally having the gun for 11 days.
Hunter Biden arrived at the courthouse with this wife, Melissa, on
Tuesday morning, emerging from an SUV. First lady Jill Biden and his
sister Ashley Biden joined him again in the courtroom.
The proceedings come after the collapse of a deal with prosecutors
that would have avoided the spectacle of a trial so close to the 2024
election. Hunter Biden has pleaded not guilty and has argued he’s being
unfairly targeted by the Justice Department after Republicans decried
the now-defunct plea deal as special treatment for the Democratic
president’s son.
The trial is unfolding just days after Donald Trump, the presumptive
Republican presidential nominee, was convicted of 34 felonies in New
York City. The two criminal cases are unrelated, but their proximity
underscores how the courts have taken center stage during the 2024
campaign.
Jury selection moved at a clip Monday in the president’s home state,
where Hunter Biden grew up and where, the elder Biden often says, the
family is deeply established. Joe Biden spent 36 years as a senator in
Delaware, commuting daily back and forth from Washington, D.C.
People just know the story of how Biden’s two young sons, Hunter and
Beau, were injured in the car accident that killed his wife and baby
girl in the early 1970s. And Beau Biden was the former state attorney
general before he died at age 46 from cancer.
Some prospective jurors were dismissed because they knew the family
personally, others because they held both positive and negative
political views about the Bidens and couldn’t be impartial. Still, it
took only a day to find the jury of six men and six women plus four
women serving as alternates, who will decide the case.
One potential juror who was sent home said she didn’t know whether
she could be impartial because of the opinion she had formed about
Hunter Biden based on media reports.
“It’s not a good one,” she said.
Another was excused because he was aware of the case and said, “It
seems like politics is playing a big role in who gets charged with what
and when.”
But much of the questioning focused on drug use, addiction and gun
ownership, as attorneys sought to test prospective jurors’ knowledge of
the case, and dismiss those with strong thoughts on drug use, or who
might want to regulate firearms — some of the very people Biden counts
as constituents.
The panel of 12 was chosen out of roughly 65 people. Their names were
not made public.
Hunter Biden also faces a trial in California in September on charges
of failing to pay $1.4 million in taxes. Both cases were to have been
resolved through the deal with prosecutors last July, the culmination of
a yearslong investigation into his business dealings.
But Judge Maryellen Noreika, who was nominated to the bench by Trump,
questioned some unusual aspects of the deal, which included a proposed
guilty plea to misdemeanor offenses to resolve the tax crimes and a
diversion agreement on the gun charge, which meant as long as he stayed
out of trouble for two years the case would be dismissed.
The lawyers could not come to a resolution on her questions, and the
deal fell apart. Attorney General Merrick Garland then appointed the top
investigator, a former U.S. attorney for Delaware, David Weiss, as a
special counsel in August, and a month later Hunter Biden was
indicted.
Opening statements come as Garland faces members of the
Republican-led House judiciary committee in Washington, which has been
investigating the president and his family and whose chairman has been
at the forefront of a stalled impeachment inquiry stemming from Hunter
Biden’s business dealings.
The Delaware trial isn’t about Hunter Biden’s foreign business
affairs, though the proceedings were likely to dredge up dark,
embarrassing and painful memories.
The president’s allies are worried about the toll the trial may take
on the elder Biden, who’s long been concerned about his only living son
and his sobriety and who must now watch as his son’s painful past
mistakes are publicly scrutinized. And the president must do so while
he’s campaigning under anemic poll numbers and preparing for an upcoming
presidential debate with Trump.
In a statement Monday, the president said he has “boundless love” for
his son, “confidence in him and respect for his strength.”
“I am the President, but I am also a Dad,” he said, adding that he
would have no further comment on the case. “Jill and I love our son, and
we are so proud of the man he is today.”
The first lady sat in court all day Monday, her 73rd birthday,
watching the proceedings quietly from the front row behind the defense
table, as did Hunter Biden’s wife, Melissa, and his sister Ashley. The
president was nearby most of the day, camped at their Wilmington home.
He departed after court adjourned for a campaign reception in Greenwich,
Connecticut.
Aboard Air Force One on Monday night, White House press secretary
Karine Jean-Pierre was asked if the case might affect the president’s
ability to do his job, and she replied, “Absolutely not.”
“He always puts the American people first and is capable of doing his
job,” said Jean-Pierre, who declined to say if Biden got updates on the
trial throughout the day or spoke to his son after the proceedings
concluded.
Biden was traveling to France on Tuesday evening and will be gone the
rest of the week. The first lady is scheduled to join him later this
week.
The case against Hunter Biden stems from a period when, by his own
public admission, he was addicted to crack. His descent followed the
2015 death of his brother from cancer. He bought and owned a gun for 11
days in October 2018 and indicated on the gun purchase form that he was
not using drugs.
If convicted, Hunter Biden could face up to 25 years in prison,
though first-time offenders do not get anywhere near the maximum, and
it’s unclear whether the judge would give him time behind bars.
Trump is set to be sentenced on July 11 by Judge Juan M. Merchan, who
raised the specter of jail time during the trial after the former
president racked up thousands of dollars in fines for violating a gag
order.
NASA
Awards University Research Projects to Support Agency Missions
date: 2024-06-04, from: NASA breaking news
NASA announced the recipients of the Established Program to Stimulate
Competitive Research (EPSCoR) grants, which will support scientific and
technical research projects for more than 20 universities and
organizations across the United States. “NASA’s EPSCoR awards are a tool
to strengthen research capacity in areas across our nation that have
historically been underrepresented in government […]
Aerospace
Trailblazer: Shirley Holland-Hunt’s Visionary Leadership Transforms
Space Exploration
date: 2024-06-04, from: NASA breaking news
From pioneering space initiatives to championing diversity and
innovation, Shirley Holland-Hunt’s multifaceted leadership at NASA
exemplifies the future of aerospace exploration. Her efforts have driven
technological advancements and advocated for the inclusion of women and
minorities in STEM fields. Holland-Hunt currently serves as the
associate division chief for Houston’s Johnson Space Center Aeroscience
and Flight […]
The Tuesday morning killing is the 36th homicide investigated by
Oakland police this year. Last year at this time police had
investigated 45 homicides in the city.
Christie’s
stolen data sold to highest bidder rather than leaked, RansomHub
claims
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Experts say auctioning the auctioneer’s data is unlikely to have been
genuinely successful
The cybercrims who claimed the attack on Christie’s fancy themselves as
auctioneers as well, after they allegedly sold off the company’s data to
the highest bidder instead of leaking everything on the dark web.…
Elon
Musk accused of improperly selling $7.5 billion in Tesla stock before
weak sales report that crashed its price
date: 2024-06-04, from: San Jose Mercury News
Musk sold a total of 41.5 million shares of Tesla stock between
November 4 and December 12, according to company filings, as he
liquidated some of his holdings to free up cash for his recently
completed purchase of Twitter.
MSI
Claw 8 AI+ is an Intel Lunar Lake handheld gaming PC with an 8 inch
display
date: 2024-06-04, from: Liliputing
As expected, MSI is updating its handheld gaming PC lineup with a new
model featuring a bigger display and a next-gen Intel Mobile processor.
The MSI Claw 8 AI+ will be one of the first handhelds powered by an
Intel Lunar Lake processor, which should bring a 1.5X boost in graphics
performance, a more modest increase in […]
A federal appeals court panel has suspended a competition to award
grants to businesses that are majority-owned by Black women. The panel
ruled the program, run by Atlanta-based venture capital firm Fearless
Fund, is likely discriminatory. We’ll parse the details. Then, Shein is
looking to go public in London rather than New York. Why is that? And
the price of Forever stamps are about to go up yet again.
Solid
State Quantum Magnetometers—Seeking out water worlds from the quantum
world
date: 2024-06-04, from: NASA breaking news
“Follow the water!” The solar system is full of water in different
states, from the Sun’s water vapor to the ice of Pluto and beyond. Water
is not only linked to the possibility to sustain life, it is also
interesting for its own geological properties and potential uses. For
example, ice on the Moon and Mars could support human exploration.
Comets that hit Earth may have deposited water on our planet. The icy
comets and rings of Saturn reveal how solar systems change over
time.
Intel
unveils Lunar Lake architecture, moves RAM on-die
date: 2024-06-04, from: OS News
Hot on the heels of AMD, here’s Intel’s next-generation processor,
this time for the laptop market. Overall, Lunar Lake represents their
second generation of disaggregated SoC architecture for the mobile
market, replacing the Meteor Lake architecture in the lower-end
space. At this time, Intel has disclosed that it uses a 4P+4E (8 core)
design, with hyper-threading/SMT disabled, so the total thread count
supported by the processor is simply the number of CPU cores, e.g.,
4P+4E/8T. ↫ Gavin Bonshor at AnandTech The most significant change in
Lunar Lake, however, has nothing to do with IPC improvements, core
counts, or power usage. No, the massive sea change here is that Lunar
Lake will do away with separate memory sticks, instead opting for on-die
memory at a maximum of 32GB LPDDR5X. This is very similar to how Apple
packages its memory on the M dies, and yes, this also means that as far
as thin Intel laptops go, you’ll no longer be able to upgrade your
memory after purchase. You choose your desired amount of memory at
purchase, and that’s what you’ll be stuck with. Buyer beware, I suppose.
We can only hope Intel isn’t going to default to 8GB.
Microsoft
accused of tracking kids with education software
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Privacy group seeks clarification of whether EU data protection law has
been breached
A privacy campaign group with a strong record in legal upheavals has
asked the Austrian data protection authority to investigate Microsoft
365 Education to clarify if it breaches transparency provisions under
GDPR.…
NASA Wallops
Visitor Center Extended Hours June 12
date: 2024-06-04, from: NASA breaking news
The NASA Wallops Visitor Center will be open for extended hours from
4-6 p.m., Wednesday, June 12, to conduct outreach focused around NASA’s
environmental work at Wallops. In addition, the Visitor Center exhibit
gallery and auditorium will be open for the public to visit, and
personnel will be onsite to share information on current and […]
About a week ago, there has been a little addition to the 3dbrew wiki
page about 3DS cartridges (carts) that outlines the technical details of
how the 3DS cartridge controller and a 3DS cartridge talk to each other.
I would like to take this opportunity to also include the 3DS itself in
the conversation to illuminate which part of which device performs which
step. I will then proceed to outline where I think the corresponding
design decisions originate. Finally, I will conclude with some concrete
ideas for improvement. ↫ Forbidden Tempura Everything you ever wanted to
know about 3DS cartridges and how they interact with the 3DS.
LogOn:
Swarms of drones can be managed by one person
date: 2024-06-04, from: VOA News USA
The U.S. military says large groups of drones and ground robots can
be managed by a single person without added stress to the operator. In
this week’s episode of LogOn, VOA’s Julie Taboh reports the technologies
may be beneficial for civilian uses, too. Videographer and video editor:
Adam Greenbaum
This is a lovely piece about Tony Stubblebine, who, as it rightly says,
is doing an excellent job as the new CEO of Medium.
“Under Stubblebine’s direction, Medium, a site known for its many
pivots, is finally being strategic about what it wants and where it’s
headed. Last year, it launched a Mastodon server for premium users, and
in March it demonetized AI-generated content on its platform. It is
solidly on the side of team human and is finally starting to see that
pay off.”
I worked at Medium in 2016-2017, and I’ve known Tony since 2007. I
genuinely like Ev, too, but I think Tony was a fantastic choice of
leader, and that’s really bearing out in his choices over the last few
years. I was particularly happy when Medium launched its own Mastodon
instance to check out the network and help give it some cloud in certain
circles.
“It’s hard not to want to root for Medium. The assumption for more than
a decade has been that the way the internet has to work will be
determined by what makes the most money for a handful of companies. They
wanted us to post content, then they wanted us to share content, then
they wanted us to watch it endlessly, and now they want us to use their
AI, which will create a bubble we’ll live in forever.”
Many
Americans still shying away from EVs despite Biden’s push, poll
finds
date: 2024-06-04, from: VOA News USA
Washington — Many Americans still aren’t sold on going electric for
their next car purchase. High prices and a lack of easy-to-find charging
stations are major sticking points, a new poll shows.
About 4 in 10 U.S. adults say they would be at least somewhat likely
to buy an EV the next time they buy a car, according to the poll by The
Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy
Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, while 46% say they are
not too likely or not at all likely to purchase one.
The poll results, which echo an AP-NORC poll from last year, show
that President Joe Biden’s election-year plan to dramatically raise EV
sales is running into resistance from American drivers. Only 13% of U.S.
adults say they or someone in their household owns or leases a
gas-hybrid car, and just 9% own or lease an electric vehicle.
Caleb Jud of Cincinnati said he’s considering an EV, but may end up
with a plug-in hybrid — if he goes electric. While Cincinnati winters
aren’t extremely cold, “the thought of getting stuck in the driveway
with an EV that won’t run is worrisome, and I know it wouldn’t be an
issue with a plug-in hybrid,″ he said. Freezing temperatures can slow
chemical reactions in EV batteries, depleting power and reducing driving
range.
A new rule from the Environmental Protection Agency requires that
about 56% of all new vehicle sales be electric by 2032, along with at
least 13% plug-in hybrids or other partially electric cars. Auto
companies are investing billions in factories and battery technology in
an effort to speed up the switch to EVs to cut pollution, fight climate
change — and meet the deadline.
EVs are a key part of Biden’s climate agenda. Republicans led by
presumptive nominee Donald Trump are turning it into a campaign issue.
Younger people are more open to eventually purchasing an EV than
older adults. More than half of those under 45 say they are at least
“somewhat” likely to consider an EV purchase. About 32% of those over 45
are somewhat likely to buy an EV, the poll shows.
But only 21% of U.S. adults say they are “very” or “extremely” likely
to buy an EV for their next car, according to the poll, and 21% call it
somewhat likely. Worries about cost are widespread, as are other
practical concerns.
Range anxiety – the idea that EVs cannot go far enough on a single
charge and may leave a driver stranded — continues to be a major reason
why many Americans do not purchase electric vehicles.
About half of U.S. adults cite worries about range as a major reason
not to buy an EV. About 4 in 10 say a major strike against EVs is that
they take too long to charge or they don’t know of any public charging
stations nearby.
Concern about range is leading some to consider gas-engine hybrids,
which allow driving even when the battery runs out. Jud, a 33-year-old
operations specialist and political independent, said a hybrid “is more
than enough for my about-town shopping, dropping my son off at school’’
and other uses.
With EV prices declining, cost would not be a factor, Jud said — a
minority view among those polled. Nearly 6 in 10 adults cite cost as a
major reason why they would not purchase an EV.
Price is a bigger concern among older adults.
The average price for a new EV was $52,314 in February, according to
Kelley Blue Book. That’s down by 12.8% from a year earlier, but still
higher than the average price for all new vehicles of $47,244, the
report said.
Jose Valdez of San Antonio owns three EVs, including a new Mustang
Mach-E. With a tax credit and other incentives, the sleek new car cost
about $49,000, Valdez said. He thinks it’s well worth the money.
“People think they cost an arm and a leg, but once they experience
(driving) an EV, they’ll have a different mindset,’’ said Valdez, a
retired state maintenance worker.
The 45-year-old Republican said he does not believe in climate
change. “I care more about saving green” dollars, he said, adding that
he loves the EV’s quiet ride and the fact he doesn’t have to pay for gas
or maintenance. EVs have fewer parts than gas-powered cars and generally
cost less to maintain. Valdez installed his home charger himself for
less than $700 and uses it for all three family cars, the Mustang and
two older Ford hybrids.
With a recently purchased converter, he can also charge at a nearby
Tesla supercharger station, Valdez said.
About half of those who say they live in rural areas cite lack of
charging infrastructure as a major factor in not buying an EV, compared
with 4 in 10 of those living in urban communities.
Daphne Boyd, of Ocala, Florida, has no interest in owning an EV.
There are few public chargers near her rural home “and EVs don’t make
any environmental sense,″ she said, citing precious metals that must be
mined to make batteries, including in some countries that rely on child
labor or other unsafe conditions. She also worries that heavy EV
batteries increase wear-and-tear on tires and make the cars less
efficient. Experts say extra battery weight can wear on tires but say
proper maintenance and careful driving can extend tire life.
Boyd, a 54-year-old Republican and self-described farm wife, said EVs
may eventually make economic and environmental sense, but “they’re not
where they need to be” to convince her to buy one now or in the
immediate future.
Ruth Mitchell, a novelist from Eureka Springs, Arkansas, loves her
EV. “It’s wonderful — quiet, great pickup, cheap to drive. I rave about
it on Facebook,″ she said.
Mitchell, a 70-year-old Democrat, charges her Chevy Volt hybrid at
home but says there are several public chargers near her house. She’s
not looking for a new car, Mitchell said, but when she does it will be
electric: “I won’t drive anything else.”
Laws About
Deepfakes Can’t Leave Sex Workers Behind
date: 2024-06-04, from: 404 Media Group
As lawmakers propose federal laws about preventing or regulating
nonconsensual AI generated images, they can’t forget that there are at
least two people in every deepfake.
TSMC
mulled moving chip fabs from Taiwan over China threat
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
CEO says it even spoke to customers about the switch but decided it was
not feasible
TSMC considered relocating its chip fabs away from Taiwan because of the
threat from China, and even discussed the matter with customers, but
decided against the move because of the difficulties it posed.…
This is an interesting business model: UK broadcasters are trading
unused ad space for equity in digital media startups, turning them into
venture-scale investors.
“The move comes as broadcasters continue to face a tough economic
downturn where corporate clients have slashed spending on advertising –
which is traditionally seen as a bellwether of the economic climate.”
The thing about venture investing is that it doesn’t have a short time
horizon: exits could easily be a decade away. So this is either a
deliberately long game or a really short-sighted move on behalf of the
broadcasters, who might not be prepared to hold a basket of liabilities
for that long. Of course, they could presumably sell the equity, but
that pressure on the secondary market would have the potential to drive
the startups’ share prices down. Really the broadcasters need to hold
onto their portfolios.
I’m very curious to see how this plays out. It’s definitely an
innovative way to use an otherwise illiquid asset (unsold ad space). I
want these broadcasters to survive, and I like the ecosystem-building
aspect of this, so I hope it all works out for everyone involved.
Analysts
join the call for Microsoft to recall Recall
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
‘Does any of this add real value for users or enterprises?’
If Microsoft intended the 2024 Build event to be overshadowed by
controversy then it succeeded as calls intensify for the company to
rethink its strategy around Recall.…
Eric Yuan has a really bizarre vision of what the future should look
like:
“Today for this session, ideally, I do not need to join. I can send a
digital version of myself to join so I can go to the beach. Or I do not
need to check my emails; the digital version of myself can read most of
the emails. Maybe one or two emails will tell me, “Eric, it’s hard for
the digital version to reply. Can you do that?” Again, today we all
spend a lot of time either making phone calls, joining meetings, sending
emails, deleting some spam emails and replying to some text messages,
still very busy. How [do we] leverage AI, how do we leverage Zoom
Workplace, to fully automate that kind of work? That’s something that is
very important for us.”
The solution to having too many meetings that you don’t really need to
attend, and too many emails that are informational only, is to not
have the meetings and emails. It’s not to let AI do it for you,
which in effect creates a world where our avatars are doing a bunch of
makework drudgery for no reason.
Instead of building better business cultures and reinventing our work
rhythms to adapt to information overload and an abundance of busywork,
the vision here is to let the busywork happen between AI. It’s an office
full of ghosts, speaking to each other on our behalf, going to standup
meetings with each other just because.
I mean, I get it. Meetings are Zoom’s business. But count me out.
Current conditions: Heat advisories are in effect
across much of California • A large landslide buried cars in Taiwan • It
is 70 degrees Fahrenheit and partly cloudy in Bonn, Germany, where
delegates from 198 countries are gathering this week for the Bonn
Climate Change Conference
THE TOP FIVE
IEA: World not on track to triple renewable capacity by 2030
A new
report
from the International Energy Agency released this morning concluded
that the world isn’t yet on track to triple renewable energy capacity by
2030 compared to 2022 levels – an ambitious goal set last year at COP28
in line with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. But we’re
not hugely far off: In examining countries’ unofficial energy policies,
the IEA found we’re likely to increase renewable capacity by about 8,000
gigawatts by 2030, which is about 70% of the 11,000 GW goal. But these
policies aren’t set in stone. In fact, very few countries (just 14) have
included clear 2030 renewable targets in their climate action plans,
known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs). The IEA wants
countries to make these ambitions official when they revise those NDCs
next year, but also urges them to move quickly on things like permitting
and grid infrastructure expansion, and in general, aim higher. “The
tripling target is ambitious but achievable – though only if governments
quickly turn promises into plans of action,” said IEA executive director
Fatih Birol.
U.S. energy bills expected to rise 8% this summer
U.S. household electricity bills are projected to rise by 8% on average
this summer compared to last year,
according
to analysis from the National Energy Assistance Directors
Association and the Center for Energy Poverty, and Climate. Costs are
going up everywhere as Americans rely heavily on air conditioning to
stay cool during intense heat. Here’s a look at expected summer electric
bills across the country:
NEADA
and CEPC
The report finds that “due to the unprecedented rise in summer
temperatures and higher rates of extreme heat events,” summer energy
bills have risen from an average cost of $476 in 2014 to a projected
$719 this year. Low-income households will feel this financial strain
the most because they spend a larger amount of their income (about 8%)
on energy. Startlingly, the survey found that the percentage of
customers that couldn’t pay their energy bills for one month or longer
jumped from 21.3% to 23.5% last year, which saw the hottest summer on
record. The largest increase was among households with children. The
report calls for more efforts to ensure houses are weatherized, and
installing heat pumps.
Researchers say climate change made Brazil floods more likely
The recent floods in southern Brazil, which have killed more than 170
people and displaced nearly 600,000, were made about
twice
as likely by human-induced climate change, according to an
international group of researchers. The analysis from the World Weather
Attribution also said the El Niño weather pattern played a big role in
the disaster, increasing the risk by nearly five times and making
rainfall between 3% and 10% more intense. Meanwhile, a bit farther north
in Brazil’s “citrus belt,” orange growers are seeing a significant drop
in crop production thanks in part to severe weather such as drought,
disease, and pests. One research group is
forecasting
that the 2024-25 season could see production drop by a quarter. Brazil
is the world’s top orange producer and exporter.
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
Puerto Rico to install solar arrays designed to withstand high winds
An Australian company called 5B has designed solar arrays that can
withstand some extreme weather. The
5B
Maverick arrays are modular, fold up like an accordian for
transporting, and can endure winds up to 166 mph. That makes them a good
option for hurricane-prone areas like Puerto Rico, where 5B is
installing 1,392 arrays, Electrekreported.
Now, if only someone could design solar panels that can withstand the
force of
six-inch
hail stones…
5B
Volvo to introduce EV battery passport
Volvo is rolling out a “passport” for EV batteries that will show the
origin of the battery’s components as well as its carbon footprint,
according
toReuters. The passport rollout will begin with Volvo’s
EX90 SUV before expanding to include all of Volvo’s EVs. Drivers will be
able to access the passport by scanning a QR code on the driver’s-side
door. The European Union is set to require battery passports for all EVs
starting in 2027, but Reuters reported that U.S.
automakers are taking notes, as rules for EV subsidies under the
Inflation Reduction Act dictate where battery parts can be manufactured.
THE KICKER
The band Coldplay
says
it has reduced the carbon footprint of its latest world tour by
nearly 60% compared to its 2016-17 tour using solutions like
power-generating dance floors and bikes that charge the show’s battery
system.
Graveyards
a favorite haunt for solar farms in Valencia
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Because the dead don’t really need all this space to themselves, surely?
In a move likely to leave both the living and the dearly departed
feeling a bit sunnier, the Spanish city of Valencia is turning its
cemeteries into bustling hubs of renewable energy.…
The latest artificial intelligence use cases, like Windows’ Recall
and Zoom’s digital twins, appear to be built specifically for managers
and executives, and literally nobody else. That’s a problem.
From the BBC World Service: In India’s elections, early signs
are pointing to a majority for a right-wing alliance of parties, led by
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. It won’t be a landslide win,
however. What does that mean for policy and the markets? And later in
the program: Nigeria’s government says it’s made a new offer to try to
bring the country’s general strike to a close.
How
To Host Your Own Super Fun Children’s Reading Party, Just Like We
Did
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The LAist
For our second annual Super-Fun Saturday, we partnered with more than
two dozen community partners, along with local Los Angeles authors and
performers.
At its recent meeting, the oil cartel OPEC+ agreed to keep its lower
production limits in place to try to prop up fuel prices. To the concern
of producers and the delight of consumers, crude has been going for less
than $80 a barrel since the beginning of May. And that’s being reflected
at the pump. Plus, what’s behind GM’s move from the landmark Renaissance
Center in Detroit?
Historic
Staff Spotlight: Richard McCulley, Historian of the Records of
Congress
date: 2024-06-04, from: National Archives, Pieces of History blog
We’re taking a look at past staff and their many contributions to the
National Archives throughout history. Today’s staff spotlight is in
memory of Richard McCulley, who served was Historian at the Center for
Legislative Archives at the National Archives in Washington, DC. A
native of Texas, Richard Todd McCulley earned his B.A. in government, …
Continue
reading Historic Staff Spotlight:
Richard McCulley, Historian of the Records of Congress
US
farmers opt for soy to limit losses as all crop prices slump
date: 2024-06-04, from: VOA News USA
Chicago — Mark Tuttle planted more soy and less corn on his northern
Illinois farm this spring as prices for both crops hover near three-year
lows and soybeans’ lower production costs offered him the best chance of
turning a profit in the country’s top soy producing state.
He even planted soybeans in one of his fields for a second straight
year, breaking the traditional soy-corn-soy rotation for field
management. He and many other farmers are hoping to just minimize
losses.
Planting more soy at a time of sputtering demand from importers and
domestic processors will only serve to drive prices lower, further swell
historically large global supplies and erode U.S. farm incomes already
poised for the steepest annual drop ever in dollar terms.
But Midwest farmers’ other main options — seeding more corn or
leaving fields fallow — could have resulted in even wider losses.
“There’s a better chance of making money with soybeans than there is
for corn right now,” Tuttle said. “But if we have another bigger crop,
prices are going to go lower and that’s not going to bode well for the
farmer.”
In March, the U.S. Department of Agriculture forecast farmers would
plant 86.5 million acres of soybeans nationwide this spring, the fifth
most ever. Some analysts expect soybean acres to increase by another
million acres or more as heavy rains close the window on corn
planting.
In nearby Princeton, Illinois, Evan Hultine also increased soy
plantings and scaled back corn. High production costs due in part to a
jump in interest rates looked likely to erode most or all of his corn
returns, while soybeans remained marginally profitable, he said.
The farm’s profits will likely be the thinnest in at least five
years, Hultine said.
In an annual early season crop budget estimate, University of
Illinois agricultural economists projected negative average farmer
returns in the state for both crops, though losses would be smaller for
soybeans.
Unprofitable crops
In northern Illinois, farmers could lose $140 per acre on average for
corn and $30 an acre for soybeans with autumn delivery prices of $4.50
and $11.50 a bushel, respectively, the analysis showed. Actual returns
vary significantly from farm to farm, however, depending on factors like
crop yields, the timing of grain sales and whether farmers own or rent
their land.
Fertilizer costs are down from highs last year, but crop prices are
also down, while land costs remain elevated and borrowing rates for
operating loans and equipment have jumped, likely forcing farmers to cut
expenses, the economists said.
When looking to cut costs, farmers often favor planting soybeans
rather than corn because they require less fertilizer and pesticides and
seed costs tend to be lower.
High interest rates have been a particularly painful expense
recently.
“If you’re borrowing $700 an acre to put a corn crop in at 7% to 8%,
you’re talking about some real dollars there just on the price of money.
You can put a bean crop in a lot cheaper. Your interest cost per acre
might be half,” Tuttle said.
More soy, less corn
An early-spring forecast from the USDA projected soy plantings would
expand by 3.5% this year while corn plantings were expected to shrink
4.9%.
The expansion is expected to swell the U.S. soy stockpile next season
by more than 30% to the highest in five years and the sixth highest
level on record as demand from the domestic and export markets is not
keeping pace with rising production, according to the USDA.
Now, rain-saturated fields in some areas could clip corn acres and
even further expand seedings of soybeans, which, unlike corn, can be
planted well into June without significant risk to yields.
Cash prices offered for the next corn and soybean harvest have
improved from earlier this spring in Spencer, Iowa, where Brent Swart
has been struggling to plant the last of his corn acres due to overly
wet weather. But neither crop pencils a profit at current prices.
Nearly a foot of rain over the past month, seven inches more than
normal, has left his fields too soggy for field work. Swart estimates
his remaining corn fields may not be in shape to plant until after his
planting deadline date of June 1, when crop insurance benefits begin to
drop with each day.
Swart’s best option in some of his fields may be to file an insurance
claim saying he was prevented from planting due to waterlogged soils.
Soybean prices remain some 40 cents a bushel under his estimated cost of
production, he said.
“If you switch to soybeans, you’re potentially looking at a loss. If
you prevent plant, you’re looking at more of a breakeven scenario,”
Swart said.
Only farmers with severe weather issues will be able to file for
insurance, however.
Weather delays and a favorable price versus corn could boost soy
plantings by 500,000 to 1 million acres above the USDA’s latest forecast
for 86.5 million, said Tanner Ehmke, lead economist for grains and
oilseeds at CoBank.
“The signal from the marketplace to the farmer right now is that, if
you have a doubt about your acreage, send those acres to soybeans,” he
said.
This is dedicated to all of you sitting at home with I-told-you-so
smirks on your faces. (Somewhere in Russia. Vladimir Putin is sitting
in a small, nondescript room with […]
Lately I have observed the growing number of food trucks and street
vendors on Castaic Road. My guess is that none of these vendors have an
operating permit from the […]
Joe
Guzzardi | On Immigration, Taking a Lesson from 100 Years Ago
date: 2024-06-04, from: The Signal
A century ago, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed
Immigration Act, also known as the Immigration Act of 1924, which
precipitated a two-generation-long pause in mass migration. Upon
Coolidge’s signature, […]
On paper, the U.S. economy seems to be doing well with historically low
unemployment. Yet most Americans have a sour view in recent polls, with
stubborn inflation in living costs […]
China and the United States have fired their opening salvos in a
critical minerals trade war. Over the past year, China has imposed
export controls on
gallium,
germanium,
and
graphite
— all minerals necessary for energy transition technologies. Then in
May, the Biden Administration shot back with tariffs on critical mineral
imports,
part of a package of trade protection measures to help shield domestic
manufacturers in strategic sectors, including the mineral industry. The
downstream consequence for energy transition technologies such as
electric vehicle batteries, however, is almost certainly higher prices.
In all likelihood, this critical mineral trade war will intensify, with
corresponding implications for U.S. industries that use these raw
materials. China’s next shot
may
be even tighter export controls on critical minerals, including minerals
for which the United States relies heavily on China. Such export
controls pose real — and serious — risks to downstream U.S. industries
for five key reasons.
Critical minerals underpin billions of dollars of U.S. economic
activity.
For example, the White House
assesses
that U.S. consumption of rare earth elements worth $613 million affects
about $496 billion in downstream economic activity across core sectors,
from petroleum refining to automotive manufacturing. Critically, the
United States relies on China for
nearly
70% of its rare earth consumption. The United States also
depends substantially on China for other minerals — more than on any
other country. Of the 50 non-fuel mineral commodities for which the
United States relied on imports to meet more than 50% of its consumption
from 2019 to 2022,
China
was the leading import source for 15. Because critical minerals are
necessary in applications affecting strategic sectors such as automotive
manufacturing and renewable energy, Chinese export controls would be
particularly disruptive and costly.
It would be tough — if not impossible — for the U.S. to find other
sources for the volume of Chinese-produced minerals it consumes.
To illustrate, the United States does not produce any
arsenic metal, which is used to produce
gallium
arsenide semiconductors for
high-performance
electronics. China supplied
97%
of America’s arsenic metal imports in 2022. If China were to restrict
arsenic metal exports to the United States, American manufacturers —
including semiconductor fabricators, which the Biden administration very
much wants to support — would likely struggle to find non-Chinese
suppliers able to meet their full needs. Multiply this across all of the
many,
many minerals China supplies to the U.S., and you get a major
problem.
Even if U.S. companies can source critical minerals outside China,
they’re probably still controlled by Chinese companies.
For instance, Chinese companies have significant stakes in cobalt
reserves and production in the
Democratic
Republic of the Congo, the world’s largest holder of cobalt
reserves and producer of cobalt ore. There, the Chinese company CMOC
owns the Kisanfu project, which calls itself one of the world’s
“largest
and highest-grade undeveloped copper-cobalt projects,” and
Chinese companies owned or financed
15
of the 19 cobalt-producing mines there as of 2020. Depending on the
extent to which the Chinese government requires overseas Chinese
companies’
help
enforcing mineral export controls, downstream U.S. industries
could be prevented from sourcing minerals produced by Chinese companies
outside China.
Higher global mineral prices could spur non-Chinese
producers to enter the mineral market — but these new entrants may
struggle in the long term.
Plenty of new companies entered the rare earth industry
after China reduced export quotas and caused
record-high
rare earth prices in
2010
and
2011.
But when prices fell in 2015 due to
lower-than-expected
demand, many of these rare earth companies went
bankrupt.
Ultimately, the success rate for rare earth projects entering production
between 2011 and 2021 was just
1.5%.
Non-Chinese mineral producers may find it attractive to enter the market
amid artificially inflated prices from export controls, but whether
their business model will hold if and when prices fall again is
decidedly less sure. Importantly, China’s commanding production share
for many critical minerals enables it to influence global prices in its
favor. If a new global industry begins to flourish, a glut of cheap
Chinese minerals may not be far behind.
Non-Chinese mineral producers could face capital and technical
challenges ramping up production.
Mines and refineries already operating near their maximum capacity would
have to invest millions or
billions
of dollars to expand production capacity, which can take up to
five
years from starting feasibility studies to commissioning new
production. For mines and refineries with the capacity to ramp up
production already available, that excess margin could be due to
long-standing
technical
issues in processes like
adjusting
the temperature during processing. Thus, non-Chinese mineral
supply may take some time — and a lot of money — to come online if China
imposes export controls.
The Chinese government has both the will and the capability to impose
mineral export controls — as evidenced by its prior and present use of
mineral trade restrictions, from banning exports of rare earth elements
to Japan in
2010
to imposing a blanket export ban on rare earth processing technology in
2023.
As U.S.-China competition intensifies, more Chinese export controls on
minerals could well follow, which would cause severe supply chain
disruptions given challenges sourcing sufficient non-Chinese mineral
supplies.
So, while it remains to be seen how China will retaliate to this new
round of U.S. mineral tariffs, the U.S. government should accelerate its
mineral stockpiling — including urging certain downstream U.S.
industries to stockpile — and its collaboration with partner countries
to improve the resilience and robustness of their mineral supply chains.
The U.S. government should tread carefully in deploying trade tools in
this critical minerals competition, and prepare accordingly for possible
Chinese responses.
Muslim
drift to Republican Party stalls amid Gaza conflict
date: 2024-06-04, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — The war in Gaza is shaking Muslim Americans’ political
loyalties ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November.
Disenchanted by President Joe Biden’s embrace of Israel, many
Democratic-leaning Muslims who once backed him are now vowing to
withdraw their endorsement.
But it’s not just Muslim Democrats abandoning their once-preferred
candidate. Some Muslim Republicans are also wavering amidst their own
party’s support of Israel.
Mo Nehad, a Pakistani American Republican activist in Fort Bend
County, Texas, has seen up close the political effects of the Gaza
conflict on Muslim American voting.
In late 2020, Nehad, who is a small-business owner, police officer
and military warrant officer, helped found a grassroots group in a bid
to engage the local Muslim community with the Republican Party.
Initially focused on opposition to COVID-19 vaccine mandates and mask
mandates, the group, called Muslim Americans of Texas, soon found a new
cause: a conservative backlash to sex and gender education policies in
local schools.
“We were essentially trying to tell the Muslim community, regardless
of what has happened in the past overseas, let’s focus on national
topics and events,” Nehad said in an interview. “And when you compare
what traditionally a Democratic-elected president has done and a
Republican-elected president has done [on national issues], a
Republican-elected president is much better for the Muslims.”
The advocacy paid off, he said. While the Fort Bend County Muslim
community remained solidly Democratic, a small number started crossing
party lines, mirroring a pattern seen across the country.
“These are people who go to the same masjid as I do, people who are
in the same home-school groups,” he said.
Then the war in Gaza broke out after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on
Israel, testing the political allegiance of Muslim Democrats and
Republicans alike, with both viewing their parties as equally
pro-Israel.
Many Muslim Americans who had overwhelmingly voted for Biden in 2020
fumed over the president’s support for an Israeli military campaign that
has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians.
Earlier this year, a group of progressive Muslim activists launched a
campaign they labeled #AbandonBiden, inducing hundreds of thousands of
voters to vote “uncommitted” in key Democratic primaries in Michigan and
elsewhere. Members were also threatening not to vote for Biden in
November.
Republican-leaning Muslims, fewer in number, have not been as vocal.
While many are backing their party, its equally staunch support of
Israel has alienated some, according to Muslim activists and
experts.
Nehad said that while he intends to vote for former President Donald
Trump in November, some Republican Muslims are reconsidering their
stance and even “going back” to the Democratic Party, drawn by that
party’s stronger criticism of Israeli actions.
“They don’t want to vote for Republican candidates because the
Republican candidates do not want to go ahead and openly denounce what
Israel is doing,” Nehad said.
Drift to GOP stalls
Youssef Chouhoud, a political science professor at Christopher
Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, said the war in Gaza
appears to have paused if not blunted the recent Muslim drift to the
GOP.
Had the war not occurred, he said that as many as 40% of Muslim
Americans would have voted for the Republican presidential nominee in
November.
“I was fully expecting that,” Chouhoud, who studies Muslim American
voting behavior, said.
Now, he said he is not so sure.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if upwards of 40% are voting third party or
otherwise testing some vote that is not a two-party vote,” he said.
A recent poll by the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee and
The Truth Project showed that only 7% of Arab American voters plan to
vote for Biden and 2% for Trump, with Green Party candidate Jill Stein
receiving 25%.
How the Muslim vote will influence the outcome of the presidential
contest between Biden and Trump remains uncertain.
Numbering about 3.5 million, Muslims make up just 1% of the U.S.
population. In tight races in swing states with large Muslim
populations, though, their vote could potentially sway the outcome of
the election.
But American Muslims are a diverse lot, with interests and priorities
often as varied as the general electorate. While anger over the Gaza
conflict may have unified the community, it is not the only issue
driving their voting decision, said Saher Selod, director of research
for the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a Muslim American
research group in Dearborn, Michigan.
“We need to know if [some Muslim voters] are centering this issue as
a major driving force in terms of how they’re going to vote,” Selod said
in an interview. “Other groups, while they might support a cease-fire,
have other issues that that they’re going to vote on.”
VOA asked both the Biden and Trump campaigns about their outreach to
Muslim Americans and any steps to assuage their concerns over the Gaza
war.
In a statement, a Biden campaign spokesperson said, “The President
shares the goal of a just and lasting peace in the region. He’s working
tirelessly to that end.”
In a separate statement, the campaign’s Michigan director said the
Biden team is in contact with Arab American and Muslim groups in Detroit
and Dearborn. Both cities have large Muslim populations.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment. The
campaign has not publicly reached out to the Muslim community on the war
in Gaza, but Trump’s son-in-law, Michael Boulos, and a former Trump
administration official recently met with a group of Arab Americans and
Middle Eastern leaders in Michigan.
Historical patterns
Historically, Muslim American voters have oscillated between the two
major political parties. Socially conservative, most voted Republican in
the 1980s and 1990s, leading some party activists to hail them as
“natural” allies. In 2000, a majority backed Republican George W.
Bush.
That changed after the attacks of Sept. 11, as the Bush
administration’s increased scrutiny of the community amid its “war on
terror” sent Muslims flocking to the Democratic Party. In every
presidential election since 2004, Muslims have favored the Democratic
nominee.
But with memories of 9/11 fading in recent years, some Muslims began
to shift back to the Republican Party, driven by shared conservative
values such as opposition to abortion, gay marriage and LGBTQ-inclusive
policies in schools.
“This is the social conservatism within this community kind of
creeping up to the surface and guiding political decisions in light of a
lot of marquee policy debates,” Chouhoud said.
Some polls confirm this recent voting trend.
In October 2020, an Institute for Social Policy and Understanding
poll found 30% of Muslims approved of Trump’s job performance, up from
13% in 2018.
In November 2020, an Associated Press exit poll found that 64%
supported Biden and 35% backed Trump.
Other polls showed a more modest increase in Muslim support for
Trump.
Muslim support for Republican candidates continued into 2022. During
that year’s midterm elections, 28% of Muslims voted Republican, up from
17% during the 2018 midterms, while 70% voted Democratic, down from
81%.
Today, the Muslim voter base is firmly rooted in the Democratic
Party, though a significant slice leans Republican.
A recent Pew Research poll found that 66% of Muslim voters are
Democrats or lean Democratic, while 32% are Republicans or lean
Republican.
Three previous polls conducted by Pew had all shown lower-level
numbers of Republican or Republican-leaning Muslim voters, according to
Besheer Mohamed, a senior Pew researcher.
“There are certain issues where Muslims tend to align more with the
Republican Party, Mohamed said, noting positive views of religion and
skepticisms toward LGBTQ issues. “Then there are other issues where
that’s not the case.”
Nehad, once an independent voter, is now a Republican. His political
pivot came after he ran unsuccessfully as a Democratic candidate for
constable where he said he felt pressured to champion policies that
clashed with his religious convictions.
This year, he stood as a Republican candidate for Fort Bend County
sheriff.
“Everything the Republican Party stands for, 70% of it aligns with my
beliefs and values,” Nehad said, in a drawl honed over more than 25
years of living in the Lone Star state. “But when I compare the same
with the Democratic Party, it’s only maybe 20 or 40%, if that.”
Zahoor Gire, another co-founder of the Muslim Americans of Texas,
said Muslim Americans “share conservative Republican values” such as
strong families, traditional marriage, traditional gender roles and
opposition to abortion.
“I had family members of my own that had voted Democratic before and
are now voting Republican,” Gire said.
Underscoring the renewed Muslim embrace of the Republican Party, he
said a record eight Republican Muslim candidates have run for office in
Texas this year.
“So that shows you the willingness of people to embrace this party
and then run for office through this party’s platform,” Gire said.
To many Muslim Republicans, Trump is not the anti-Muslim politician
as he is seen by others. They’ve defended his so-called “Muslim ban” as
a necessary national security measure rather than a religiously
motivated injunction.
But the Gaza war has become “the main issue” for Muslims in America,
Gire said. And with Trump urging Israel earlier this year to “finish
what they started,” his perceived support of Israel at the expense of
Palestinians is giving some Muslim Republicans pause.
Asked if he will support Trump in November, Gire said, “We need to
see very specifically what his foreign policies will be, what his stance
towards Muslim Americans will be.”
I’m on my way to a workshop at The New Institute in Hamburg, where I
will talk about the scope for a public option in (especially) digital
markets. As preparation, I’ve read a recent short (and moderately
technical) book surveying …
Continue
reading →
Fired-up
Pat Gelsinger shoots from the lip at Qualcomm and Nvidia
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Intel boss reveals first 18A silicon will run next week as he undercuts
H100s on price and dismisses X Elite metrics
Computex Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has used his keynote
address at the Computex conference in Taiwan to fire back at competitors
Qualcomm and Nvidia, and reveal a product he thinks will make his
assertions more than words.…
Flying
phone base stations to take off over Japan in 2026
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
NTT Docomo teams with Airbus subsidiary to make it happen
A string of aerial telecommunication base stations should be flying
above Japan in around two years’ time – thanks to Airbus subsidiary
AALTO and a consortium led by Japanese mobile phone operator NTT
Docomo.…
Perhaps no week of AI drama will ever match the week in which Sam got
fired and rehired, but the writers for the AI reality series we are all
watching just don’t quit. For one thing, the bad press about Sam Altman
and OpenAI, who once seemingly could do no wrong, just keep coming.
Intel
details how Lunar Lake PC chips deliver 120 TOPS
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
A bigger NPU, faster graphics core in GPU, and on-package memory will do
that to a chip
Computex In the emerging world of AI PCs, everything
eventually boils down to TOPS: How many trillions of byte-sized
operations can your neural processing units (NPUs) , GPU, and/or CPU
churn out.…
Intel
challenges AMD’s Epycs with a 144 e-core Xeon
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
128 p-core Xeons to follow in Q3 while the x86 giant will release its
288 e-core monster early next year
Computex With the launch of its many-cored Xeon 6
processors at Computex on Tuesday, Intel is closer to reclaiming the
core-count lead over competitors AMD and Ampere.…
Intel
Lunar Lake mobile chips bring 3X boost in AI, 50% faster graphics, 40%
lower power consumption
date: 2024-06-04, from: Liliputing
And then there were three… sets of processors capable of supporting
Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC platform. When Microsoft unveiled its new brand
for next-gen PCs two weeks ago, the company noted that a minimum
requirement was a processor with at least 40 TOPS of
hardware-accelerated AI performance. At the time, the only PC chips that
met […]
Elections in the United States are some of the most expensive in the
world, with campaign spending far outpacing that in most countries. The
2020 U.S. presidential and congressional races cost $16.4 billion and
experts say the cost of the 2024 races are likely to be much higher.
Hudson
Rock yanks report fingering Snowflake employee creds snafu for
mega-leak
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Cloud storage giant lawyers up against infosec house
Analysis Hudson Rock, citing legal pressure from
Snowflake, has removed its online report that claimed miscreants broke
into the cloud storage and analytics giant’s underlying systems and
stole data from potentially hundreds of customers including Ticketmaster
and Santander Bank.…
U.S. citizens elect a president and a Congress to steer the country.
But presidents have certain tools enabling them to alter policies on
their own. One that’s gotten a lot of recent attention is the executive
order.
How
Voting Snags Left Many Local Mexicans Unable To Vote In Mexico’s
Historic Election
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The LAist
Former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum was elected Mexico’s first
female president in the nation’s first electoral face-off between two
female presidential candidates. But many local Mexican citizens who had
hoped to cast a ballot at the local consulate couldn’t do so.
News release Rep. Mike Garcia, R-Santa Clarita, hosted a reception to
congratulate the U.S. military academy appointees from California’s 27th
Congressional District, which includes the Santa Clarita Valley. This
[…]
date: 2024-06-04, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
On Memorial Day, I joined three brave Veterans for Peace on East Ojai
Avenue holding my sign, which read “Remember the Millions of Innocent
Civilians Who Have Died in the Name of ‘Democracy.’”
Addressing crime trends in the third-largest city in L.A. County
involves a myriad of resources that come from throughout the nation’s
largest sheriff’s department, according to Santa Clarita Valley
Sheriff’s […]
Meta
algorithms push Black people more toward expensive universities, study
finds
date: 2024-06-04, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Just as we saw with housing, Facebook giant’s advertising system seems
to treat Whites and POC differently
Special report Meta’s algorithms for presenting
educational ads show signs of racial bias, according to researchers from
Princeton University and the University of Southern California.…
Since we first launched our REST API around 2013 as a Labs project, it
has evolved well beyond a prototype into arguably Crossref’s most
visible and valuable service. It is the result of 20,000 organisations
around the world that have worked for many years to curate and share
metadata about their various resources, from research grants to research
articles and other component inputs and outputs of research.
The REST API is relied on by a large part of the research information
community and beyond, seeing around 1.8 billion requests each month.
Just five years ago, that average monthly number was 600 million. Our
members are the heaviest users, using it for all kinds of information
about their own records or picking up connections like citations and
other relationships. Databases, discovery tools, libraries, and
governments all use the API. Research groups use it for all sorts of
things such as analysing trends in science or recording retractions and
corrections.
So the chances are high that almost any tool you rely on in scientific
research has somewhere incorporated metadata through us.
Optimising performance
For some time, we’ve been noticing reduced performance in a number of
ways, and periodically we have a flurry of manually blocking/unblocking
IP addresses from requesters that are hammering and degrading the
service for everyone else, and this is of course only minimally
effective and very short term. You can always watch out status page for
alerts. This is the current one about REST API performance:
https://status.crossref.org/incidents/d7k4ml9vvswv.
As the number of users and requests has grown, our strategies for
serving those requests must evolve. This post discusses how we’re
approaching balancing the growth in usage for the immediate term and
provides some thoughts about things we could try in the future on which
we’ll update gladly take feedback and advice.
Load balancing
In 2018, we started routing users through three different pools
(public, polite, and plus). This coincided
with the launch of
Metadata
Plus, a paid-for service with monthly data dumps and very high rate
limits. Note that all metadata is exactly the same and real-time across
all pools. We also, more recently, introduced an internal pool.
Here’s more about them:
Plus: This is the aforementioned premium option; it’s really
for ‘enterprise-wide’ use in production services and is not really
relevant here.
Public: This is the default and is the one that is struggling
at the moment. You don’t have to identify yourself and, in theory, we
don’t have to work through the night to support it if it’s struggling
(although we often do). Public currently receives around
30,000 requests per minute.
Polite: Traffic is routed to polite simply by
detecting a mailto in the header. Any system or person including an
email is being routed to a currently-quieter pool, this means we can
always get in touch for troubleshooting (and only troubleshooting).
Polite currently receives around 5,000
requests per minute.
Internal: In 2021, we introduced a new pool just for our own
tools where we can control and predict the traffic. Internal
currently receives around 1,000 requests per minute.
The volumes of traffic across public, polite and
internal pools are very different and yet each pool has always
had similar resources. The purpose of each of these pools has been
long-established but our efforts to ask the community to use
polite by default have not been particularly successful and it
is clear that we don’t have the right balance.
The internal pool has been dedicated to our internal services
that have predictable usage and that have requests that are not
initiated by external users. The internal pool has arbitrarily
included reference matching but not Crossmark, Event Data, or
search.crossref.org, which all use the polite pool instead,
along with the community. We have the capacity on the internal
pool to shift all of this “internal” traffic across, and in doing so we
will create more capacity for genuine polite users and redefine
what we consider to be “internal”.
Creating more capacity on polite will also give us the
opportunity to load-balance requests to both polite and
public across the two pools. We are at a point where we cannot
eke more performance out of the API without architectural changes. In
order to buy ourselves time to address this properly, we will modify the
routing of polite and public and evenly distribute
requests to the two pools 50/50.
The public and polite pools have equal resources at
the moment yet handle very different volumes of traffic (30,000 req/min
vs 5,000 req/min), and with the proposed changes to internal traffic the
polite pool would handle a fraction of this. The result would
look something like 31,000 req/min evenly distributed across
public and polite.
Rate limiting
Our rate-limiting also needs review. We track a number of metrics in our
web proxy but only deny requests on one of them - the number of requests
per second. On public and polite we limit each IP
address to sending 50 req/sec and if this rate is exceeded users are
denied access for 10 seconds. These limits are generous and we cannot
realistically support this volume of request for all users of the
public or polite API.
However, when requests are taking a long time to return, we potentially
have a separate problem of high concurrency as hundreds of requests
could be sent before the first one has returned. We intend to identify
and impose an appropriate rate limit on concurrent requests from each IP
to prevent a small number of users from disproportionately affecting all
users with long-running queries.
Longer-term
So, in the short-term we will revise our pool traffic as described
above. We’ll do that this week. Then we will review the current rate
limits and reduce them to something more reasonable for the majority of
users. And we’ll identify and introduce a rate limit for concurrent
requests from each user.
Longer-term, we need to rearchitect our Elasticsearch pools so that we
can:
Reduce shard sizes to improve performance of queries
Balance data shards and replicas more evenly
Optimise our instance types for our workload
Want to help?
Thanks for asking!
Firstly, please, everyone, do always put an email in your API request
headers - while the short term plan will help stabilise performance,
this habit will always help us troubleshoot e.g. we can always contact
you instead of blocking you!
Secondly, we know many of you incorporate Crossref metadata, add lots of
value to it in order to deliver important services, and also develop
APIs of your own. We’d love any comments or recommendations from those
of you handling similar situations on scaling and optimising API
performance. You can comment on this post which is managed via our
Discourse forum. We’ll aslo be adding updates to this thread as well as
on status.crossref.org. If you’d like to be in touch with any of us
directly, all our emails are
firstinitiallastname@crossref.org.
The Los Angeles County Aging & Disabilities Department is hosting
a special webinar Tuesday, June 11, at 10 a.m., in honor of World Elder
Abuse Awareness Day.
Barger
Issues Statement on SBA’s Disaster Relief Loans
date: 2024-06-03, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) is operating a Disaster
Loan Outreach Center in Los Angeles County, offering in-person support
until Wednesday, June
Two
Years After Installation, Solar Arrays at Six Santa Barbara Unified
Sites Generating Nothing but Shade
date: 2024-06-03, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The sites — which include all three of the district’s high schools — are
“close to going online” but still awaiting the utility’s approval,
officials say.
The campus of the University of Southern California offers much for
the visitor to enjoy. Come with us on this walking tour, with its
spectacular architecture, deep film history, and a stunning
panorama.
“Digital Diaspora: Futuristic Landscapes in Cyber Age” is an
exhibition that explores the evolving relationship between humanity’s
future in both physical and psychological realms, with social media and
artificial intelligence serving as integral extensions of our
existence.
Court
accepts Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim’s insider trading
settlement
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Billionaire Arista chief architect to pay inconsequential sum via SEC
A California federal court has entered a final judgment in the US
Securities and Exchange Commission’s insider trading case against
billionaire Andreas “Andy” Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems
and founder of Arista Networks.…
Fauci
deflects partisan attacks in fiery House hearing over COVID
date: 2024-06-03, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease
expert until leaving the government in 2022, was back before Congress on
Monday, calling Republican allegations that he’d tried to cover up
origins of the COVID-19 pandemic “simply preposterous.”
A GOP-led subcommittee has spent over a year probing the nation’s
response to the pandemic and whether U.S.-funded research in China may
have played any role in how it started — yet found no evidence linking
Fauci to wrongdoing.
He’d already been grilled behind closed doors, for 14 hours over two
days in January. But Monday, Fauci testified voluntarily in public and
on camera at a hearing that quickly deteriorated into partisan
attacks.
Republicans repeated unproven accusations against the longtime
National Institutes of Health scientist while Democrats apologized for
Congress besmirching his name and bemoaned a missed opportunity to
prepare for the next scary outbreak.
“He is not a comic book super villain,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, a
Maryland Democrat, adding that the Select Subcommittee on the
Coronavirus Pandemic had failed to prove a list of damaging
allegations.
Fauci was the public face of the government’s early COVID-19 response
under then-President Donald Trump and later as an adviser to President
Joe Biden. A trusted voice to millions, he also was the target of
partisan anger and choked up Monday as he recalled death threats and
other harassment of himself and his family, the threats he said
continue. Police later escorted hecklers out of the hearing room.
The main issue: Many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged
in nature and jumped from animals to people, probably at a wildlife
market in Wuhan, the city in China where the outbreak began. There’s no
new scientific information supporting that the virus might instead have
leaked from a laboratory. A U.S. intelligence analysis says there’s
insufficient evidence to prove either way — and a recent Associated
Press investigation found the Chinese government froze critical efforts
to trace the source of the virus in the first weeks of the
outbreak.
Fauci has long said publicly that he was open to both theories but
that there’s more evidence supporting COVID-19’s natural origins, the
way other deadly viruses including coronavirus cousins SARS and MERS
jumped into people. It was a position he repeated Monday as Republican
lawmakers questioned if he worked behind-the-scenes to squelch the
lab-leak theory or even tried to influence intelligence agencies.
“I have repeatedly stated that I have a completely open mind to
either possibility and that if definitive evidence becomes available to
validate or refute either theory, I will readily accept it,” Fauci said.
He later invoked a fictional secret agent, decrying a conspiracy theory
that “I was parachuting into the CIA like Jason Bourne and told the CIA
that they should really not be talking about a lab leak.”
Republicans also have accused Fauci of lying to Congress in denying
that his agency funded “gain of function” research — the practice of
enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential real-world impact — at
a lab in Wuhan.
NIH for years gave grants to a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth
Alliance that used some of the funds to work with a Chinese lab studying
coronaviruses commonly carried by bats. Last month, the government
suspended EcoHealth’s federal funding, citing its failure to properly
monitor some of those experiments.
The definition of “gain of function” covers both general research and
especially risky experiments to “enhance” the ability of potentially
pandemic pathogens to spread or cause severe disease in humans. Fauci
stressed he was using the risky experiment definition, saying “it would
be molecularly impossible” for the bat viruses studied with EcoHealth’s
funds to be turned into the virus that caused the pandemic.
In an exchange with Rep. H. Morgan Griffith, a Republican from
Virginia, Fauci acknowledged that the lab leak is still an open question
since it’s impossible to know if some other lab, not funded by NIH
money, was doing risky research with coronaviruses.
Fauci did face a new set of questions about the credibility of NIH’s
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he led for
38 years. Last month, the House panel revealed emails from an NIAID
colleague about ways to evade public records laws, including by not
discussing controversial pandemic issues in government email.
Fauci denounced the actions of that colleague and insisted that “to
the best of my knowledge I have never conducted official business via my
personal email.”
The pandemic’s origins weren’t the only hot topic. The House panel
also blasted some public health measures taken to slow spread of the
virus before COVID-19 vaccines, spurred by NIAID research, helped allow
a return to normalcy. Ordering people to stay 6 feet apart meant many
businesses, schools and churches couldn’t stay open, and subcommittee
chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup, a Republican from Ohio, called it a
“burdensome” and arbitrary rule, noting that in his prior closed-door
testimony Fauci had acknowledged it wasn’t scientifically backed.
Fauci responded Monday that the 6-feet distancing wasn’t his
guideline but one created by the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention before scientists had learned that the new virus was
airborne, not spread simply by droplets emitted a certain distance.
Much of stand-up comedy in the United States is rooted in the
country’s freedoms of speech. In Southern California, that attracts
immigrant comedians eager to express their opinions and make people
laugh. Genia Dulot reports.
Senate
Democrats renew calls for Supreme Court code of conduct
date: 2024-06-03, from: VOA News USA
The debate over ethics in the U.S. Supreme Court renewed this week as
congressional Democrats called on conservative Associate Justice Samuel
Alito to recuse himself from two cases relating to the 2020 election.
VOA Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson reports.
MNT
Pocket Reform is now shipping (crowdfunded open hardware
mini-laptop)
date: 2024-06-03, from: Liliputing
The MNT Pocket Reform is a tiny, Linux-compatible laptop computer with a
7 inch display, a mechanical ortholinear keyboard, and a modular design.
While the laptop initially ships with an NXP i.MX8M Plus quad-core ARM
Cortex-A53 processor, the system-on-a-module is removable and
replaceable, making it possible to replace or upgrade to a different
SoM. MNT launched […]
UN
Security Council to discuss North Korea human rights
date: 2024-06-03, from: VOA News USA
united nations — The U.N. Security Council will hold a public meeting
in mid-June on human rights in North Korea while South Korea holds the
council’s rotating presidency.
“Some countries have some reservations about human rights issues
being discussed in the Security Council,” South Korean Ambassador Hwang
Joon-kook said in announcing the session on Monday. “We know their
logic.”
Countries including Russia and China oppose human rights issues being
discussed in the 15-nation council, which is tasked with maintaining
international peace and security. They, and other like-minded countries,
argue that human rights issues should be handled in designated U.N.
fora, such as the Geneva-based Human Rights Council or the General
Assembly committee that deals with rights issues.
They could call for a procedural vote to try to block the meeting, in
which case at least nine of the council’s 15 members would need to
support the session.
Hwang told reporters at a news conference launching Seoul’s June
presidency that unlike other countries, North Korea’s human rights
situation is part of the council’s official agenda.
“This is unique to North Korea, and there are some good reasons for
it,” he said. The “DPRK human rights and humanitarian situation is
closely interlinked with North Korea’s aggressive weapons — their
aggressive WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and nuclear
development.”
DPRK is the abbreviation for North Korea’s official name, the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
The council was last publicly briefed on the issue on August 17,
2023, by U.N. Human Rights chief Volker Türk, who said that many of the
severe and widespread rights violations in North Korea are directly
linked to the regime’s pursuit of nuclear and ballistic missile
technology.
In 2014, a U.N. Commission of Inquiry found that North Korea’s rights
violations had risen to the level of crimes against humanity and
included murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape and enforced
disappearance, among other crimes.
Relations between Seoul and Pyongyang have deteriorated in recent
months. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has said he has given up on
reunification with the South and designated it a foreign enemy state. He
has also enshrined the country’s illicit nuclear program into its
constitution.
Washington says North Korea is advancing its prohibited weapons
program “at an alarming rate” and has launched more than 100 ballistic
missiles since the beginning of 2022.
And in one of its more bizarre actions, last week Pyongyang sent
balloons filled with trash and feces into the skies over South Korea,
dropping them on busy streets.
Fed up, South Korea said Monday it will fully suspend a 2018 military
agreement with the North that is aimed at lowering tensions. Seoul
partially suspended the agreement last November to protest the launch of
a North Korean spy satellite.
HP-Autonomy:
Attorneys wrap up arguments in Mike Lynch’s stateside criminal fraud
trial
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
And we await the San Francisco jury’s verdict
Closing arguments were delivered today in Mike Lynch’s criminal fraud
trial in San Francisco, over a decade after the HP/Autonomy merger that
provoked the whole kerfuffle.…
Kini
Motion Detector Adds Email Notifications and Previews Stasis Mode
date: 2024-06-03, from: TidBITS blog
The Kini motion detectors can now alert you to motion using email
instead of or in addition to SMS, making them usable by those outside
North America and opening up automation options. Kinisium is also
testing a Stasis Mode that alerts you when a Kini hasn’t moved as
anticipated.
Trump
returns to campaign trail after guilty verdicts
date: 2024-06-03, from: VOA News USA
Donald Trump returns to political campaigning this week as the first
convicted felon to run for U.S. president as a major-party candidate.
VOA Correspondent Scott Stearns looks at how voters are reacting to the
verdict on the campaign trail.
June 4:
Saugus Union District Regular Board Meeting
date: 2024-06-03, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The regular meeting of the Saugus Union School District Governing
Board will take place Tuesday, June 4, with closed session beginning at
5:30 p.m., followed immediately by public session at 6:30 p.m
Andreas
Kling steps down from SerenityOS to focus entirely on the Ladybird
browser
date: 2024-06-03, from: OS News
We’ve got some possibly sad, possibly great news. Today, Andreas
Kling, the amazing developer who started SerenityOS as a way to regain a
sense or normalcy after completing his drug rehab program, has announced
he’s stepping down as the ‘big dictator for life’ of the SerenityOS
project, handing leadership over the maintainer group. The other half of
the coin, however, is that Kling will officially fork Ladybird, the
cross-platform web browser that originated as part of SerenityOS,
turning it into a proper, separate project. Personally, for the past two
years, I’ve been almost entirely focused on Ladybird, a new web browser
that started as a simple HTML viewer for SerenityOS. When Ladybird
became a cross-platform project in 2022, I switched all my attention to
the Linux version, as testing on Linux was much easier and didn’t
require booting into SerenityOS. Time flew by, and now I can’t remember
the last time I worked on something in SerenityOS that wasn’t related to
Ladybird. ↫ Andreas Kling If you know a little bit about Kling’s career,
it’s not entirely surprising that his heart lies with working on a
browser engine. He originally worked at Nokia, and then at Apple in San
Francisco on WebKit, and there’s most likely some code that he’s written
in the browser you’re using right now (except, perhaps, for us Firefox
users). As such, it makes sense that once Ladybird grew into something
more than just a simple HTML viewer, he’d be focusing on it a lot. As
part of the fork, Ladybird will focus entirely on Linux and macOS, and
drop SerenityOS as a target. This may seem weird at first, but this is
an entirely amicable and planned step, as this allows Ladybird to adopt,
use, and integrate third party code, something SerenityOS does not
allow. In addition, many of these open source projects Ladybird couldn’t
really use anyway because they simply didn’t exist for SerenityOS in the
first place. This decision creates a lot of breathing room and
flexibility for both projects. Ladybird was getting a lot of attention
from outside of SerenityOS circles, from large donations to code
contributions. I’m not entirely surprised by this step, and I really
hope it’s going to be the beginning of something great. We really need
new and competitive browser engines to push the web forward, and
alongside Servo, it now seems Ladybird has also picked up the baton.
What this will mean for SerenityOS remains to be seen. As Kling said, he
hasn’t really been involved with SerenityOS outside of Ladybird work for
two years now, so it seems the rest of the contributors were already
doing a lot of the heavy lifting. I hope this doesn’t mean the project
will peter out, since it has a certain flair few other operating systems
have.
NIST
turns to IT consultants to clear National Vulnerability Database
backlog
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Aims to get CVE logjam cleared by the end of FY 24
Facing a growing backlog of reported flaws, NIST has extended a
commercial contract with an outside consultancy to help it get on top of
its National Vulnerability Database (NVD).…
June 5:
Hart District Governing Board Regular Meeting
date: 2024-06-03, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The regular meeting of the William S. Hart Union High School
District’s Governing Board will be held Wednesday, June 5, beginning
with closed session at 5 p.m., followed immediately by public session at
7 p.m.
Trump
urges Supreme Court to decide before his sentencing date
date: 2024-06-03, from: The Signal
By Jack Phillips Contributing Writer Former President Donald Trump on
Sunday called on the U.S. Supreme Court to quickly intervene after he
was convicted for falsifying business records last week. In […]
Beirut, Lebanon — Iran’s acting foreign minister Ali Bagheri said
Monday his government was engaged in negotiations with arch-foe the
United States hosted by the Gulf sultanate of Oman.
Asked about the issue at a news conference during a visit to Beirut,
Bagheri said, “we have always continued our negotiations … and they have
never stopped.”
Washington and Tehran have not had diplomatic relations since the
1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.
The British daily Financial Times reported in March that Bagheri was
involved in indirect talks with the United States in Oman in early 2024,
against the backdrop of heightened regional tensions over the
Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.
The United States is Israel’s close ally and top provider of military
assistance, while Iran backs the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Bagheri arrived Monday in Lebanon, on his first foreign trip since
assuming the interim role following the death of Hossein Amirabdollahian
in a helicopter crash last month that also killed Iran’s president,
Ebrahim Raisi.
Bagheri said the choice of destination for his visit was “because
Lebanon is the cradle of resistance” against Israel.
Iran supports the powerful Lebanese group Hezbollah financially and
militarily.
The Shiite Muslim movement, a Hamas ally, has traded regular
cross-border fire with Israel since the start of the Gaza war in early
October.
Bagheri, Iran’s former top nuclear negotiator, said discussions with
Western powers about Tehran’s atomic activities were ongoing.
Western governments fear Iran is seeking to develop a nuclear weapon
— a claim the Islamic republic denies.
“We advise them not to miss the opportunity any further and
compensate for the actions that they must have carried out but didn’t,”
Bagheri said, as a meeting of the U.N. nuclear watchdog opened in
Vienna.
Diplomats told AFP that Britain, France and Germany will seek to
censure Tehran over its lack of cooperation with the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at the organization’s board meeting.
At the last board meeting in March, European powers shelved their
plans to confront Iran because of a lack of support from
Washington.
Bagheri is due to travel from Lebanon to Syria on Tuesday.
NASA
Updates Coverage for Crew Flight Test Launch, Docking to Station
date: 2024-06-03, from: NASA breaking news
NASA will provide live coverage of launch activities for the agency’s
Boeing Crew Flight Test, which will carry NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore
and Suni Williams to and from the International Space Station. Launch of
the ULA (United Launch Alliance) Atlas V rocket and Boeing Starliner
spacecraft is targeted for 10:52 a.m. EDT Wednesday, June 5, […]
The
new Asus Zenbook S 16 is a 3K OLED laptop with AMD Strix Point and a
lightweight “Ceraluminum” chassis
date: 2024-06-03, from: Liliputing
The Asus Zenbook S 16 (UM5606) is a laptop with a big, bright OLED
display, a 28-watt AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, and a 78 Wh battery.
But it’s also a surprisingly thin and light notebook that measures about
half an inch thick and weighs about 3.3 pounds. It also has an all-metal
body […]
As some of you may know, I started out as a radio journalist. And
when I discovered the web in around 1996, I knew that, to me, radio and
TV were not the dominant news media any longer. Nowhere but on the web
was it possible to research and cross-reference from dozens or resources
with […]
By Zachary Stieber Contributing Writer Dr. Anthony Fauci disavowed a
longtime senior adviser at a congressional hearing on Monday and said
the official violated federal rules by using personal email for […]
June
6: Parks, Recreation Scheduled to Discuss 2024 Summer Programming
date: 2024-06-03, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Santa Clarita Parks, Recreation and Community Services Commission
will hold its regular meeting Thursday, June 6, at 6 p.m., in Council
Chambers at City Hall.
Fable Studio, a San Francisco-based startup that gained fame for
demonstrating the ability to create an episode of South Park with
a brief prompt, is making headlines again. The company
is launching Showrunner, a streaming platform that will enable users to
create their own AI-prompted episodes of various shows. “The vision is
to be the Netflix of AI,” says chief executive Edward Saatchi. “Maybe
you finish all of the …
On
Alaska’s remote southeast coastline, radio keeps communities
connected
date: 2024-06-03, from: VOA News USA
washington — In the remote and rural communities of southeastern
Alaska, news is never in short supply thanks to a small but dedicated
crew of journalists.
“We are what we call community radio,” said Angela Denning. The radio
journalist is the regional news director of the media nonprofit
CoastAlaska and oversees six newsrooms.
All of them, she said, are “pretty darn remote.”
Just one person runs the newsroom in Wrangell — an island borough of
little more than 2,000 people on the Alaska panhandle — while two people
run the newsroom that Denning oversees in Petersburg, another panhandle
town.
“It has 3,300 people. It’s on an island, so no roads in or out. We
take planes, we take boats,” she told VOA.
Denning says their audiences rely on stations like hers for news and
natural disaster warnings. But radio also provides a human connection
that is harder to achieve through websites.
“It’s very personal,” said Denning, adding that listeners often tune
in for updates on middle school basketball games, or just to hear the
voices of their neighbors, friends or colleagues.
That personal connection serves them well as CoastAlaska teams up
with media nonprofits working to prevent the spread of
disinformation.
Communities where agriculture, logging or mining are the main
industries are seeing a growth in misinformation and disinformation,
media groups say. To stem that, organizations like the Rural News
Network and the News Literacy Project work with affiliates, including
CoastAlaska, to offer audiences the tools to spot and debunk false
information.
Local media are often on the front line of fighting disinformation,
said Mike Webb, the News Literacy Project’s senior vice president of
communications.
As the U.S. prepares for elections, his nonpartisan group is helping
newsrooms like Denning’s to equip audiences with the tools they need to
spot misinformation.
Ten years ago in Alaska, Denning said, misinformation and distrust in
media were less of a worry.
“Trust. It was something we took for granted,” she said. But now, “we
don’t assume there’s trust anymore. Quite the opposite.”
To build and preserve trust, CoastAlaska works with its community to
help audiences feel more involved. They have changed the formats of
public forums to allow more engagement and to receive feedback from
their audiences.
For instance, when residents felt as if they didn’t have a voice in a
local election, the journalists set up a way for audiences to ask
questions at a borough assembly candidates forum.
For the first half, the media asked questions. Then they let
residents quiz the candidates.
“We pulled their names out of the hat during the program so that
those people would be able to ask the questions,” Denning said. And
people had to ask their question to all the candidates, not just
one.
It was one way for some people who are suspicious of or don’t have
much trust in media outlets to feel like they were empowered and part of
the process.
“I think it kind of worked,” she said. “We got good feedback about
it. But of course, we approached it very carefully.”
Part of CoastAlaska’s success is its existing connections with the
audience.
“I think it works because we are covering community-based local
events such as who’s going to tell the community how the high school did
at their basketball game over the weekend. That’s us,” Denning said.
In her region, the most engagement their reporting receives is often
on the successes of students or community member profiles, Denning said.
Though, she added, the reporters also cover issues like landslides,
conflicts with the logging industry, and economic problems.
“Our listeners and readers may not agree with everything we say but
they also really appreciate the coverage that we give to the community,
all those little things,” she said.
Despite being largely isolated on islands in the state’s southeast,
Denning’s reporters are always talking with each other.
“If you’re in constant contact with your colleagues, even if they’re
a few hundred miles away on a different island, you can still feel
supported,” Denning said. “During this time of misinformation and
distrust, that’s more important than ever.”
When asked how it felt to turn 100 years old, Marie De La Torre laughed
and said, “It feels like I’m 100.” “I don’t know whether I’m grateful
or thankful,” […]
Redox
replaces core applications with COSMIC applications
date: 2024-06-03, from: OS News
Another month, another Redox progress report. The Rust-based
operating system, headed by system76 engineer Jeremy Soller, has made a
big move by replacing Redox’ Orbital file manager, text editor and
terminal by their COSMIC counterparts, COSMIC Files, COSMIC Editor and
COSMIC Terminal, in the default Redox installation. COSMIC is the
Rust-based desktop environment system76 is currently developing for
their Linux distribution, Pop!_OS. You really have to start wondering
what the long-term goals for Redox really are here. I’m not saying
they’re intending to replace Linux with it – that’d be suicide – but the
steady progress towards a general purpose operating system is
undeniable.
Asus
ProArt PX13 is a 3 pound convertible notebook with Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and
up to NVIDIA RTX 4070
date: 2024-06-03, from: Liliputing
The Asus ProArt PX13 is a thin and light convertible notebook with a
13.3 inch, 2880 x 1800 pixel, 60 Hz OLED display with support for up to
32GB of RAM, and up to 2TB of storage. It’s also a Windows Copilot+ PC
thanks to support for up to an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 […]
There’s no denying that not everyone is happy with the state of the
GTK world, and I, too, have argued that GNOME’s massive presence and
seeming unwillingness to cooperate with or even consider the existence
of other GTK-based desktop environments is doing real, measurable harm
to the likes of Xfce, Cinnamon, and others. A major root cause is a
feeling that GTK is nothing but a vessel for GNOME, and that the project
doesn’t really seem to care much about anyone else. GNOME Foundation
member and all-round very kind person Hari Rana, also known as
TheEvilSkeleton, penned a blog post highlighting the other side of the
story. In essence, what it comes down to, according to Rana, is that
it’s better for everyone if GNOME-specific widgets are moved out of GTK,
and into something else – first libhandy, and now its succesor
libadwaita, splitting the toolkit (GTK) from the design language
(libadwaita). This allows GNOME developers to focus on, well, GNOME, and
frees up time for GTK developers to focus on generic widgets that aren’t
specific to GNOME. Thanks to the removal of GNOME widgets from GTK 4,
GTK developers can continue to work on general-purpose widgets, without
being influenced or restricted in any way by the GNOME HIG. Developers
of cross-platform GTK 3 apps that rely exclusively on general-purpose
widgets can be more confident that GTK 4 won’t remove these widgets, and
hopefully enjoy the benefits that GTK 4 offers. ↫ Hari Rana From a GNOME
standpoint, this makes perfect sense, and I can obviously see the
benefits for them. However, what this entire post seems to ignore is
that the main effect of the split between GTK 4 and libadwaita is that
various GTK applications, now targeting libadwaita because of GNOME’s
immense popularity, simply no longer integrate very well with other
desktops, like Xfce or Cinnamon. GNOME is, of course, under no
obligation to remedy this situation, but at the very least they could
acknowledge this is a very real problem that their fellow developers
working on Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, and others, have to deal with. It works
the other way around too. Developers targeting the Linux desktop, where
GNOME is more or less the default, have to choose between making a GTK
application that integrates well with GNOME by opting for libadwaita and
leaving non-GNOME users with a crappy experience, or opting for ‘pure’
GTK 4 and leaving GNOME users with a worse experience. Neither option is
good for the Linux desktop as a whole. The very real ripple effects of
GNOME’s choices regarding GTK and libadwaita are seemingly being
stubbornly ignored, neglected, and often not even acknowledged at all,
and it’s no surprise this creates an immense amount of friction in the
wider desktop Linux community. It just feels smug and careless, and of
course that’s going to rub people the wrong way- regardless of the
purity of your intentions.
Get ready to light up the night at The Cube – Ice and Entertainment
Center, Powered by FivePoint Valencia. Starting in June, join us for
Glow Nights every Saturday night from 7:30-9:30 p.m. When you purchase a
Public Skate admission, you’ll receive a FREE glowstick and have an
unforgettably fun experience! Bring your friends and […]
CA
Senate Preserves Big Corporate Tax Breaks That Benefit Some Cities
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: The LAist
California cities funnel $1 billion in online sales taxes back to
wealthy corporations, but the state Senate killed a bill that would
change the rules for those arrangements. The vote came down to whether
senators represent a city with a major retailer in a tax-sharing
agreement in their districts.
Solving
the macOS Installer’s “Failed to Personalize” Error with New
Firmware
date: 2024-06-03, from: TidBITS blog
A TidBITS Talk user was unable to update macOS on an M2 16-inch MacBook
Pro, receiving a “Failed to personalize” error each time. The problem
turned out to be related to firmware, and the little-known solution
required restoring with Apple Configurator.
How to
Respond to China’s Tactics in the South China Sea
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: RAND blog
China has the Philippines in an ever-tightening stranglehold that is
increasingly compromising the latter’s sovereignty and territorial
integrity at sea. If international law is to be upheld and borders are
to remain inviolable, the United States should do more to help the
Philippines.
Missed
the ‘Parade of Planets’? These Upcoming Alignments Will Likely Be
Better, Anyway
date: 2024-06-03, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Astronomers tempered expectations of the celestial event this week,
pointing to others in the near future as more exciting opportunities for
sky watchers
The
new Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 gaming laptop combines Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with
NVIDIA RTX 40 series graphics
date: 2024-06-03, from: Liliputing
The latest Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 gaming laptop features a 16 inch, 2560
x 1600 pixel OLED display featuring a 240 Hz refresh rate, an AMD Ryzen
AI 9 HX 370 processor, and support for up to NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070
processor. It has a 90 Wh battery and three fans inside the case to […]
Crooks
threaten to leak 3B personal records ‘stolen from background check
firm’
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Turns out opting out actually works?
Billions of records detailing people’s personal information may soon be
dumped online after being allegedly obtained from a Florida firm that
handles background checks and other requests for folks’ private info.…
If you have any interest in software development on RISC OS, then
you’ll be pleased to read that the next occasional ‘friendly fireside
chat’ for programmers, and anyone with a related interest or who is
thinking about trying their hand at coding, is set to take place on
Saturday, 8th June. These meetings take place on a semi-regular basis,
online via the Zoom video conferencing system, and provide a means for
people to get together and discuss programming issues that matter to
them. For some they are an opportunity to…
Mark Moxon
talking to WROCC about Lander – 5th June
date: 2024-06-03, from: RiscOS Story
If your use of RISC OS goes back to the early days of the operating
system, there’s a very good chance you’ll have either have played Lander
or, at the very least, will have found it lurking on one of the discs
that came with your computer. It was supplied on the ‘Applications
Discs’ that came with early Archimedes and A3000 computers. The game was
based around a very simple concept: You control a craft called a Lander,
and you fly around the protecting your world by eliminating enemy
ships…
The next meeting of the Midlands User Group (MUG) will be an
in-person event, and will be held from 2:00pm on Saturday, 8th June, at:
Dodderhill Parish Community Hall,School Road,Wychbold,WR9 7PU. Attendees
will see a demonstration of how to update a system based around the
‘ROOL distribution’ of RISC OS – that’s one where the operating system
and disc image comes from the RISC OS Open Limited website – so that
it’s running version 5.30 of the OS. This will cover not just updating
the ROM image itself, but also…
Kevin Wells has released a new version of his application for looking
up information about MAC addresses from the RISC OS desktop. Version
2.00 of MACadd brings with it a number of changes over the last release.
The chief driver of the update is that the provider of the remote
application programmer interface (API) that was being used is no longer
working with the software, so Kevin has changed the code to support a
new one, called MACLookup. Other changes include preventing multiple
copies of the software running at once,…
NASA
Invites Media to Discuss Hubble Operations Update
date: 2024-06-03, from: NASA breaking news
NASA will hold a media teleconference at 4 p.m. EDT, Tuesday, June 4,
to provide an update on operations for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA anticipates Hubble will continue making discoveries, working with
other observatories such as the agency’s James Webb Space Telescope,
throughout this decade and into the next. Audio of the teleconference
will stream […]
Beelink
GTi Ultra is a mini PC with a PCIe connector for a discrete graphics
dock
date: 2024-06-03, from: Liliputing
The upcoming Beelink GTi Ultra is a small desktop computer that will be
available soon with support for 12th, 13th, or 14th-gen Intel Core
processors. But what really makes it stand out the way Beelink has added
support for an external graphics card. While it’s not unusual to find
mini PCs with Thunderbolt 4, USB4, or […]
Wildfires are razing U.S. forests faster than either natural regrowth or
active replanting can restore them. There’s a nearly 4 million-acre
backlog in the western U.S. of forests that have burned and not been
re-seeded. That’s slightly larger than the size of Connecticut. And
unless we pick up the pace, the shortfall could increase two to three
times over by 2050 as wildfires get worse under a warming climate.
These are the findings of a
study
published last week on the yawning gap between reforestation needs and
reforestation capacity in the western U.S. Trees are still the country’s
most important resource to counteract climate change,
offsetting
more than 12% of annual greenhouse gas emissions as of 2021. But
in some areas like in the fire-ravaged Rocky Mountain region, forests
have
become
a net source of carbon to the atmosphere, releasing more than
they draw down. To prevent the reforestation gap from widening, the new
study warns, we have to fix the “reforestation pipeline” — our capacity
to collect seeds, grow seedlings, and plant them.
It also highlights solutions. The research was primarily funded by a
company that finances tree-planting efforts by selling credits to
carbon-emitting businesses based on the amount of carbon the trees suck
up, allowing those businesses to offset their own emissions. To rebuild
the country’s reforestation capacity, the study recommends — surprise,
surprise — expanding the role of forest carbon offsets, among other
ideas.
Some might look at this paper and dismiss it as biased science, but it
got me thinking about the long-running debate in the climate community
over trees. Should companies be allowed to offset their emissions from
burning fossil fuel by planting carbon-sucking forests? It’s easy to say
no. Too many forest-related carbon offset projects have come under fire
for using faulty accounting methods or for “protecting” forests that
were at no risk of being felled. Plus, there’s the larger risk that
offsets provide a license to emit.
But when you contemplate the chasm between the funding and
infrastructure required to restore forests and current capacity and
incentives — not just in the U.S., but also globally — it’s easy to see
why so many people ignore these realities and say we
must finance reforestation through carbon markets. The
new study spells out the predicament quite clearly.
Solomon Dobrowski, the lead author and a professor of landscape ecology
at the University of Montana, was quick to tell me that these numbers
were a rough estimate. “I’m not so hung up on the absolute number,” he
said. “We can increase the precision of that number. But the take-home
message here is that the needs are rapidly outstripping our capacity to
fill them.”
Dobrowski studies how forests grow back after a disturbance like a
wildfire, and he’s been documenting a concerning trend. Larger, more
severe fires are “punching these big holes into landscapes,” he told me.
A severe burn might leave a mile-long stretch between nearest living
trees, making it impossible for the forest to regenerate through natural
seed dispersal.
At the same time, the government is struggling to pick up the slack. Due
to funding shortfalls, the U.S. Forest Service has
managed
to address “just 6% of post-wildfire replanting needs” per year
over the last decade.
The average area burned in the U.S.
more
than doubled from 2000 to 2017 compared to the preceding 17-year
period. But the uptick in severe fires is not the only reason we’ve
fallen so far behind on reforestation. At the same time fires have
increased, both public and private forestry shops have collapsed.
Ironically, the decline of an ecologically destructive industry —
logging — also gutted the potential for an ecologically regenerative
forestry industry to thrive.
Previously, most of the Forest Service’s reforestation work was
funded
by the agency’s timber sales. But beginning in the 1990s,
logging on public lands sharply declined due to
a
confluence of factors, including over-harvesting in previous
decades and the listing of the northern spotted owl as protected under
the Endangered Species Act. The agency’s non-fire workforce has
decreased by 40% over the past two decades. It also shut down more than
half its nurseries, leaving
just
six remaining. Many
state-owned
nurseries have also closed due to budget cuts and reduced demand
for seedlings.
Today, the reforestation supply chain is mostly sustained by private
companies serving what’s left of the wood product and fiber industry.
State and local regulations require companies to replant in the areas
they harvest. But since the industry is concentrated on the west coast,
so is the supply chain — 95% of seedling production in the western U.S.
occurs in Washington, Oregon, and California. That means interior states
like Montana, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico, which are seeing
increasingly large fires, have no mature supply chain to support
reforestation.
The New Mexico Natural Resources Department, for example,
estimates
it needs 150 million to 390 million seedlings to replant the
acres burned in the past 20 years. But the only big nursery in the
state, a research center at New Mexico State University, can supply just
300,000 seedlings per year. The nearest U.S. Forest Service nursery
serving the region is in Boise, Idaho, more than 700 miles away. Matthew
Hurteau, a forest ecologist at the University of New Mexico who is a
co-author on the reforestation study, told me he has been working with
the state to develop a new nursery capable of producing 5 million
seedlings a year. The project has received some funding from the U.S.
Department of Agriculture and the state government, but still needs to
raise roughly $60 million more, Hurteau said.
Nurseries aren’t the only bottleneck. Hurteau has also been working to
build the state’s seedbank, a time-consuming process that requires going
out into the field and collecting seeds one by one. Another piece of the
puzzle is workforce development. Dowbrowski pointed out that the
majority of tree planting today is not done by government workers but
rather by private contractors that hire H2B guest workers. Due to
federal limits on immigration, reforestation contractors
haven’t
even been able to hire enough to meet current planting demand.
The new paper is far from the first to highlight these issues, and
policymakers are beginning to address the problem. In 2021, the Forest
Service got a major infusion of cash from the Bipartisan Infrastructure
Law, which lifted the cap on its annual budget for reforestation from
$30 million to at least $140 million with the directive to clear its
backlog.
But Dobrowski said this is a far cry from all that’s needed. In the
study, he and his co-authors estimated that clearing the existing
backlog in the West alone could cost at least $3.6 billion. And that’s a
conservative estimate — it doesn’t include the cost of building more
greenhouses or expanding the workforce. “The reality is that the feds
don’t have the infrastructure and workforce to address this at scale,”
he told me. The Forest Service budget also won’t address reforestation
needs on private lands, which account for about 30% of forested land in
the western U.S.
After establishing the scale of the problem, the paper raises a followup
question: How can we scale the reforestation supply chain? There, it
pivots to argue that “new economic drivers” — like carbon markets — “can
modernize the reforestation pipeline and align tree planting efforts
with broader ecosystem resilience and climate mitigation goals.”
This is precisely what Mast Reforestation, the company that funded the
research, is trying to do. Mast is vertically integrated — it collects
seeds, grows seedlings, and plants them. The company has developed
software to improve the efficiency of each of these steps and increase
the chances of success, i.e. to minimize tree deaths. To fund its
tree-planting efforts, Mast sells carbon credits based on the amount of
CO2 the trees will remove from the atmosphere over their lifetimes. It
only plants on privately owned, previously burned land that wouldn’t
have otherwise been replanted (because the owner couldn’t afford it) or
regenerated (because the burn was so severe). The idea is to create a
more stable source of financing for reforestation not subject to the
whims of congressional appropriations.
Matthew Aghai, an ecologist who works as the chief science officer at
Mast and another of the study’s co-authors, told me there’s a
misunderstanding among policymakers and the general public that when
forests burn, the government is ready to step in, and all that’s needed
is more funding for seedling production. Aghai hopes the new paper
illuminates the truth, and how risky it is to wait for state backing
that may never arrive. He told me that he sought out Dobrowski to work
with him because he knew, as a former academic himself, that if he had
written the paper on his own, there would have been a stigma attached to
it. “I think the best way for me to get those ideas out was actually
something that needs to happen in our broader market, which is a lot
more collaboration,” he said.
There are many climate advocates who believe the problems with carbon
offsets can be fixed, that the markets can be reformed, and that “high
quality” nature-based credits are possible. Indeed, many consider
restoring trust in nature-based carbon credits an imperative if we are
to fund reforestation at the level that tackling climate change
requires. A few weeks ago, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Salesforce
announced
a new coalition called Symbiosis that will purchase up to 20
million tons of carbon removal credits from nature-based projects that
“meet the highest quality bar” and “reflect the latest and greatest
science.” Then, last Tuesday, the Biden administration followed up with
a show of
support
for fixing the voluntary carbon market, because it can “deliver
steady, reliable revenue streams to a range of decarbonization projects,
programs, and practices, including nature-based solutions.”
But there is one fundamental problem with selling carbon credits based
on trees, which no amount of reform or commitment to high integrity can
solve. Fossil fuel CO2 emissions are essentially permanent — they stay
in the atmosphere for upward of a thousand years. The CO2 sequestered by
forests is not. Trees die. In a warming world, with worsening pest
outbreaks, drought, and wildfires, the chances of a tree making it to a
thousand years without releasing at least some of its stored carbon are
slimmer than ever.
Hurteau, despite contributing to the paper, is deeply skeptical of
financing reforestation through the sale of carbon credits. “We need to
be making monster investments in maintaining forest cover globally, and
I understand why people look at carbon finance to do this,” he said.
“But you can’t fly in an airplane and pay somebody to plant trees and
have it zero out. From an energy balance perspective, for the Earth’s
system, that’s not real.”
When I raised this with Dobrowski, who endorsed the paper’s conclusions
about the potential for carbon markets, he said it’s something he
struggles with. He agreed that a ton of fossil fuel emissions is not the
same as a ton of carbon sequestered in trees, but comes back to the fact
that we need new incentive structures for people to do reforestation and
be better stewards of our forests. It’s something I’ve heard echoed many
times over in my reporting — the unspoken subtext essentially being, do
you have any better ideas to raise the billions of dollars needed to do
this?
Aghai had a slightly different take. To him, the one-to-one math isn’t
so important “as long as the trajectory is moving forward, we’re
accumulating carbon, we’re protecting watersheds, we’re increasing the
biodiversity index.” That may sound a bit hand-wavy — and it still gives
a pass to polluters. But then he raised an interesting point, one that I
don’t think I’ve heard before. The environmental damage caused by fossil
fuels is not just the carbon they spew into the atmosphere. And the
value forests provide is not just the carbon they sequester.
“Carbon’s our currency right now. It’s the thing that everyone is
measuring around,” he said. “But what about all the other destruction
that comes with the energy sector? There’s cascading effects that impact
water, soils, methane. Forests tend to stabilize everything by moving us
toward homeostasis at a landscape level. For me, these markets will work
when we catalyze them at a regional, dare I say global scale.”
Are these benefits enough to dismiss the incongruity inherent to forest
carbon offsets? To say, for example, that trees might not actually
offset the full amount of carbon that Google is putting in the
atmosphere, but the funding Google is providing to get these trees in
the ground makes some greater, unquantifiable progress toward our
climate goals?
Some scientists have proposed alternative solutions. Myles Allen, a
professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford, has
advocated
for “like for like” offsetting, in which companies only buy
nature-based carbon credits to offset their emissions from nature-based
sources, such as land cleared to grow food. To offset fossil fuel
emissions, the logic goes, they could buy other kinds of credits, like
those based on carbon captured from the air and sequestered deep
underground for millenia. The European Union is
currently
considering a rule that would require companies adhere to this
principle. Others have
suggested
companies could make “contributions” to climate mitigation through
investments in forests, rather than buying offsets.
Both would be significant departures from the way corporate
sustainability managers have used carbon markets in the past. But the
current system is in crisis. The volume of carbon credits traded
declined
precipitously in the last two years as buyers were spooked off
buying offsets. Forestry-related credits, in particular, contracted from
$1.1 billion in sales in 2022 to just $351 million in sales in 2023, a
69% drop. Within that, the vast majority of the credits traded during
both years came from forestry projects that reduced emissions, not
reforestation projects like Mast’s that remove carbon from the
atmosphere.
Even if you agree with Aghai that carbon markets are our best hope at
addressing the reforestation gap, gaining the trust of buyers is a
prerequisite. That means that scientists, companies, and governance
groups like the
Integrity
Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market first have to converge
on what these credits actually mean and how they can be used.
Kevin Beaumont (via Stephen Hackett): Microsoft told media outlets a
hacker cannot exfiltrate Copilot+ Recall activity remotely.Reality: how
do you think hackers will exfiltrate this plain text database of
everything the user has ever viewed on their PC? Very easily, I have it
automated. […] Microsoft are going to deliberately set cybersecurity
back a decade […]
Josh Whiton: A crazy experience — I lost my earbuds in a remote town
in Chile, so tried buying a new pair at the airport before flying out.
But the new wired, iPhone, lightning-cable headphones didn’t work.
Strange.[…]By now the gift shop people and their manager and all the
people in line behind me are […]
ICQ (via Hacker News): ICQ will stop working from June 26 You can
chat with friends in VK Messenger, and with colleagues in VK WorkSpace
Wes Davis: ICQ was started in 1996 by Israeli company Mirabilis, which
AOL bought in 1998. ICQ grew to 100 million registered users at one
point, at least according to […]
Elisha Fieldstadt (via Hacker News): An Apple AirTag led to the
arrest of an airline subcontractor accused of stealing thousands of
dollars’ worth of items from luggage at a Florida airport.[…]Okaloosa
County sheriff’s deputies investigating both suspected thefts
cross-referenced Destin-Fort Walton Beach Airport employees who lived
near Kathy Court and found De Luca at his […]
EBay is offering 20% off thousands of items when you use the coupon
HOT20DEALS for up to $500 off your total purchase. Peacock and
Paramount+ are both offering deep discounts on 1-year subscriptions to
their video streaming services. And Amazon, Google, and Samsung are all
offering deals on products including smartphones, tablets, and media
streamers. […]
Mexico
City’s Reservoirs Are at Risk of Running Out of Water
date: 2024-06-03, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Amid climate change, drought and aging infrastructure, the largest
metropolitan area in North America is struggling to conserve water in a
major reservoir system
Scriptnotes,
Episode 640: Can You Believe It?, Transcript
date: 2024-06-03, 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 640 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things
that are interesting to […] The post
Scriptnotes,
Episode 640: Can You Believe It?, Transcript first appeared on
John August.
Winners
Announced in Gateways to Blue Skies Aeronautics Competition
date: 2024-06-03, from: NASA breaking news
The California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, team, with their
project titled “Aero-Quake Emergency Response Network,” took first place
at the third annual Gateways to Blue Skies Competition. Competing among
eight finalist teams that presented their ideas for aviation-related
systems for natural disasters, the California State Polytechnic
University, Pomona team earned the top award at the […]
The oringinal post for this episode can be found here. John August:
Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig
Mazin. John: And this is Episode 639 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about
screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on
the show, why are you or your […] The post
Scriptnotes,
Episode 639: Intrinsic Motivation, Transcript first appeared on
John August.
Asus
introduces Vivobook S 14 OLED with Ryzen AI 300 and a 120Hz OLED
displays
date: 2024-06-03, from: Liliputing
The new Asus Vivobook S 14 OLED (M5406) is thin and light laptop with
support for up to an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, 32GB of RAM, and
1TB of storage. It has a 2880 x 1800 pixel, 120 Hz OLED display, a 75 Wh
battery, and a single-zone RGB backlit keyboard. And Asus fits […]
Comicpalooza, the largest annual pop culture festival in the southern
United States, is home to thousands of comic book, science, anime, and
gaming fanatics in Houston. Guests have the opportunity to celebrate
their passions through a variety of entertainment, panels, and meet and
greets. NASA’s Johnson Space Center has participated in Comicpalooza’s
festivities for the […]
Energy
buffs give small modular reactors a gigantic reality check
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Too expensive, slow, and risky for investors, and they’re taking focus
off renewables, say IEEFA experts
Miniature nuclear reactors promise a future filled with local, clean,
safe zero-carbon energy, but those promises quickly melt when confronted
with reality, say a pair of researchers.…
Artemis
Generation Shines During NASA’s 2024 Lunabotics Challenge
date: 2024-06-03, from: NASA breaking news
Members of the Artemis Generation kicked up some simulated lunar dust
as part of NASA’s 2024 Lunabotics Challenge, held at The Astronauts
Memorial Foundation’s Center for Space Education at the agency’s Kennedy
Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. When the dust settled, two
teams emerged from Artemis Arena as the grand prize winners of this
year’s competition. […]
Summary
of the 2023 Precipitation Measurement Mission Science Team Meeting
date: 2024-06-03, from: NASA breaking news
Andrea Portier, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Science Systems
and Applications, Inc., andrea.m.portier@nasa.gov Introduction The
annual Precipitation Measurement Mission (PMM) Science Team Meeting
(STM) took place September 18–22, 2023, in Minneapolis, MN. The PMM
program supports scientific research and applications, algorithm
development, and ground-based validation activities for the completed
Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) and current […]
Explore the Lagniappe for June 2024 issue, featuring an innovative
approach to infrastructure upgrades, how NASA Stennis has helped one
family build a generational legacy and more!
Microsoft
Photos: Migrating from UWP to Windows App SDK
date: 2024-06-03, from: Windows Developer Blog
The
Microsoft
Photos App team recently released a major update, <a
href=“https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2024/04/02/windows-photos-begins-previewing-a-windows-app-s
Schenker
shows off a Linux laptop prototype with Snapdragon X Elite at Computex
2024
date: 2024-06-03, from: Liliputing
Most of the first computers powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Plus
and Snapdragon X Elite chips are expected to be Windows PCs. But
Qualcomm has also indicated that it’s working to ensure that support for
its chips makes it to the mainline Linux kernel as well. And now it
looks like at least one […]
PlayStation
VR2 PC adapter coming in August for $60 (use a PSVR2 headset with
Windows PCs)
date: 2024-06-03, from: Liliputing
Sony’s PlayStation VR2 is a virtual reality headset designed for use
with a PS5 game console. But, as expected, Sony has just announced that
you’ll soon be able to plug the headset into a Windows computer and use
it to play PC games… although you’ll need an adapter to do that. The
Sony PlayStation VR2 […]
<p>Months ago I ranted about <a href="https://manuelmoreale.com/a-rant-on-arc-search">Arc Search</a>. My thoughts on the subject have not changed. Not long after that post, the fun people at The Browser Company released a teaser video for an upcoming 5 video series called “WE MIGHT NOT MAKE IT”. And guess what? My blog post made a brief cameo in the trailer, right after Casey Newton, something I found amusing. Anyway, the series was supposed to make fun of all the people who criticise what TBC is doing with their Arc browser and highlight all the reasons why they’re not going to make it. I guess that’s because they’re so confident in their product and are probably sure that they will, in fact, make it, whatever that means.</p>
Well, it’s June. The teaser video came out on March 21st, the second
episode on March 22nd, and the third on April 4th. I’m still waiting for
a new one to come out but I guess they might not make it to the end of
their planned 5 videos series. Oh well.
Unrelated but can I just say that I find the name of the company itself
quite baffling? It’s called The Browser Company but what they make is a
wrapper around the Chromium web browser. So the browser company is
making everything but the actual browser. Can you imagine starting a
company called “the pizza company” and then outsourcing the pizza part
to a 3rd party? So bizarre.
Anyway, TBC people, if you’re reading this, I look forward to your next
video about how you “ruined the internet” and also very much look
forward to the one about how you “listen to your members” considering
you never replied to the two emails I sent to your support.
<hr>
<p>Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.</p>
<p><a href="mailto:hello@manuelmoreale.com">Email me</a> ::
<a href="https://manuelmoreale.com/guestbook">Sign my guestbook</a> ::
<a href="https://ko-fi.com/manuelmoreale">Support for 1$/month</a> ::
<a href="https://manuelmoreale.com/supporters">See my awesome supporters</a> ::
<a href="https://buttondown.email/peopleandblogs">Subscribe to People and Blogs</a></p>
Asus
TUF Gaming A14 is a thin and light gaming laptop with AMD Ryzen AI 300
and NVIDIA RTX 40 series graphics
date: 2024-06-03, from: Liliputing
When you think of thin and light gaming laptops from Asus, you typically
think of the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 or G16. But Asus also sells a line of
cheaper laptops as part of the Asus TUF Gaming brand. I haven’t paid
them much attention in the past, because those lower price tags are
usually […]
Microsoft
to spend $3.2B on expanding cloud and AI in green energy-rich
Sweden
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Budget to be blown on construction and 20K GPUs among other things in
the next 2 years
Just weeks after reporting a hike in carbon dioxide emissions for 2023,
Microsoft says it will invest $3.2 billion in Sweden over the next two
years, expanding its cloud and AI operations in the country.…
Russia’s
foreign minister again visits Africa, this time in Guinea, as some ties
cool with the West
date: 2024-06-03, from: Associated Press, World News
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has arrived in Guinea on his
latest visit to West Africa. Coups and growing discontent with
traditional allies like France and the United States have contributed to
a shift toward Moscow by some countries in the region.
As you’ve likely heard by now, Claudia Sheinbaum won Mexico’s
presidential election in a landslide victory and is slated to become the
nation’s first female president. But Mexico is facing a major budget
deficit, exacerbated by spending on infrastructure and social programs.
We’ll discuss what Sheinbaum’s win means for the economy. Plus, we’ll
examine the latest in the meme stock craze after the value of GameStop
shares soared in premarket trading.
Qualcomm
CEO: Snapdragon X “coming to all PC form factors” including
desktops
date: 2024-06-03, from: Liliputing
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X Elite processors for
Windows PCs are debuting in laptops and tablets, but Qualcomm CEO
Cristiano Amon says the company’s new chips will eventually be available
in “all PC form factors.” During Qualcomm’s Computex keynote event, Amon
showed a presentation slide teasing additional form factors including
mini PCs and […]
The spring housing season is almost over, and the results have been
mixed. Both existing and new home sales dipped in April, though prices
remain elevated. The median existing-home sales price was $407,600 in
April, and $433,500 for a new house. Those numbers have jumped due to
the pandemic-era frenzy for real estate. Four years ago, the median was
[…]
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: RAND blog
The Biden administration’s decision to approve Ukraine’s use of U.S.
weapons to attack targets inside Russia marks another turn of a
tit-for-tat spiral that has continuously raised the risks of a broader
war without offering a path to ending this one. Without a bargaining
process, this spiral dynamic might continue for years to come.
Asus
ProArt PZ13 is a Windows Copilot+ tablet with Snapdragon X and a
detachable keyboard
date: 2024-06-03, from: Liliputing
The first Windows PCs powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors are
expected to hit the streets this summer. A bunch of PC makers announced
laptops with the new chip last month when Microsoft unveiled its new
Copilot+ platform. But at the time the new Microsoft Surface Pro was the
only tablet. Now Asus has introduced […]
Russia
takes gold for disinformation as Olympics approach
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Featuring Tom Cruise deepfakes and multiple made-up terrorism threats
Still throwing toys out the pram over its relationship with
international sport, Russia is engaged in a multi-pronged disinformation
campaign against the Olympic Games and host nation France that’s
intensifying as the opening ceremony approaches.…
The fediverse is a decentralized cooperative of social networks that can
interact with each other: a user on one network can follow, reply, like,
and re-share content from a user on another network. The whole thing
depends on an open standard called ActivityPub, shared community norms,
and a cooperative culture.
Of course, my first reaction was that Cara should be compatible with the
fediverse so that its content could be more easily discoverable by users
on social networks like Threads, Flipboard, and Mastodon. Cara is
explicitly set up to be a network for human artists, with no
AI-generated content, which will be increasingly valuable as the web
becomes flooded with machine-made art. The fediverse would allow them to
publish on sites like Cara that are set up to support their needs, while
finding a broad audience across the entire web.
With the widespread use of generative AI, we decided to build a place
that filters out generative AI images so that people who want to find
authentic creatives and artwork can do so easily.
[…] We do not agree with generative AI tools in their current unethical
form, and we won’t host AI-generated portfolios unless the rampant
ethical and data privacy issues around datasets are resolved via
regulation.
I’d love to follow artists on Cara from my Mastodon or Threads accounts.
But how does Cara’s AI stance square with the fediverse? How might
artists on Cara find a broad audience for their work across the web
without risking that art being used as training data without permission?
The first thing a site can do to prevent its content from being used as
training data is to
add
exclusion rules to its robots.txt file. These theoretically prevent
crawlers owned by model vendors like OpenAI from directly accessing art
from the site. There is
nothing that legally
binds crawlers from obeying robots.txt; it’s less enforceable than a
handshake agreement. Still, most claim that they voluntarily do.
But even if robots.txt was an ironclad agreement, content published to
the fediverse doesn’t solely live on its originating server. If Cara was
connected to the fediverse, images posted there could still be found on
its servers, but they would also be syndicated to the home servers of
anyone who followed its users. If a user on Threads followed a Cara
user, the Cara user’s images would be copied to Threads; if a user on a
Mastodon instance followed that user, the images would be copied to that
Mastodon instance. The images are copied across the web as soon as they
are published; even if Cara protects its servers from being
accessed by AI crawlers, these other downstream fediverse servers are
not guaranteed to be protected.
By connecting to the fediverse, one might argue that servers implicitly
license their content to be reused across different services. This is
markedly different from RSS,
where
this is explicitly not the case: there is legal precedent that says
my RSS feed cannot be used to republish my content elsewhere
without my permission (although you can, of course, access its content
in a private feed reader; that’s the point). But on the fediverse, the
ability to reshare across platforms is core functionality.
The following things are all true:
Content published to the fediverse may be both re-copied to and served
from other peoples’ servers
Those servers may have different policies regarding content use
In the absence of a robots.txt directive, AI crawlers will scrape a
website’s data, even if they don’t have the legal right to
Some servers may themselves be owned by AI vendors and may use federated
content to train generative models even without the use of a scraper
As a result, there is no way an author can protect it from being used in
an AI training set. The owners of a fediverse site wouldn’t have the
right to make a deal with an AI vendor to sell the content it
hosted because they wouldn’t have the copyright to all of that content
in the first place. But because AI crawlers greedily scrape content
without asking for permission, unless the site explicitly opts out with
robots.txt, it doesn’t matter.
This leads me to a few conclusions:
It is a moral obligation for every fediverse site to prevent crawling of
federated content by robustly setting robots.txt directives at a minimum
Someone needs to legally prevent AI vendors from using all available
data as training fodder
A fediverse (and a web!) where Cara can safely join while adhering to
its principles is a more functional, safer network. To build it we’ll
need to support explicit licensing on the fediverse, create a stronger
standard for user protections across fediverse sites, and seek more
robust legal protections against AI crawler activity. While these are
ambitious goals, I believe they’re achievable — and necessary to support
the artists and content creators who make the web their home.
AMD
unveils Ryzen 9000 CPUs for desktop, Zen 5 takes center stage at
Computex 2024
date: 2024-06-03, from: OS News
In regards to performance, AMD is touting an average (geomean) IPC
increase in desktop workloads for Zen 5 of 16%. And with the new desktop
Ryzen chips’ turbo clockspeeds remaining largely identical to their
Ryzen 7000 predecessors, this should translate into similar performance
expectations for the new chips. The AMD Ryzen 9000 series will also
launch on the AM5 socket, which debuted with AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series and
marks AMD’s commitment to socket/platform longevity. Along with the
Ryzen 9000 series will come a pair of new high-performance chipsets: the
X870E (Extreme) and the regular X870 chipsets. The fundamental features
that vendors will integrate into their specific motherboards remain
tight-lipped. Still, we do know that USB 4.0 ports are standard on the
X870E/X870 boards, along with PCIe 5.0 for both PCIe graphics and NVMe
storage, with higher AMD EXPO memory profile support expected than
previous generations. ↫ Gavin Bonshor at AnandTech I absolutely love
that AMD maintains compatibility with its chipset and socket generations
as well as it does. I’m currently running a Ryzen 9 7900X, and I see no
reason to upgrade any time soon, but it’s good to know I’ll at least
have otions once the time comes. Compare this to Intel, which broke
compatibility pretty much intentionally almost every generation for
years now, and this is a huge win for consumers. Of course, as AMD
regains more and more of its foothold across the market, it will
eventually also resort to the kind of tactics Intel has been using while
it pretty much had the market to itself. It’s only a matter of time
before we’ll see the first new Ryzen generation that mysteriously
requires a new socket or chipset out of the blue.
MSI
Claw 8 AI+ leak points to a next-gen handheld gaming PC with Intel Lunar
Lake
date: 2024-06-03, from: Liliputing
MSI’s first handheld gaming PC arrived earlier this year to pretty lousy
reviews. That’s largely due to the MSI Claw’s processor: Intel’s Meteor
Lake processors may offer much better graphics performance than the
company’s older mobile chips, but they still can’t really compete with
AMD’s latest Ryzen processors when it comes to balancing performance and
[…]
Tock:
a secure embedded operating system for microcontrollers
date: 2024-06-03, from: OS News
Tock is an embedded operating system designed for running multiple
concurrent, mutually distrustful applications on Cortex-M and RISC-V
based embedded platforms. Tock’s design centers around protection, both
from potentially malicious applications and from device drivers. Tock
uses two mechanisms to protect different components of the operating
system. First, the kernel and device drivers are written in Rust, a
systems programming language that provides compile-time memory safety
and type safety. Tock uses Rust to protect the kernel (e.g. the
scheduler and hardware abstraction layer) from platform specific device
drivers as well as isolate device drivers from each other. Second, Tock
uses memory protection units to isolate applications from each other and
the kernel. ↫ Tock GitHub page We’ve never featured Tock on OSNews
before, as far as I can tell, which seems odd considering it’s been
around for a while. The most recent release stems from January 2023, so
a short while ago, but that’s not too surprising considering the target
audience of this embedded operating system. It’s licensed under either
Apache or MIT.
Travel
Troubleshooter: I canceled my airline tickets months ago, so where’s my
money?
date: 2024-06-03, from: San Jose Mercury News
After John Bernath cancels his flight from Amman, Jordan, to Tel
Aviv, Israel, a Booking.com representative promises him a full refund.
So, why hasn’t he received anything?
Wine
bar’s legal battle with Richmond raises questions about the future of
the waterfront
date: 2024-06-03, from: San Jose Mercury News
Nearly a decade after opening, the owners of R&B Cellars and the
Riggers Loft wine bar are now in a legal fight with the landlord — the
city of Richmond.
Google Leak
Reveals Thousands of Privacy Incidents
date: 2024-06-03, from: 404 Media Group
An internal Google database obtained by 404 Media shows Google
recording childrens’ voices, saving license plates from Street View, and
many other self-reported incidents, large and small.
It’s
make your mind up time as Atos sets deadline to pick rescue package
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
June 5 the day to opt for Onepoint-led consortium or Daniel Křetínský’s
EPEI
HPC heavyweight Atos has given itself until June 5 – this Wednesday – to
decide between rival financial restructuring proposals to reduce the
company’s debt and put its future finances on firmer footing.…
Human Genome Meeting (HGM) is a series of annual conferences
organized by the Human Genome Organisation (HUGO). It started as a
meeting dedicated for Human Genome Mapping. Over the years, with the
completion of the Human Genome Project, HGM has evolved from a small
targeted meeting into a scientific conference for all genetic and
genomic […]
US
veterans get heroes’ welcome in France ahead of D-Day anniversary
date: 2024-06-03, from: VOA News USA
DEAUVILLE/PARIS — Crowds cheered and applauded as U.S. veterans
arrived at French airports ahead of ceremonies marking the 80th
anniversary of D-Day, when more than 150,000 Allied soldiers landed in
Normandy to drive out Nazi Germany forces.
Many of those flying in over the weekend into Monday were older than
100, pushed on wheelchairs by relatives and aides.
“It’s unreal. It’s unreal. Wow,” 107-year-old Reynolds Tomter said at
Paris Charles-de-Gaulle airport as students waved U.S. and French flags
and held up photos of the veterans.
“It feels great … and I’m so thankful that I got the opportunity to
be back out here, my son with me,” said 101-year-old Bill Wall, as his
son, Ray, pushed him through arrivals.
“I lost some great friends. All of these people who are out there on
their crosses and unmarked graves are the true heroes. It gives me a
chance to pay tribute to them which they so need. It will bring back
some memories of some great people,” he added.
After shaking hands with students, 95-year-old Dave Yoho said: “My
heart is full. My heart is full.”
In Deauville, Normandy, a specially chartered flight landed on
Monday.
Across Normandy, where beaches and fields still bear the scars of the
fighting that erupted on June 6, 1944 and the weeks that followed,
preparations were in full gear for official ceremonies. World leaders
from U.S. President Joe Biden to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will
attend.
Already, at the weekend, in Vierville-sur-Mer, a town just above
Omaha Beach - one of the sectors where U.S. soldiers landed - a
re-enactment camp was set up, giving visitors a chance to see what
equipment the soldiers were using.
People took rides in World War Two jeeps and armored vehicles.
“It’s always very intense when we meet veterans, because they always
have many stories to tell, and you still feel the emotion,” said Julie
Boisard, who lives in Normandy and took part in the re-enactment.
A handful of serving members of the Virginia National Guard 29th
Infantry Division gazed out over the beach their elders stormed 80 years
earlier.
“It’s historic, it’s memorable … and it’s very emotional as well,”
said U.S. serviceman Esaw Lee. “Those guys were so courageous and so
mythical. They were legendary.”
With war raging on Europe’s borders in 2024, this anniversary’s D-Day
ceremony will carry special resonance.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will be among the guests.
Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022,
touching off Europe’s biggest armed conflict since World War Two, was
not invited to the D-Day events.
The commemorations “remind us that we were occupied for four years
and were liberated by the Americans,” said Marie-Therese Legallois, who
was seven at the time of D-Day, and remembers it vividly.
“But I always have a bit of sadness to see that the war continues, in
Ukraine or elsewhere.”
Current conditions: At least two people have died
in ongoing flooding in southern Germany • Delhi’s deadly heat wave
continues this week • Seven-inch hail
reportedly
fell in the Texas Panhandle.
THE TOP FIVE
Mexico elects climate scientist as next president
Mexico resoundingly
elected
Claudia Sheinbaum as its next president over the weekend. Sheinbaum, 61,
is making headlines for becoming the country’s first female president,
as well as its first Jewish leader, but she is also a climate scientist,
and her landslide victory “could mark a turning point from the current
administration’s pro-fossil fuel policies,” as Climate Home News
explained.
Sheinbaum studied physics and then received her doctorate in energy
engineering. She spent four years at the
Lawrence
Berkeley Lab studying Mexico’s energy consumption, and had a brief
stint on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She
was tapped as secretary of the environment for Mexico City before being
elected as the capital’s mayor in 2018. During her tenure she was an
advocate for rooftop solar and better public transportation
infrastructure.
Manuel
Velasquez/Getty Images
On the presidential campaign trail, Sheinbaum
promised
to “accelerate the energy transition” by boosting wind and solar,
installing new transmission lines, and improving the country’s
hydropower stations. But she has also backed the “energy sovereignty”
policies of her predecessor and mentor, President Andrés Manuel López
Obrador. He built an oil refinery, funneled support into an indebted
state oil company, and failed to set a national net zero target. Under
his leadership, private investment in renewable projects has
slumped.
Energy policy may be on Sheinbaum’s to-do list when she takes office in
October, but tackling crime is likely to be top of the agenda.
House set to consider 2025 energy and environment programs
The House returns to Washington this week, with 12 bills for 2025 fiscal
spending up for debate. GOP lawmakers will seek “deep cuts for energy
and environment programs,” E&E Newsreported,
while looking to shift funding toward bills that prioritize defense and
homeland security. The proposed Agriculture spending bill, up for
subcommittee considerations on June 11, contains annual funding for the
U.S. Department of Agriculture, among other agencies. The
farm
bill got the stamp of approval from the Agriculture Committee
recently after the panel “rejected a Democratic-led effort to preserve
conservation programs’ focus on farming practices that reduce emissions
tied to the warming and erratic climate,”
according
toE&E News.
La Niña looms as Atlantic hurricane season kicks off
The Atlantic hurricane season started on Saturday, and forecasters are
getting nervous as ocean water temperatures
remain
at record highs and the La Niña weather pattern approaches. Warm
waters supercharge storms, while La Niña removes wind shear, which is
“one key barrier that can block Atlantic storms,” explained Brian
Sullivan at Bloomberg. This morning the World
Meteorological Organization (WMO)
said
there is a 60% chance of La Niña returning between July and September,
and a 70% chance that it’ll make an appearance between August and
November. “We’ve never had a La Niña combined with ocean temperatures
this warm in recorded history so that’s a little ominous,” University of
Miami tropical meteorology researcher Brian McNoldy told
PBS.
Various agencies and experts (including NOAA and Colorado State
University) estimate that the number of hurricanes this year could range
between eight and 13, compared to the annual average of seven. But for
now, the coast is clear:
NOAA
West Coast braces for early-season heat wave
A whopper early-season heat wave is headed for the West Coast, and it
could last all week – maybe longer. The heat dome will likely tip
temperatures into triple digits in Northern California, with Sacramento
Valley expecting to see 110 degrees Fahrenheit by Wednesday. The heat
could “be the death knell for the remainder of the state’s snowpack,”
wrote
Hayley Smith at the Los Angeles Times. Coastal regions will
probably be spared the worst of the heat. That said, a
wildfire
near San Francisco has burned about 14,000 acres, making it the state’s
largest fire of the season so far. It was about 50% contained as of
yesterday.
OPEC locks in more oil production cuts
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its
allies agreed over the weekend to continue to cut oil production into
2025, the Financial Times
reported.
There are several reasons: Demand growth remains slow, interest rates
remain high, and the U.S. is ramping up production. All of this means
OPEC+ isn’t keen to boost supply for fear of depressing oil prices,
which have hovered around $80 per barrel recently, down from $90 in
April, and much lower than OPEC’s desired $100 per barrel.
THE KICKER
The European Union’s wind and solar power generation has
increased
by 45% since 2019, while fossil fuel power generation has dropped by
22%.
Check
Point warns customers to patch VPN vulnerability under active
exploitation
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Also, free pianos are the latest internet scam bait, Cooler Master gets
pwned, and some critical vulnerabilities
Infosec in brief Cybersecurity software vendor Check
Point is warning customers to update their software immediately in light
of a zero day vulnerability under active exploitation.…
Volkswagen
calls
its new EV minivan “the electric reincarnation of the iconic Microbus.”
But while the ID.Buzz may be a touchscreens-and-LEDs update on the
bare-bones icon of the Sixties, it is far from the first electrified
take on the VW bus.
On an August morning in 1968, a Volkswagen bus jammed full of Caltech
students who had hacked it to run on battery power departed their home
base in Pasadena, California. Their destination: Cambridge,
Massachusetts, home of rival MIT. At the same moment, MIT students in an
electrified Chevy
Corvair
left the East Coast bound for the West.
“I came up with the crazy idea of a cross-country electric car race
between Caltech and MIT,” said Wally Rippel, the student who owned that
electrified VW bus and challenged MIT to the 1968 race, while
reminiscing about the competition in a
lecture
at Caltech last Thursday night. [Editor’s note: Caltech is where
the author does his day job.] “There would be some interest
there, and it would stimulate interest in research at Caltech and MIT.”
The great electric car race of 1968 carried the energy of a world’s
fair, offering gawkers along its transcontinental route the chance to
see the vehicles of the future. It would be another half-century before
the EV finally went mainstream, of course. But the Caltech-MIT
competition presaged what electric car builders and drivers would need
to overcome, and their race is a reminder that the electric car wasn’t
just an idea forsaken soon after the dawn of the automotive industry and
then suddenly resurrected by Tesla. All along, engineers and scientists
imagined another way.
Climate change is the reason for the whole electric vehicle revolution
this century, but it wasn’t the animating force for the EV tinkerers of
the ’60s. Wally Rippel, who owned the Caltech VW bus, and his
compatriots were focused on solving
smog
and air pollution, the car-related environmental calamities of that era.
In his Caltech talk, Rippel compared the air quality of that smoggy era
to the fire-and-brimstone atmosphere of hell itself. “I don’t think any
of you could understand it if you didn’t live in Pasadena in the ’60s,”
he said.
Since 80% of L.A.’s smog came from automotive exhaust, Rippel came to
the
conclusion
that the internal combustion engine should be replaced. The question
was, replaced with what? Fuel cells were used during the space race of
the 1960s, but they were maddeningly expensive and could provide only
1/20th of the energy he needed to move a car. After seeing
electric-powered golf carts around campus, he thought of the electric
car.
Just like the climate activists to come, they faced their doubters when
the EV race got under way. Team member Dick Rubenstein reminisced in an
article
about the race: “I remember the service station attendant at Amboy. He
thought it was all a joke and asked: ‘What do you need an electric car
for, anyway? What air pollution?’”
The challenges of long-distance EV driving were all present in 1968.
Rippel wondered, like many people do today, how much more electricity
the nation would need to power a country full of EVs. After whipping out
his slide rule and performing a few calculations, he determined the U.S.
would need 20 to 25 percent more electricity, a reasonable goal.
Rippel and company needed charging stations, of course. The Electric
Fuel Propulsion Corporation of Michigan worked with utilities to set up
55 charging stations on the route across the country. Now, those stops
didn’t look quite like the Tesla Superchargers of today, located in
outlet mall parking lots. Rippel explained that some of their stops
amounted to nothing more than a connection to a power line tower or a
wire coming up from a manhole.
It typically took 45 to 60 minutes to recharge using the onboard 30kW
charger that Rippel put in the bus. That’s not that
far off from today’s times, even though the students ran lead-acid and
nickel-cadmium batteries rather than the lithium-ion that is today’s
state of the art. (Caltech’s VW carried a literal ton
of batteries to store 16 kWh of energy.) Still: After blowing fuses and
causing a power outage in Seligman, Arizona, the Caltech team had to
start charging at a lower speed in order to avoid overloading the
technology of the time.
Range anxiety was naturally worse, given the experimental technology and
the need to make it to the next station on the list. Both teams had
chase cars accompanying their EV and occasionally resorted to towing the
electric car when mechanical gremlins struck. Caltech towed a generator
along just in case.
The biggest enemy? Heat. Today’s EV batteries suffer under extreme
temperatures, with heat degrading battery life and cold diminishing
range. But modern EVs have sophisticated cooling mechanisms to help
protect the cells. The student EVs did not have this. They resorted to a
simpler fix: dumping ice on the batteries during charging stops.
Wrote Rubenstein: “We finally solved our battery overheating problem in
McLean, Texas. While the car was charging, I went into town to buy some
rubber tubing and a rubber syringe bulb. We got some small ice cubes and
put them on the batteries, then used the tubing to siphon the water out
of the battery enclosure. We used the syringe bulb to start the siphon.
That was our handy-dandy cooling system, for which I blushingly accept
credit.”
In other ways, their simple EV technology is startlingly familiar. The
VW bus nearly didn’t make it to the charging stop in the desert of
Needles, California, but used the downhill grade into town to put some
charge back on the battery, just as regenerative braking in today’s EVs
saves energy when the car is decelerating or rolling downhill. (Today,
Needles is home to several EV fast-charging stations, befitting its
nature as one of the rare pit stops on this lonely stretch of desert
highway.)
The article in Caltech’s Engineering & Science
magazine concludes by saying future lead-cobalt rechargeable batteries
might reach 250 miles of range — just about what lithium-ion batteries
were actually doing a half-century later, when cars
like the Tesla Model 3 arrived.
The race ended nine days later, on September 4. MIT reached the end of
the line first, by about a day and a half. But, per the agreed-upon
rules, its team was dinged with many hours’ worth of time penalties
because of how often the electric Chevy Corvair had to be towed —
including across the finish line. The EV van from Pasadena, for all its
own troubles, reached MIT under its own power and was, eventually,
declared the winner.
In retrospect, the race looks like a one-off — a moment when young
scientists with a dream tried to show the world a better way but decades
before the world was ready to see it. In fact, though, this calamitous,
makeshift Cannonball Run left threads that led to the electrification of
vehicles that’s finally happening around the world.
The next generation of idealistic auto engineers created the
Sunraycer,
a 1980s solar-powered race car that crossed the Australian Outback. Its
success led to the
GM
Impact, a 1990 concept EV meant to show the world what was
possible. And the Impact led to the fabled, doomed GM EV1.
EV1 is remembered as the electric car that wasn’t, the victim in the
case of
Who
Killed the Electric Car? But attempts like it and the
AC
Propulsion tZero in the 1990s showed that EVs were not only
possible, but could be downright cool if you did them right. The rest is
history.
This week, we’re examining the ways cities are adapting to the future of
how we live and work. Some of these changes were sped up by the
pandemic, but some are a long-time coming — like evolving tech in the
auto industry. In Detroit, an abandoned train station has been brought
back to life by the Ford Motor Company as a center for tech innovation.
Will the investment pay off? But first: automakers and deep sea mining.
CEOs
got hefty pay raises in 2023, widening the gap with the workers they
oversee
date: 2024-06-03, from: VOA News USA
New York — The typical compensation package for chief executives who
run companies in the S&P 500 jumped nearly 13% last year, easily
surpassing the gains for workers at a time when inflation was putting
considerable pressure on Americans’ budgets.
The median pay package for CEOs rose to $16.3 million, up 12.6%,
according to data analyzed for The Associated Press by Equilar.
Meanwhile, wages and benefits netted by private-sector workers rose 4.1%
through 2023. At half the companies in this year’s pay survey, it would
take the worker at the middle of the company’s pay scale almost 200
years to make what their CEO did.
CEOs got rewarded as the economy showed remarkable resilience,
underpinning strong profits and boosting stock prices. After navigating
the pandemic, companies faced challenges from persistent inflation and
higher interest rates. About two dozen CEOs in the AP’s annual survey
received a pay bump of 50% or more.
“In this post-pandemic market, the desire is for boards to reward and
retain CEOs when they feel like they have a good leader in place,” said
Kelly Malafis, founding partner of Compensation Advisory Partners in New
York. “That all combined kind of leads to increased compensation.”
But Sarah Anderson, who directs the Global Economy Project at the
progressive Institute for Policy Studies, believes the gap in earnings
between top executives and workers plays into the overall
dissatisfaction among Americans about the economy.
“Most of the focus here is on inflation, which people are really
feeling, but they’re feeling the pain of inflation more because they’re
not seeing their wages go up enough,” she said.
Many companies have heeded calls from shareholders to tie CEO
compensation more closely to performance. As a result, a large
proportion of pay packages consist of stock awards, which the CEO often
can’t cash in for years, if at all, unless the company meets certain
targets, typically a higher stock price or market value or improved
operating profits. The median stock award rose almost 11% last year
compared to a 2.7% increase in bonuses.
The AP’s CEO compensation study included pay data for 341 executives
at S&P 500 companies who have served at least two full consecutive
fiscal years at their companies, which filed proxy statements between
Jan. 1 and April 30.
Top earners
Hock Tan, the CEO of Broadcom Inc., topped the AP survey with a pay
package valued at about $162 million.
Broadcom granted Tan stock awards valued at $160.5 million on
Oct. 31, 2022, for the company’s 2023 fiscal year. Tan was given the
opportunity to earn up to 1 million shares starting in fiscal 2025,
according to a securities filing, provided that Broadcom’s stock meets
certain targets – and he remains CEO for five years.
At the time of the award, Broadcom’s stock was trading at $470. Tan
would receive portions of the stock awards if the stock hit $825 and
$950 and the the full award if the average closing price is at or above
$1,125 for 20 consecutive days between October 2025 and October 2027.
The targets seemed ambitious when set, but the stock has skyrocketed
since, and reached an all-time closing high of $1,436.17 on May 28.
Like rival Nvidia Inc., Broadcom is riding the current artificial
intelligence frenzy among tech companies. Its chips are used by
businesses and public entities ranging from major banks, retailers,
telecom operators and government bodies.
In granting the stock award, Broadcom noted that under Tan its market
value has increased from $3.8 billion in 2009 to $645 billion (as of May
23) and that its total shareholder return during that time easily
surpassed that of the S&P 500. It also said Tan will not receive
additional stock awards during the remainder of the five-year
period.
Other CEOs at the top of AP’s survey are William Lansing of Fair
Isaac Corp, ($66.3 million); Tim Cook of Apple Inc. ($63.2 million);
Hamid Moghadam of Prologis Inc. ($50.9 million); and Ted Sarandos,
co-CEO of Netflix ($49.8 million).
At Apple, Cook’s compensation represented a 36% decline from the year
prior. Cook requested a pay cut for 2023, in response to the vote at
Apple’s 2022 annual meeting, where just 64% of shareholders approved of
his pay package.
The survey’s methodology excluded CEOs such as Nikesh Arora at Palo
Alto Networks ($151.4 million) and Christopher Winfrey at Charter
Communications ($89 million).
Although securities filings show Elon Musk received no compensation
as CEO of Tesla Inc., his pay is currently front and center at the
electric car company. Musk is asking shareholders to restore a pay
package that was struck down by a judge in Delaware, who said the
approval process for the package was “deeply flawed.” The compensation,
mostly stock awards valued at $2.3 billion when granted in 2018, is now
estimated to be worth around $45 billion.
CEO pay vs workers
Workers across the country have been winning higher pay since the
pandemic, with wages and benefits for private-sector employees rising
4.1% in 2023 after a 5.1% increase in 2022, according to the Labor
Department.
Even with those gains, the gap between the person in the corner
office and everyone else keeps getting wider. Half the CEOs in this
year’s pay survey made at least 196 times what their median employee
earned. That’s up from 185 times in last year’s survey.
The gap is particularly wide at companies where employees typically
earn lower wages, such as retailers. At Ross Stores, for example, the
company says its employee at the very middle of the pay scale was a
part-time retail store associate who made $8,618. It would take 2,100
years earning that much to equal CEO Barbara Rentler’s compensation from
2023, valued at $18.1 million. A year earlier, it would have taken the
median worker 1,137 years to match the CEO’s pay.
Corporate boards often feel pressure to keep upping the pay for
well-performing CEOs out of fear that they’ll walk out the door and make
more at a rival. They focus on paying compensation that is competitive
within their industry or marketplace and not on the pay ratio, Malafis
said. The better an executive performs, the more the board is willing to
pay.
The disparity between what the chief executive makes and the workers
earn wasn’t always so wide.
After World War II and up until the 1980s, CEOs of large publicly
traded companies made about 40 to 50 times the average worker’s pay,
said Brandon Rees, deputy director of corporations and capital markets
for the AFL-CIO, which runs an Executive Paywatch website that tracks
CEO pay.
“The [current] pay ratio signals a sort of a winner take all culture,
that companies are treating their CEOs as, you know, as superstars as
opposed to, team players,” Rees said.
Say on pay
Despite the criticism, shareholders tend to give overwhelming support
to pay packages for company leaders. From 2019 to 2023, companies
typically received just under 90% of the vote for their executive
compensation plans, according to data from Equilar.
Shareholders do, however, occasionally reject a compensation plan,
although the votes are non-binding. In 2023, shareholders at 13
companies in the S&P 500 gave the executive pay packages less than
50% support.
After its investors gave another resounding thumbs down to the pay
packages for its top executives, Netflix met with many of its biggest
shareholders last year to discuss their concerns. It also talked with
major proxy-advisory firms, which are influential because they recommend
how investors should vote at companies’ annual meetings.
Following the talks, Netflix announced several changes to redesign
its pay policies. For one, it eliminated executives’ option to allocate
their compensation between cash and options. It will no longer give out
stock options, which can give executives a payday as long as the stock
price stays above a certain level. Instead, the company will give
restricted stock that executives can profit from only after a certain
amount of time or after certain performance measures are met.
The changes will take effect in 2024. For last year, co-CEO Ted
Sarandos received options valued at $28.3 million and a cash bonus of
$16.5 million. Co-CEO Greg Peters received options valued at $22.7
million and a cash bonus of $13.9 million.
Anderson, of the Institute for Policy Studies, said Say on Pay votes
are important because they “shine a spotlight on some of the most
egregious cases of executive access, and it can lead to negotiations
over pay and other issues that shareholders might want to raise with
corporate leadership.”
“But I think the impact, certainly on the overall size of CEO
packages has not had much effect in some cases,” she said.
Female CEOs
More women made the AP survey than in previous years, but their
numbers in the corner office are still minuscule compared to their male
counterparts. Of the 342 CEOs included in Equilar’s data, 25 were
women.
Lisa Su, CEO and chair of the board of chip maker Advanced Micro
Devices, was the highest paid female CEO in the AP survey for the fifth
year in a row in fiscal 2023, bringing in compensation valued at $30.3
million — flat with her compensation package in 2022. Her overall rank
rose to 21 from 25.
The other top paid female CEOs include Mary Barra of automaker
General Motors ($27.8 million); Jane Fraser of banking giant Citigroup
($25.5 million); Kathy Warden of aerospace and defense company Northrop
Grumman Corp. ($23.5 million); and Carol Tome of package deliverer UPS
Inc. ($23.4 million).
The median pay package for female CEOs rose 21% to $17.6 million.
That’s better than the men fared: Their median pay package rose 12.2% to
$16.3 million.
As
Hunter Biden’s gun case starts jury selection, president says he has
‘boundless love’ for him
date: 2024-06-03, from: VOA News USA
WILMINGTON, Del. — President Joe Biden’s son Hunter arrived at court
on Monday for jury selection in a federal gun case against him after the
collapse of a deal with prosecutors that would have avoided the
spectacle of a trial so close to the 2024 election. First lady Jill
Biden arrived shortly after, entering the courthouse in support of her
son.
Joe Biden said that as president he wouldn’t comment on the criminal
trial but as a dad he has “boundless love for my son, confidence in him,
and respect for his strength.”
“I am the President, but I am also a Dad,” he said in a statement.
“Jill and I love our son, and we are so proud of the man he is
today.”
Hunter Biden, who spent the weekend with his parents, has been
charged in Delaware with three felonies stemming from a 2018 firearm
purchase when he was, according to his memoir, in the throes of a crack
addiction. He has been accused of lying to a federally licensed gun
dealer, making a false claim on the application used to screen firearms
applicants when he said he was not a drug user, and illegally having the
gun for 11 days.
He has pleaded not guilty and has argued he’s being unfairly targeted
by the Justice Department, after Republicans decried the now-defunct
deal as special treatment for the Democratic president’s son.
The trial comes just days after Donald Trump, Republicans’
presumptive 2024 presidential nominee, was convicted of 34 felonies in
New York City. A jury found the former president guilty of a scheme to
cover up a hush money payment to a porn actor to fend off damage to his
2016 presidential campaign. The two criminal cases are unrelated, but
their proximity underscores how the criminal courtroom has taken center
stage during the 2024 campaign.
Hunter Biden is also facing a separate trial in California in
September on charges of failing to pay $1.4 million in taxes. Both cases
were to have been resolved through a deal with prosecutors last July,
the culmination of a yearslong investigation into his business
dealings.
But Judge Maryellen Noreika, who was nominated to the bench by Trump,
questioned some unusual aspects of the deal, which included a proposed
guilty plea to misdemeanor offenses to resolve the tax crimes and a
diversion agreement on the gun charge, which meant as long as he stayed
out of trouble for two years the case would be dismissed. The lawyers
squabbled over the agreement, could not come to a resolution, and the
deal fell apart. Attorney General Merrick Garland then appointed the top
investigator as a special counsel in August, and a month later Hunter
Biden was indicted.
This trial isn’t about Hunter Biden’s foreign business affairs —
which Republicans have seized on without evidence to try to paint the
Biden family as corrupt. But it will excavate some of Hunter Biden’s
darkest moments and put them on display.
The president’s allies are worried about the toll the trial may take
on the elder Biden, who’s long been concerned about the well-being and
sobriety of his only living son and who must now watch as those painful
past mistakes are publicly scrutinized. He’s also protective: Hunter
Biden was with his father all weekend before the case began, biking with
his dad and attending church together.
President Biden, in a last-minute switch in plans, shifted from his
Rehoboth Beach home back to his Wilmington compound on Sunday evening.
Boarding a helicopter on Sunday was the only time the president was seen
publicly without his son all weekend.
Hunter Biden arrived first at the Delaware courthouse on Monday. The
first lady, who turned 73 on Monday, followed about 15 minutes later and
walked briskly into court, flanked by U.S. Secret Service agents. Hunter
Biden’s sister Ashley Biden was also in court to support him.
Allies are also worried the trial could become a distraction as the
president tries to campaign under anemic poll numbers and as he is
preparing for an upcoming presidential debate while the proceedings play
out.
Prosecutors are hoping to show Hunter Biden was in the throes of
addiction when he bought the gun and therefore lied on the forms. They
have said they’re planning to use as evidence his published memoir, and
they may also introduce contents from a laptop that he left at a
Delaware repair shop and never retrieved. The contents made their way to
Republicans in 2020 and were publicly leaked, revealing embarrassing and
personal photos in which he’s often nude and doing drugs and messages in
which he asks dealers about scores.
The judge will ask a group of prospective jurors a series of
questions to determine whether they can serve impartially on the jury,
including whether they have donated to political campaigns or run for
political office. She will ask whether their views about the 2024
presidential campaign prevent them from being impartial.
She’s also going to ask whether prospective jurors believe Hunter
Biden is being prosecuted because his father is the president. Also,
she’ll ask about firearms purchasing and addiction issues, including:
“Do you believe someone who is addicted to drugs should not be charged
with a crime?”
The case against Hunter Biden stems from a period when, by his own
public admission, he was addicted to crack. His descent into drugs and
alcohol followed the 2015 death of his brother, Beau Biden, from cancer.
He bought and owned a gun for 11 days in October 2018 and indicated on
the gun purchase form that he was not using drugs.
Hunter Biden has pleaded not guilty in both cases, and his attorneys
have suggested they may argue he didn’t see himself as an addict when
prosecutors say he checked “no” to the question on the form. They’ll
also attack the credibility of the gun store owner.
Prosecutors, meanwhile, are also planning to call as witnesses Hunter
Biden’s ex-wife and his brother’s widow, Hallie, with whom he became
romantically involved.
If he were to be convicted, he could face up to 25 years in prison,
though first-time offenders do not get anywhere near the maximum and
it’s unclear whether the judge would give him time behind bars.
Huawei
to go: China’s tech giant No1… in foldable smartphones
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Still struggling to pull in supplies for homegrown 5G SoC, though
It seems that US sanctions are not holding back Huawei, as the Chinese
tech giant has now risen to the global top spot in smartphone shipments,
at least as far as foldable models go.…
From the BBC World Service: Mexico is set to elect its first
female president, and South Africa’s African National Congress party has
lost its majority after 30 years. So what will that look like for the
economies of both countries? Then, a BBC investigation finds evidence
about the fate of Ruja Ignatova — the woman on the FBI’s 10 most-wanted
list for her alleged participation in a fake crypto scheme worth $4.5
billion.
California
firefighters continue battling wind-driven wildfire east of San
Francisco
date: 2024-06-03, from: VOA News USA
SACRAMENTO, California — California firefighters made significant
progress Sunday to tame a wind-driven wildfire that scorched thousands
of acres 97 kilometers east of San Francisco, burned down a home and
forced residents to flee the area near the central California city of
Tracy.
The fire erupted Saturday afternoon in the grassy hills managed by
the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the country’s key
centers for nuclear weapons science and technology. The cause was under
investigation.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said the
research center was not under immediate threat from the blaze, dubbed
the Corral Fire, which had devoured some 52 square kilometers by Sunday
afternoon. The fire was 50% contained as of Sunday evening.
Thousands of people in the area, including parts of the city of Tracy
with a population of 100,000, were ordered to leave for evacuation
centers Saturday. The evacuation order was lifted to allow residents to
return home starting Sunday evening. Tracy is about 112 kilometers south
of California’s capital in Sacramento.
CalFire Battalion Chief Josh Silveira said Sunday afternoon the fire
“burned right up to the homes” in the area and destroyed one house. With
calmer winds and milder weather Sunday, Silveira said he didn’t expect
the fire to grow.
Two firefighters suffered minor to moderate burns on Saturday and
were expected to make a full recovery, Silveira said.
The wildfire presented no threat to any laboratory facilities or
operations and had moved away from the site, Lawrence Livermore
spokesperson Paul Rhien said in a statement to The Associated Press
early Sunday.
“As a precaution, we have activated our emergency operations center
to monitor the situation through the weekend,” Rhien said.
Photos showed a wall of flames moving over the parched landscape as
dark smoke billowed into the sky.
The wildfire also forced the closure of two major highways, including
an interstate that connects the San Francisco Bay Area to San Joaquin
County in central California. But they had reopened by Sunday
afternoon.
The San Joaquin County Office of Emergency Services on Saturday
issued an evacuation order for areas west of the California Aqueduct,
south of Corral Hollow Creek, west to Alameda County and south to
Stanislaus County. A temporary evacuation point was established at Larch
Clover Community Center in Tracy. The county also asked residents to
temporarily use boiled tap water or bottled water for drinking and
cooking purposes.
Sunday’s high temperature for Tracy was expected to reach 29 degrees
Celsius, with no rain in the forecast. But hotter conditions are on
their way.
The National Weather Service said “dangerously hot conditions” with
highs of 39.4 C to 42.2 C were expected later in the week for the San
Joaquin Valley, an area that encompasses Tracy. Wind gusts of up to 72
kph lashed the region Saturday night, according to meteorologist Idamis
Shoemaker of the weather service in Sacramento.
UK
may not hit goal of 95% mobile coverage, commons committee warns
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Sitting in a not-spot in the countryside? It’s not great news
The UK’s mobile networks are unlikely to hit the government target for
95 percent coverage of the country by December 2025, because the
remaining locations will be increasingly harder and therefore costlier
to reach.…
Lea Desdandre and Thomas Dunford in Mantua … With Mantua looking
wonderful, and Lea too, and she and Thomas (it goes without saying)
musically stunning as always. Hugely enjoyable (even if you can’t follow
the German voice-over).
OpenAI playing nice, Google giving terrible advice, Microsoft’s
spyware and lots to learn from excellent books and tutorials.News and
ArticlesThe Doge meme dog died and we wonder what this does to the
crypto market.ICQ shuts down, and all the numbers in pirated Blink182
MP3s don’t make any sense any longer.OpenAI tries to play nice and
[…]
Broadcom’s
VMware strategy looks ever more shaky - and less relevant
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Yes, it’s that darned AI again
Opinion For many, VMware by Broadcom has meant misery
by the boatload. The virtualization platform’s new owners have embarked
on price hikes for the big and forcible eviction for the little. The
dividing line isn’t clear. A 24,000 seat migration by share repository
Computershare seemingly triggered by the gouge suggests things might not
go to plan.…
I’m at the tail end of finalising the draft of my next book, with an
end-June deadline, so my reading recently has mainly been fiction, to
rest the brain. I enjoyed the international Booker winner Kairos by
Jenny Erpenbeck, and …
Continue
reading →
Screwdrivers:
is there anything they can’t do badly? Maybe not
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
We’re starting to wonder if any of you know what those things are
actually for
Who, Me? Welcome once again, to another manic Monday,
The Reg‘s very own fun day, on which we celebrate the less
celebrated moments of our readers’ careers in a column we call Who, Me?…
While blaming inflation for rising prices, the country’s biggest food
and restaurant companies are raking in billions and showering
shareholders with payouts.
We spent this month moving northward through both southern and northern
British Columbia. We’ve been moving almost every day, stopping every
night to anchor, sleep and recuperate. Sailing near land is not as
relaxing as sailing offshore, this reef-strewn coast requires careful
navigation. We’ve had many long days of endless tacking from one side of
the channel to the other, almost all the way to Port McNeill, then after
that we started to get more weather from the south for some mostly
pleasant, but cold and rainy, downwind sailing. We’ve been using our
woodstove a lot, in evenings it helps warm the boat after a long sail.
On May 29th, 623 nautical miles miles after leaving Victoria, we arrived
in Prince Rupert, our last major port in British Columbia before we head
north to Southeast Alaska. Then, on June 2nd, we arrived in Ketchikan,
Southeast Alaska. Most of our updates this month detail some of the
places we’ve been(see the above list). To see our path, look at
Western Canada and
us se alaska. We
update the map as we find internet.
We’ve seen sea otters, lots of humpback whales, two pods of orcas(one
pod had a baby tagging along), eagles, and lots of mountains. In other
non-travel related news, Devine is going to speak again at
Handmade
Seattle this upcoming November!
Pino book & movie club
Book Club: This month we are reading The Martian by Andy Weir.
STMicro
bags €2B from Europe for Sicily car chip fab
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Eurocrats made them an offer they couldn’t refuse
STMicro will receive €2 billion ($2.17 billion) from the EU under the
European Chips Act to build a manufacturing plant in Italy for
high-power semiconductors used in electric vehicles.…
Researchers
warn robot cars can be crashed with tinfoil and paint daubed on
cardboard
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-04, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Use Baidu’s platform to show how the fusion of Lidar, radar, and cameras
can be fooled by stuff from your kids’ craft box
A team of researchers from prominent universities – including SUNY
Buffalo, Iowa State, UNC Charlotte, and Purdue – were able to turn an
autonomous vehicle (AV) operated on the open sourced Apollo driving
platform from Chinese web giant Baidu into a deadly weapon by tricking
its multi-sensor fusion system, and suggest the attack could be applied
to other self-driving cars.…
Sally
Buzbee steps down as executive editor of The Washington Post
date: 2024-06-03, from: VOA News USA
New York — The Washington Post said Sunday that its executive editor,
Sally Buzbee, has stepped down after three years at the top of one of
journalism’s most storied brands.
She will be replaced by Matt Murray, former editor in chief of The
Wall Street Journal, through this fall’s presidential election.
Following that, Robert Winnett, deputy editor of the Telegraph Media
Group, will take over as editor as the newsroom restructures its
operations.
No reason was given for Buzbee’s departure. She wasn’t quoted in the
news release announcing that she was leaving and did not immediately
return a message seeking comment.
The Post also announced that it was launching a new division in its
newsroom dedicated to reaching audiences who want to pay for and consume
news in a different way.
Buzbee, former top editor at The Associated Press, was selected as
the Post’s top editor in May 2021. She replaced a renowned predecessor,
Martin Baron, after the Post exploded in popularity during the Trump
administration.
Buzbee was the first woman to serve as executive editor of The
Washington Post. And like Jill Abramson, the first woman to be top
editor at The New York Times, her tenure was short: Abramson had her job
from 2011 to 2014.
It has been a miserable few years financially for the news industry,
including for the Post. It has bled subscribers to the point where new
publisher, Will Lewis, told employees last month that the newspaper lost
$77 million last year.
“To speak candidly, we are in a hole, and have been for some time,”
Lewis said, according to the Post.
Lewis was named late last year to replace Fred Ryan as Post
publisher. He has worked at both The Wall Street Journal and The
Telegraph in England, the places he turned to to find the new
executives.
He’s talked about creating a multi-tier subscription plan for The
Post, similar to that in place at Politico. In an email to employees
late Sunday, Lewis said the new department will focus on more video
storytelling, embrace artificial intelligence and flexible payment
methods. It will begin this fall, he said.
In an earlier meeting, “we highlighted the need to move away from the
traditional one-size-fits-all approach in the news media industry and
focus on creating news for a broader range of readers and
customers.”
It augurs a change to the traditional structure of the Post. In his
memo, Lewis mentioned “three newsrooms.” Winnett will not take on the
title of executive editor, but he will be responsible for the “core
coverage areas” of politics, investigations, business, technology,
sports and features. He has run The Telegraph’s news operations since
2013, the Post said.
Murray will take over as leader of the newly created department
starting Nov. 6, the Post said. No one will have the title of executive
editor: Murray, Winnett and David Shipley, the editorial page editor who
will lead the “opinions newsroom,” will each report directly to Lewis,
the Post said.
“By creating three strong journalism functions — core, service/social
and opinions — we are taking a definitive step away from the ‘one size
fits all’ approach and moving towards meeting our audiences where they
are,” Lewis said.
The Post won three Pulitzer Prizes last month, including one in
national reporting for a vivid series on the impact of the AR-15
rifle.
date: 2024-06-03, updated: 2024-06-03, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Arm, schmarm: New 50TOPS NPUs that talk Block FP16 really make AI sing,
says CEO Lisa Su
Computex Two weeks after Microsoft made the AI PC all
about Arm-powered processors from Qualcomm, AMD has announced a pair of
PC CPU ranges it boasts will handle AI as well or better than any rival
– plus silicon that it claimed is the fastest consumer-grade processor
ever built.…
AMD
launches Ryzen 9000 desktop chips with Zen 5 CPU cores
date: 2024-06-03, from: Liliputing
AMD’s new Ryzen 9000 “Granite Ridge” series desktop processors are among
the company’s first chips to feature Zen 5 CPU cores, which the company
says brings big improvements over Zen 4 in terms of instruction and data
bandwidth and AI performance, while support the same AM5 socket as
previous-gen processors, making the new chips compatible […]
AMD’s
next-gen mobile chips are the Ryzen AI 300 series with up to 50 TOPS of
AI performance (plus Zen 5 CPUs, RDNA 3.5 graphics)
date: 2024-06-03, from: Liliputing
When Microsoft launched its Copilot+ PC brand last month, the only
computers that qualified were those with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus or
Elite processors, because those were the only PC chips announced to date
with neural processing units capable of delivering the more than 40 TOPS
of AI performance Microsoft had set as the baseline. […]
Puerto
Rico Rep. Jesús Manuel Ortiz wins gubernatorial primary
date: 2024-06-03, from: VOA News USA
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Puerto Rico Rep. Jesús Manuel Ortiz defeated
Sen. Juan Zaragoza in a gubernatorial primary held Sunday by their
Popular Democratic Party, which seeks a return to power in the upcoming
general elections.
Zaragoza conceded defeat after obtaining 38% of the votes to his
rival’s 62%, even though only a little more than 60% of the votes had
been counted.
Meanwhile, Gov. Pedro Pierluisi was still locked in a battle against
Puerto Rico congresswoman Jenniffer González in a primary held by the
pro-statehood New Progressive Party. The two ran on the same ticket four
years ago, but González announced her plan to challenge Pierluisi in
early December.
All candidates face disgruntled voters on an island still struggling
with chronic power outages and awaiting completion of reconstruction
projects following Hurricane Maria, which hit as a Category 4 storm in
September 2017.
Other ongoing complaints include the difficulty of obtaining business
permits, a fractured education system and the lack of access to capital
markets after the local government emerged two years ago from the
biggest U.S. municipal bankruptcy in history after announcing in 2015
that it was unable to pay its more than $70 billion public debt
load.
The debt was accumulated by governments that overspent, overestimated
revenue and borrowed millions despite a ballooning debt.
Running alongside Pierluisi for the position of congressional
representative was Puerto Rico Sen. William Villafañe, while senior U.S.
naval military officer Elmer Román, a former secretary of state for
Puerto Rico, sought the position under González.
Meanwhile, Puerto Rico Sen. Juan Zaragoza, who was highly lauded for
his work as the island’s former treasury secretary, ran against
Rep. Jesús Manuel Ortiz to be the main candidate for the Popular
Democratic Party, which supports the island’s status quo as a U.S.
territory.
Attorney Pablo José Hernández was running unopposed to be the party’s
candidate for resident commissioner, the first person in 20 years to
seek that nomination.
Voting centers closed Sunday evening, with political pundits warning
that voter turnout appeared low and that electronic voting machines did
not properly work in some towns, although it was too early to determine
the magnitude of the problem.
All candidates faced disgruntled voters on an island still struggling
with chronic power outages and high electric bills as it awaits
completion of reconstruction projects following Hurricane Maria, which
hit as a Category 4 storm in September 2017.
Power outages were reported at more than a dozen voting centers,
including one where Ortiz arrived to cast his vote, forcing officials to
revert to a manual process. Heavy rains also pelted parts of the island,
with flood warnings issued for nearly a dozen towns and cities.
Power outages remain such a big concern that the State Commission of
Elections rented more than a dozen generators and a private power
company identified 81 alternate voting sites with guaranteed
electricity.
“It’s been years since I last voted,” said Benito López, a
66-year-old retiree wearing a T-shirt that read, “The Island of
Enchantment.” He planned to cast a vote for a candidate he would not
reveal “to see if there’s any improvement and change.”
Other voter complaints include the difficulty of obtaining business
permits, a fractured education system, and the island’s lack of access
to capital markets after the local government emerged two years ago from
the largest debt restructuring in U.S. history.
Meanwhile, more than $9 billion of debt owed by Puerto Rico’s power
company, the largest of any government agency, remains unresolved. A
federal judge overseeing a bankruptcy-like process has yet to rule on a
restructuring plan following bitter negotiations between the government
and bondholders.
“They have broken Puerto Rico,” said 79-year-old Cecilio Rodríguez of
the current and previous administrations as he waited to cast his vote.
“Economic development must be a priority.”
For other voters, stopping the exodus of doctors from Puerto Rico and
improving the U.S. territory’s crumbling health system is a
priority.
“The patients are the ones who have to stay here and endure this.
It’s not fair,” said Dr. Alfredo Rivera Freytes, an anesthesiologist who
left Puerto Rico for the U.S. Virgin Island of St. Thomas because of the
ongoing problems with the local health system.
He returned two years ago with plans to retire but found himself
working again because of the need for anesthesiologists in Puerto
Rico.
Ahead of the primaries, Pierluisi has touted record tourist numbers,
ongoing hurricane reconstruction and growing economic development among
his successes as he seeks re-election. He has pledged to prioritize
projects targeting children and the island’s growing elderly population,
among other things.
An event marking the end of his campaign held a week before the
primaries was headlined by former Gov. Ricardo Rosselló, who resigned in
August 2019 following nearly two weeks of massive protests touched off
by a leak of crude and insulting chat messages between him and his top
advisers.
His opponent, González, did not hold a campaign closer. She has
pledged to crack down on corruption, award more funds to agencies to
help victims of violence amid a surge in killings of women, and stem an
exodus of doctors and other medical workers to the U.S. mainland.
Meanwhile, Zaragoza has promised to prioritize climate change and
renewable energy, decentralize the island’s education department and
improve access to health. His opponent, Ortiz, has pledged to improve
the licensing process to retain doctors, simplify the island’s tax
system and revamp health care.
Puerto Rico’s next governor will have to work alongside a federal
control board that oversees the island’s finances and was created after
the government declared bankruptcy.
Ahead of Sunday’s primaries, more than 4,900 inmates voted in prisons
across the U.S. territory. The State Commission of Elections also has
received and counted more than 122,000 early ballots.
One of my biggest regrets is how the Known hosted service declined. The
paid subscriptions came to an end, and eventually the hosting whimpered
out. Behind the scenes, the database cluster was in need of more
maintenance than I was able to provide.
Known itself has required more maintenance than I’ve been able to
provide for quite some time. I wish I could spend more bandwidth on it,
but the state of my life right now is that it’s just not possible for me
to dedicate the coding time for something that isn’t paying my bills and
isn’t having the impact I wanted it to.
I wish we’d sent out a strong email at the end and allowed everyone to
export their data automatically. I also wish Known had import/export
that was reliable so that people could explore other platforms.
After attempting to claw the time to do it myself, I’d like to hire
someone to build the latter, and then apply it to everyone who had a
hosted account. The export function could be built into the Known UI or
as a CLI tool. If this seems like something you might be able to do, let
me know.
Overall, I have a ton of regrets about Known — something for a future
post (or series of posts), maybe. This site is still powered by it,
though, and I know other people still use it, too. So it’s not dead —
just small.
Forming
friendships: Scout’s buddy bench project at Mint Canyon Elementary
date: 2024-06-03, from: The Signal
Joseph Wickham-Vilaubi, Life Scout from Scouts BSA 303A, had difficulty
making friends during his years at Mint Canyon Elementary School when he
was growing up. As someone with autism it […]
Border
mayors heading to DC for Tuesday’s immigration announcement
date: 2024-06-03, from: VOA News USA
McALLEN, TEXAS — At least two Texas border mayors are headed to
Washington on Tuesday when President Joe Biden is expected to announce
an executive order that will mark his latest and most aggressive plan to
curtail the number of migrants allowed to seek asylum in the U.S.
Brownsville Mayor John Cowen and Edinburg Mayor Ramiro Garza both
confirmed they were invited by the White House for an immigration
announcement on Tuesday. Cowen told the Associated Press that he plans
to attend, while Garza said he would have more details on Monday about
his plans.
Notably, the Democratic mayor of Eagle Pass, the Texas-Mexico border
town where the number of migrants led to a state-federal clash over
border security, had not received an invitation as of Sunday. The mayor
from McAllen said he was invited but could not attend because of a prior
commitment.
A White House spokesman did not immediately return a request for
comment on other mayors who were invited to the announcement.
The AP reported last week that the White House was finalizing an
executive order that could shut off asylum requests and automatically
deny entrance to migrants once the number of people encountered by U.S.
border officials exceeded a new daily threshold.
The unilateral action is expected even as the number of border
crossings at the southern U.S. border has declined since December, due
in large part to Mexico’s escalated enforcement efforts. But Biden wants
to head off any potential spike in crossings that could occur later in
the year, as the fall election draws closer, when the weather cools and
numbers tend to rise.
Immigration remains a concern for voters ahead of the November
elections, with Republicans eager to punish Biden electorally over the
issue. Democrats have responded that Republicans, at the behest of
Donald Trump, killed a bipartisan border deal in Congress that would
have led to the toughest legislative restrictions on asylum in
years.
Courtesy
of Climeworks
NEADA
and CEPC
5B
Manuel
Velasquez/Getty Images
NOAA
