News gathered 2024-06-13
(date: 2024-06-13 08:16:32)
Grand jury rips county housing agency over San Jose real estate blunder
date: 2024-06-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
A grand jury has scorched a Santa Clara County housing agency for blunders in its attempts to wheel and deal on a San Jose office building.
Larry Magid: Hearing aids are cool now
date: 2024-06-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
I’m not claiming that these hearing aids make me any cooler or, as my generation used to say, “groovy”, but they are definitely not my grandfather’s hearing aids. If you hear what I’m saying.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/06/13/larry-magid-hearing-aids-are-cool-now/
Man shot during robbery in Oakland’s Fruitvale District
date: 2024-06-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
Police do not have a motive for the shooting.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/06/13/man-shot-during-robbery-in-oaklands-fruitvale-district/
Virtual keyboard for Android
date: 2024-06-13, from: Tilde.news
https://software-lab.de/StenoBoard/README
‘Remote’ Amazonian Tribes Have Been Using the Internet for a Long Time
date: 2024-06-13, from: 404 Media Group
The Marubo people written about by the New York Times have been using the internet—and grappling with its implications—long before Starlink came to their village.
China miffed over electric vehicle tariff tiff with EU
date: 2024-06-13, updated: 2024-06-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Trade body bemoans move as ‘notably unfair’ but no countermeasures yet
China has issued a withering response to the EU’s decision to raise tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles, describing the move as “notably unfair.”…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/13/china_eu_ev_tariffs/
California has No. 1 US wage gap between haves and have-nots
date: 2024-06-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
There’s a 146% difference between California’s top half salaries vs. the bottom half. Nationally, there’s a 108% gap.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/06/13/california-has-no-1-us-wage-gap-between-haves-and-have-nots/
US reporter Evan Gershkovich, jailed in Russia on espionage charges, to stand trial, officials say
date: 2024-06-13, from: VOA News USA
Moscow — American reporter Evan Gershkovich, jailed in Russia on espionage charges, will stand trial in the city of Yekaterinburg, Russian authorities said Thursday.
Russia’s Prosecutor General’s office said an indictment of Gershkovich has been finalized and his case was filed to the Sverdlovsky Regional Court in the city in the Ural Mountains.
Gershkovich is accused of “gathering secret information” about a facility in the Sverdlovsk region that produced and repaired military equipment, the Prosecutor General’s office said in a statement, revealing for the first time the details of the accusations against the jailed reporter. Gershkovich has been charged with espionage.
The officials didn’t provide any evidence to back up the accusations.
Gershkovich was detained while on a reporting trip to Yekaterinburg in March 2023 and accused of spying for the U.S. The Federal Security Service, or FSB, alleged at the time he was acting on U.S. orders to collect state secrets but also provided no evidence. Washington designated him as wrongfully detained.
He was the first U.S. journalist taken into custody on espionage charges since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986 at the height of the Cold War. Gershkovich’s arrest shocked foreign journalists in Russia, even though the country had enacted increasingly repressive laws on freedom of speech after sending troops into Ukraine.
Cops Released a Car’s Travel History to a Total Stranger
date: 2024-06-13, from: 404 Media Group
In a rare instance of too much transparency, an Ohio police department released the precise movements of a particular vehicle in response to a public records request, showing just how invasive license plate reading technology can be.
https://www.404media.co/cops-released-a-cars-travel-history-to-a-total-stranger/
Unanimous Supreme Court preserves access to widely used abortion medication
date: 2024-06-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
The Supreme Court has preserved access to a medication used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. last year. It’s the court’s first abortion decision since conservative justices overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago. The justices ruled Thursday abortion opponents lacked the legal right to sue over the federal Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the medication, mifepristone, and the FDA’s subsequent actions to ease access to it. The case had threatened to restrict access to mifepristone across the country, including in states where abortion remains legal. The Biden administration and New York-based manufacturer Danco Laboratories argued mifepristone is among the safest drugs the FDA has ever approved.
Barbecue dinner? Surprise guests with these 3 easy sides
date: 2024-06-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
A veggie-forward Thai noodle salad, a pickled pepper-potato salad and elote will stand out from the sea of ho-hum summer sides.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/06/13/barbecue-dinner-surprise-guests-with-3-easy-sides/
Motorcyclist dies after lane splitting on Interstate 580 in Livermore
date: 2024-06-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
The crash happened about 5:40 a.m..
Google’s Privacy Sandbox more like a privacy mirage, campaigners claim
date: 2024-06-13, updated: 2024-06-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Chocolate Factory accused of misleading Chrome browser users
Privacy campaigner noyb has filed a GDPR complaint regarding Google’s Privacy Sandbox, alleging that turning on a “Privacy Feature” in the Chrome browser resulted in unwanted tracking by the US megacorp.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/13/noyb_gdpr_privacy_sandbox/
7 incredible Bay Area things to do this weekend, June 14-16
date: 2024-06-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
Got your weekend plans? We have some nifty ideas, from a new Pixar film to al fresco dining and family-friendly breweries.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/06/13/7-incredible-bay-area-things-to-do-this-weekend-june-14-16/
California EV sales hit record level, but other states seem to have lost interest
date: 2024-06-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
Nearly 1 in every 4 Californians who bought a car the first quarter of this year went electric.
US senators propose guardrails for government AI purchases and operations
date: 2024-06-13, updated: 2024-06-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Bill proposes appointment of chief AI officers, privacy safeguards, and lots of testing
Two US senators have introduced a bipartisan bill that defines guardrails for the acquisition and implementation of AI across the federal government.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/13/prepared_for_ai_bill/
School of Squash Gets Low-Income Kids into College
date: 2024-06-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Mentoring, academic, and squash programs are a successful combination.
The post School of Squash Gets Low-Income Kids into College appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/13/school-of-squash-gets-low-income-kids-into-college/
Ukrainian winemakers visit Napa Valley to learn how to heal war-ravaged vineyards
date: 2024-06-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
As the head of an association of winemakers in southern Ukraine, Georgiy Molchanov knows a lot about how to cultivate grapes; not so much how to grow them amid undetonated mines.
Email Self-Defense - a guide to fighting surveillance with GnuPGencryption
date: 2024-06-13, from: Tilde.news
https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/en/
Biden, G7 leaders focus on Ukraine, Gaza, global infrastructure, Africa
date: 2024-06-13, from: VOA News USA
BORGO EGNAZIA, ITALY — U.S. President Joe Biden is in Apuglia, Italy, meeting with leaders of the Group of Seven wealthy democracies Thursday, aiming to address global economic security amid wars in Europe and the Middle East and U.S. rivalry with China.
The G7 leaders arrived at the luxury resort of Borgo Egnazia, the summit venue, welcomed by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Meloni’s hard-right party took nearly 29% of the vote in last weekend’s European Parliament election, making her the only leader of a major Western European country to emerge from the ballots stronger.
Meanwhile Biden is dealing with a contentious reelection campaign against Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump, and a personal ordeal. On Tuesday, a day before departing for the summit, his son, Hunter, was found guilty on federal charges for possessing a gun while being addicted to drugs.
Still, Biden came to the summit hoping to convince the group to provide a $50 billion loan to Ukraine using interest from Russian frozen assets, and deal with Chinese overcapacity in strategic green technologies, including electric vehicles.
The European Union signaled their support by announcing duties on Chinese EVs a day ahead of the summit, a move that echoed the Biden administration’s steep tariff hike on Chinese EVs and other key sectors in May.
Biden is also lending his support to key themes in Meloni’s presidency – investing in Africa, international development, and climate change. Those topics were covered in the opening session of the G7 on Thursday, followed by discussions on the Gaza and Ukraine wars.
Gaza cease-fire
With cease-fire negotiations at a critical juncture, Biden could face tough questions from leaders on whether he is doing enough to pressure Israel to pause its military campaign, reduce civilian casualties and provide more aid for Palestinians.
Leaders are “focused on one thing overall; getting a cease-fire in place and getting the hostages home as part of that,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told VOA as he spoke to reporters on board Air Force One en route to Italy. Biden has “their full backing,” Sullivan added.
Leaders will also discuss increasing tension along the Israeli border with Lebanon, Sullivan told reporters Thursday morning.
“They’ll compare notes on the continuing threat posed by Iran both with respect to its support for proxy forces and with respect to the Iranian nuclear program,” he added.
While the group has thrown its weight behind the cease-fire, G7 members are split on other Gaza-related issues, including the International Criminal Court’s decision last month to seek arrest warrants for the leaders of Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The United States denounced the court’s decision, and Britain called it “unhelpful.” France said it supports the court’s “fight against impunity,” while Berlin said it would arrest Netanyahu on German soil should a warrant is released.
Sullivan dismissed a United Nations inquiry result released Wednesday that alleges both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes and grave violations of international law.
“We’ve made our position clear,” he told VOA, referring to a review published in April by the State Department concluding that Israel’s campaign did not violate international humanitarian law.
Russian assets
Biden is pushing G7 leaders to provide Kyiv with a loan of up to $50 billion that will be paid back to Western allies using interest income from the $280 billion Russian assets frozen in Western financial institutions, estimated at $3 billion a year, for 10 years or more.
The goal is a leaders declaration at the end of the summit, a “framework that is not generic, that is quite specific in terms of what it would entail,” Sullivan told VOA Wednesday. Core operational details would still need to be worked out, he added.
In April, Biden signed legislation to seize the roughly $5 billion in Russian assets that had been immobilized in U.S. financial institutions. The bulk of the money, though, $190 billion, is in Belgium, and much of the rest is in France and Germany.
“There’s a tension here between a Biden administration ambition on an issue in which they do not have the final say, hitting against very staunch European fiscal conservatism and simply the mechanics of, how do you get something done in Europe in the week of European [parliamentary] elections,” Kristine Berzina, managing director of Geostrategy North at the German Marshall Fund think tank, told VOA.
Attending the summit for the second consecutive year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is advocating for the deal to pass. He and Biden will sign a separate bilateral security agreement outlining U.S. support for Ukraine and speak in a joint press conference Thursday evening.
From Italy, Zelenskyy heads to Switzerland for a Ukraine peace conference over the weekend.
Africa, climate change and development
Meloni, a far-right politician who once called for a naval blockade to prevent African migrants from crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, now wants to achieve the goal by bolstering international investments to the continent.
Most of the nearly 261,000 migrants who crossed the Mediterranean Sea from northern Africa in 2023 entered Europe through Italy, according to the United Nations.
She has aligned her G7 presidency with this agenda, and the group is set to release a statement on providing debt relief for low- and middle-income countries, dealing with irregular migration and calling for more investments in Africa.
The G7 statement will reflect the Nairobi/Washington vision that Biden signed with Kenyan President William Ruto, Sullivan said.
Meloni invited several African leaders as observers to the G7 meeting, including Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, Tunisia’s Kais Saied, Kenyan President William Ruto and Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, the president of Mauritania. The invitation follows the first Italy-Africa summit in Rome in January, where Meloni launched her investment initiative called the Mattei Plan for Africa.
The Mattei Plan has been integrated into the G7’s Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, which aims to mobilize $600 billion private infrastructure funding by 2027 as an alternative to Chin’s Belt and Road initiative.
On climate change, the G7 has an uphill climb. None of the group’s members are on track to meet their existing emission reduction targets for 2030 to align with the Paris Agreement goal, according to data compiled by Climate Analytics.
NASA hits wrong button, broadcasts ISS emergency training by mistake
date: 2024-06-13, updated: 2024-06-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Simulation stimulates social media panic
NASA provided an inadvertent insight into its training techniques when it accidentally broadcast audio that sounded like an emergency on the International Space Station.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/13/nasa_iss_emergency_broadcast/
The disappearance — and reimagination — of the gay bar
date: 2024-06-13, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Gay bars are often a fixture of queer nightlife and can help foster a sense of community. Yet across the country, gay bars have shuttered at an alarming pace, down around 45% between 2002 and 2023. But queer nightlife isn’t disappearing — it may just be evolving. We’ll hear more. But first: Interest rates are staying where they are, so where do we go from here?
Microsoft Refused to Fix Flaw Years Before SolarWinds Hack
date: 2024-06-13, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
<div class="known-bookmark">
<div class="e-content">“Former [Microsoft] employee says software giant dismissed his warnings about a critical flaw because it feared losing government business. Russian hackers later used the weakness to breach the National Nuclear Security Administration, among others.”
This is a damning story about profit over principles: Microsoft failed to close a major security flaw that left the government (alongside other customers) vulnerable because it wanted to win their business. This directly paved the way for the SolarWinds hack.
This doesn’t seem to have been covert or subtext at Microsoft:
“Morowczynski told Harris that his approach could also undermine the company’s chances of getting one of the largest government computing contracts in U.S. history, which would be formally announced the next year. Internally, Nadella had made clear that Microsoft needed a piece of this multibillion-dollar deal with the Pentagon if it wanted to have a future in selling cloud services, Harris and other former employees said.”
But publicly it said something very different:
“From the moment the hack surfaced, Microsoft insisted it was blameless. Microsoft President Brad Smith assured Congress in 2021 that “there was no vulnerability in any Microsoft product or service that was exploited” in SolarWinds.”
It will be interesting to see what the fallout of this disclosure is, and whether Microsoft and other companies might be forced behave differently in the future. This story represents business as usual, and without external pressure, it’s likely that nothing will change.
<p>[<a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-solarwinds-golden-saml-data-breach-russian-hackers">Link</a>]</p>
</div>
</div>https://werd.io/2024/microsoft-refused-to-fix-flaw-years-before-solarwinds-hack
What’s in a name? “AI” versus “Machine Learning”
date: 2024-06-13, from: Dave Karpf’s blog
Are large language models a new general purpose technology, or an incremental advancement on existing technologies?
https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/whats-in-a-name-ai-versus-machine
What Is Transitional Kindergarten? What to Expect When Enrolling Your Child
date: 2024-06-13, updated: 2024-06-13, from: The LAist
California is making transitional kindergarten available to all 4-year-olds. So what is it, and how do you know if it’s right for your child and your family?
UK Labour Party promises end to datacenter planning ‘barriers’
date: 2024-06-13, updated: 2024-06-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
With a strong lead going into general election, opposition claims it will ‘supercharge’ tech sector
The UK’s opposition Labour Party – which boasts a sizable poll lead heading into July’s general election – has promised to ease planning restrictions holding back investment in datacenters.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/13/labour_party_datacenter_pledge/
Google’s Plan to Power Data Centers with Geothermal
date: 2024-06-13, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Extreme flooding has displaced hundreds of people in Chile • Schools and tourist sites are closed across Greece due to dangerously high temperatures • A heat wave is settling over the Midwest and could last through next weekend.
THE TOP FIVE
- Tesla shareholders vote on Musk’s pay package
We’ll know today whether Tesla CEO Elon Musk gets to keep his $56 billion pay package. The compensation deal was originally approved in 2018, but a Delaware court voided it earlier this year, saying it was “deeply flawed” and that shareholders weren’t made fully aware of its details. So the board is letting shareholders have their say once more. Remote voting closed at midnight last night. This morning Musk “leaked” the early vote results, claiming the resolution – along with a ballot measure to move the company from Delaware to Texas – was passing by a wide margin.
- Google to buy geothermal energy from Nevada utility to power data
centers
Google is teaming up with Nevada utility NV Energy Inc., and startup Fervo Energy, to power its data centers in the state with enhanced geothermal energy. The deal still needs to be approved by state regulators, but if it goes through, Fervo would develop a geothermal power plant to supply 115 megawatts of carbon-free electricity to NV Energy, which the utility would sell to Google. It represents “a new way that companies with very large emerging electricity loads and climate goals may get their power in regulated power markets,” Reuters explained. Fervo is already supplying Google with about 3.5 MW of power as part of a pilot program. Its enhanced geothermal process involves drilling down beneath the Earth’s surface to harness the constant heat that radiates there.
- Fires ravage world’s largest tropical wetland
Brazil’s tropical wetlands are on fire. The Pantanal, in central-western Brazil, spans an area twice the size of Portugal, making it the world’s largest tropical wetland. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and a refuge for wildlife including the world’s largest species of jaguar, approximately 10 million caiman crocodiles, giant anteaters, and many monkeys. But all those creatures are in danger. Thanks to climate change and the El Niño weather pattern, ongoing drought in the region has led to early-season wildfires of epic proportions. In the first five months of the year there have been more than 1,300 fires, a huge increase over the 127 fires reported in the same period last year. The “real” wildfire season doesn’t start until next month and won’t peak until August or September.
- New report quantifies climate impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused $32 billion in climate damages and has a greenhouse gas footprint equivalent to releasing at least 175 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to a new report published by Ukraine’s environment ministry and several climate NGOs. This is more than the annual emissions of The Netherlands, and would be like putting 90 million new combustion engine vehicles on the road. The calculation includes “reconstruction” emissions that will be generated from rebuilding infrastructure, which requires carbon-intensive materials like steel and cement.
Initiative
on GHG accounting of war
- Ford is reportedly building a ‘secretive low-cost EV team’
Ford has reportedly been snapping up workers from its rivals to beef up its own EV talent. The company is building a “secretive low-cost EV team,” according to TechCrunch. The 300-person team includes around 50 former Rivian workers, 20 former Tesla employees, as well as people from Lucid Motors and Apple’s ill-fated EV project. Internally, Ford’s EV team is known as “Ford Advanced EV.” Doug Field, Ford’s chief EV, digital and design officer, told TechCrunch that “this team is leading the development of breakthrough EV products and technologies.”
THE KICKER
“Conservation shouldn’t just happen in ‘pristine’ and ‘untouched’ landscapes, but in areas where wildlife have used and adapted to the human-induced changes in habitats.” –Emilie Hardouin, a conservation geneticist at Bournemouth University in the U.K., advocates for better conservation efforts in cities.
https://heatmap.news/technology/google-geothermal-fervo-nevada
Student’s flimsy bin bags blamed for latest NHS data breach
date: 2024-06-13, updated: 2024-06-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Confidential patient information found by member of the public
A data protection gaffe affecting the UK’s NHS is being pinned on a medical student who placed too much trust in their bin bags.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/13/nhs_bin_bag_data_breach/
The Journey of Lot 6
date: 2024-06-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
You think of me as ol lot 6 / But once I was wilderness out in the stix
The post The Journey of Lot 6 appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/13/the-journey-of-lot-6/
Jack Be Nimble
date: 2024-06-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
As a young ’80s-era county planner, I was privileged to know and drink with Jack and other ’80s era environmental giants such as Supervisors Bill Wallace and Tom Rogers.
The post Jack Be Nimble appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/13/jack-be-nimble/
Argentinians protest over economic reforms
date: 2024-06-13, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Demonstrators argued that the measures, which include cutting state spending and watering down workers’ rights, will hurt millions of working Argentinians. Meanwhile, leaders of the G7 are meeting in Italy to discuss increasing economic pressure on Russia in response to its war against Ukraine. And around the world, hundreds of thousands of tons of nuclear waste are piling up in temporary storage, but Finland thinks it has a solution.
There’s Gold in That There Battery Waste
date: 2024-06-13, from: Heatmap News
Every year, millions of tons of sodium sulfate waste are generated throughout the lithium-ion battery supply chain. And although the chemical compound seems relatively innocuous — it looks just like table salt and is not particularly toxic — the sheer amount that’s produced via mining, cathode production, and battery recycling is a problem. Dumping it in rivers or oceans would obviously be disruptive to ecosystems (although that’s generally what happens in China), and with landfills running short on space, there are fewer options there, as well.
That is where Aepnus Technology is attempting to come in. The startup emerged from stealth today with $8 million in seed funding led by Clean Energy Ventures and supported by a number of other cleantech investors, including Lowercarbon Capital and Voyager Ventures. The company uses a novel electrolysis process to convert sodium sulfate waste into sodium hydroxide and sulfuric acid, which are themselves essential chemicals for battery production.
“It’s a fully circular approach,” Bilen Akuzum, Aepnus’ co-founder and CTO, told me. “Rather than in the current paradigm where companies are buying chemicals and having to deal with disposing of the waste, we can co-locate with them and they give us the waste, and we give them back the chemicals.” This recycling process, he says, can happen an indefinite number of times.
Akuzum told me that companies using Aepnus’ tech can “speed up their environmental permits because they’re not going to be producing that waste anymore. Instead, they can just turn it into value.” In an ideal scenario, this could increase domestic production of critical minerals and battery components, which will decrease the U.S.’s reliance on China, a major goal of the Biden administration. On-site chemicals production will also help to decarbonize the supply chain, as it eliminates the need for these substances to be trucked into remote mining sites or out to battery manufacturing and recycling facilities.
To do the chemical recycling, Aepnus has developed an electrolysis system that it says is 50% more efficient than the processes normally used to produce sodium hydroxide, and is uniquely tailored to process sodium sulfate waste. Energy nerds might associate electrolysis with the pricey production of green hydrogen, but this has actually always been the process by which sodium hydroxide is made.
Making sulfuric acid, however, doesn’t traditionally involve electrolysis, but because sodium hydroxide is the more valuable of the two chemicals, combining their production via a single, more efficient electrochemical process gives Aepnus a much better chance at being cost competitive with other chemical producers than, say, the likelihood of green hydrogen being cost competitive with natural gas. Akuzum told me that the company’s electrolyzers can operate at lower voltages and higher temperatures than the industry standard, thereby increasing efficiency, and don’t require rare earth elements, thereby reducing costs.
Ultimately, Akuzum said that Aepnus aims to become an electrolyzer manufacturer rather than a chemicals producer. “We just want to be the technology provider and almost like application agnostic in a sense that this [the battery industry] is just the first market that we’re going after,” Akuzum told me, citing a number of other potential markets such as textile and pigment manufacturing, which also produce sodium sulfate waste.
The company is currently working to get initial customers onboard for pilot demonstrations, which are planned to take place over the next 18 months. In the extended near term, Aepnus wants to expand its platform to produce a greater variety of chemicals. As the tech scales and is deployed across various industries, the company says it has potential to mitigate a total of 3 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions between now and 2050, as calculated by Clean Energy Ventures’ Simple Emissions Reduction Calculator.
https://heatmap.news/sparks/aepnus-battery-technology
Version 256 of systemd boasts ‘42% less Unix philosophy’
date: 2024-06-13, updated: 2024-06-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
And it’s subsuming another bit of Linux by replacing sudo
The latest version of the systemd init system is out, with the openly confrontational tag line: “Available soon in your nearest distro, now with 42 percent less Unix philosophy.”…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/13/version_256_systemd/
Neil Fitzgerald | Is This What We Want Our Elections to Be?
date: 2024-06-13, from: The Signal
When I first started writing these articles, I said that America needed a new Ronald Regan. I had hoped one would be found during the primary process and would become […]
The post Neil Fitzgerald | Is This What We Want Our Elections to Be? appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/neil-fitzgerald-is-this-what-we-want-our-elections-to-be/
Bll Stires | Why Are They Pumping Water?
date: 2024-06-13, from: The Signal
Could someone please explain why in Canyon Country, near Discovery Park, that a pump station in the river is pumping thousands of gallons of water back into the river. It’s […]
The post Bll Stires | Why Are They Pumping Water? appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/bll-stires-why-are-they-pumping-water/
Bill Spaniel | Going Nuts Over Donut vs. Doughnut
date: 2024-06-13, from: The Signal
I almost upchucked my oatmeal breakfast when I read the recent (June 11) Signal deckhead, “Local Salvation Army chapter hosts inaugural Donut Day event.” Most of the rest of the […]
The post Bill Spaniel | Going Nuts Over Donut vs. Doughnut appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/bill-spaniel-going-nuts-over-donut-vs-doughnut/
Thomas Oatway | Pandering to the Radical Wing
date: 2024-06-13, from: The Signal
Rep. Mike Garcia’s April 20 column in The Signal proved that he panders to the most radical wing of his party. He seems to have forgotten how to be a […]
The post Thomas Oatway | Pandering to the Radical Wing appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/thomas-oatway-pandering-to-the-radical-wing/
The Lens Scales for Global Impact
date: 2024-06-13, from: Lens.org news
Moore Foundation supports The Lens’ growth as the definitive open global innovation resource. Canberra, Australia and Palo Alto, USA. 13 June 2024 Cambia today announced a major grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to enhance global reach of its flagship project The Lens, as it becomes the pre-eminent free and open, multi-lingual, non-surveilled […]
https://about.lens.org/the-lens-scales-for-global-impact/
The origin of 3D Pipes, Windows’ best screensaver
date: 2024-06-13, updated: 2024-06-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Raymond Chen talks teapots, and a fully engaged marketing team
Archaeologic Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has shared the origin story behind the Windows 3D Pipes screensaver.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/13/windows_3d_pipes_screensaver/
Byron York | Transgender Ideology Push Backfires
date: 2024-06-13, from: The Signal
President Joe Biden has done more to promote transgender ideology than any president, ever. A scroll through the White House archives shows statement after statement, proclamation after proclamation, speech after […]
The post Byron York | Transgender Ideology Push Backfires appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/byron-york-transgender-ideology-push-backfires/
Marsha McLean | Dive into Water Safety
date: 2024-06-13, from: The Signal
It is disturbing and unfortunate that children ages 1 to 4 have the highest drowning rate. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fatal drowning is the leading […]
The post Marsha McLean | Dive into Water Safety appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/marsha-mclean-dive-into-water-safety/
Dr Ed Stone, former director of JPL, Voyager project scientist, dies at 88
date: 2024-06-13, updated: 2024-06-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
A legacy of scientific discovery, inspiration and engagement
Obit Edward C Stone, the project scientist for NASA’s Voyager mission from 1972 to 2022, has died.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/13/dr_ed_stone_voyager_project/
Raspberry Pi fireplace emulator
date: 2024-06-13, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
While summer is ostensibly here in the UK, so far it’s the kind where this original Raspberry Pi fireplace project is highly appealing.
The post Raspberry Pi fireplace emulator appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-fireplace-emulator/
Montecito Home Is a Magnet for Memories
date: 2024-06-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
This Berkus-designed Ennisbrook contemporary is ready for a new steward.
The post Montecito Home Is a Magnet for Memories appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/13/montecito-home-is-a-magnet-for-memories/
License To Drill
date: 2024-06-13, from: The Lever News
Fossil-fueled Democrats want to use unverifiable “certified gas” schemes to undermine one of Biden’s most important climate moves.
https://www.levernews.com/license-to-drill/
Preventing another chip shortage on G7 summit agenda
date: 2024-06-13, updated: 2024-06-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Group will also look into protecting subsea communications infrastructure
More than three years after the pandemic crippled semiconductor supply chains, it seems G7 nations are getting ready to do something to prevent future disruptions.…
Today in SCV History (June 13)
date: 2024-06-13, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1949 – Frank Walker deeds over the first 40 acres of Placerita Canyon State Park. [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-june-13/
ASUS quietly built supercomputers, datacenters and an LLM. Now it’s quietly selling them all together
date: 2024-06-13, updated: 2024-06-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The plan is a slow build – not a breakout into enterprise tech
Taiwan’s ASUS is best known for its laptops and Wi-Fi kit, but it’s quietly building an enterprise tech and cloud business – and slowly introducing it to the world after big successes at home.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/13/asus_enterprise_tech_growth_plans/
The $220 Billion Medical Debt Problem (With Rep. Ro Khanna)
date: 2024-06-13, from: The Lever News
Rep. Ro Khanna unveils his plan with Bernie Sanders to wipe out more than $200 billion in medical debt.
https://www.levernews.com/the-220-billion-medical-debt-problem-with-rep-ro-khanna/
India beats US at cricket’s Twenty20 World Cup
date: 2024-06-13, from: VOA News USA
WESTBURY, New York — There was no upset this time for the United States as the home team was easily beaten by cricket heavyweight India at the Twenty20 World Cup on Wednesday.
Suryakumar Yadav’s half-century powered India to a seven-wicket win over the U.S., which had shocked Pakistan last week.
With the win, India reached the Super 8 round. The U.S. can advance by beating Ireland on Friday.
In a later match at Brian Lara Stadium in Trinidad, Sherfane Rutherford scored an unbeaten 68 from 39 deliveries to help the West Indies in their great escape — the co-hosts beat New Zealand by 13 runs.
The Caribbean lineup, 149-9 in its 20 overs, was 76-7 before its Rutherford-led recovery. Alzarri Joseph snared four New Zealand wickets and Gudakesh Motie took three — including New Zealand captain Kane Williamson for 1 — to restrict the Black Caps to 136-9 in reply.
On Long Island, Yadvav’s 50 runs came off 49 balls and included two boundaries and two sixes. He put on 72 runs off 65 balls in an unbeaten fourth-wicket stand with Shivam Dube, who scored 31 not out as India finished with 111-3 in 18.2 overs in reply to 110-8 by the United States.
Left-arm pacer Arshdeep Singh returned figures of 4-9 — including two wickets in the first over — to restrict the co-hosts after India had won the toss and opted to field at the Nassau County International Stadium.
India was in early trouble in its chase as Indian-born medium pacer Saurabh Netravalkar continued his golden run for the Americans.
After bowling the co-hosts to the upset over Pakistan, he celebrated the wickets of Indian superstars Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli.
Kohli was caught behind for a golden duck — dismissed off the first delivery he faced — in what surely will become a career highlight for Netravalkar. Sharma (3) fell to a slower delivery as Netravalkar finished with 2-18 in four overs.
Rishabh Pant scored 18 off 20 balls batting at No. 3 before he was bowled by Ali Khan delivery. With India struggling at 39-3 in 7.3 overs, the U.S. team momentarily raised visions of an even bigger shock.
West Indies advanceLeft-hander Rutherford turned the home team’s fortunes around, going to the crease with the West Indies reeling at 22-4 after 5.4 overs. Rutherford scored 18 off the last over that culminated with a six and a boundary.
The loss left New Zealand with a strong possibility it will not make the second round. If Afghanistan beats Papua New Guinea on Thursday, three-time runner-up New Zealand will be out of contention.
For most of the first half of the game, the Black Caps were on top.
But Rutherford went on the attack as the West Indies added 58-2 in the last five overs of their innings.
He was 15 off 14 deliveries when star allrounder Andre Russell was out for 14 in the 13th over, and he accelerated with the lower-order in a counter-attacking, 72-minute innings containing six sixes and two boundaries.
“It’s a good feeling, to help my team. That is what we live for and work hard for,” man-of-the-match Rutherford said during the innings break. “It was a very tough surface to start on. I think 149 is a brilliant score on this wicket.”
After the match, Rutherford had a more optimistic tone: “It is only the start of something big to come and hopefully we can keep winning and momentum going.”
New Zealand started well after winning the toss and fielding, with Trent Boult (3-16) bowling opener Johnson Charles to end the first over.
Tim Southee (2-21), recalled after missing New Zealand’s opening loss to Afghanistan, dismissed dangerman Nicholas Pooran for 12 in the fourth over, trigging a run of three wickets for three runs.
Lockie Ferguson deceived Roston Chase with a slower ball to make it 21-3 and skipper Rovman Powell (1) was caught behind off Southee five balls later.
Russell went on the attack but his dismissal — caught in the deep of Boult’s bowling — appeared to be an insurmountable setback until Rutherford took up the challenge.
“The quality of Sherfane’s innings was high,” New Zealand skipper Williamson said. “The batting depth in their side was beneficial for sure. We cannot make excuses and have to find ways.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/india-beats-united-states-at-cricket-s-twenty20-world-cup/7654075.html
Japan forces Apple and Google to allow third-party app stores and payments
date: 2024-06-13, updated: 2024-06-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
DMA-like law passes in pursuit of a more innovative and open smartphone market
Japan’s parliament has passed a law that will require Apple and Google to allow access to third-party app stores and payment providers on devices running their mobile operating systems.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/13/japan_smartphone_software_law/
Anti-Muslim hate groups in US surge back into spotlight
date: 2024-06-13, from: VOA News USA
Washington — Once seemingly fading into obscurity, anti-Muslim hate groups in the United States have surged back into the spotlight in recent months, reinvigorated by the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
Many of these groups, such as Jihad Watch and ACT for America, emerged in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. and thrived on public fears of terrorism. But as those fears waned in recent years, so did the groups’ sway. Some disbanded, while others gravitated to other hot-button issues.
From a peak of 114 in 2017, their number dropped to a mere 34 last year, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that tracks hate groups.
In early 2023, “Islamophobia was down to a slow trickle,” SPLC senior research analyst Caleb Kieffer said.
Then came the October 7 Hamas assault on Israel, which claimed about 1,200 lives and triggered a massive Israeli military response in Gaza.
Anti-Muslim groups that had “opportunistically” seized on divisive issues, such as critical race theory and LGBTQ-inclusive policies, swung back into action.
“These anti-Muslim groups went right back to their core messaging,” Kieffer said in an interview with VOA. “They’ve been going hard on the rhetoric since October last year.”
Take ACT for America. Founded in 2007 by Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese American political activist and self-described “survivor of terrorism,” it grew into one of the country’s leading anti-Muslim organizations.
At its peak, the group had more than 50 active chapters, each counted as a separate hate group by the SPLC. But in recent years, most of those chapters either shut down or shifted into other areas, leaving ACT for America with just eight on SPLC’s most recent list.
According to the SPLC, ACT for America embraced a “nativist tone” before October 7, circulating, among other things, a petition calling to “Stop the Taxpayer Funded Border Invasion.”
After October 7, the group launched another petition more in line with its agenda and with a call by former U.S. President Donald Trump to stop admitting Palestinian refugees from Gaza.
Warning her followers about homegrown jihadi terror, Gabriel, a staunch Trump supporter, began peddling her bestselling anti-Muslim book, Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America, in exchange for a $25 donation.
In a video titled “Wake Up America” in October, she claimed, “Hamas has a large network of cells spreading all across America,” from Laurel, Maryland, to Tucson, Arizona.
Other groups that had also latched onto contentious issues similarly pivoted back to their core agenda.
Jihad Watch, a website run by prominent anti-Muslim figure Robert Spencer, published an article last October claiming, “We’re in a war between savages and civilization. Everything else is a detail.”
Eight days later, an affiliated political website called FrontPage Magazine ran a piece titled “It’s Islam, Stupid,” arguing that everything Hamas did “has been done by Muslims throughout history and is still being practiced today.’’
FrontPage Magazine is published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, another leading anti-Muslim group. Jihad Watch is a project of the center.
ACT for America, Jihad Watch and the David Horowitz Freedom Center are part of what experts describe as a well-funded, close-knit anti-Muslim industry, with each group playing a distinct role in the ecosystem.
With chapters across the country, Washington-based ACT for America provides the “grassroots muscle” to the movement, Kieffer said. The Center for Security Policy serves as its think tank, he said.
The SPLC-designated groups appear on other hate lists. Several SPLC-branded groups contacted by VOA condemned their designation.
In a statement to VOA, a spokesperson for ACT for America rejected the “anti-Muslim” label, saying the organization has “always welcomed and included members of all faiths,” including Muslims, and hosted Muslim keynote speakers at its conferences.
ACT for America works “on a broad range of issues, none of which are anti-Muslim,” the spokesperson said. “As a matter of fact, since the defeat of ISIS and al-Qaida between 2018 and 2024, you didn’t hear a blurb from ACT for America about radical Islam.”
In response to a VOA query, Jihad Watch’s Spencer accused the SPLC of smearing and defaming “organizations that oppose its far-left political agenda by lumping them in with the likes of the KKK and neo-Nazis.”
In a brief interview with VOA, J. Michael Waller, a senior analyst for strategy at the Center for Security Policy, called the designation “slander,” saying it was tied to his group’s criticism of the Iranian government and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Kieffer defended the SPLC’s methodology, saying it only designates groups that “vilify” and “demonize” people because of their race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity.
The SPLC defines anti-Muslim hate groups as organizations that “broadly defame Islam and traffic in conspiracy theories of Muslims being a subversive threat to the nation.”
Not every anti-Muslim hate group has stood the test of time. In recent years, dozens of ACT for America chapters have closed.
The ACT for America spokesperson said most of its member groups have “turned into digital chapters meeting via zoom or other technology platforms.”
Last year, an anti-refugee and anti-Muslim blog called Refugee Resettlement Watch became inactive and was dropped from SPLC’s list of hate groups.
Another well-known anti-Muslim group called Understanding the Threat announced last year it was shutting down. The group was operated by a former FBI agent known for spreading anti-Muslim conspiracy theories.
Other groups have rebranded. One former ACT for America chapter now operates as AlertAmerica.News, according to SPLC. Its focus ranges from “strengthening national security” to “fighting communism and American Marxism.”
Kieffer said while the group’s central focus may have shifted away from Islamophobia, it continues to invite well-known, anti-Muslim speakers to its events.
With the war in Gaza still raging, the resurgence in Islamophobia remains unabated, Kieffer said. But that’s likely to change in the run-up to the presidential election in November.
“I imagine that we’re going to slowly see a decline again as these groups start to push other issues,” he said.
Brian Levin, a criminologist and hate crime researcher, noted that anti-Muslim hate crimes have surged in recent years, even as the number of hate groups has dwindled.
That’s because hatred has found a new home in the mainstream, rendering niche groups such as Islamophobic outfits increasingly obsolete, he said.
“The bottom line is, the way we associate to express and amplify hatred has changed,” Levin said in an interview with VOA. “Up-and-coming bigots of all sorts will find an array of xenophobic bigotry and conspiracism within general mainstream platforms.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/anti-muslim-hate-groups-in-us-surge-back-into-spotlight-/7654021.html
Biden arrives at G7 in Italy with sanctions for Russia, support for Ukraine, but no deal on Gaza
date: 2024-06-13, from: VOA News USA
Brindisi, Italy — U.S. President Joe Biden arrived in Brindisi, Italy, late Wednesday ahead of his meeting with leaders of the Group of Seven industrialized democracies.
He came armed with fresh sanctions for Russia, a new bilateral security agreement for Ukraine, but no breakthrough on Gaza cease-fire negotiations that now sit at a critical juncture.
The United States is working with mediators Egypt and Qatar after reviewing Hamas’ response to the proposal, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Italy early Wednesday.
“Many of the proposed changes are minor and not unanticipated,” he said. “Others differ quite substantively from what was outlined in the U.N. Security Council resolution.”
As Biden was in flight to Italy, the U.S. Treasury Department announced fresh sanctions that target foreign individuals and companies aiding Moscow’s military industrial base. They include companies based in China, that are selling semiconductors to Russia.
It includes an expansion of secondary sanctions that allow the United States to blacklist any bank around the world that does business with Russian financial institutions already facing sanctions. The goal is to prevent smaller banks in China and other countries from funding the Russian war effort.
The sanctions also target networks Russia uses to obtain critical materials for building aerial drones, anti-drone equipment, industrial machinery and for the country’s chemical and biological weapons program, the Treasury Department said.
“We are increasing the risk for financial institutions dealing with Russia’s war economy and eliminating paths for evasion, and diminishing Russia’s ability to benefit from access to foreign technology, equipment, software, and IT services,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement.
The Moscow Exchange, Russia’s top financial marketplace, announced it was halting trading of dollars and euros after being listed in the new sanctions.
Biden is also set to sign on Thursday a bilateral security agreement with Ukraine during his meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The agreement is intended to show U.S. resolve to strengthen Ukraine’s defense and deterrence capabilities without committing American troops on the Ukrainian battlefield. The agreement would include Ukrainian commitment to reform and on end-use monitoring of U.S.-provided weapons.
It will be Biden’s second meeting with Zelenskyy in the span of days; the two met in Paris on the sidelines of the 80-year commemoration of D-Day last week.
Russian frozen assets
Zelenskyy will be urging G7 leaders to get behind Biden’s plan to provide Kyiv with a loan of up to $50 billion for Ukraine’s war efforts against Russia, amid Moscow’s strategic advances in the battlefield. The U.S. proposal would pay back Western allies using interest income from the $280 billion in Russian assets frozen in Western financial institutions, estimated at $3 billion a year, for 10 years or more.
The goal is a Leaders’ Declaration at the end of the summit, a “framework that is not generic, that is quite specific in terms of what it would entail,” Sullivan told VOA as he spoke to reporters in flight. However, “core operational details” would still need to be worked out. It’s unclear whether the loan will be provided by the G7 or only some of its members.
In April, Biden signed legislation to seize the roughly $5 billion in Russian assets that had been immobilized in U.S. financial institutions. But the bulk of the money, $190 billion, is in Belgium and much of the rest, is in France and Germany.
A big source of concern for Europeans is who will be responsible to cover losses should interest rates fall below expectations or if the sanctions that immobilize the funds are not renewed. Russia considers the immobilizing of its assets following its invasion on Ukraine as theft and has threatened retaliation.
Although Ukraine is not a G7 member, this is the second consecutive year Zelenskyy is attending the summit. From Italy, he heads to Switzerland for a Ukraine peace conference over the weekend.
EU puts tariffs on Chinese EVs
Biden imposed a drastic tariff hike in May to confront what he calls Chinese overcapacity in strategic green technologies and has been urging the G7 to do the same.
On Wednesday, the European Union responded to the call by announcing it would slap Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) with higher tariffs, up to 38.1%, saying the imports benefit “heavily from unfair subsidies” and pose a “threat of economic injury” to producers in Europe.
U.S. tariffs on Chinese EVs were quadrupled to a 100% rate, while solar cell and semiconductor import tariffs were doubled to 50%. The rates on certain steel and aluminum imports were tripled to 25%. The additional duties covered $18 billion in Chinese products.
Europe is taking action to address Chinese overcapacity just as the United States has done, Sullivan said. A “common framework” on how to deal with various economic security issues posed by China will likely be included in the G7 final communique, he added.
The punitive moves could prompt retaliation from Beijing, which accuses the West of hyping overcapacity claims to blunt China’s competitive edge.
Biden arrived on the global forum after a family drama. On Tuesday, a day before departing for the summit, his son Hunter Biden was found guilty on federal charges of possessing of a gun while being addicted to drugs.
Biden has said he would not use presidential powers to pardon his son. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to respond to further questions, including the possibility of commuting Hunter Biden’s sentence when it is given by the judge.
US voices support for South Korean ‘balloon war’ efforts
date: 2024-06-13, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The U.S. expressed its support for providing outside information to the people of North Korea even as attempts are made in South Korea to block leaflet campaigns aimed at sending information to the North.
Tensions on the Korean Peninsula have been rising in recent weeks due to tit-for-tat exchanges between Pyongyang and Seoul over balloons they both have been sending across the inter-Korean border.
Responding to an inquiry by VOA’s Korean Service, a State Department spokesperson said on Monday that “it is critical for the people of North Korea to have access to independent information not controlled by the DPRK regime.”
“We continue to promote the free flow of information into, out of, and within the DPRK,” continued the spokesperson, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“We continue to urge North Korea to reduce tensions and cease any actions that could increase the risk of conflict,” the spokesperson added.
North Korea, listed by Human Rights Watch among “the most repressive countries in the world,” considers outside information a threat to the ruling regime’s survival and denies its people access to information.
The government heavily controls all forms of media and cracks down on people distributing, watching or listening to any South Korean cultural content.
In what it said was a response to South Korean activists sending balloons carrying leaflets into the North, Pyongyang has floated more than 1,600 balloons filled with trash and waste into South Korea since May 28.
In response, Seoul on June 4 fully suspended an inter-Korean military deal made in 2018 and resumed loudspeaker broadcasts at the border Sunday before halting them the following day.
The South Korean balloons, sent aloft by human rights activists, have carried leaflets conveying information about the outside world and the North Korean regime. They also carried thumb drives containing K-pop songs and dramas.
But the effort has caused controversy in South Korea, where attempts are being made to halt the campaign.
In September 2023, the South Korean constitutional court struck down a law banning the sending of leaflets to North Korea, saying it violated the constitutional right to freedom of expression.
Nevertheless, the opposition Democratic Party of Korea is attempting to apply other existing laws to block the campaign.
The opposition party, preferring engagement with North Korea, has been opposed to sending leaflets to North Korea. The anti-leaflet law was passed in December 2020 by the liberal party of former President Moon Jae-in six months after North Korea, expressing discontentment over leaflet activities, blew up an inter-Korean liaison office in Kaesong, a town in North Korea near the border.
On Tuesday, Lee Jae-myung, the leader of the party, called leaflet activities “illegal under the current law.”
In June 2020, Lee, the then-governor of Gyeonggi Province, declared five cities in the province as “danger zones” under the Framework Act on the Management of Disasters and Safety. Gyeonggi Province borders North Korea.
Lee then issued an administrative order banning people from entering the areas to launch balloons.
Kim Dong-yeon, from the opposition party and the current governor of Gyeonggi Province, said on Wednesday a consideration is being made to declare some areas in the province “danger zones” to “prevent the launch of propaganda leaflets in accordance with related laws.”
He said he will “immediately dispatch provincial police to potential leaflet sites to bolster patrols and surveillance,” according to South Korea’s liberal daily Hankyore.
Questions have been raised in South Korea whether the police can stop leaflet-sending activities based on the Act on the Performance of Duties by Police Officers, according to Seoul-based news agency Yonhap. The act allows police to restrain people from causing damage to property or harm other people.
Yoon Hee-keun, National Police Agency commissioner, told reporters Monday that the leaflet campaigns cannot be blocked on the basis of that law.
He said this is because it is “unclear whether the trash-carrying balloons” sent by North Korea “would constitute an urgent and grave threat to the lives and bodies of the public, which is prerequisite for restricting them under the law.”
David Maxwell, vice president of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy, told VOA on Tuesday via email that Seoul is “complying with the 2014 U.N. Commission of Inquiry that calls on people around the world to call out North Korea for its human rights abuses, one of which is the isolation of the people and the denial of all information going into the North.”
Bruce Klingner, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said, “The North Korean balloons are government actions and thus a violation of the armistice,” whereas balloons from the South are sent by non-government organizations.
Robert Rapson, who served as charge d’affaires and deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul in 2018-21, said while Seoul’s “decision to pause loudspeaker broadcasts” is “a positive step toward de-escalation, it should go further by also pausing balloon launches from the South.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-voices-support-for-south-korean-balloon-war-efforts/7654056.html
VMware revenue plunges $600 million, but Broadcom assures investors growth plan is on track
date: 2024-06-13, updated: 2024-06-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Costs cut deeply, with more to come, and forward bookings surge
VMware’s quarterly revenue appears to have fallen by $600 million during its first full quarter of ownership by Broadcom, which revealed strong growth in forward bookings and huge cost cuts at the virtualization giant.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/13/broadcom_q2_2024/
Santa Barbara Celebrates James Joyce and ‘Ulysses’
date: 2024-06-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Bloomsday, censorship, dirty books, and dirty minds.
The post Santa Barbara Celebrates James Joyce and ‘Ulysses’ appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/12/santa-barbara-celebrates-james-joyce-and-ulysses/
SK hynix shimmies towards AI silicon by driving merger of South Korean Nvidia challengers
date: 2024-06-13, updated: 2024-06-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Sapeon and Rebellions think they can do better together
Two South Korean members of the AI Platform Alliance – a group that advocates an open alternative to Nvidia – have proposed a merger to accelerate their work and achieve greater scale, and perhaps give local chipmaker SK hynix a way into the market for AI silicon.…
Crooks crack customer info at tracking device vendor Tile, issue ‘extortion’ demands
date: 2024-06-13, updated: 2024-06-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Who tracks the trackers?
Life360, purveyor of “Tile” Bluetooth tracking devices and developer of associated apps, has revealed it is dealing with a “criminal extortion attempt” after unknown miscreants contacted it with an allegation they had customer data in their possession.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/13/tile_life360_extortion/
June 18: Regular Meeting of SCV Water Board
date: 2024-06-13, from: SCV New (TV Station)
SCV Water Agency will be holding their next regular board meeting next Tuesday on June 18.
https://scvnews.com/june-18-regular-meeting-of-scv-water-board/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-13, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Let’s Talk About Trump’s Gibberish.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/06/trump-sharks-las-vegas-rally-speech/678667/
Soroptimists to celebrate 50 years with laughs
date: 2024-06-13, from: The Signal
News release Soroptimist International of Valencia is scheduled Aug. 2 to host “Laughs for a Cause,” a special event celebrating the organization’s 50th anniversary benefiting its dream programs: Live Your […]
The post Soroptimists to celebrate 50 years with laughs appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/soroptimists-to-celebrate-50-years-with-laughs/
Council gives first approval of $342.4M budget
date: 2024-06-13, from: The Signal
As the city’s monthslong budgeting process comes to a close, the Santa Clarita City Council gave its first approval of the city’s spending plan and annual review of its capital […]
The post Council gives first approval of $342.4M budget appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/council-gives-first-approval-of-342-4m-budget/
Calm Company Fund is taking a break
date: 2024-06-13, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
<div class="known-bookmark">
<div class="e-content">“Inhale. Exhale. Find the space between… Calm Company Fund is going on sabbatical and taking a break from investing in new companies and raising new funds. Here’s why.”
Calm Company Fund’s model seems interesting. It’s a revenue-based investor that makes a return based on its portfolio companies’ earnings, but still uses a traditional VC model to derive its operating budget. That means it makes a very small percentage of funds committed from Limited Partners, rather than sharing in the success of its portfolio (at least until much later, when the companies begin to earn out).
That would make sense in a world where the funds committed were enormous, but revenue-based investment tends to raise smaller fund sizes. So Calm Company Fund had enough money to pay for basically one person - and although the portfolio was growing, the staff size couldn’t scale up to cope.
So what does an alternative look like? I imagine that it might look like taking a larger percentage of incoming revenue as if it were an LP itself. Or maybe this kind of funding simply doesn’t work with a hands-on firm, and the models that attract larger institutional investors are inherently more viable (even if that isn’t always reflected in their fund returns).
I want something like this to exist, but the truth is that it might live in the realm of boring old business loans, and venture likely is able to exist because of the risks involved in those sorts of companies.
<p>[<a href="https://calmfund.com/writing/pause">Link</a>]</p>
</div>
</div>https://werd.io/2024/calm-company-fund-is-taking-a-break
Commuters balk at transit proposals
date: 2024-06-13, from: The Signal
More than a dozen residents came together Tuesday to express their concerns about what they called the city’s attempt to expand weekday or weekend service at the expense of its […]
The post Commuters balk at transit proposals appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/commuters-balk-at-transit-proposals/
Sols 4212-4214: Gearing up to Drill!
date: 2024-06-13, from: NASA breaking news
Earth planning date: Monday, June 11, 2024 Curiosity is gearing up to drill! Last week, it encountered a rock with unusual coloration and texture that was just out of reach (you can read about it and see pictures here and here). So that Curiosity could learn more about the geology around these rocks, it “bumped” […]
https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/sols-4212-4214-gearing-up-to-drill/
County Receives Highest Credit Rating From Two Major Ratings Agencies
date: 2024-06-13, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Fitch Ratings has raised the County’s long-term issuer credit rating to AAA from AA+, garnering the highest possible credit rating available in the financial markets
https://scvnews.com/county-receives-highest-credit-rating-from-two-major-ratings-agencies/
Less Is More
date: 2024-06-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
It is no secret that the supply of restrooms in downtown Los Olivos is woefully inadequate to support the tourism generated by a hotel, three restaurants, dozens of wine tasting rooms, a couple of sandwich shops and coffee houses, and a brewery.
The post Less Is More appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/12/less-is-more/
Google borrows from Android to make ChromeOS better
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Parts of the ’droid tech stack are replacing laptop OS plumbing
Google’s ChromeOS team has begun borrowing from Android’s tech stack to innovate faster, to reduce the burden of maintaining multiple operating systems, and to enhance device interoperability in the face of vendor kernel variability, the company says.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/google_android_chromeos/
SCV Water Honored by Government Finance Officers Association
date: 2024-06-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
SCV Water is proud to announce it has received the prestigious Distinguished Budget Presentation award for its FY 2023/24 & FY 2024/25 Biennial Budget from the Government Finance Officers Association
https://scvnews.com/scv-water-honored-by-government-finance-officers-association/
Ames Research Center Democratizes Space Biosciences Research with First Commercial Astronaut Data
date: 2024-06-12, from: NASA breaking news
Background: To protect astronauts from spaceflight health risks like solar radiation and microgravity, scientists develop countermeasures by studying model organisms exposed to the space environment. For the first time, commercial astronaut data from the Inspiration4 (I4) mission has been collected for open-access research in an effort led by Weill Cornell Medicine. ARC’s Open Science Data […]
Valencia alum earns all-Big West conference honors as freshman
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Signal
Valencia alumnus Ricky Ojeda dominated on the mound in his senior season with Vikings baseball. Now as a freshman UC Irvine Anteater, not much has changed. Ojeda made an immediate […]
The post Valencia alum earns all-Big West conference honors as freshman appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/valencia-alum-earns-all-big-west-conference-honors-as-freshman/
SDA acting, dramatic writing MFA degrees to be tuition-free
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The change will go into effect in the 2024-25 academic year.
The post SDA acting, dramatic writing MFA degrees to be tuition-free appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/12/sda-acting-dramatic-writing-mfa-degrees-to-be-tuition-free/
Kennedy Space Center Recipient of Presidential Federal Sustainability Award
date: 2024-06-12, from: NASA breaking news
KSC is the first NASA Center to offer workplace EV charging, setting the foundation for other NASA Centers. EV chargers are one way the KSC team is embracing the Executive Order goal for Zero Emission Vehicles (ZEVs) by 2035. These charging stations greatly benefit KSC sustainability efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Within the first […]
Renew Your Love of Reading at the Santa Clarita Public Library’s Summer Reading Program
date: 2024-06-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Summer is right around the corner and the Santa Clarita Public Library has launched its highly anticipated Summer Reading Program through July
Trees Shade Habitat
date: 2024-06-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
I just read the excellent and timely article in the Santa Barbara Independent on the Urban Mini-Forest by Dennis Allen.
The post Trees Shade Habitat appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/12/trees-shade-habitat/
Chrome OS switching to the Android Linux kernel and related Android subsystems
date: 2024-06-12, from: OS News
Surprisingly quietly, in the middle of Apple’s WWDC, Google’s ChromeOS team has made a rather massive announcement that seems to be staying a bit under the radar. Google is announcing today that it is replacing many of ChromeOS’ current relatively standard Linux-based subsystems with the comparable subsystems from Android. To continue rolling out new Google AI features to users at a faster and even larger scale, we’ll be embracing portions of the Android stack, like the Android Linux kernel and Android frameworks, as part of the foundation of ChromeOS. We already have a strong history of collaboration, with Android apps available on ChromeOS and the start of unifying our Bluetooth stacks as of ChromeOS 122. ↫ Prajakta Gudadhe and Alexander Kuscher on the Chromium blog The benefits to Google here are obvious: instead of developing and maintaining two variants of the Linux kernel and various related subsystems, they now only have to focus on one, saving money and time. It will also make it easier for both platforms to benefit from new features and bugfixes, which should benefit users of both platforms quite a bit. As mentioned in the snippet, the first major subsystem in ChromeOS to be replaced by its Android counterpart is Bluetooth. ChromeOS was using the BlueZ Bluetooth stack, the same one used by most (all?) Linux distributions today, which was initially developed by Qualcomm, but has now switched over to using Fluoride, the one from Android. According to Google, Fluoride has a number of benefits over BlueZ. It runs almost entirely in userspace, as opposed to BlueZ, where more than 50% of the code resides in the kernel. In addition, Fluoride is written in Rust, and Google claims it has a simpler architecture, making it easier to perform testing. Google also highlights that Fluoride has a far larger userbase – i.e., all Android users – which also presents a number of benefits. Google performed internal tests to measure the improvements as a result from switching ChromeOS from BlueZ to Fluoride, and the test results speak for themselves – pairing is faster, pairing fails less often, and reconnecting an already paired device fails less often. With Bluetooth being a rather problematic technology to use, any improvements to the user experience are welcome. At the end of Google’s detailed blog post about the switch to Fluoride, the company notes that it intends for the project as whole – which is called Project Floss – to be a standalone open source project, capable of running on any Linux distribution. ↫ Russ Lindsay, Abhishek Pandit-Subedi, Alain Michaud, and Loic Wei Yu Neng on the chromeOS dev website We aspire to position Project Floss as a standalone open source project that can reach beyond the walls of Google’s own operating system in a way where we can maximize the overall value and agility of the larger Bluetooth ecosystem. We also intend to support the Linux community as a whole with the goal that Floss can easily run on most Linux distributions. If Fluoride can indeed deliver tangible, measurable benefits in Bluetooth performance on Linux desktops, I have no doubt quite a few distributions will be more than willing to switch over. Bluetooth is used a lot, and if Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and so on, can improve the Bluetooth experience by switching over, I’m pretty sure they will, or at least consider doing so.
Lawyer for the Sharks
date: 2024-06-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
This summer, I ventured to join the Santa Barbara community in order to help protect our ocean — a dream I have had since I was a child hoping to be a lawyer for the sharks.
The post Lawyer for the Sharks appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/12/lawyer-for-the-sharks/
Waymo issues software fix after driverless taxi hits telephone pole
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
NHTSA already probing robo-car biz over crashes with ‘clearly visible objects’
Waymo is updating its self-driving cars’ software after another accident in Phoenix, Arizona, that the driverless taxi biz is blaming on faulty maps and code.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/waymo_software_recall/
Renew Your Love for Reading at the Santa Clarita Public Library’s Annual Summer Reading Program
date: 2024-06-12, from: City of Santa Clarita
Read, Renew and Repeat at the Library! Summer is right around the corner and the Santa Clarita Public Library has launched its highly anticipated Summer Reading Program through July 27. This beloved program offers residents of all ages a variety of family-friendly activities, reading challenges, crafts and more—all for free. With the theme “Read, Renew, […]
The post Renew Your Love for Reading at the Santa Clarita Public Library’s Annual Summer Reading Program appeared first on City of Santa Clarita.
What would Trump’s and Biden’s second-term policy on Ukraine look like?
date: 2024-06-12, from: VOA News USA
US says transparency will be key to Ukraine energy sector upgrade
date: 2024-06-12, from: VOA News USA
Arm, Qualcomm legal battle seen disrupting AI-powered PC wave
date: 2024-06-12, from: OS News
The new Windows on ARM Copilot+ PC thing, running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Pro chips, isn’t even out the door yet, and we’re already dealing with legal proceedings. But the main conversation among conference attendees was over how a contract dispute between Arm Holdings and Qualcomm, which work together to make the chips powering these new laptops, could abruptly halt the shipment of new PCs that industry leaders expect will make Microsoft and its partners billions of dollars. ↫ Max A. Cherney at Reuters The basic gist of the story is as follows. Qualcomm acquired a company named Nuvia, founded by former Apple processor engineers, in order to gain new technology to build its Snapdragon X Elite and Pro chips. Nuvia was planning on developing ARM chips for servers, but after the acquisition, Qualcomm changed their plans and repurposed their technology for use in laptops – the new X chips. ARM claims that Nuvia was only granted a license for server use, and not laptop use. Qualcomm, meanwhile, argued that it has a broad license to use ARM for pretty much anything, and as such, that any possible restrictions Nuvia had are irrelevant. While this all sounds like very rich corporations having a silly legal slapfight, it could have real consequences. If the legal case goes very, very wrong for Qualcomm, it could halt the sale of devices powered by the Snapdragon X chips well before they’re even shipping. I doubt it’ll get that far – it rarely does, and there’s some big names and big reputations at play here – but it does highlight the absurdity of how the ARM ecosystem works. Speaking of the ARM ecosystem, Qualcomm isn’t the only ARM chip makers dying to break into the PC market. Qualcomm currently has a weird exclusivity agreement with Microsoft where it’s the only ARM chip supplier for PCs, but that agreement is running out soon. Another player that’s ready to storm this market once that happens is MediaTek, who is also developing a chip geared towards Microsoft’s Copilot+ specifications, with a release target of 2025. Let’s hope MediaTek will be as forthcoming with Linux support as Qualcomm surprisingly has been, but I have my sincerest doubt.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139939/arm-qualcomm-legal-battle-seen-disrupting-ai-powered-pc-wave/
US House holds attorney general in contempt for withholding Biden audio
date: 2024-06-12, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The House voted Wednesday to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over audio of President Joe Biden’s interview in his classified documents case, Republicans’ latest and strongest rebuke of the Justice Department as partisan conflict over the rule of law animates the 2024 presidential campaign.
The 216-207 vote fell along party lines, with Republicans coalescing behind the contempt effort despite reservations among some of the party’s more centrist members. Only one Republican — Rep. David Joyce of Ohio — voted against it.
Garland said in a statement late Wednesday, “It is deeply disappointing that this House of Representatives has turned a serious congressional authority into a partisan weapon. Today’s vote disregards the constitutional separation of powers, the Justice Department’s need to protect its investigations, and the substantial amount of information we have provided to the Committees.”
He added, “I will always stand up for this Department, its employees, and its vital mission to defend our democracy.”
Garland is now the third attorney general to be held in contempt of Congress. Yet it is unlikely that the Justice Department — which Garland oversees — will prosecute him. The White House’s decision to exert executive privilege over the audio recording, shielding it from Congress, would make it exceedingly difficult to make a criminal case against Garland.
Nonetheless, Speaker Mike Johnson defended the decision to push ahead with what is now a mostly symbolic effort.
“Look, we did our job on the contempt, and I think it sends an important message,” the Louisiana Republican said following the vote. “We’ll see what happens next, but, I mean, the House has to do its work and I’m pleased with the outcome today.”
The White House and congressional Democrats have slammed Republicans’ motives for pursuing contempt and dismissed their efforts to obtain the audio as purely political. They also pointed out that Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, defied his own congressional subpoena last session.
Garland has defended the Justice Department, saying officials have gone to extraordinary lengths to provide information to the committees about Special Counsel Robert Hur’s classified documents investigation, including a transcript of Biden’s interview with him.
“There have been a series of unprecedented and frankly unfounded attacks on the Justice Department,” Garland said in a press conference last month. “This request, this effort to use contempt as a method of obtaining our sensitive law enforcement files is just most recent.”
Republicans were incensed when Hur declined to prosecute Biden over his handling of classified documents and quickly opened an investigation. Republican lawmakers — led by Jordan and Rep. James Comer — sent a subpoena for audio of Hur’s interviews with Biden during the spring. But the Justice Department only turned over some of the records, leaving out audio of the interview with the president.
On the last day to comply with the Republicans’ subpoena for the audio, the White House blocked the release by invoking executive privilege. It said that Republicans in Congress only wanted the recordings “to chop them up” and use them for political purposes.
Executive privilege gives presidents the right to keep information from the courts, Congress and the public to protect the confidentiality of decision-making, though it can be challenged in court.
Administrations of both political parties have long held the position that officials who assert a president’s claim of executive privilege can’t be prosecuted for contempt of Congress, a Justice Department official told Republicans last month.
Hur spent a year investigating the president’s improper retention of classified documents, from his time as a senator and as vice president. The result was a 345-page report that questioned Biden’s age and mental competence but recommended no criminal charges for the 81-year-old. Hur said he found insufficient evidence to successfully prosecute a case in court.
In March, Hur stood by his no-prosecution assessment in testimony before the Judiciary Committee, where he was grilled for more than four hours by both Democratic and Republican lawmakers.
His defense did not satisfy Republicans, who insist that there is a politically motivated double standard at the Justice Department, which is prosecuting former President Donald Trump over his retention of classified documents at his Florida club after he left the White House.
But there are major differences between the two probes. Biden’s team returned the documents after they were discovered, and the president cooperated with the investigation by voluntarily sitting for an interview and consenting to searches of his homes.
Trump, by contrast, is accused of enlisting the help of aides and lawyers to conceal the documents from the government and of seeking to have potentially incriminating evidence destroyed.
NASA Welcomes Armenia as 43rd Artemis Accords Signatory
date: 2024-06-12, from: NASA breaking news
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson welcomed Armenia as the newest nation to sign the Artemis Accords Wednesday during a ceremony with the U.S. State Department at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Armenia joins 42 other countries in a commitment to advancing principles for the safe, transparent, and responsible exploration of the Moon, Mars and beyond. “NASA is […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-welcomes-armenia-as-43rd-artemis-accords-signatory/
CSUN Prof Gives TEDx Talk on Creating a Unified Framework for Psychotherapy
date: 2024-06-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
With the stigma around mental health shifting, conversations about therapy are becoming increasingly popular. However, those who seek mental health counseling know finding a therapist or an ideal therapy approach isn’t always easy.
https://scvnews.com/csun-prof-gives-tedx-talk-on-creating-a-unified-framework-for-psychotherapy/
Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA) Package
date: 2024-06-12, from: NASA breaking news
June 11, 2024 – The Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA) package, the largest-ever collection of data for aerospace medicine and space biology, was publicly released on Tuesday! This monumental achievement was made possible through the collaborative efforts of over 100 institutions from more than 25 countries. Of the total 44 publications in the SOMA […]
https://www.nasa.gov/general/space-omice-and-medical-atlas-soma-package/
Ransomware crew may have exploited Windows make-me-admin bug as a zero-day
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Symantec suggests Black Basta crew beat Microsoft to the patch
The Black Basta ransomware gang may have exploited a now-patched Windows privilege escalation bug as a zero-day, according to Symantec’s threat hunters.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/black_basta_ransomware_windows/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-12, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Trump Lashes Out Over Report He’d Enforce Mandatory Military Service.
https://newrepublic.com/post/182579/trump-report-mandatory-military-service
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-12, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Starlink user terminal now costs just $300 in 28 states, $500 in rest of US.
Santa Barbara County Budget Is Tight and Tough
date: 2024-06-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Prudent saving and spending and paying down the pension debt.
The post Santa Barbara County Budget Is Tight and Tough appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/12/santa-barbara-county-budget-is-tight-and-tough/
Linus Torvalds: extensible scheduler “sched_ext” in Linux 6.11
date: 2024-06-12, from: OS News
The extensible scheduler “sched_ext” code has proven quite versatile for opening up better Linux gaming performance, more quickly prototyping new scheduler changes, Ubuntu/Canonical has been evaluating it for pursuing a more micro-kernel like design, and many other interesting approaches with it. Yet it’s remained out of tree but that is now changing with the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle. Linus Torvalds as the benevolent dictator for life “BDFL” of the Linux kernel announced he intends to merge the sched_ext patches for Linux 6.11 even though there has been some objections by other kernel developers. Torvalds feels the sched_ext code is ready enough and provides real value to the mainline Linux kernel. It’s not worth dragging out sched_ext continuing to be out-of-tree. ↫ Michael Larabel at Phoronix I haven’t felt the need to mess around with the Linux scheduler in a long, long time – I have some vague memories of perhaps well over a decade ago where opting for a different scheduler could lead to better desktop-focused performance characteristics, but the details in my brain are so fuzzy that it may just be a fabricated or confabulated memory.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139937/linus-torvalds-extensible-scheduler-sched_ext-in-linux-6-11/
Pilar Schiavo | Pilar’s Pocketbook Tax Filing Help
date: 2024-06-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Welcome to this edition of Pilar’s Pocketbook. This week, has crucial information to help navigate tax filings and ensure entitled benefits are received
https://scvnews.com/pilars-pocketbook-tax-filing-help/
OpenBSD extreme privacy setup
date: 2024-06-12, from: OS News
This is an attempt to turn OpenBSD into a Whonix or Tails alternative, although if you really need that level of privacy, use a system from this list and not the present guide. It is easy to spot OpenBSD using network fingerprinting, this can not be defeated, you can not hide the fact you use OpenBSD to network operators. I did this guide as a challenge for fun, but I also know some users have a use for this level of privacy. ↫ Solène Rapenne Written by OpenBSD developer Solène Rapenne, so you’re probably not going to find a guide written by anyone more knowledgeable.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139935/openbsd-extreme-privacy-setup/
The Marshall Star for June 12, 2024
date: 2024-06-12, from: NASA breaking news
Shining Stars: Marshall Teams Support Successful Crew Flight Test By Wayne Smith From preparing for flight readiness, to providing day-of-launch support, to delivering a critical piece of replacement hardware, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center played an integral role in the agency’s crew flight test to the International Space Station. The Starliner spacecraft – NASA’s Boeing […]
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/marshall/the-marshall-star-for-june-12-2024/
Microsoft pulls release preview build of Windows 11 24H2 after Recall controversy
date: 2024-06-12, from: OS News
Microsoft recently announced some big changes to the Recall feature in Windows, and now it’s pulled the Release Preview version which contained Recall entirely. It’s likely not a coincidence that Microsoft also quietly pulled the build of the Windows 11 24H2 update that it had been testing in its Release Preview channel for Windows Insiders. It’s not unheard of for Microsoft to stop distributing a beta build of Windows after releasing it, but the Release Preview channel is typically the last stop for a Windows update before a wider release. ↫ Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica The company doesn’t actually mention why the release was pulled, but the reason is pretty obvious if you connect the dots. I’m at least glad Microsoft is taking the complaints seriously, and while I don’t personally think Recall is a good idea, if a user gives their consent and uses it knowingly and willingly, I don’t see any problems with it.
These Wrongly Arrested Black Men Say a California Bill Would Let Police Misuse Face Recognition
date: 2024-06-12, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
<div class="known-bookmark">
<div class="e-content">“Now all three men are speaking out against pending California legislation that would make it illegal for police to use face recognition technology as the sole reason for a search or arrest. Instead it would require corroborating indicators.”
Even with mitigations, it will lead to wrongful arrests: so-called “corroborating indicators” don’t assist with the fact that the technology is racially biased and unreliable, and in fact may provide justification for using it.
And the stories of this technology being used are intensely bad miscarriages of justice:
“Other than a photo lineup, the detective did no other investigation. So it’s easy to say that it’s the officer’s fault, that he did a poor job or no investigation. But he relied on (face recognition), believing it must be right. That’s the automation bias this has been referenced in these sessions.”
“Believing it must be right” is one of core social problems widespread AI is introducing. Many people think of computers as being coldly logical deterministic thinkers. Instead, there’s always the underlying biases of the people who built the systems and, in the case of AI, in the vast amounts of public data used to train them. False positives are bad in any scenario; in law enforcement, it can destroy or even end lives.
<p>[<a href="https://themarkup.org/2024/06/12/these-wrongly-arrested-black-men-say-a-california-bill-would-let-police-misuse-face-recognition">Link</a>]</p>
</div>
</div>https://werd.io/2024/these-wrongly-arrested-black-men-say-a-california-bill-would
Thank You, Big Nerd Ranch
date: 2024-06-12, from: Michael Tsai
Big Nerd Ranch: It is with a mix of emotions that we announce the upcoming sunsetting of some key aspects of Big Nerd Ranch and the transition of others. For over 23 years, we’ve had the privilege of empowering aspiring programmers through our immersive bootcamps and books. From the iconic ranch in south Georgia to […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/06/12/thank-you-big-nerd-ranch/
iOS RCS Support Delayed
date: 2024-06-12, from: Michael Tsai
Allison Johnson (Hacker News): The long-awaited day is here: Apple has announced that its Messages app will support RCS in iOS 18. The new standard will replace SMS as the default communication protocol between Android and iOS devices. The move comes after years of taunting, cajoling, and finally, some regulatory scrutiny from the EU. Unfortunately, […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/06/12/ios-rcs-support-delayed/
US, Ukraine to sign security agreement
date: 2024-06-12, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-ukraine-to-sign-security-agreement/7653483.html
These Wrongly Arrested Black Men Say a California Bill Would Let Police Misuse Face Recognition
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Markup blog
Three men falsely arrested based on face recognition technology have joined the fight against a California bill that aims to place guardrails around police use of the technology. They say it will still allow abuses and misguided arrests.
What 2 Years of High Interest Rates Have Done to Clean Energy
date: 2024-06-12, from: Heatmap News
Are interest rates going to go down? The market will have to wait.
Following a Tuesday report showing steady consumer prices in May and prices overall only rising 3.3% in the past year, the Federal Reserve held steady on interest rates, releasing a projection Wednesday showing just one rate cut this year.
If rates do indeed fall this year (or next, when the Fed is projecting four cuts), that would be a big relief to renewable developers. There’s been an unprecedented flow of money into the sector in the past few years — whether from tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act or power purchase agreements from utilities and corporations that want to decarbonize, you name it — but it’s come at the same time as projects have gotten more expensive to undertake. That’s in terms of labor and supplies, but also the most important part of any project: money.
“In the near term, investors are looking for market rates to fall to reduce financing costs — the Fed cutting the base rate could greatly help this along,” Srinivasan Santhakumar, senior research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, told me in an email.
Interest rates don’t affect every project equally. Renewables tend to be capital intensive, meaning that a higher portion of their costs are in building them as opposed to operating them. For an offshore wind turbine project, almost 70% of the expenditure comes from capital, whereas with a combined-cycle natural gas turbine plant it’s less than 20%, according to Wood Mackenzie data.
That’s because, in the case of wind and solar, the “fuel” is free, unlike with natural gas and other fossil-based energy sources. This means that developers have to fund more of the project upfront with borrowed money, which means a bigger hit from higher interest rates. According to an analysis by the investment bank Lazard, when the cost of debt is 5%, the levelized cost of an offshore wind project is $88 per megawatt-hour; when the cost of debt rises to 8%, the levelized cost rises to $118. For a combined cycle gas plant, the levelized cost per megawatt-hour rises from $66 to just $76.
“You’re really sensitive to interest rates” as a renewable developer, as Tim Latimer, the chief executive officer of the geothermal startup Fervo, explained to me. “That’s a big investment up front.”
In some sense, renewables economics have been a victim of their own success, Latimer said. Because there are lots of buyers for 15 years’ worth of renewable electricity and no risk of fuel costs surging or falling dramatically, the “spread” that renewable projects demand over risk-free rates is much smaller than for natural gas projects. But that means as rates rise, the spread shrinks more with renewables. “That has a much bigger relative impact on the economics,” Latimer said.
Geothermal projects have similar economics to other renewables, Latimer said, and being able to sell power to offtakers has helped protect the finances of Fervo’s projects.
Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Elizabeth Warren have pressed Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell on the high rates, citing the effect on renewable investments. “Your decision to rapidly raise interest rates beginning in 2022, and the potential that they may remain too high for too long, has halted advances in deploying renewable energy technologies and delayed significant climate and economic benefits from these projects,” the two wrote in a letter to Powell in March.
Executives from some of the world’s biggest renewables companies have been singing this song, as well. “Renewable energy in general is very, very susceptible to rising interest rates and offshore wind, even the most of all of the renewable energy sectors because it’s so capital intensive. Our fuel is free, we say, but our fuel is really the cost of capital because we put so much capital out upfront,” Orsted Americas chief executive officer David Hardy told Bloomberg.
In a May earnings call, Orsted’s global chief executive, Mads Nipper, told investors, “It’s impossible to say whether [costs] have peaked yet, and on the way down, as that will hinge, very much, on the macroeconomic factors, and the rates, specifically.”
The premium renewables can yield over government debt has shrunk dramatically since 2020, BloombergNEF analyst Atin Jain said. In response, developers have increased prices for power purchase agreements, knowing that they can do so thanks to the demand for their clean electrons. But that also means more expensive power when the deals are struck, and in the case of several offshore wind projects in the Northeast, price increases can sometimes mean the deals never get done at all, even in spite of generous IRA tax credits.
“Higher interest rates are driving up project costs and [power purchase agreement] costs as well,” explained Michael Arndt, the president of Recurrent Energy, at a forum hosted by the American Council on Renewable Energy. “Being able to bring in more tax equity is a big offset to a higher interest rate environment.”
According to BNEF data, developers have tried to shorten the term of their borrowing, aiming to avoid getting locked into higher rates for a long time, while also going to the bond market for financing as opposed to bank loans, which typically means paying a lower rate. This then advantages longer tenured and more established developers who are better able to access the bond market. As Esper Nemi, the chief financial officer of the green energy giant Brookfield Renewable Partners, said in a May earnings call, “Our access to scale capital means we can execute on large opportunities where there are fewer viable partners and risk adjusted returns can therefore be very attractive.”
“Where possible, if you’re a creditworthy issuer and you’re more financially stable and have the ability to make regular interest payments, you have been viewed attractively by the bond market,” Jain told me. Bond issuance by utilities and renewable developers has more than doubled since before the pandemic, according to BNEF data. “That’s how people are navigating this environment: cutting loan tenors, doubling down on bonds. Everyone is hoping that though they have to tap more expensive debt now they’ll be able to refinance those loans,” Jain said.
How many people will be able refinance remains to be seen. “Developers with deeper balance sheets are able to navigate this a little bit better than smaller or midsize companies,” Jain added.
Latimer said that higher rates could be particularly challenging to first of a kind projects. Investors have a return they want a new project to generate and that figure moves up with interest rates.
“The return hurdle that you need to hit to entice capital that views your project as a new development and new technology moves up with interest rates,” Latimer told me. “Your project economics have to be that much better relative to what your baseline was before because everyone has higher return expectations.”
https://heatmap.news/economy/fed-interest-rate-renewables
US Federal Reserve sees inflation progress but envisions only one rate cut this year
date: 2024-06-12, from: VOA News USA
washington — Federal Reserve officials said Wednesday that inflation has fallen further toward their target level in recent months but signaled they expect to cut their benchmark interest rate just once this year.
The policymakers’ forecast for one rate cut was down from a previous forecast of three, because inflation, despite having cooled in the past two months, remains persistently elevated.
In a statement issued after its two-day meeting, the Fed said the economy is growing at a solid pace, while hiring has “remained strong.” The officials also noted that in recent months there has been “modest” further progress toward their 2% inflation target. That is a more positive assessment than after the Fed’s previous meeting May 1, when the officials had noted a lack of progress.
Still, the central bank made clear Wednesday that further improvement is needed.
“We’ll need to see more good data to bolster our confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2%,” Chair Jerome Powell said at a news conference after the Fed meeting ended.
As expected, the policymakers kept their key rate unchanged at roughly 5.3%. The benchmark rate has remained at that level since July of last year, after the Fed raised it 11 times to try to slow borrowing and spending and cool inflation. Fed rate cuts would, over time, lighten loan costs for consumers, who have faced punishingly high rates for mortgages, auto loans, credit cards and other forms of borrowing.
The officials’ rate-cut forecast reflects the individual estimates of 19 policymakers. The Fed said eight of the officials projected two rate cuts. Seven projected one cut. Four of the policymakers envisioned no cuts at all this year.
“What everyone agrees on,” Powell said at his news conference, is that the Fed’s timetable for rate cuts is “going to be data dependent.”
The Fed’s latest projections are by no means fixed. The policymakers frequently revise their plans for rate cuts — or hikes — depending on how economic growth and inflation evolve over time.
On Wednesday morning, the government reported that inflation eased in May for a second straight month, a hopeful sign that an acceleration of prices that occurred early this year may have passed. Consumer prices excluding volatile food and energy costs — the closely watched “core” index — rose just 0.2% from April, the smallest rise since October. Measured from a year earlier, core prices climbed 3.4%, the mildest pace in three years.
“We welcome today’s reading and hope for more like that,” Powell said.
Though inflation has tumbled from a peak of 9.1% two years ago, it remains too high for the Fed’s liking. The policymakers now face the delicate task of keeping rates high enough to slow spending and defeat high inflation without derailing the economy.
No, an AI bot isn’t running for mayor of Cheyenne, Wyoming
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
But candidate Victor Miller tells The Reg he’ll use machine learning to help govern
Officials in Wyoming are trying to figure out how to respond to an application to run for mayor of the City of Cheyenne that comes with the promise of AI-assisted governance.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/ai_bot_wyoming/
Retired Hart High School Baseball Coach Jim Ozella Releases Book
date: 2024-06-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Santa Clarita resident and retired William S. Hart High School Baseball Coach Jim Ozella announced his first book was published this spring
https://scvnews.com/retired-hart-high-school-baseball-coach-jim-ozella-releases-book/
🤫 Some unspoken thing
date: 2024-06-12, from: Interesting, a blog on writing
Using the page to tell actors what to leave unsaid.
https://inneresting.substack.com/p/some-unspoken-thing
NASA Selects Raytheon Company to Build Landsat Next Instruments
date: 2024-06-12, from: NASA breaking news
NASA selects Raytheon Company to provide three instruments and related services, with an option for one additional instrument, in support of the Landsat Next mission based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The contract includes a cost-plus-award-fee base period and a cost-plus-fixed-fee option period with a total value of $506.7 million. The […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-selects-raytheon-company-to-build-landsat-next-instruments/
The Stephen Miller of Climate Policy
date: 2024-06-12, from: Heatmap News
It is my sincere belief that, as with many aspects of governance, thinking about climate policy bores former President Donald Trump. He is not without his hobbyhorses — wind turbines are ugly bird-killers; it’s freezing in New York, so where the hell is global warming? — but on the whole, I tend to agree with the assessment that he basically believes “nothing” on climate change. Trump simply isn’t all that interested. He prefers to let the others do the thinking for him.
This isn’t a knock on Trump, per se; part of leading a bureaucracy as big and as complicated as the United States government is surrounding yourself with people who can offload some of that thinking for you. But the crucial question then becomes: Who is doing that thinking?
The answer, to a large extent, is Russ Vought.
The name might not immediately ring a bell. Biographical details of the 48-year-old career bureaucrat can be hard to find (“a native of Trumbull, Connecticut,” “the youngest of seven children,” “a die-hard Yankees fan”), giving the impression that Vought came out of nowhere. In a sense, he did: For years, Vought dealt mainly with spreadsheets as he worked first as a budget staffer for Texas Republican Sen. Phil Gramm and Rep. Jeb Hensarling, then later for then-Rep. Mike Pence, and eventually the Heritage Foundation. It was Gramm, though, who gave Vought his outlook on the world: “If you do budget, you do everything.”
After a stint with the Trump transition team, Vought became deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget in 2018, and took over entirely in 2019. At OMB, he famously held up military aid to Ukraine in what became the subject of Trump’s first impeachment. Described as “ideological in the extreme,” “adversarial” with his colleagues, and having an “aggressive personal style” — incongruous, perhaps, with his somewhat nerdy, bespectacled appearance — Vought would reportedly go too far in proposed budget cuts sometimes even for his boss.
After Biden’s win in 2020, Vought launched the Center for American Restoration, a pro-Trump think tank with the mission of renewing “a consensus of America as a nation under God,” and has otherwise kept busy with appearances on conservative-friendly talk shows on One America News Network and Fox News. Steve Bannon has approvingly dubbed him “MAGA’s bulldog,” though he rarely speaks to the mainstream press. (I received a failed delivery message in response to an email to the address listed on the website for the Center for American Restoration; other attempts to contact Vought went unanswered.)
Vought is all but assured to take up a powerful position in a potential incoming Trump cabinet. He “trained up during the first Trump administration, and he is looking to apply those skills that he learned in a second,” said Alex Witt, the senior advisor for oil and gas at Climate Power, a strategic communications group that shared its research on Vought with me.
Vought may not be the most obvious architect for the project of dismantling climate progress, however. In Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for the next Republican president, Vought authored the chapter on the Office of the President of the United States — hardly the most climate-y section, given that there are also chapters on reforming the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Department of the Interior. A flurry of new articles about Vought describe him as a Christian nationalist crusader preoccupied with fending off big government and orchestrating an expansion of presidential powers.
But just as Trump advisor Stephen Miller shaped far-right immigration policies from behind the scenes, Vought would be a hidden hand in a future administration dismantling climate progress. In his chapter in Project 2025, for example, Vought proposes moving the National Defense Strategy from under the purview of the Defense Department to the White House and its National Security Council — normal “expansion of presidential powers” stuff. But Vought goes even further, directing the NSC then to “rigorously review” the staff with an eye for “climate change … and other polarizing policies that weaken our armed force.”
Erin Sikorsky, the director of the Center for Climate and Security, told me that such a proposal indicates “a misunderstanding of how connected climate hazards are to the core duties of what the military is focused on.” It could also put the U.S. armed forces on the back foot in conflicts around the world if it’s followed through. As just one example, if the military isn’t engaging with its Indo-Pacific partners “and helping those countries build resilience to climate change, then China is more than happy to step in and address that,” Sikorsky warned. At home, NSC analyses of the domestic impacts of climate change will likely come to a halt, scuttling future coordination between the military and local governments after disasters and hampering mitigation efforts around the country.
The most significant blow on the climate front, however, would come from Vought’s proposal to reinstate Schedule F, a job classification that aims to convert at least 50,000 career civil servants to “at-will” political employees. (Trump used an executive order to implement Schedule F at the very end of his term; President Biden unimplemented it soon after taking office.) The employment classification ostensibly aims to make it easier to replace “rogue” or “woke” civil servants and would-be whistleblowers, a.k.a. “the deep state,” with party-line faithful. But in the words of Vought himself, Schedule F is also necessary because Biden’s “climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.”
The effects of such a decision, experts told me, could range from very bad to disastrous self-sabotage. Schedule F is “designed to be a tool to purge federal agencies of nonpartisan experts” and replace them with “partisan loyalists who would willingly follow any order without question, regardless of whether it was legal, constitutional, or the right thing to do for the people,” Joe Spielberger, the policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, an independent and nonpartisan watchdog group, told me. In practice, that might mean firing longtime civil servants perceived as not loyal enough, or even just “creating and perpetuating a climate of fear and intimidation where people are not able or willing to speak out when they see abuse of power and other corruption happening.”
Such a scenario is concerning for employees at agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who work on climate modeling. But the expertise of the U.S. civil service is broad and deep; Schedule F could impact everyone from the economists, lawyers, and engineers who work on something like the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards to the people who sit on the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee.
“Civil service positions are not classified as political appointees for a reason, which is so that staff, especially scientists, can do work that spans administrations because it is so fundamental to public health and welfare,” Chitra Kumar, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ managing director for climate and energy, told me in an email. The people made fireable under Schedule F, in other words, are the ones who actually know what is going on, whereas “elected officials come and go, often taking a year or more to understand the latest underlying science.”
Reimplementing and expanding Schedule F, however, is apparently one of Vought’s greatest ambitions. Earlier this year, the National Treasury Employees Union obtained documents via a Freedom of Information Act request that showed Vought’s intent to apply the status to much of OMB’s workforce in 2020. As justification for taking an implicit machete to his staff, Vought writes in Project 2025 that “it is the president’s agenda that should matter to the departments and agencies that operate under his constitutional authority,” but that instead, the U.S. civil service is “all too often … carrying out its own policy plans and preferences — or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”
Ann Carlson, the former acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and a professor of environmental law at UCLA, strongly refutes Vought’s claim. For one thing, she told me that the great irony of the Schedule F proposal is that it would make it more difficult for the Trump administration to carry out its goals in the long run.
“Part of the problem for a conservative administration is, if you want to roll back policies that are in place, you need people who know how to do that,” Carlson pointed out. She also bristled at the suggestion that civil servants are unable to check their biases at the door: Carlson’s team at NHTSA helped put together the Biden administration’s rules to strengthen fuel economy standards, but it also worked to roll back the Obama administration’s regulations and replaced them with the SAFE standards under Trump. “I don’t actually know, for most of them, which one they preferred,” Carlson said.
Carlson wasn’t the only former political appointee I spoke with who fiercely defended the integrity of her staff. Ron Sanders, a three-year Trump appointee, so vehemently opposed Schedule F when it was briefly implemented in 2020 that he resigned as chairman of the Federal Salary Council. Today, he represents a group of Republican former national security officials who are imploring Congress to find a middle ground between the current status quo and the extreme political loyalty demanded by Schedule F.
When I read Sanders the part of Vought’s Project 2025 chapter that calls for weeding out the “radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country,” he told me that such thinking is “myopic.” “This is potentially a Republican administration coming in and finding ‘Democrats’ in place,” Sanders said. “You could say the same thing about the Biden administration, but they knew better — they knew that senior career officials appointed in the Trump administration are still politically neutral. It just happened to be a matter of timing.”
It likewise struck me as curious that Vought would push so hard for a policy that would not only hamstring the Trump administration but might also allow future Democratic presidents to carry out purges of perceived conservative government operatives.
The Biden administration has made moves to prevent Schedule F from potentially returning under a different president. Still, Spielberger from the Project on Government Oversight told me that short of a legislative fix by Congress, such actions will only delay reimplementation of the policy by “a matter of months” should Trump be reelected. The damage to climate science from four years of Schedule F, however, could be drastic.
“What we’re going to end up with is an executive branch that’s just uninformed,” Daniel Farber, the director of the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley, stressed to me. Farber’s fear is not just that “a bunch of uninformed ideologues” would be running the show, but also that once government experts are kicked out, it will be difficult to replace them or entice them to return.
“Even after we go back to a Democratic president, you can’t wave a wand and get all those people back,” Farber said. In the first nine months of the Trump administration, for example, the EPA lost more than 700 employees — and that was due to poor morale and high turnover even without the threat of Schedule F.
Schedule F doesn’t just chase out climate-related experts from the government. It also accelerates the revolving door that allows anti-climate zealots actors in. Both the Heritage Foundation and Vought’s think tank, the Center for American Restoration, have taken money from Big Oil groups and executives. Trump has already made his own transactional assurances to the industry if it funds his return to the White House. Schedule F, meanwhile, would open up hundreds if not thousands of positions for unqualified political operatives — essentially creating a “spoils system” where the lines between government and private industry would blur more than they already do.
“Russ Vought is not the problem,” Witt, of Climate Power, told me. “The problem is Donald Trump: Donald and the GOP are bought out by Big Oil, and Vought and other bad actors are a cog in that machine.”
It’s a metaphor that works well for the federal government, too: What happens when you have 50,000 cogs, but the person you’ve deferred to run the machine has fired all the mechanics?
“You take out all that expertise, all the people who understand how the system works?” Carlson, the former NHTSA director, said. “Good luck to you.”
https://heatmap.news/politics/russ-vought-schedule-f
Four more US states pile on Apple as DoJ turns up antitrust heat
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Growing coalition joins federal fray, accusing iGiant of playing monopoly
Four more US states have jumped on the Department of Justice’s (DoJ) antitrust lawsuit against Apple.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/us_apple_antitrust_case/
You Could Write in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Former Portland Home Studio
date: 2024-06-12, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The Le Guin family has donated the science fiction novelist’s former house to be used for a new writers residency
See the Rare, 2,000-Pound Hoodwinker Sunfish That Washed Ashore in Oregon
date: 2024-06-12, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The species was only described in 2017 after “hiding in plain sight” for nearly three centuries
Stay Green Landscaping Firm Makes Lawn & Landscape Top 100
date: 2024-06-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Making Lawn & Landscape Magazine’s Top 100 List based on a company’s previous year’s revenue is no small feat, yet commercial landscaping design, build and maintenance company Stay Green keeps receiving this top industry honor year after year, placing this family-run business on the map in this nationwide competition.
Santa Barbara Foresters Suffer First Loss of the Season 2-0 to S.L.O. Blues
date: 2024-06-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Santa Barbara pitching allowed an opponent to score for the first time this season.
The post Santa Barbara Foresters Suffer First Loss of the Season 2-0 to S.L.O. Blues appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Framework open sources the 3D CAD design files for its modular 16 inch laptop
date: 2024-06-12, from: Liliputing
Framework makes laptops that feature a modular, repairable, and upgradeable design. All of the company’s laptops have motherboards that can be removed and replaced with newer models, as well as a modular port system that leverages USB-C connectors on the mainboard to let you decide which ports you want and where to put them. The […]
The post Framework open sources the 3D CAD design files for its modular 16 inch laptop appeared first on Liliputing.
Discovery of 4,000-Year-Old Structure in Greece Stumps Archaeologists and Threatens Major Airport Construction
date: 2024-06-12, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The mystifying Minoan structure, unearthed on a hilltop in Crete, is one of 35 newly announced archaeological finds in the area
Rivals and legal action cast shadows over Windows on Arm market
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Player MediaTek: Ready
The race for Arm-based Windows laptops could soon get interesting, as MediaTek is said to be preparing to enter the game, while the legal battle between Arm and Qualcomm could disrupt the latter’s products.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/windows_on_arm_market/
Celebrating failure
date: 2024-06-12, from: Manu - I write blog
<p>Biographies of great people, interviews with successful entrepreneurs, and podcast episodes with famous creators. The world doesn’t lack celebrations of greatness. It should be inspiring to hear from someone successful, it should motivate you to do more, to work harder, and to strive for greatness. But like many other good things in life, too much of it can be detrimental. You can ingest only so many success stories before starting to feel bad for not being one of them. It’s partly why social media mostly sucks. It’s performative. Everyone is showing the best parts of their lives while the shitty moments are kept private, away from public eyes.</p>Failure should be shared. Trying and failing at something should be celebrated. Not because of the failure itself but because that’s the only way to achieve something worthwhile. Failing is inevitable. Everyone has to go through it and confront it one way or another. It’s part of the process and it’s something we should be more upfront and open about it. And again, it should be celebrated.
Does anyone make a podcast with interviews with people who didn’t have success? To people who tried hard but ultimately failed? I’d love to listen to those stories.
<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>
https://manuelmoreale.com/@/page/Rk9hyuobQj7FEq1j
June 15: Super Pet Adoption Event at William S. Hart Regional Park
date: 2024-06-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control is pleased to announce the second Heart to Home Super Pet Adoption Event taking place at William S Hart Regional Park in Santa Clarita on June 15 from 10 a.m.-3 p.m
A Workplace Safety Board Bucked Gavin Newsom. Now He’s Shaking It Up
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The LAist
The governor’s office demoted the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board’s chairperson and removed another member who criticized the administration.
https://laist.com/news/politics/a-workplace-safety-board-bucked-gavin-newsom-now-hes-shaking-it-up
Lakita Lowe: Leading Space Commercialization Innovations and Fostering STEM Engagement
date: 2024-06-12, from: NASA breaking news
Lakita Lowe is at the forefront of space commercialization, seamlessly merging scientific expertise with visionary leadership to propel NASA’s commercial ambitions and ignite a passion for STEM in future generations. As a project integrator for NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program (CLDP), Lowe leverages her extensive background in scientific research and biomedical studies to […]
Quirky Circling Behavior in Mice Informs Research on Humans in Space
date: 2024-06-12, from: NASA breaking news
During the Rodent Research-1 (RR-1) mission flown to the ISS in 2014, videos that were taken to observe the mice revealed an unusual behavior that researchers are still working to understand. Young (16-week-old) but not old (32-week-old) mice engaged in a high level of ‘running’ behavior beginning within two weeks of launch (Sci Reports, 2019). Some […]
https://www.nasa.gov/general/quirky-circling-behavior-in-mice-aboard-the-iss/
A Solitary Sight
date: 2024-06-12, from: NASA breaking news
ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Andreas Mogensen snapped a photo of the waning gibbous moon from the International Space Station as it soared 260 miles above the Atlantic Ocean near the northeast coast of South America on Sept. 30, 2023. Waning gibbous is one of eight moon phases, occurring after the full moon. The Sun […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/a-solitary-sight/
Italian premier taps Pope Francis to warn G7 of AI disaster if ethics ignored
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Holy smokes, don’t screw this up
Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni and Pope Francis have joined forces to deliver a high-stakes warning to world leaders: Dive headfirst into AI without thinking about ethics, and you’re essentially inviting disaster.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/pope_g7_ai_warning/
SIROTA’S SIGNALS: America’s Biggest Ponzi Scheme
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Lever News
Plus, a simple fix for clean energy, how to save a half-trillion dollars, and banks repossessing wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs.
https://www.levernews.com/sirotas-signals-americas-biggest-ponzi-scheme/
African Elephants May Call Each Other by Name
date: 2024-06-12, from: Smithsonian Magazine
In a new study, a computer model was able to identify the recipient of an elephant’s call more than a quarter of the time, which scientists say is significantly greater than chance
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/african-elephants-may-call-each-other-by-name-180984521/
US Southern Baptists effort to enshrine ban on women pastors falls short
date: 2024-06-12, from: VOA News USA
US expands sanctions against Russia
date: 2024-06-12, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-expands-sanctions-against-russia/7653136.html
Adios, accountability: X to hide ‘likes’ for everyone this week
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Hello, blackmail: Posters can still see who liked their stuff even if it’s a secret from the rest of the digital town square
After making the option available for Premium users last year, the site formerly known as Twitter has decided to begin hiding everyone’s “likes” to “better protect your privacy.” …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/x_hides_likes/
Instagram Experiments With Injecting Pop Up Ads Into Your Friends’ Stories
date: 2024-06-12, from: 404 Media Group
Ads for a game called “Super Rumble” are popping up into Instagram users’ stories as Meta experiments with more invasive types of ads.
https://www.404media.co/instagram-experiments-with-injecting-pop-up-ads-into-your-friends-stories/
UCLA Appoints Julio Frenk, University Of Miami President, As New Chancellor
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The LAist
Frenk will lead one of the country’s most competitive public universities after a turbulent year.
https://laist.com/news/education/ucla-new-chancellor-julio-frenk-gene-block
ONEXPLAYER X1 handheld gaming PC now available with Ryzen 7 8840U (instead of Intel Meteor Lake)
date: 2024-06-12, from: Liliputing
When the ONEXPLAYER X1 handheld gaming PC first launched earlier this year, there were a few things that made it stand out in an increasingly crowded market. It has a 10.95 inch display, making it larger than most competitors. Its game controllers are detachable, letting you choose between several different operating modes. And it was powered by […]
The post ONEXPLAYER X1 handheld gaming PC now available with Ryzen 7 8840U (instead of Intel Meteor Lake) appeared first on Liliputing.
This Stash of Silver Coins Found in Germany Belonged to a Wealthy 17th-Century Mayor
date: 2024-06-12, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The collection includes pieces from surrounding regions, as well as Italy and the Spanish Netherlands
White House report dishes deets on all 11 major government breaches from 2023
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The MOVEit breach and ransomware weren’t kind to the Feds last year
The number of cybersecurity incidents reported by US federal agencies rose 9.9 percent year-on-year (YoY) in 2023 to a total of 32,211, per a new White House report, which also spilled the details on the most serious incidents suffered across the government.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/white_house_report/
Astronomers Discover Water Frost on Mars’ Tallest Volcanoes
date: 2024-06-12, from: Smithsonian Magazine
On early winter mornings, a thin layer of ice forms in craters atop the Red Planet’s towering peaks, near its equator, according to a new study
A sense of rebellion
date: 2024-06-12, from: Tilde.news
https://www.sense-of-rebellion.com
Jabra’s new true wireless earbuds will be its last consumer products
date: 2024-06-12, from: Liliputing
This week Jabra introduced its new Elite 10 Gen 2 and Elite 8 Active Gen 2 true wireless earbuds with improved noise cancellation, call performance, and spatial sound. Set to ship later this month, both sets of earbuds come with a new LE Audio smart case that basically acts as a Bluetooth LE Audio adapter: […]
The post Jabra’s new true wireless earbuds will be its last consumer products appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/jabras-new-true-wireless-earbuds-will-be-its-last-consumer-products/
Chinese electric car brands zapped by price surge as EU cranks tariffs
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Companies that cooperated with probe will be slightly less hard hit
The European Union is set to raise tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles, saying they benefit from “unfair subsidization” from the Chinese government.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/eu_chinese_ev_tariffs/
This $6 adapter gives the Raspberry Pi 5 two full-sized HDMI ports
date: 2024-06-12, from: Liliputing
The Raspberry Pi 5 is a credit card-sized computer with a 2.4 GHz ARM Cortex-A76 quad-core processor, up to 8GB of LPDDR4x-4267 RAM, support for microSD cards or PCIe NVMe storage (the latter requires an adapter) and full-sized USB and Gigabit Ethernet ports. It also supports up to two 4K displays thanks to a pair […]
The post This $6 adapter gives the Raspberry Pi 5 two full-sized HDMI ports appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/this-6-adapter-gives-the-raspberry-pi-5-two-full-sized-hdmi-ports/
SAP customers may struggle to escape ECC before support shutters if they don’t start now
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
User group warns of systems integrator and consultant shortage to make herculean shift to S4/HANA
Global ERP giant SAP has set a deadline of 2027 to get off its ECC ERP system before mainstream support ends. But representatives of German-speaking users fear a significant number will fail to meet the 2030 cut-off when extended support ends.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/sap_ecc_support_deadline/
US inflation cooled in May in sign that price pressures may be easing
date: 2024-06-12, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — Inflation in the United States eased in May for a second straight month, a hopeful sign that a pickup in prices that occurred early this year may have passed. The trend, if it holds, could move the Federal Reserve closer to cutting its benchmark interest rate from its 23-year peak.
Consumer prices excluding volatile food and energy costs — the closely watched “core” index — rose 0.2% from April to May, the government said Wednesday. That was down from 0.3% the previous month and was the smallest increase since October. Measured from a year earlier, core prices rose 3.4%, below last month’s 3.6% increase.
Fed officials are scrutinizing each month’s inflation data to assess their progress in their fight against rising prices. Even as overall inflation moderates, such necessities as groceries, rent and health care are much pricier than they were three years ago — a continuing source of public discontent and a political threat to President Joe Biden’s re-election bid. Most other measures suggest that the economy is healthy: Unemployment remains low, hiring is robust and consumers are traveling, eating out and spending on entertainment.
Overall inflation also slowed last month, with consumer prices unchanged from April to May, in part because of sharp falls in the cost of gasoline, air fares and new cars. Measured from a year earlier, consumer prices rose 3.3%, less than the 3.6% increase a month earlier.
The cost of auto insurance, which has soared in recent months, actually dipped from April to May, though it’s still up more than 20% from a year earlier. Grocery prices were unchanged last month, after declining slightly in April. They’re now up just 1% on a year-over-year basis.
The Fed has kept its key rate unchanged for nearly a year after having rapidly raised it in 2022 and 2023 to fight the worst bout of inflation in four decades. Those higher rates have led, in turn, to more expensive mortgages, auto loans, credit cards and other forms of consumer and business borrowing. Though inflation is now far below its peak of 9.1% in mid-2022, it remains above the Fed’s target level.
Persistently elevated inflation has posed a vexing challenge for the Fed, which raises interest rates — or keeps them high — to try to slow borrowing and spending, cool the economy and ease the pace of price increases.
The longer the Fed keeps borrowing costs high, the more it risks weakening the economy too much and causing a recession. Yet if it cuts rates too soon, it risks reigniting inflation. Most of the policymakers have said they think their rate policies are slowing growth and should curb inflation over time.
Inflation had fallen steadily in the second half of last year, raising hopes that the Fed could pull off a “soft landing,” whereby it manages to conquer inflation through higher interest rates without causing a recession. Such an outcome is difficult and rare.
But inflation came in unexpectedly high in the first three months of this year, delaying hoped-for Fed rate cuts and possibly imperiling a soft landing.
In early May, Chair Jerome Powell said the central bank needed more confidence that inflation was returning to its target before it would reduce its benchmark rate. Several Fed officials have said in recent weeks that they needed to see several consecutive months of lower inflation.
Some signs suggest that inflation will continue to cool in the coming months. Americans, particularly lower-income households, are pulling back on their spending. In response, several major retail and restaurant chains, including Walmart, Target, Walgreen’s, McDonald’s and Burger King, have responded by announcing price cuts or deals.
Jerry West, 3-time Hall of Famer and NBA logo figure, dies at 86
date: 2024-06-12, from: VOA News USA
Biden and Trump at odds over gun control
date: 2024-06-12, from: VOA News USA
In this U.S. presidential campaign, guns continue to divide Americans. President Joe Biden wants a ban on assault weapons. His opponent Donald Trump says Biden is threatening the constitutional rights of gun owners. VOA Correspondent Scott Stearns reports, the president spoke about guns on a day when his son was convicted of lying about his drug use to illegally buy a gun.
https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-and-trump-at-odds-over-gun-control-/7652903.html
What causes inflation? Economists and the public disagree
date: 2024-06-12, from: Marketplace Morning Report
The general public doesn’t always see eye-to-eye with economists on why inflation happens or on how to fight it, a new survey finds. We’ll unpack. Plus, a resilient U.S. economy lifts global economic outlook. And later: The Federal Reserve is expected to leave interest rates unchanged today. But let’s revisit the ’70s and ’80s, when the Fed was battling double-digit inflation and didn’t have the luxury of patiently holding interest rates steady.
A Question About Disputed South China Sea Sends Perplexity AI Into a Sanitized Infinite Loop
date: 2024-06-12, from: 404 Media Group
The answer shows a conversation between a “human” and an “AI” about the proper way to answer a sensitive question.
https://www.404media.co/perplexity-malfunction-reveals-ai-answer-about-south-china-sea-is-sanitized/
California’s top wages only buy 61% of typical home
date: 2024-06-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
And in California this pay is third-highest in the nation at $93,250.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/06/12/higher-california-wages-only-buy-61-of-typical-home/
China’s FortiGate attacks more extensive than first thought
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Dutch intelligence says at least 20,000 firewalls pwned in just a few months
The Netherlands’ cybersecurity agency (NCSC) says the previously reported attack on the country’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) was far more extensive than previously thought.…
NASA’s Roman Mission Gets Cosmic ‘Sneak Peek’ From Supercomputers
date: 2024-06-12, from: NASA breaking news
Researchers are diving into a synthetic universe to help us better understand the real one. Using supercomputers at the U.S. DOE’s (Department of Energy’s) Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, scientists have created nearly 4 million simulated images depicting the cosmos as NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, jointly funded […]
Jerry West dies; Basketball Hall of Famer, model for NBA logo
date: 2024-06-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
West, nicknamed “Mr. Clutch” for his late-game exploits as a player, went into the Hall of Fame as a player in 1980 and again as a member of the 1960 U.S. Olympic Team.
Hundreds of affordable homes may sprout on empty San Jose lot after loan deal
date: 2024-06-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Hundreds of affordable homes could sprout on an empty lot in San Jose.
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-06-12, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
And now Gnome does a cameo at Apple’s WWDC, you must see it to believe it!
Part of this great and concise video:
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2024/10184/
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112603953776125289
UK CMA says public sector will be in cloud services probe after all
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Nothing is as juicy as a nice fat tender, amirite tech giants?
Britain’s competition watchdog says it is including the public sector in its investigation into the UK cloud services market, following earlier claims that this area could be overlooked.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/uk_cma_says_public_sector/
Quick Cook: Endive, gorgonzola and apricots combine for a stunning salad
date: 2024-06-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Take a break from regular salad greens which this gorgeous salad
Taste-Off: The primo pickled peppers — and the bad ones
date: 2024-06-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
We taste-tested 10 varieties of pickled peppers – primarily pepperoncini and banana peppers – available at local markets to find the ones worth buying and the ones best avoided.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/06/12/taste-off-the-primo-pickled-peppers-and-the-bad-ones/
Computation Is All Around Us, and You Can See It if You Try
date: 2024-06-12, from: Quanta Magazine
Computer scientist Lance Fortnow writes that by embracing the computations that surround us, we can begin to understand and tame our seemingly random world.The post Computation Is All Around Us, and You Can See It if You Try first appeared on Quanta Magazine
https://www.quantamagazine.org/computation-is-all-around-us-and-you-can-see-it-if-you-try-20240612/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-12, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Is this the user experience writers want from WordPress?
https://x.com/davewiner/status/1800879295063003367
‘Save the Ridge’ battle could finally be settled in Contra Costa County
date: 2024-06-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
The Faria/Southwest Hills Project aims to construct up to 1,500 new single-family homes concentrated around the Los Medanos Ridgeline in Pittsburg.
One Bay Area county is falling behind on preparing high school grads for public university
date: 2024-06-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Search for any public Bay Area high school in the interactive table to see the percentage of graduates who meet UC and CSU requirements.
We Need to Talk About Nitrous Oxide
date: 2024-06-12, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Temperatures in northern China will top 107 degrees Fahrenheit today • Months-long water shortages have sparked riots in Algeria • Unseasonably cold and wet weather is being blamed for stunted economic growth in the U.K.
THE TOP FIVE
- Torrential rains flood southern Florida
More than 7 million people are under flood advisories in Florida, with a tropical storm stalled over the state at least through Friday. Flooding was reported across the southern part of Florida including Fort Myers, Miami, and even farther north. In Sarasota, just south of Tampa, nearly four inches of rain fell in an hour, a new record for the area, with total rainfall reaching about 10 inches on Tuesday. The downpour was a one-in-1,000-year event. “The steadiest and heaviest rain will fall on South and central Florida through Thursday, but more spotty downpours and thunderstorms will continue to pester the region into Saturday,” AccuWeather senior meteorologist Reneé Duff said.
X/
- Report: New hydropower installations see ‘downward trend’
There has been a “downward trend” in global hydropower output over the last five years, according to the International Hydropower Association’s new 2024 World Hydropower Outlook. Hydropower is the largest renewable source of electricity, according to the International Energy Agency. It generates more electricity than all other renewable technologies combined, and plays a key role in the energy transition. But hydropower installations must double to meet net zero goals by 2050. The IEA has also projected that “without major policy changes, global hydropower expansion is expected to slow down this decade.” That may already be happening:
International
Hydropower Association
The report estimates that investment needs to double – to $130 billion per year – in order to double installed hydropower capacity by 2050.
- N20 emissions rise, but HCFC levels fall
Nitrous oxide doesn’t get as much attention as carbon dioxide or methane, but it should: This greenhouse gas is more potent than both, depletes the ozone, and is the third largest contributor to climate change, according to Carbon Brief. A new study published in the journal Earth System Science Data finds that human-caused N20 emissions rose by 40% over the past 40 years, and that most of this increase was driven by the use of nitrogen fertilizer and manure in agriculture to meet growing demand for meat and dairy. Agriculture emissions of N20 were 67% higher in 2020 than they were in 1980. The concentration of N20 in the atmosphere is now 25% higher than in pre-industrial years. “The unfettered increase in a greenhouse gas with a global warming potential approximately 300 times larger than carbon dioxide, presents dire consequences for the planet,” the researchers said in a press release.
But it’s not all bad news. A separate study out this week finds that atmospheric levels of ozone-depleting greenhouse gases called hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) peaked in 2021 – five years ahead of schedule – and are declining faster than expected.
- Latest talks on climate finance goals end in stalemate
UN climate finance talks in Bonn, Germany, ended on a sour note yesterday, “with negotiators from developing and developed countries blaming each other in fiery exchanges,” according to Climate Home News. The discussions were a lead-up to November’s COP29 in Azerbaijan, where countries are expected to put forward a new annual finance goal for helping vulnerable countries protect themselves from climate change and shift to clean energy. The current target, set in 2009, sits at $100 billion annually. Boosting this fund is seen as “the most important decision” expected to come out of this year’s climate summit. But so far, there has been little progress. Rich countries only managed to meet the existing $100 billion annual pledge in 2022, two years late.
- Rising sea levels threaten Greek island known as mythological
birthplace of Apollo
One of the most important sites in Greek and Roman mythology is sinking into the sea as climate change causes water levels to rise. The tiny abandoned Greek island of Delos, in the Aegean Sea, was first settled in the third millennium BC and was once a busy port city with 30,000 occupants. In Greek mythology, it was the birthplace of Apollo and his sister Artemis. Today it is dotted with 2,000-year-old archaeological ruins and has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1990. But sea levels around the island have risen 66 feet in just 10 years, and archaeologists told AFP the ruins will disappear entirely in about 50 years, eaten away by encroaching sea water and rising temperatures.
Ruins
on
DelosChloé
Chavanon via
Unsplash
THE KICKER
Joey Chestnut, the 16-time winner of Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island, has been banned from the competition this year because he struck a deal with plant-based food company Impossible Foods.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this articles mistakenly referred to nitrous oxide as N02 instead of N20. It has been corrected. We regret the error.
https://heatmap.news/climate/nitrous-oxide-hydropower-florida-flood
NHL Draft: Will the Sharks address a need at No. 14? Grier offers a small hint
date: 2024-06-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
After taking Macklin Celebrini at No. 1, what will the San Jose Sharks do at Nos. 14, 33 and 42?
Catapult Shots Fired During 13th-Century Siege Unearthed at British Castle
date: 2024-06-12, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Found on the grounds of Kenilworth Castle, the eight stones were used during a clash between rebels and royal forces in 1266
Payoff from AI projects is ‘dismal’, biz leaders complain
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
No wonder most orgs are slowing their spending
Businesses have become more cautious about investing in artificial intelligence tools due to concerns about cost, data security, and safety, according to a study conducted by Lucidworks, a provider of e-commerce search and customer service applications.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/survey_ai_projects/
Podcast: Hacking the Adderall Shortage
date: 2024-06-12, from: 404 Media Group
People in the U.S. are outsourcing the hunt for Adderall to people in the Philippines; an Apple AirTag stalking case; and the Gateway Pundit’s (alleged) bankruptcy.
https://www.404media.co/404-media-podcast-hacking-the-adderall-shortage/
NASA Supports California Students Aiming to Advance Technology
date: 2024-06-12, from: NASA breaking news
Students from a minority-serving university in California are helping solve challenges of autonomous systems for future drone operations on Earth and other planets. These students are making the most of opportunities with NASA, the U.S. Department of Defense, and industry, focusing on autopilot development and advanced systems that adapt and evolve. Students from California State […]
Analysts see closer US-Indonesia ties under incoming president
date: 2024-06-12, from: VOA News USA
Indonesia’s Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto is set to be sworn in as the country’s next president in October, after having resoundingly won elections in February. VOA’s Virginia Gunawan reports on what this means for U.S. relations with Southeast Asia’s largest country. Ahadian Utama, Hafizh Sahadeva contributed to this report
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-12, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
AI Bot Runs for Mayor in Wyoming.
https://politicalwire.com/2024/06/12/ai-bot-runs-for-mayor/
An Age of Hyperabundance
date: 2024-06-12, from: Tilde.news
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-47/essays/an-age-of-hyperabundance/
These wrongly arrested Black men say a California bill would let police misuse face recognition
date: 2024-06-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Three men falsely arrested based on face recognition technology have joined the fight against a California bill that aims to place guardrails around police use of the technology. They say it will still allow abuses and misguided arrests.
Walters: California restaurants seek exemption from new hidden fees law
date: 2024-06-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
State bill would not ‘enhance consumer protection,’ but instead allow restaurants to resume bait-and-switch tactics.
Microsoft sued by ParTec in Texas over AI supercomputer patents
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
German HPC outfit asks for damages, injunction that would see Azure AI shut down
Microsoft is facing legal action from German HPC vendor ParTec over claims of patent infringement relating to technology used in putting together AI supercomputers.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/microsoft_sued_by_partec/
Oracle’s Netravalkar relishes big cricket moment as U.S. faces India, his country of birth
date: 2024-06-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Netravalkar and his U.S. teammates already completed one of the biggest upsets in the history of the sport when they stunned Pakistan in its second match of the month-long international tournament.
Hacker Accesses Internal ‘Tile’ Tool That Provides Location Data to Cops
date: 2024-06-12, from: 404 Media Group
A hacker broke into systems used by Tile, the tracking company, then stole a wealth of customer data and had access to internal company tools.
https://www.404media.co/hacker-accesses-internal-tile-tool-that-provides-location-data-to-cops/
California’s Transitional Kindergarten Expansion Creates Big Choices For Parents
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The LAist
As California moves toward its goal of serving more than 300,000 students by the fall of 2025, the success of universal TK will largely depend on parents buying into the program.
Single family residence sells for $2.6 million in Fremont
date: 2024-06-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
A house located in the 41600 block of Joyce Avenue in Fremont has new owners. The 1,670-square-foot property, built in 1960, was sold on April 25, 2024.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/06/12/single-family-residence-sells-for-2-6-million-in-fremont-2/
Tesla’s Autopilot false advertising tussle with California DMV must go to trial
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
At stake: Carmaker’s licenses to make and sell motor vehicles in golden state
A California judge has rejected Tesla’s bid to dismiss claims that the self-driving capabilities of its vehicles were overstated.…
Jobs IRL: Georgia bets big on EVs, and Savannahians
date: 2024-06-12, from: Marketplace Morning Report
It’s been called the largest economic development project in Georgia’s history. And it’s massive — six times the size of Disneyland. When Hyundai’s Metaplant comes online, it will pump out up to 300,000 electric vehicles per year, plus batteries. Jobs at the plant will pay more than the area average, and job training will be free of charge. We’ll hear more. Also on the program: banishing medical debt from credit reports.
Retired Army Capt. Sam Brown overcomes crowded GOP Senate primary field, setting up key Nevada race
date: 2024-06-12, from: VOA News USA
AMD’s DC chief happy to work with Intel and others to chip away at Nvidia’s AI empire
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
‘If everybody’s got their own little ecosystem, it’s very inefficient’
AMD and Intel have been rivals for decades, but there’s at least one thing they can agree on: they have a common enemy in Nvidia. And the enemy of your enemy can be your friend.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/amd_intel_nvidia/
The EU imposes tariffs on Chinese EVs
date: 2024-06-12, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: The European Commission will add tariffs to electric vehicles coming into the European Union from China, and China’s not too happy about it. Then, the World Health Organization (WHO) has blamed major industries — tobacco, ultra-processed foods, fossil fuels and alcohol — for 2.7 million deaths a year in Europe. Also: news on bread in Egypt and spicy ramen noodles in Denmark.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/the-eu-imposes-tariffs-on-chinese-evs
US Rep. Nancy Mace overcomes McCarthy-backed challenger to win Republican primary in South Carolina
date: 2024-06-12, from: VOA News USA
COLUMBIA, S.C. — U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace has won the Republican nomination after a tumultuous second term in South Carolina that saw her go from a critic to an ally of former President Donald Trump and make headlines for plenty of things off the House floor.
Mace defeated challengers Catherine Templeton and Bill Young in voting that ended Tuesday. She will face a Democratic opponent in the general election in the 1st District, which is the closest thing South Carolina has to a swing district in the Republican-dominated state.
Trump’s endorsement — after he called her crazy and terrible in 2022 — is just one of many ways Mace has attracted a spotlight far greater than a typical second-term member of Congress.
She’s a regular on interview shows, often antagonizing the hosts. She calls for her party to moderate on abortion and marijuana but joined seven of the farthest right members to oust former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
McCarthy threw his weight against Mace and the other defectors. His political action committee gave a $10,000 contribution to Templeton, and the American Prosperity Alliance, where a McCarthy ally serves as a senior adviser, donated to a group called South Carolina Patriots PAC, which spent more than $2.1 million against Mace.
Mace has said her positions and beliefs aren’t erratic — she is just reflecting the values of the 1st District, which stretches from the centuries-old neighborhoods of Charleston down the coast to Beaufort County’s booming freshly built neighborhoods of retirees moving to South Carolina from somewhere else.
Mace, the first woman to graduate from South Carolina’s military academy The Citadel, thanked her voters for tuning out the “senseless noise” from her opponents and realizing she is unafraid to stand up to powerful people.
“When you are the first woman to sit in The Citadel’s barber chair to get all of your hair chopped off, you don’t get your feelings hurt when you don’t get invited to the fancy cocktail parties in Washington, D.C.,” Mace said. “While sometimes I may be a caucus of one, I’m not alone because I’m not there for me — I’m there for each and every one of you.”
Mace’s opponents argued that by seeming to land everywhere on issues, Mace is nowhere.
Templeton ran South Carolina’s health and environmental agency to some angst a decade ago and in her only political race finished third in the 2018 GOP gubernatorial primary won by Gov. Henry McMaster. Young is a Marine veteran and financial planner.
Templeton didn’t mention Mace’s name, but asked Tuesday for her voters to keep backing Republicans.
“I think it is safe to say everybody in here has the conservative values that we share, and in November we are all going to stand behind our president and we are all going to join together to support the Republican Party,” Templeton said.
In the Democratic primary, businessman and former International African American Museum CEO Michael Moore defeated Mac Deford, a Citadel graduate and lawyer for a couple of the larger bedroom communities in the district.
South Carolina lawmakers drew the district to be more Republican after the seat flipped for one term in 2018. The 1st District was the only congressional district won by Nikki Haley over Trump in the 2024 South Carolina Republican presidential primary.
4th District
For the second election in a row, U.S. Rep. William Timmons has fought off a spirited challenge in the Republican primary.
Timmons defeated state Rep. Adam Morgan, the leader of the state House Freedom Caucus who argued Timmons was too liberal.
Timmons’ divorce — and a widely shared Instagram post by a husband who said Timmons had an affair with his wife — complicated his reelection bid. Timmons has denied the allegations.
Timmons has Trump’s endorsement as he seeks a fourth term in the district anchored by Greenville and Spartanburg.
Timmons was not in his district Tuesday night, instead staying in Washington, where Republicans only have a two vote majority in the U.S. House.
He said he was thankful his voters recognized his strong conservative record and saw through the “countless lies” from his opponent.
“In Washington I am focused on policy not headlines, on representing my constituents not myself, and working with my colleagues instead of working against them,” Timmons said in a statement on social media.
In November’s general election, Timmons will face Democrat Kathryn Harvey, who helps nonprofit organizations with marketing, fundraising and leadership, and Constitutional Party candidate Mark Hackett.
3rd District
South Carolina’s 3rd District is open after Republican Rep. Jeff Duncan decided not to run again after seven terms. Duncan’s wife of 35 years filed for divorce in 2023, accusing him of several affairs.
The Republican nomination is going to a runoff between a candidate endorsed by Trump and another endorsed by his good friend McMaster.
Mark Burns is a Black pastor who has backed Trump since before his first race for president and made it to the runoff after losing twice before in the GOP primary in the neighboring 4th District.
His opponent is nurse practitioner Sheri Biggs, who along with her husband have been faithful contributors and friends of McMaster for years.
They defeated five other candidates including South Carolina Rep. Stewart Jones and Kevin Bishop, who handled communications for U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham for more than two decades.
Sherwin-Williams paint store manager Byron Best from Greenwood won the Democratic nomination in the 3rd District.
Other races
The only other U.S. House incumbent facing a primary challenger is Republican Rep. Joe Wilson who won the party’s nomination as he seeks a 12th full term in the 2nd District, which stretches from suburban areas around Columbia west and south toward Aiken.
Wilson will face David Robinson II. The U.S. Army veteran who enlisted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and is an advocate for missing people after his son disappeared in the desert in Arizona won the Democratic primary.
Attorney Duke Buckner won the Republican 6th District primary and will face Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, who is seeking a 17th term in the state’s majority-minority district that is bounded by areas around Charleston, Beaufort and Columbia.
In the 7th District Democratic primary, teacher Mal Hyman, who calls himself an independent Democrat, faces Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom veteran Daryl Scott. The winner takes on Republican U.S. Rep. Russel Fry, who is seeking a second term in the district that stretches from Myrtle Beach to Florence in the northeast part of the state.
Juneteenth: The First Commemoration of Abolition
date: 2024-06-12, from: National Archives, Pieces of History blog
June 19th, or “Juneteenth,” is the oldest known celebration commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. Today’s post, looking at the history of the federal holiday, comes from Saba Samy, an intern at the National Archives in Washington, DC. On September 17, 1862, the United States Civil War reached a gruesome peak with … Continue reading Juneteenth: The First Commemoration of Abolition
https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2024/06/12/juneteenth-the-first-commemoration-of-abolition/
Space health shocker: Astronauts return mostly fine
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Largest ever study reveals some of the effects on human body aren’t as bad as thought, but work needs to be done
Scientists have dumped a mountainous cache of research papers on the unsuspecting public in what amounts to the largest collective study of the effects of space travel on human health.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/space_travel_not_too_bad_for_you/
K8s celebrates KuberTENes: A decade of working together
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Give yourselves a pat on the back - all 88,000 of you
In 2014, Google released Kubernetes, an open source cluster management system that takes its name from the Greek word for “helmsman” or “pilot.”…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/kubertenes_decade_anniversary/
How to Fix Electricity Bills in America
date: 2024-06-12, from: Heatmap News
Have you looked at your power bill — like, really looked at it? If you’re anything like Rob, you pay whatever number appears at the bottom every month and drop it in the recycling. But how everyone’s power bill is calculated — in wonk terms, the “electricity rate design” — turns out to be surprisingly important and could be a big driver of decarbonization.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk about why power bills matter, how Jesse would design electricity rates if he was king of the world, and how to fix rooftop solar in America. This is the finale of our recent series of episodes on rooftop solar and rate design. If you’d like to catch up, you can listen to our previous episodes featuring Sunrun CEO Mary Powell, the University of California, Berkeley’s Severin Borenstein, and Heatmap’s own Emily Pontecorvo.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add
the
show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: There’s other issues we could talk about electricity rate design, and I want to come back to them in a second. But let’s say you were made Grand Vizier of all public utility commissions across the country. How would you fix this? Like, what do we need to do?
Jesse Jenkins: I think there’s basically two options that we have, here — and this is, you know, a reflection of the fact that there is no one unified electricity market structure in the U.S. We have a bunch of different ways that we do things. And so I’ll just sketch two kind of classic examples of that. There are lots of little gradations in between.
One is a kind of traditional regulated market where you get your power from a regulated or publicly owned utility, like a municipal utility, or a rural utility district, or an investor-owned utility. It’s regulated by the state, and you buy power at whatever the regulated rate is. And so, if that’s the case, we need to get those rates right. And by that I mean: There are multiple things you’re paying for when you’re paying for your bill. You’re paying for the actual energy you’re consuming, and that is a kind of volumetric thing — you know, you should pay more the more you consume, all else equal.
But the interesting feature of electricity pricing is that it varies from hour to hour because of the fact that demand is changing all the time and renewable energy availability is changing all the time. And so the actual marginal cost of generating electricity depends on this intersection of how much you demand and what the available supply is. And if you have a lot of cheap renewables, for example, flooding the grid, that price could be very low. It could even be zero — when you’re curtailing solar or wind, you have excess free power, effectively. And at other times it can be very expensive when you’re running diesel generators or inefficient gas turbines to meet this sort of peak demand requirements. Electricity prices could be several hundred dollars a megawatt-hour.
And so we have a very wide range of pricing and we don’t communicate that at all to people today. And I think we have to restore that, in some way — to let people understand that if you consume more energy during the middle of the day when there’s lots of solar available, even if you don’t have solar on your roof, it’s coming from your neighbor or utility-scale solar farm far away, that’s the cheapest, best time to consume electricity. And if you’re consuming when fossil power plants are producing expensive power, you should think about how to reduce that consumption. So it’s really important that we get that kind of time dynamic rate right for the energy component.
Robinson Meyer: So you would expose people to prices. I mean, that’s kind of your basic answer is that you would expose people to these time-of-day prices even if — and I just want to be clear, here. You’re talking about folks who live in Washington, D.C., who live in New York, who live in Philadelphia, who live in San Francisco, who live in Atlanta …
Jesse Jenkins: All over. Yeah, everywhere.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by…
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
https://heatmap.news/podcast/shift-key-episode-19-fix-electricity-bills
Blinken: Hamas has proposed unworkable changes to cease-fire deal
date: 2024-06-12, from: VOA News USA
This roof-mounted Raspberry Pi tracks flights and photographs the aurora borealis
date: 2024-06-12, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
An Alaska-based maker sees your flight tracker and raises you with a two-for-one: a flight-tracking, aurora borealis-photographing, roof-mounted setup.
The post This roof-mounted Raspberry Pi tracks flights and photographs the aurora borealis appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Annette Lucas | Wiley-Calgrove 2006 and Now
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Signal
In 2006, The Commons project from Monteverde Development was presented to city staff but withdrawn by Monteverde before any formal plans were submitted to the city. In this proposed project […]
The post Annette Lucas | Wiley-Calgrove 2006 and Now appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/annette-lucas-wiley-calgrove-2006-and-now/
Arthur Saginian | Just Missing a Bibliography
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Signal
With regards to Mr. David Smith of Santa Clarita (letters, May 14), I recently ran into a childhood neighbor friend of mine at the Lowes on Bouquet Canyon Road. He […]
The post Arthur Saginian | Just Missing a Bibliography appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/arthur-saginian-just-missing-a-bibliography/
Kyndryl and Apollo Global linked to bid for DXC Technology
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Creating economies of scale by merging ever-shrinking infrastructure services businesses
DXC Technology, the beleaguered tech services provider that emerged from the alliance between HPE Enterprise Services and CSC then lost billions in revenue, is again reportedly the subject of takeover talks.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/kyndryl_apollo_global_dxc/
Christopher Lucero | Laying Blame for the Stench
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Signal
Chiquita Canyon. After a couple years of record precipitation, rainwater percolated through the soil. Then, bacteria and other thirsty microbes metabolized the waste and their metabolic processes warmed up the […]
The post Christopher Lucero | Laying Blame for the Stench appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/christopher-lucero-laying-blame-for-the-stench/
The Savvy Senior | Long-Term Care Benefits for Veterans and Surviving Spouses
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Signal
Dear Savvy Senior, I understand that the Veterans Administration has a benefit that can help veterans and spouses with long-term care costs. We recently had to move my elderly […]
The post The Savvy Senior | Long-Term Care Benefits for Veterans and Surviving Spouses appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
Christine Flowers | Hunter’s Verdict Should Thrill Gun Control Advocates
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Signal
There is so much concern for the tender sensitivities of a former drug addict from Delaware. It’s incredibly touching how the media, and Joe Biden supporters, are rallying around a […]
The post Christine Flowers | Hunter’s Verdict Should Thrill Gun Control Advocates appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/christine-flowers-hunters-verdict-should-thrill-gun-control-advocates/
Mistral AI raises $644M, hits $6.2B in valuation
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
French firm has nearly tripled in value since beginning of the year
France’s Mistral AI drew €600 million ($640 million, £510 million) in its latest funding round, bringing its valuation to €5.8 billion ($6.2 billion, £4.9 billion).…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/mistral_ai_funding/
Classifieds – June 12, 2024
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The Daily Trojan features Classified advertising in each day’s edition. Here you can read, search, and even print out each day’s edition of the Classifieds.
The post Classifieds – June 12, 2024 appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/12/classifieds-june-12-2024/
Today in SCV History (June 12)
date: 2024-06-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1868 – Ravenna post office (one “n”) established in Soledad Canyon. [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-june-12/
DJ creates community with music in Signal Hill
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Arron Herrera promotes music and good cheer to Hilltop Park every Sunday.
The post DJ creates community with music in Signal Hill appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/12/dj-creates-community-with-music-in-signal-hill/
Structured obedience fuels the violence against Gazans
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Learned conformity has allowed atrocities against Palestine to keep occuring.
The post Structured obedience fuels the violence against Gazans appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/12/structured-obedience-fuels-the-violence-against-gazans/
The ascent of Noah Roberts
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
After facing early adversity, the redshirt freshman is a future star for the Trojans.
The post The ascent of Noah Roberts appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/12/the-ascent-of-noah-roberts/
Student Health shares advice for practicing healthy sleep, nutrition
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Practicing mindfulness can improve physical and emotional health, Student Health said.
The post Student Health shares advice for practicing healthy sleep, nutrition appeared first on Daily Trojan.
Rocco’s Revival
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Anaheim native Rocco Grimaldi is building a magical second act of his hockey career.
The post Rocco’s Revival appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/12/roccos-revival/
Moving away from people taught me to value time with myself
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
We are constantly around friends in college, so a solo summer was very daunting.
The post Moving away from people taught me to value time with myself appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/12/moving-away-from-people-taught-me-to-value-time-with-myself/
University releases preliminary culture survey results
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Respondents rated the University highest in “Excellence” and lowest in “Open Communication” and “Accountability.”
The post University releases preliminary culture survey results appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/12/university-releases-preliminary-culture-survey-results/
Daily Trojan A&E staff predicts the 77th Tony Awards
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The prestigious Broadway awards will take place on June 16 in New York City.
The post Daily Trojan A&E staff predicts the 77th Tony Awards appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/12/daily-trojan-ae-staff-predicts-the-77th-tony-awards/
Keck workers hold informational picket
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Workers called attention to the ongoing contract negotiations between the University and the Keck National Union of Healthcare Workers group, which have been unfolding for the past four months.
The post Keck workers hold informational picket appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/12/keck-workers-hold-informational-picket/
Microsoft’s Recall should be celebrated as the savior of SMEs and scourge of CEOs
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Small businesses have seldom had the chance to understand how they work. A history of PC use makes it possible
Column A year and a half into the explosion of AI fueled by ChatGPT, the hype and fear of missing out has begun to thin just enough to make out the shape of two starkly different visions for AI: one that imagines using it to replace people and the other that wants AI to enhance people.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/microsoft_recall_sme_benefits/
Advania acquires Servium as part of IT services outfit expansion plans
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
CEO tells The Reg about plumping the portfolio and AI
Exclusive IT services biz Advania is buying UK IT solutions provider reseller Servium as it continues to bulk out ops.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/advania_acquires_servium/
Microsoft extends Azure into Oracle cloud to satisfy OpenAI
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Big Red has also cuddled up to Google’s cloud and made the transition to high-growth off-prem business
Oracle has revealed its cloud will be used by Microsoft to run workloads for OpenAI.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/oracle_q4_2024/
UAE minister says US fears over Middle East becoming an AI proxy for China are valid
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
But we’re America’s friends, insists Omar Al Olama
Fears that China could be using Middle East countries as a proxy to overcome US sanctions on machine learning accelerators are justifiable, according to the United Arab Emirates minister of AI and digital economy.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/uae_us_china_ai/
Beijing wants more outfits like Temu teeming around the world
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Calls for massive cross-border e-commerce expansion at home and abroad
China’s Ministry of Commerce has issued a policy calling for massive expansion of the nation’s cross-border e-commerce industry.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/china_ecommerce_expansion_policy/
US House committee report finds Wall Street colluded to curb emissions
date: 2024-06-12, from: VOA News USA
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-12, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Alito Slams ProPublica's Reporting on Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court.
Elon Musk ends OpenAI lawsuit without explaining why
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Court docs suggest this matter could have run for years
Elon Musk has aborted his legal action against OpenAI.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/musk_vs_openai_case_ended/
Aug. 2-11: ‘Eye Candy’ at SCAA Gallery in Old Town Newhall
date: 2024-06-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Three award winning local Santa Clarita Valley artists, Harriette Knight, Patty Haft and Georgette Arison invite the public to an opening reception of a visually stimulating art show called “Eye Candy” on Saturday, Aug. 3, from 5-8 p.m. at the Santa Clarita Artists Association Gallery in Old Town Newhall
https://scvnews.com/aug-2-11-eye-candy-at-scaa-gallery-in-old-town-newhall/
Residents say historic Mentryville property in need of some TLC
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Signal
A historic area off Pico Canyon Road known as Mentryville represents a town that sprouted up after “black gold” began pouring out of the ground in 1876. The first commercially […]
The post Residents say historic Mentryville property in need of some TLC appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/residents-say-historic-mentryville-property-in-need-of-some-tlc/
Vigil held at Fair Oaks Park for man killed in shooting
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Signal
Community members gathered Sunday evening at Fair Oaks Park to mourn the life of a 20-year-old man who was killed in a June 2 shooting in Los Angeles. Medical examiners […]
The post Vigil held at Fair Oaks Park for man killed in shooting appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/vigil-held-at-fair-oaks-park-for-man-killed-in-shooting/
Santa Barbara County Supervisors Approve Additional $85M in Funding for Behavioral Wellness Department
date: 2024-06-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The contract renewal grants BeWell millions more in state and federal funding over the next three years to treat Medi-Cal beneficiaries’ substance-use disorders.
The post Santa Barbara County Supervisors Approve Additional $85M in Funding for Behavioral Wellness Department appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Parker named chairman of the board at Mission Valley Bank
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Signal
News release Mission Valley Bank has announced the appointment of John Parker as the new chairman of the board, succeeding Earle S. Wasserman. Parker, executive officer and co-founder of […]
The post Parker named chairman of the board at Mission Valley Bank appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/parker-named-chairman-of-the-board-at-mission-valley-bank/
SCAA to host Annette Power free art demo
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Signal
News release The Santa Clarita Artists Association is inviting the community to a free demo by artist Annette Power during the group’s monthly meeting on Monday. The event, which […]
The post SCAA to host Annette Power free art demo appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/scaa-to-host-annette-power-free-art-demo/
NASA Ames Hosts National Wildfire Coordinating Group
date: 2024-06-12, from: NASA breaking news
On May 21-23, 2024, the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) visited NASA Ames Research Center, with participants representing 13 agencies and organizations. NWCG is a cooperative group focused on providing national leadership to enable interoperable wildland fire operations among federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial partners. NASA became an associate member of NWCG in February […]
https://www.nasa.gov/general/nasa-ames-hosts-national-wildfire-coordinating-group/
Santa Barbara’s Lee Gabler, Legendary Agent to David Letterman, Dies at 84
date: 2024-06-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The Hope Ranch resident helped create the iconic films and TV series of the past half century, including ‘Beverly Hills, 90210’, ‘American Idol,’ ‘Everybody Loves Raymond,’ ‘The West Wing,’ and ‘Mad Men.’
The post Santa Barbara’s Lee Gabler, Legendary Agent to David Letterman, Dies at 84 appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-12, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Jon Stewart is making America great again, once a week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWVbZ0WQ3s8
At G7, Biden to push plans for frozen Russian assets, Chinese overcapacity
date: 2024-06-12, from: VOA News USA
At the Group of Seven summit this week, U.S. President Joe Biden will seek agreement on using interest from frozen Russian assets to aid Ukraine’s war effort. He will also push for unity in tackling global challenges such as infrastructure funding, artificial intelligence, and Chinese overcapacity in green technologies. However, as White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara reports, a shift right in the European political landscape could complicate his plans.
Newsom appoints pair of SCV residents to state posts
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Signal
News release Gov. Gavin Newsom has announced the appointments of a pair of Santa Clarita residents to two different state boards. According to a news release from the governor’s office, […]
The post Newsom appoints pair of SCV residents to state posts appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/newsom-appoints-pair-of-scv-residents-to-state-posts/
Let’s kick off our summer with a pwn-me-by-Wi-Fi bug in Microsoft Windows
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Redmond splats dozens of bugs as does Adobe while Arm drivers and PHP under active attack
Patch Tuesday Microsoft kicked off our summer season with a relatively light June Patch Tuesday, releasing updates for 49 CVE-tagged security flaws in its products – including one bug deemed critical, a fairly terrifying one in wireless networking, and one listed as publicly disclosed.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/june_patch_tuesday/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-12, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
MLB players starting to fear for their safety from gamblers.
California Credit Union Foundation Awards Grants to Two SCV Teachers
date: 2024-06-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Two Santa Clarita Valley schools will launch new programs, thanks to funding from California Credit Union Foundation through its Spring 2024 Teacher Grant program. As part of its commitment to help educators create innovative learning opportunities for their students, the Foundation provided 10 grants of $500 each to underwrite class projects in Los Angeles and Ventura counties
https://scvnews.com/california-credit-union-foundation-awards-grants-to-two-scv-teachers/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-12, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Berkeley residents losing their homeowner's insurance to fire risk.
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/06/11/berkeley-california-insurance-crisis
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-12, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
A fresh look at blogrolls.
MOXI, The Wolf Museum of Exploration +Innovation, will Celebrate Its One-Millinonth Guest of June20
date: 2024-06-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SANTA BARBARA, CA. (Friday, June 7, 2024) – Celebrate one million bright ideas with us in honor of MOXI’s one-millionth guest! On
The post MOXI, The Wolf Museum of Exploration +Innovation, will Celebrate Its One-Millinonth Guest of June20 appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
California Can Ban Gun Sales At Fairgrounds And On State Property, Federal Judges Rule
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The LAist
Judges at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals distinguished between gun buyers’ First Amendment rights and the government’s authority to decide what kind of commerce takes place on public property.
Women’s Economic Ventures Chosen as a 2024 California Nonprofit of the Year by State Senator Monique Limon
date: 2024-06-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Santa Barbara and Ventura County, CA– Women’s Economic Ventures (WEV)is proud to announce it has been selected as a 2024
The post Women’s Economic Ventures Chosen as a 2024 California Nonprofit of the Year by State Senator Monique Limon appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Foodbank Hosts Picnic in the Park (PIP) Program 2024, Offering Free Healthy Lunches for Kids Countywide
date: 2024-06-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
(Santa Barbara, CA) — The Foodbank of Santa Barbara County is hosting the children’s End Summer Hunger program Picnic in
The post Foodbank Hosts Picnic in the Park (PIP) Program 2024, Offering Free Healthy Lunches for Kids Countywide appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
One805 Announces Kelly Loggins as its 2024 Heart of the Community Award Recipient
date: 2024-06-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Santa Barbara, CA, June 10, 2024 – One805 announces Grammy-winning recording artist Kenny Loggins as its 2024 Heart of the Community Award recipient.
The post One805 Announces Kelly Loggins as its 2024 Heart of the Community Award Recipient appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
La ciudad de Goleta reduce las tarifas de licencia de negocio
date: 2024-06-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
GOLETA, CA, 10 de Junio, 2024 – A partir del próximo mes, el costo de hacer negocios en Goleta será
The post La ciudad de Goleta reduce las tarifas de licencia de negocio appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
wal2mongo v1.0.7 is released
date: 2024-06-12, from: PostgreSQL News
HighGo Software is pleased to announce the first GitHub community release of wal2mongo v1.0.7, which can be used to replicate PostgreSQL database changes to an output format that can be directly fed into the mongo client tool to achieve logical replication between PostgreSQl and MongoDB. Wal2mongo plugin is useful for a case where PostgreSQL is used as the main raw data source to collect data from outside world but MongoDB is used internally for data analytics purposes. Manual data migration between PostgreSQL and MongoDB poses a lot of potential problem and having a logical decoding plugin like wal2mongo can help reduce the data migration complexity between the two databases.
Source Code on GitHub
The source code releases of wal2mongo plugin can be found here
Project Home on GitHub
https://github.com/HighgoSoftware/wal2mongo
About wal2mongo
wal2mongo is a PostgreSQL logical decoding output plugin designed to simplify logical replication from PostgreSQL to MongoDB by formatting the output into a JSON-like format accepted by MongoDB. For detailed information on how to use it, you can find it here
The logical replication application project that can be used with wal2mongo to achieve a fully automatic logical replication setup with enhanced control, security and performance in mind. We will continue to improve the logical decoding performance and enhance wal2mongo functionalities based on community feedback.
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/wal2mongo-v107-is-released-2873/
Registration open for PGDay UK 2024, September 11th, London, England
date: 2024-06-12, from: PostgreSQL News
PGDay UK 2024 will take place in London on September 11th at the Cavendish Conference Centre!
Registration
Registration for attendees is now open. For more information and to secure your seat, please visit:
https://2024.pgday.uk/registration/
The discount code EARLYBIRD may be used by up to 20 attendees, so register quickly if you want to save a few quid!
Sponsors
Sponsor the event and take your chance to present your services or products to the PostgreSQL community - or see it as a give-back opportunity. The benefactor sponsorship level also includes a free entrance ticket. Please head to:
https://2024.pgday.uk/become-sponsor/ for more details.
See you there!
As usual, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us at contact@pgday.uk.
We look forward to seeing you in London in September!
PGDay UK 2024 is a PostgreSQL Europe event run according to the PostgreSQL Community Conference Recognition programme. Local logistics and other services are provided by Slonik Enterprises Ltd. on a not-for-profit basis.