News gathered 2024-07-08
(date: 2024-07-09 07:19:59)
Elexon’s Insight into UK electricity felled by expired certificate
date: 2024-07-09, updated: 2024-07-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Understanding the power needs of the UK begins with knowing when renewals are due
Certificate Watch Demonstrating that Microsoft is not alone in its inability to keep track of certificates is UK power market biz Elexon.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/09/elexons_insight_expired_cert/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-09, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Podcast: Jon Stewart, yes you should STFU.
http://scripting.com/2024/07/09/131713.html
Evolve Bank & Trust confirms LockBit stole 7.6 million people’s data
date: 2024-07-09, updated: 2024-07-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Making cyberattack among the largest ever recorded in finance industry
Evolve Bank & Trust says the data of more than 7.6 million customers was stolen during the LockBit break-in in late May, per a fresh filing with Maine’s attorney general.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/09/evolve_lockbit_attack/
Book celebrates 20th year of Montalvo’s artist residency
date: 2024-07-09, from: San Jose Mercury News
‘Hello, Goodbye, Hello’ explores program’s impact on participants.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/09/book-celebrates-20th-year-of-montalvos-artist-residency/
Person rents a room in Los Gatos and steals air conditioner
date: 2024-07-09, from: San Jose Mercury News
Juveniles again reported throwing hotdogs in separate incident.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/09/suspect-rents-a-room-in-los-gatos-and-steals-air-conditioner/
Taste-Off: The best sugar-free root beer — and the fizzy duds
date: 2024-07-09, from: San Jose Mercury News
We tasted through eight brands of diet root beer, from A&W to Barq’s and Stewart’s, to find the ones that taste great – and the awful ones to avoid.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/09/taste-off-the-best-sugar-free-root-beer-and-the-fizzy-duds/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-09, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Why vote for Biden?
https://this.how/whyVoteForBiden/
Local wine industry loses icons Narsai David, Warren Winiarski
date: 2024-07-09, from: San Jose Mercury News
Both men served as inspiration for next-gen winemakers.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-09, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Pennsylvania voter: The bottom line is, I'm going with Joey Jobs over Donnie-Do-Nothing any day of the week.
https://www.threads.net/@bidenharrishq/post/C9NCG8kM3-C
From Polar Peaks to Celestial Heights: Christy Hansen’s Unique Path to Leading NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program
date: 2024-07-09, from: NASA breaking news
Christy Hansen’s journey with NASA spans more than two decades and is marked by roles that have shaped her into a leader in space exploration. Now serving on a six-month rotation as the deputy manager for NASA’s CLDP (Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program) at Johnson Space Center in Houston, she brings 25 years of […]
Oakland man arrested on suspicion of DUI following injury crash
date: 2024-07-09, from: San Jose Mercury News
The collision happened Saturday night at Salinas and Elkhorn roads near Watsonville.
U.S. Nuke Agency Buys Internet Backbone Data
date: 2024-07-09, from: 404 Media Group
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has bought access to netflow data. The tool covers more than 90 percent of the world’s internet data and can trace activity through virtual private networks.
https://www.404media.co/u-s-nuke-agency-buys-internet-backbone-data/
Gravitational Wave Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of the World’s Oldest Analog Computer
date: 2024-07-09, from: Smithsonian Magazine
A new study challenges a core assumption about the Antikythera mechanism, a 2,000-year-old device that inspired the latest “Indiana Jones” film
Santa Barbara’s Parma Park Project Completed
date: 2024-07-09, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
New plants and trails wind through the park overlooking the Riviera.
The post Santa Barbara’s Parma Park Project Completed appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/09/santa-barbaras-parma-park-project-completed/
Report: Extreme heat events created $7.7 billion in hidden costs in California
date: 2024-07-09, from: San Jose Mercury News
New study analyzed seven extreme heat events from past decade
Jonathan Kraut | Misconceptions on the Nine Commandments
date: 2024-07-09, from: The Signal
The Louisiana Republican Legislature recently passed a bill, signed by their governor, ordering a poster of the “Ten Commandments” to be placed in every K-12 classroom in that state. If […]
The post Jonathan Kraut | Misconceptions on the Nine Commandments appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/jonathan-kraut-misconceptions-on-the-nine-commandments/
Tony Maldonado | A Strategy for Change
date: 2024-07-09, from: The Signal
In a revealing article from June 19, The Signal highlighted a concerning statistic: nearly one-fifth of College of the Canyons employees feel unwelcome at their institution. This story, titled “Survey: […]
The post Tony Maldonado | A Strategy for Change appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/tony-maldonado-a-strategy-for-change/
SF Giants fans share personal memories of Willie Mays at memorial event
date: 2024-07-09, from: San Jose Mercury News
Thousands of fans attended Oracle Park on Monday evening for Willie Mays’ celebration of life
Vandalism incidents at Oakland synagogue being investigated as possible hate crimes
date: 2024-07-09, from: San Jose Mercury News
At least one person was seen throwing a large object at a window on June 21 and July 6, police said
Tesla parental controls keep teenage lead feet in check
date: 2024-07-09, updated: 2024-07-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Because trusting your kid with 300 horsepower should come with a curfew
If you owned a Tesla, would you let your kid drive it? The electric vehicle marque seems to think you might with the addition of “Parental Controls” in a July update.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/09/tesla_parental_controls/
Dan Walters | Highway Opposition Qualifies as Ridiculous
date: 2024-07-09, from: The Signal
Some things are just so ridiculous that they demand critical attention. One of them is the opposition from environmental groups to widening Interstate 80 between Sacramento and Davis. For years, […]
The post Dan Walters | Highway Opposition Qualifies as Ridiculous appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/dan-walters-highway-opposition-qualifies-as-ridiculous/
Walters: Environmental fight over vital Sacramento-area highway project is ridiculous
date: 2024-07-09, from: San Jose Mercury News
Widening I-80 near bottleneck won’t encourage more use, as traffic on the major east-west route has nowhere else to go.
Transformation chief leaves Asda amid Walmart divorce IT projects
date: 2024-07-09, updated: 2024-07-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
After 28 years’ service, Mark Simpson departs ‘by mutual agreement’
The UK’s third-largest supermarket chain, Asda, has parted company with its digital transformation chief amid delays in separating IT systems from former owner Walmart, the US retail giant.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/09/transformation_chief_leaves_asda/
How many students applied for financial aid in your school district?
date: 2024-07-09, updated: 2024-07-09, from: The LAist
Completion rates are down statewide following the new FAFSA’s troubled rollout, but some districts managed to maintain last year’s levels.
https://laist.com/news/education/fafsa-financial-aid-completion-rates-school-district
Opinion: Putin and Kim Jong Un alliance won’t spell doom for United States
date: 2024-07-09, from: San Jose Mercury News
While the military deal between Moscow and Pyongyang sounds frightening, it’s weaker than the Cold War-era treaty.
After latest homeless count, officials cheered progress. But for many unhoused Latinos little has changed
date: 2024-07-09, updated: 2024-07-09, from: The LAist
The results of the recent homeless count showed fewer unhoused people sleeping outdoors in L.A. But for unhoused Latinos, the region’s largest unhoused population, finding solutions remains a challenge.
https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/homeless-latinos-lahsa-count
At NATO summit, nations weigh Ukraine spending
date: 2024-07-09, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Military spending and aid for Ukraine are high on the agenda at this week’s NATO summit; Americans added more than $11 billion to consumer debt in May; and a practical look at newly-implemented guidelines from the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-09, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Jon Stewart Examines Biden’s Future Amidst Calls For Him to Drop Out.
Saudi Aramco’s Big Bet on Combustion Engines
date: 2024-07-09, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Some Greek islands are resorting to desalinating sea water for tourists this summer as reservoirs run dry • Tokyo residents have been warned to avoid physical activity due to a risk of heatstroke • It will be 98 degrees Fahrenheit today in Washington, D.C., where Biden is hosting a NATO summit.
THE TOP FIVE
- Oil giant invests big in internal combustion engines
The world’s largest oil company, Saudi Aramco, recently invested €740 million (about $800 million) in taking a 10% stake in a company that makes internal combustion engines (ICEs), the Financial Times reported, signalling that the oil giant believes these engines aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. The investment in Horse Powertrain is based on a calculation that “as the industry stops designing and developing its own combustion engines, it will start buying them from third parties,” the FT wrote. Aramco’s executive vice president, Yasser Mufti, told the paper he thinks ICEs will see “significant improvements” over the coming years that will make them more sustainable, but didn’t specify what those improvements might be. ICEs, of course, run on fossil fuels and spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Saudi Aramco last year bought lubricant brand Valvoline, which will supply all Horse engines with products. As the FT noted, “the venture’s success will depend on whether other carmakers are willing to put their trust in a company born out of their rivals.”
- Weakened Beryl spawns tornadoes as it moves north
At least seven people are dead and more than 2 million remain without power in Texas after Hurricane Beryl made landfall on the state’s Gulf Coast yesterday. Officials are assessing the economic damage, but large parts of Houston are flooded, with water levels exceeding 10 inches. The streets are littered with branches and downed power lines, and first responders have been dispatched to help stranded residents. Temperatures are climbing in the area, posing even more risk to people without power.
A
stranded vehicle on a flooded road in Houston.
Brandon
Bell/Getty Images
The storm system has been downgraded to a tropical depression but is expected to bring heavy rain and tornado conditions to Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, and parts of southern Illinois and Indiana as it tracks northeast this week. Already more than 110 tornado warnings were issued overnight across in eastern Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas, which is “the most tornado warnings issued in the U.S. in a single July day since records began in 1986,” according to weather analyst Colin McCarthy.
- NYC bridge temporarily closed because of extreme heat
The Third Avenue Bridge in New York City was temporarily closed yesterday after sweltering temperatures caused its steel to expand. The 126-year-old bridge, which serves as an artery between the Bronx and Manhattan, swings opened to accommodate water traffic in the Harlem River. Temperatures reached 95 degrees Fahrenheit in the city yesterday, and after the bridge opened, it wouldn’t close. Authorities tried to cool the structure by spraying water on it. Eventually the bridge reopened a few hours later. Yesterday was the hottest day of the year so far in NYC, and the heat wave will last through the week.
- House tees up votes on efficiency standards for household appliances
House Republicans are expected to vote today on two bills aimed at curbing the Department of Energy’s authority to set efficiency standards for home appliances. H.R. 7637, known as the “Refrigerator Freedom Act,” and H.R. 7700, aka the “Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards Act,” would “prohibit the Secretary of Energy from prescribing or enforcing energy conservation standards” that “are not cost-effective or technologically feasible.” The DOE finalized efficiency standards for several appliances over the last few months, aiming to improve their performance, cut greenhouse gas emissions, and save consumers money. It estimated the standards will save Americans $33 billion on utility bills over 30 years. Republican lawmakers claim the new rules will increase the costs of appliances, but others say the savings on utility bills would more than make up for any short-term increase in sticker prices. Most of the energy consumed by homes and commercial buildings goes toward powering appliances.
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- Colombia sees deforestation drop
Deforestation in Colombia dropped by 36% last year to a 23-year low, according to the nation’s environment ministry. The government credits its program of paying farmers to conserve nature, as well as peace talks with guerilla groups. But those peace talks have reached a stalemate, and deforestation has increased in 2024. “It’s really good news … but we definitely cannot say that the battle is won,” Environment Minister Susana Muhamad said.
THE KICKER
“Each push alert marks the distance we’re closing between the previous range of normal activity and the future that scientists warned us of.” –Zoë Schlanger writing in The Atlantic about how we’ll watch the climate crisis unfold through emergency push alerts on our phones.
https://heatmap.news/electric-vehicles/saudi-aramco-combustion-engine-evs
Users rage as Microsoft announces retirement of Office 365 connectors within Teams
date: 2024-07-09, updated: 2024-07-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Expletives fly as admins deal with recommendation to move to Power Automate workflows
Microsoft has thrown some enterprises into a spin after confirming that, with only a few months’ notice, Office 365 connectors within Teams will be cut.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/09/users_rage_as_microsoft_announces/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-09, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Trump plans to block hearings in January 6 case before 2024 election.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/09/trump-january-6-witnesses-election
Facilitating Good Decision Making: Context, Scope, and Timeframe
date: 2024-07-09, from: Accidentally in Code
Someone asked me about my management philosophy recently, and after I stopped panicking (I wrote a book, I should have a philosphy… how do you summarize 400 pages and 2 years of your life in one sentence) I came up with: “My job is to make it easier for people to make good decisions.” What […]
https://cate.blog/2024/07/09/facilitating-good-decision-making-context-scope-and-timeframe/
Modi meets Putin
date: 2024-07-09, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, is in Russia to “deepen ties” between the two countries on Mr. Modi’s first trip to Russia since the beginning of its war Ukraine. China’s biggest electric carmaker — and Tesla’s big rival — BYD has reached a deal to build a $1 billion manufacturing plant in Turkey. And Sweden marks 50 years of paid parental leave for couples to share.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/modi-meets-putin
Houthi rebels are operating their own GuardZoo spyware
date: 2024-07-09, updated: 2024-07-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Fairly ‘low budget’, unsophisticated malware, say researchers, but it can collect the same data as Pegasus
Interview When it comes to surveillance malware, sophisticated spyware with complex capabilities tends to hog the limelight – for example NSO Group’s Pegasus, which is sold to established governments. But it’s actually less polished kit that you’ve never heard of, like GuardZoo – developed and used by Houthi rebels in Yemen – that dominates the space.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/09/houthi_rebels_malware/
Raspberry Pi OS airs out some fresh options for the summer
date: 2024-07-09, updated: 2024-07-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Why go outside in the sunshine when you could play with tiny computers in a darkened room?
Perhaps hoping to mark independence from x86 PCs, there’s a new July 4th release of the official Raspberry Pi OS, although it remains coy of giving a version number.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/09/raspberry_pi_os_5_3/
Who Is Auditioning for Trump’s Cabinet?
date: 2024-07-09, from: Heatmap News
If Donald Trump moves back to Washington, D.C., in January 2025, he won’t arrive alone. Though Trump’s first term was marked by a messy transition and bouts of political incompetence, Republican operatives have spent the past four years putting together a plan to hit the ground running if or when he returns — as well as a list of friendly names for plum positions in the would-be Trump administration. Many additional Republicans have quietly (and, often, not so quietly) spent the past few years auditioning for these top roles, typically by signaling their willingness to continue dismantling the regulatory and administrative states.
While nearly all positions in a Trump cabinet have at least some ability to limit or eliminate climate progress, here are some names circulating for the most influential departments.
The Department of Energy
The past is prologue when it comes to a future Trump administration, making Dan Brouillette an easy guess to head of the Department of Energy: His reappointment would mark a return to the post he left during the presidential transition in 2021.
But Secretary of Energy is nothing if not a competitive position, and Brouillette isn’t treating it like he’s a shoo-in, either. Since 2023, he’s served as the president and CEO of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade association for electric utilities that has taken a more tepid stance on climate policies during his tenure. He’s also spent plenty of time going on TV and speaking to the press against Biden’s (since overturned) pause in approving new export facilities for liquified natural gas — an industry he has history with but that falls well outside his purview EEI. The effect is more a performance for Trump than it is any sort of service for his organization’s members. Brouillette has also repeatedly insisted that the Trump administration won’t gut the Inflation Reduction Act, an oddly blasé attitude about legislation that has significantly benefited the utilities EEI represents.
Bernard McNamee, the author of the Department of Energy section of Project 2025, is another top choice for the DOE. One of the “most overtly political” people to ever be appointed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, in the words of E&E News, McNamee has said that fossil fuels are “key to our prosperity” and that the renewable push amounts to “tyranny.” His chapter of Project 2025 calls for — among other things — closing the renewable energy offices at the DOE, eliminating energy efficiency standards for appliances, and refocusing the three National Labs run by DOE on “national security issues.”
If Trump doesn’t pick Doug Burgum for vice president, there is a strong chance there could be a home for him at the DOE instead. Many see the governor of North Dakota as a frontrunner for Energy Secretary, suspicions Burgum has reinforced by cozying up to Trump as a political surrogate, even warming up crowds at the candidate’s political rallies. While Burgum “at times [could] seem environmentally conscious” during his gubernatorial tenure, he’s recently shifted to more familiar Republican talking points on the oil and gas industry and reportedly helped connect Trump to would-be donors in the fossil fuel sectors, according to reporting by The New York Times. He has also informally advised the Trump campaign on energy policy.
There might also be a high-ranking position in the DOE for Texas oil and fracking magnate Harold Hamm, who was reportedly a finalist for the position back in 2016. Hamm, a conservative megadonor, briefly broke with Trump during the Republican primary but has since returned to fundraise for his campaign. Trump prizes loyalty, however, which is why Secretary Hamm might be more of a longshot; Hamm may return to being an informal advisor for the administration instead.
The Department of the Interior
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem seems pretty solidly off the VP shortlist after making national headlines for admitting in her memoir that she killed a puppy, but she may yet fill a role in the administration that is less in the public spotlight. Interior wouldn’t be so far-fetched: Noem played an active part in slashing environmental protections in her state — something that ought to endear her to Trump — and she worked closely with Trump’s Secretary of the Interior to explore returning controversial firework shows to Mount Rushmore. In South Dakota, Noem also rolled the Department of Environment and Natural Resources into the Department of Agriculture and has been actively hostile to the build-out of renewable energy, going so far as to refuse to apply for IRA grant money — an action that signals her uncompromising commitment to the party’s political message to anyone watching.
If not Noem, it’s possible David Bernhardt could return to the position he held under the first Trump administration. He’s used his time out of national politics to promote better swamp management (that’s the metaphorical swamp, not literal swamps, such as the critical beachfront-adjacent wetlands he limited protections for while in office) and to push Trump’s plan to reinstate Schedule F — which will make it easier to fire employees that aren’t deemed loyal enough to the administration — declaring that his own agency had been “overwhelmingly liberal” during his tenure. Bernhardt has adopted skepticism of career civil servants as something of a pet cause, publishing a 2023 book called You Report to Me: Accountability for the Failing Administrative State and filing an amicus brief to the Supreme Court earlier this year that argued, “One would be naïve not to understand how policy drives the ‘science’ at an agency.”
Those familiar with Bernhardt’s thinking, though, see the former secretary as angling for a more ambitious post in a future Trump administration, such as director of the Office of Management and Budget. An OMB appointment would potentially put Bernhardt on a collision course with Russ Vought, another Schedule F proponent, which means that if the former Interior secretary’s apparent angling for a new office doesn’t pan out, he may end up back in a more familiar role.
Trump’s former ambassador to Portugal, George Glass, has also been floated in the Interior conversation. An Oregon businessman, Glass fits the bill as a Westerner — since 1949, just one Interior secretary has not been a resident or native of a state west of the Mississippi. He also sees eye-to-eye with Trump as a China hawk, and while he doesn’t have much of a climate record, he has been a steady donor whose loyalty could be rewarded again with a plum administrative position.
The Department of Agriculture
While the Department of Agriculture doesn’t have the same levers to pull as Interior or Energy, the USDA nevertheless oversees one of the most significant sources of planet-warming emissions in the United States. While the Biden administration’s USDA has explicitly pursued an “equitable and climate-smart food and agriculture economy,” the Heritage Foundation instead wants the agency to “play a limited role” that doesn’t “hinder food production or otherwise undermine efforts to meet consumer demand.”
J. D. Vance has emerged as one candidate to get that job done. The Hillbilly Elegy author-turned-Ohio-senator previously invested in an agriculture startup and has taken a particular interest in the farm bill, while at the same time boasts a 0% lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters. Vance’s name has also been in the hat for VP, and he’s certainly done his best to remain in Trump’s good graces, which could land him a secretary post if he doesn’t ultimately make the cut as a running mate.
There might be a better case, though, that this department ends up in the hands of Sid Miller. Currently serving as the Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Miller was reportedly on the shortlist for the position back in 2016. He has blamed weather-related power outages in his state on renewable intermittency, at one time writing, “to heck with green energy or climate change.” Miller is something of a firebrand, however, alienating even some within his own party, and he could struggle to garner the bipartisan support that will likely be necessary to win confirmation.
The Environmental Protection Agency
Though Trump initially avoided answering a question about the climate during the first presidential debate, he had talking points ready thanks to Andrew Wheeler, his former head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Trump seemingly referred to Wheeler as one of “my top environmental people,” suggesting that in addition to being an informal adviser to the campaign, Wheeler and his work at the EPA remain in high regard with Trump himself. While in the previous administration, Wheeler notably helped to roll back over 100 clean air, water, and environmental regulations.
Wheeler himself has been cagey about whether he’s auditioning for another Trump position, though — this spring, he joined the Holland & Hart law firm as a partner focused on federal affairs. If Wheeler decides to stay in the private sector, Trump might turn instead to Mandy Gunasekara, one of the primary architects of the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change and the author of the especially concerning Project 2025 chapter on the EPA.
Gunasekara has bolstered the case for herself by describing how she would curtail the EPA’s powers, eliminate its enforcement office, and “update the 2009 endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health and the environment — science that has been used as the backbone for the EPA’s climate change regulations for years. Gunasekara has also said that while she believes in human-caused climate change, planetary warming is “overstated” and erroneously claimed that scientific data shows “a mild and manageable climate change in the future.” That rhetoric puts her right in sync with her potential future boss.
https://heatmap.news/politics/trump-cabinet
UK minister recalls two planning decisions which blocked datacenter investment
date: 2024-07-09, updated: 2024-07-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Deputy leader to act after promise of more business-friendly planning process
The UK’s deputy prime minister is set to recall two planning decisions which have held up datacenter investment in the UK.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/09/uk_datacenter_new_govt_planning/
Support for Ukraine in focus as NATO opens summit in Washington
date: 2024-07-09, from: VOA News USA
Some more thoughts on TBC
date: 2024-07-09, from: Manu - I write blog
<p>I know, I know. You’re tired of hearing me ranting about The Browser Company and their Arc “browser”. I’m also tired of reading about them but I keep stumbling on news about this silly company and I can’t help myself from yelling at the screen. They aired a commercial on TV the other day, clearly a reasonable thing to do when you have a product with no revenues and no business model. And not happy with that, they released a YouTube video with the CEO explaining the ideas “hidden” in the commercial and that tells you how good at marketing these people are. If you need to release an almost 5-minute video to explain the meaning of a stupid 1-minute ad you probably need a better marketing department.</p>Anyway, leaving aside the pointlessness of this whole thing what prompted me to write this post were some of the things the CEO said in the video explainer which are so profoundly stupid that I find them offensive. If you are an ARC user you should be offended too because he must think you’re all a bunch of idiots.
He said in the video that there were three questions he wanted to ask:
- What is this internet we want to live within?
- What if the web were truly made for you?
- What are we here for?
What is this internet we want to live within? What do we want to create for ourselves?
Just to make it clear, what this company is allegedly making is a browser. It’s in their fucking name: The Browser Company. They’re not making a new internet. They’re not creating anything. As I wrote before, they’re not even making an actual browser like the awesome people at Ladybird. They’re building a wrapper around Chrome. This makes the CEO rant about browser monoculture even more hilarious since by doing that they’re part of the problem.
In the video, he tries to argue that Silicon Valley companies are driven by efficiency, you type something in Google and he gives you an answer but there are times when you don’t want an answer, you want to get access to the best set of results because you’re after experiences and serendipity and a bunch of other complete nonsense. He asked, “Do we even believe in a single answer?“. The answer is no Josh. No, we don’t. This is why all search engines have a SERP. No search engine gives you one answer.
A lot of other times something just seems really interesting to you and you want to go wide and deep and be surprised there are a lot of other things we might want to optimise for when we’re designing this new internet
Designing this new internet? You’re not designing a new internet. You’re using some algorithm to decide for me which 6 or 8 results I should be seeing. In doing that you’re worse than Google.
The second thing is what would it look like if truly the web was made for you?
I’m gonna ask you a question Josh: how can you make a web for me without profiling me? I’ll wait for an answer the same way I’m still waiting to hear back from your support team on that ticket I opened months ago where I was asking how to prevent your stupid ARC Search from accessing my sites.
You asked “What does the personal web, the personal internet look like” and there are various ways to tackle this question but it certainly doesn’t look like a generated ARC Search result page that is the same for everyone. You said the web doesn’t feel personal because we all see the same stuff and yet you showed a screenshot of your stupid ARC Search pulling in results from Reddit and Trip Advisor. Again, if you’re reading this and you’re an ARC user, they must think you’re a complete idiot to believe all this stuff.
As for the final question, what are we here for and why am I looking at this video, well Josh, I work in tech. I code websites, I care about the web. Especially the independent, personal one. The one you’re ranting about but probably don’t care about at all. I also have to care about your stupid browser because even though it’s Chrome sometimes it has bugs that aren’t present on Chrome and so I have to test on it. I’d love to not care about your browser and your stupid ARC Search but I have to because this is the world I live in. My email is public if you want to get in touch. You probably won’t because why would you, you have nothing to gain from a private exchange after all.
<hr>
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Twirly Shirley the Pico-powered precision turntable
date: 2024-07-09, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
VEEB Projects has decided to take down Lazy Susan by introducing Twirly Shirley, a Raspberry Pi Pico W-powered precision turntable.
The post Twirly Shirley the Pico-powered precision turntable appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/twirly-shirley-the-pico-powered-precision-turntable/
Everyone Has A Price — And Corporations Know Yours
date: 2024-07-09, from: The Lever News
Digital surveillance and customer isolation are locking us into a consumer hell of personalized prices.
https://www.levernews.com/everyone-has-a-price-and-corporations-know-yours/
Eldorado ransomware-as-a-service gang targets Linux, Windows systems
date: 2024-07-09, updated: 2024-07-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
US orgs bear the brunt of attacks by probably-Russian crew
A ransomware-as-a-service operation dubbed “Eldorado” that encrypts files on both Linux and Windows machines has infected at least 16 organizations – primarily in the US – as of June.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/09/eldorado_ransomware_linux_windows/
Today in SCV History (July 9)
date: 2024-07-09, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1939 – Death of Harald Sandberg; built Sandberg’s Summit Hotel on the Ridge Route. [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-july-9/
Microsoft China staff can’t log on with an Android, so Redmond buys them iThings
date: 2024-07-09, updated: 2024-07-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Google’s absence creates software distribution issues not even mighty Microsoft can handle
Microsoft China will provide staff with Apple devices so they can log on to the software giant’s systems.…
Scammers double-scam victims by offering to help recover from scams
date: 2024-07-09, updated: 2024-07-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Scum keep databases of the people they’ve already skimmed
Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission has warned that scammers are targeting scam victims with fake offers to help them recover from scams.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/09/australia_rescam_warning/
Founder of Indian ride-share biz Ola calls for 70-hour work week
date: 2024-07-09, updated: 2024-07-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
‘A generation will have to do penance’ says Bhavish Aggarwal
Indian tech entrepreneur Bhavish Aggarwal – founder of Ola Cabs, Ole Electric and AI unicorn Ola Krutrim – doubled down on support for 70-hour work weeks during an interview posted last Sunday.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/09/ola_founder_70_hour_weeks/
After $1B gift, most Johns Hopkins medical students won’t pay tuition
date: 2024-07-09, from: VOA News USA
Victim phones in gunshot near Canyon Country liquor store
date: 2024-07-09, from: The Signal
Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station deputies are investigating a report of a gunshot victim who called in his own injury, according to station officials. “The initial call was (8:41 p.m.),” […]
The post Victim phones in gunshot near Canyon Country liquor store appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/victim-phones-in-gunshot-near-canyon-country-liquor-store/
Remnants of Hurricane Beryl spread rain inland after killing 3 in Texas
date: 2024-07-09, from: VOA News USA
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-07-09, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Also, heavily borrowing the style from FinalCut Pro for their inspector.
My original attempt on the left, the one where I start to use fonts, spacing and bubbles from FinalCutPro styled on the right - still a work in progress, but it already feels better:
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112754493858510362
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-07-09, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
I loved the FinalCut Pro UI elements for entering rotation data. One neat feature is that in addition to the swipe to choose an angle, if you long-press the dial goes into high-precision input mode.
I think I finally got the animation just right:
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112754476066529208
China’s APT40 gang is ready to attack vulns within hours or days of public release
date: 2024-07-09, updated: 2024-07-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Lax patching and vulnerable small biz kit make life easy for Beijing’s secret-stealers
Law enforcement agencies from eight nations, led by Australia, have issued an advisory that details the tradecraft used by China-aligned threat actor APT40 – aka Kryptonite Panda, GINGHAM TYPHOON, Leviathan and Bronze Mohawk – and found it prioritizes developing exploits for newly found vulnerabilities and can target them within hours.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/09/apt_40_tradecraft_advisory/
NATO alliance meets under cloud over President Biden’s future
date: 2024-07-09, from: VOA News USA
President Joe Biden welcomes members of the newly enlarged NATO alliance this week for a summit aimed at planning for Ukraine’s future defense — and, some observers say, “Trump-proofing” it if Biden loses the November poll amid growing doubts over his future. VOA White House correspondent Anita Powell reports from the White House.
https://www.voanews.com/a/nato-alliance-meets-under-cloud-over-president-biden-s-future/7690440.html
Lake Fire Grows to More Than 20,000 Acres, 8 Percent Containment
date: 2024-07-09, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Evacuation orders and warning zones expanded Sunday night.
The post Lake Fire Grows to More Than 20,000 Acres, 8 Percent Containment appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Blue Heat remain perfect, beat LASC at home
date: 2024-07-09, from: The Signal
Playoffs and the Western Conference title were well in hand, but that didn’t deter the Blue Heat from bringing the intensity in Sunday’s home win over Los Angeles Soccer Club. […]
The post Blue Heat remain perfect, beat LASC at home appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/blue-heat-remain-perfect-beat-lasc-at-home/
Deputies seek public’s help to ID theft suspect
date: 2024-07-09, from: The Signal
Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station officials are hoping some attention on a man who’s been victimizing a shop owner for months will help them identify and arrest the suspect who’s […]
The post Deputies seek public’s help to ID theft suspect appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/deputies-seek-publics-help-to-id-theft-suspect/
DUI suspect arrested after brief pursuit
date: 2024-07-09, from: The Signal
Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station officials arrested a man Sunday night after a brief pursuit in Newhall, officials said Monday. Deputies observed a man driving his car recklessly, weaving in […]
The post DUI suspect arrested after brief pursuit appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/dui-suspect-arrested-after-brief-pursuit/
Castaic school district’s stance on landfill to be discussed
date: 2024-07-09, from: The Signal
The Castaic Union School District on Thursday could officially take a stance against the Chiquita Canyon Landfill after more than a year of residents complaining about the odors emanating from […]
The post Castaic school district’s stance on landfill to be discussed appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/castaic-school-districts-stance-on-landfill-to-be-discussed/
SCV stars battle in Skaggs All-Star baseball game
date: 2024-07-09, from: The Signal
Academic scholarships, big plays and bragging rights were all up for grabs on Saturday at the fourth annual Tyler Skaggs Foundation All-Star baseball game. Eight local stars took the field […]
The post SCV stars battle in Skaggs All-Star baseball game appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/scv-stars-battle-in-skaggs-all-star-baseball-game/
Van Hook’s evaluation at COC to span a fourth meeting
date: 2024-07-09, from: The Signal
Another Santa Clarita Community College District board of trustees meeting will begin with a closed session regarding the board’s evaluation of Chancellor Dianne Van Hook’s performance. The board, which oversees […]
The post Van Hook’s evaluation at COC to span a fourth meeting appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/van-hooks-evaluation-at-coc-to-span-a-fourth-meeting/
China’s Moore Threads adds support for 10K GPU clusters
date: 2024-07-09, updated: 2024-07-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Chinese slinger’s kit still no match for Nvidia’s sanction-evading cards
Chinese GPU vendor Moore Threads says its datacenter-focused AI systems can now support clusters of up to 10,000 accelerators – a tenfold increase from tech it offered last year.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/09/moore_threads_10k_cluster/
American mountaineer found mummified in Peru 22 years after vanishing
date: 2024-07-09, from: VOA News USA
LIMA, Peru — The preserved body of an American mountaineer — who disappeared 22 years ago while scaling a snowy peak in Peru — has been found after being exposed by climate change-induced ice melt, police said Monday.
William Stampfl was reported missing in June 2002, aged 59, when an avalanche buried his climbing party on the mountain Huascaran, which stands more than 6,700 meters (22,000 feet) high. Search and rescue efforts were fruitless.
Peruvian police said his remains were finally exposed by ice melt on the Cordillera Blanca range of the Andes.
Stampfl’s body, as well as his clothes, harness and boots had been well-preserved by the cold, according to images distributed by the police.
His passport was found among his possessions in good condition, allowing police to identify the body.
The mountains of northeastern Peru, home to snowy peaks such as Huascaran and Cashan, are a favorite with mountaineers from around the world.
In May, the body of an Israeli hiker was found there nearly a month after he disappeared.
And last month, an experienced Italian mountaineer was found dead after he fell while trying to scale another Andean peak.
Searing heat grips parts of US, causes deaths in the West
date: 2024-07-09, from: VOA News USA
death valley, california — A searing heat wave gripped large parts of the United States on Monday, with record daily high temperatures in Oregon suspected to have caused four deaths in the Portland area following a motorcyclist’s death in dangerous heat over the weekend in Death Valley, California.
More than 146 million people around the U.S. were under heat alerts Monday, especially in the Western states. California, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, Washington and Idaho on Monday were under an excessive heat warning, the National Weather Service’s highest alert, while parts of the East Coast as well as Alabama and Mississippi were under heat advisories.
The early U.S. heat wave came as the global temperature in June reached record warmth for the 13th straight month and marked the 12th straight month that the world was 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times, the European climate service Copernicus said.
Dozens of locations in the West and Pacific Northwest tied or broke previous heat records over the weekend and are expected to keep doing so into the week.
In Oregon’s Multnomah County, home to Portland, the medical examiner is investigating four suspected heat-related deaths recorded Friday, Saturday and Sunday, officials said. Three of the deaths involved county residents who were 64, 75 and 84 years old, county officials said in an email. Heat also was suspected in the death of a 33-year-old man transported to a Portland hospital from outside the county.
Portland broke daily record temperatures Friday, Saturday and Sunday and was on track to do so again on Monday with a forecast high of 102 degrees Fahrenheit (38.9 Celsius), National Weather Service meteorologist Hannah Chandler-Cooley said. High temperatures were expected in Portland through Tuesday evening.
“We are looking at the potential for breaking more records,” she said.
The temperatures aren’t expected to reach as high as they did during a similar heat wave in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, which killed an estimated 600 people across Oregon, Washington and western Canada. But the duration could be problematic because many homes in the region lack air conditioning. Round-the-clock hot weather keeps people from cooling off sufficiently at night, and the issue is compounded in urban areas where concrete and pavement store heat.
Heat illness and injury are cumulative and can build over the course of a day or days, officials warn. In San Jose, California, a homeless man died last week from apparent heat-related causes, Mayor Matt Mahan reported on the social platform X, calling it “an avoidable tragedy.” San Jose police said the man’s body had no obvious signs of foul play.
In eastern California’s sizzling desert, a high temperature of 128 F (53.3 C) was recorded Saturday and Sunday at Death Valley National Park, where a visitor, who was not identified, died Saturday from heat exposure. Another person was hospitalized, officials said.
They were among six motorcyclists riding through the Badwater Basin area in scorching weather, the park said in a statement. The other four were treated at the scene. Emergency medical helicopters were unable to respond because the aircraft cannot generally fly safely over 120 F (48.8 C), officials said.
More extreme highs are in the near-term forecast, with a high of around 127 F (52.7 C) expected in Death Valley on Monday, and possibly 130 F (54.4 C) around midweek.
The largest national park outside Alaska, Death Valley is considered one of the most extreme environments in the world and is among the hottest during the summer. The hottest temperature ever officially recorded on Earth was 134 F (56.67 C) in July 1913 in Death Valley, though some experts dispute that measurement and say the real record was 130 F (54.4 C), recorded there in July 2021.
“While this is a very exciting time to experience potential world-record-setting temperatures in Death Valley, we encourage visitors to choose their activities carefully, avoiding prolonged periods of time outside an air-conditioned vehicle or building when temperatures are this high,” park Superintendent Mike Reynolds said.
Across the desert in Nevada, Las Vegas set a record high of 120 F (48.8 C) Sunday and was forecast to hit a record high of 115 F (46.1 C) Monday. The National Weather Service forecast a high of 117 F (47.2 C) in Phoenix.
People flocked Monday to the beaches around Lake Tahoe, especially Sand Harbor State Park, where the record high of 92 (33.3) set Sunday smashed the old record of 88 (31.1 ) set in 2014. For the fifth consecutive day, Sand Harbor closed its gates within 90 minutes of opening at 8 a.m. because it had reached capacity.
“It’s definitely hotter than we are used to,” Nevada State Parks spokesperson Tyler Kerver said.
https://www.voanews.com/a/searing-heat-grips-parts-of-us-causes-deaths-in-the-west-/7690084.html
Chaos in Santa Barbara
date: 2024-07-09, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Games, names, and automobiles.
The post Chaos in Santa Barbara appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/08/chaos-in-santa-barbara/
TMU Alum Publishes Book on Grief
date: 2024-07-09, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Last year, The Master’s University alum Emily Curtis (’09) published a book titled “Hope in the Mourning: A Hope-Filled Guide Through Grief,” which contains both first-hand testimonies of suffering and biblical wisdom for navigating such trials
https://scvnews.com/tmu-alum-publishes-book-on-grief/
Drinking Water from Three Santa Barbara County Water Systems Fail to Meet State Requirements
date: 2024-07-09, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Solvang Water Division, which was the largest of the three failures, was removed from the state’s list of failing systems this week.
The post Drinking Water from Three Santa Barbara County Water Systems Fail to Meet State Requirements appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Ocean Water Warning Continues for L.A. County Beaches
date: 2024-07-09, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health cautions residents who are planning to visit the following Los Angeles County beaches to avoid swimming, surfing and playing in ocean waters due to bacterial levels exceeding health standards when last tested
https://scvnews.com/ocean-water-warning-continues-for-l-a-county-beaches-5/
US not expecting policy change from Iran under new president
date: 2024-07-09, from: VOA News USA
washington — The United States said Monday that it did not expect policy changes from Iran after voters elected reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian, and downplayed chances to resume dialogue.
“We have no expectation that this election will lead to a fundamental change in Iran’s direction or its policies,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters.
Miller said Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was expected to call the shots in Iran, an adversary of the United States since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
“Obviously, if the new president had the authority to make steps to curtail Iran’s nuclear program, to stop funding terrorism, to stop destabilizing activities in the region, those would be steps that we would welcome,” Miller said.
“But needless to say, we don’t have any expectation that that’s what’s likely to ensue.”
Asked if the United States was at least willing to reopen diplomacy with Iran after Pezeshkian’s election, Miller said: “We have always said that diplomacy is the most effective way to achieve an effective, sustainable solution with regard to Iran’s nuclear program.”
But at the White House, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, asked if the United States was ready to resume nuclear talks with Iran, said emphatically, “No.”
“We’ll see what this guy wants to get done, but we are not expecting any changes in Iranian behavior,” Kirby said.
President Joe Biden took office in 2021 with hopes of returning to a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that was negotiated under former President Barack Obama and ended by his successor, Donald Trump, who imposed sweeping sanctions on Iran.
But talks, negotiated through the European Union, broke down in part over a dispute about the extent to which the United States would remove sanctions on Iran.
Relations have deteriorated further since the October 7 attack on U.S. ally Israel by Hamas, which receives support from Iran.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-not-expecting-policy-change-from-iran-under-new-president-/7690076.html
L.A. County Releases $14.5M Funding for Parkland Acquisitions
date: 2024-07-08, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Los Angeles County Regional Park and Open Space District announced Monday the Measure A Acquisition-Only Competitive Grant Program, releasing $14.5 million in funding opportunities for parkland acquisitions throughout Los Angeles County
https://scvnews.com/l-a-county-releases-14-5m-funding-for-parkland-acquisitions/
NATO representatives to meet under cloud over Biden’s future
date: 2024-07-08, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/nato-representatives-to-meet-under-cloud-over-biden-s-future/7690077.html
Register Now for Child & Family Center’s Purple Palooza
date: 2024-07-08, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Child & Family Center is the only organization in Santa Clarita that provides domestic violence services for individuals and their children who are in abusive relationships
https://scvnews.com/register-now-for-child-family-centers-purple-palooza/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-08, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
This Lincoln Project video resets the political agenda where it should be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpLpOtFNFWg
Coders’ Copilot code-copying copyright claims crumble against GitHub, Microsoft
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
A few devs versus the powerful forces of Redmond – who did you think was going to win?
Claims by developers that GitHub Copilot was unlawfully copying their code have largely been dismissed, leaving the engineers for now with just two allegations remaining in their lawsuit against the code warehouse.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/github_copilot_dmca/
Paramount, Skydance merge, ending Redstone family reign
date: 2024-07-08, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — The entertainment giant Paramount will merge with Skydance, closing out a decades-long run by the Redstone family in Hollywood and injecting desperately needed cash into a legacy studio that has struggled to adapt to a shifting entertainment landscape.
It also signals the rise of a new power player, David Ellison, the founder of Skydance and son of billionaire Larry Ellison, the founder of the software company Oracle.
Shari Redstone’s National Amusements has owned more than three-quarters of Paramount’s Class A voting shares through the estate of her late father, Sumner Redstone. She had battled to maintain control of the company that owns CBS, which is behind blockbuster films such as “Top Gun” and “The Godfather.”
Just weeks after turning down a similar agreement with Skydance, however, Redstone agreed to a deal on terms that had not changed much.
“Given the changes in the industry, we want to fortify Paramount for the future while ensuring that content remains king,” said Redstone, who is chair of Paramount Global.
The new combined company is valued at around $28 billion. In connection with the proposed transaction, which is expected to close in September 2025 pending regulatory approval, a consortium led by the Ellison family and RedBird Capital will be investing $8 billion.
Skydance, based in Santa Monica, California, has helped produce some major
Paramount hits in recent years, including Tom Cruise films like “Top Gun: Maverick” and installments of the “Mission Impossible” series.
Skydance was founded in 2010 by David Ellison and it quickly formed a production partnership with Paramount that same year. If the deal is approved, Ellison will become chairman and chief executive officer of what’s being called New Paramount.
Ellison outlined the vision for New Paramount on a conference call about the transaction Monday. In addition to doubling down on core competencies, notably with a “creative first” approach, he stressed that the company needs to transition into a “tech hybrid” to stay competitive in today’s evolving media landscape.
“You’ve watched some incredibly powerful technology companies move into the … media space and do so very successfully,” Ellison said. He added that it was “essential” for New Paramount to chart a similar course going forward.
That includes plans to “rebuild” the Paramount+ streaming service, Ellison noted — pointing to wider goals to expand direct-to-consumer business, such as increasing engagement time on the platform and reducing user churn. He also said that the company aims to transition to more cloud-based production and continue the use of generative artificial intelligence to boost efficiency.
Executives also outlined further restructuring plans for New Paramount on Monday’s conference call, with chairman of RedBird Sports and Media Jeff Shell noting that they had identified some $2 billion in cost efficiencies and synergies that they’ll “attempt to deliver pretty rapidly.”
Shell and others addressed the declining growth of linear TV. Flagship linear brands will continue to represent a big chunk of the company’s operations, but learning how to run this portion of business differently will be key, he said.
Paramount’s struggles
The on-again, off-again merger arrives at a tumultuous time for Paramount, which has struggled to find its footing for years and its cable business has been hemorrhaging. In an annual shareholder meeting in early June, the company also laid out a restructuring plan that included major cost cuts.
Leadership at Paramount was also volatile earlier this year after its CEO Bob Bakish, following several disputes with Redstone, was replaced with an “office of the C.E.O,” run by three executives. Four company directors were also replaced.
Paramount is one of Hollywood’s oldest studios, dating back its founding in 1914 as a distributor. Throughout its rich history, Paramount has had a hand in releasing films — from “Sunset Boulevard” and “The Godfather,” to “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Titanic.”
The studio also distributed several early Marvel Cinematic Universe films, including “Iron Man” and “Thor,” before the Disney acquisition. In addition to “Mission: Impossible” and “Top Gun,” Paramount’s current franchises include “Transformers,” “Star Trek” and “Jackass.”
While Paramount has not topped the annual domestic box office charts for over a decade, the wild box office success of “Top Gun: Maverick” in 2022 (nearly $1.5 billion worldwide) was an important boon to both movie theaters and the industry’s pandemic recovery.
Still, its theatrical output has declined somewhat in recent years. Last year it released only eight new movies and came in fifth place for overall box office at around $2 billion — behind Universal (24 films), Disney (17 films), Warner Bros. and Sony.
Movie plans
This year the release calendar is similarly modest, especially with the absence of “Mission: Impossible 8,” which was pushed to 2025 amid the strikes. The studio has had some successes, with “Bob Marley: One Love” and “A Quiet Place: Day One,” and still to come is Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator” sequel.
The National Association of Theatre Owners, a trade organization that represents over 35,000 screens in the U.S., said in a statement Monday that it plans to look closely at the details of the merger with an eye toward whether it will produce more or less theatrical releases.
“We are encouraged by the commitment that David Ellison and the Skydance Media team have shown to theatrical exhibition in the past,” said Michael O’Leary, president and CEO of the National Association of Theatre Owners. “A merger that results in fewer movies being produced will not only hurt consumers and result in less revenue, but negatively impact people who work in all sectors of this great industry — creative, distribution and exhibition.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/paramount-skydance-merge-ending-redstone-family-reign-/7690065.html
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-07-08, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Making Godot on iPad shine, like Gnome or Mono before has graduated from “how hard can this be?” To “oh god what have I done”
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112753403629430456
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-08, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The Man Who Created Apple's Most Iconic Sounds.
https://laughingsquid.com/jim-reekes-apple-sound-designer/
Book Review | ‘The Lichen Museum’ by A. Laurie Palmer
date: 2024-07-08, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Travel writing, memoir, history, science, and photography — all through the unlikely lens of lichen.
The post Book Review | ‘The Lichen Museum’ by A. Laurie Palmer appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/08/book-review-the-lichen-museum-by-a-laurie-palmer/
Proyecto de Paseos Comunitarios del Eastside: Mejorando la Seguridad y Accesibilidad del Vecindario
date: 2024-07-08, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SANTA BARBARA, CA – 8 de julio de 2024 El Proyecto de Paseos Comunitarios del Eastside está cerca de su
The post Proyecto de Paseos Comunitarios del Eastside: Mejorando la Seguridad y Accesibilidad del Vecindario appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Eastside Community Paseos Project: Enhancing Neighborhood Safety & Accessibility
date: 2024-07-08, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SANTA BARBARA, CA – July 8, 2024 The Eastside Community Paseos Project is nearing completion, with ongoing construction on Haley
The post Eastside Community Paseos Project: Enhancing Neighborhood Safety & Accessibility appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
NASA Moon Rocket Stage for Artemis II Moved, Prepped for Shipment
date: 2024-07-08, from: NASA breaking news
NASA is preparing the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket core stage that will help power the first crewed mission of NASA’s Artemis campaign for shipment. On July 6, NASA and Boeing, the core stage lead contractor, moved the Artemis II rocket stage to another part of the agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. The […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasa-moon-rocket-stage-for-artemis-ii-moved-prepped-for-shipment/
Over 700 Santa Barbara County Adults and Teens Trained in Youth Mental Health First Aid Last Year
date: 2024-07-08, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Santa Barbara County, CA (July 8, 2024) – Family Service Agency (FSA) and Youthwell are pleased to announce that over 700
The post Over 700 Santa Barbara County Adults and Teens Trained in Youth Mental Health First Aid Last Year appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Museum of Natural History Hosts Splendid Wine + Food Festival
date: 2024-07-08, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Proceeds support Museum’s education programs and exhibits.
The post Museum of Natural History Hosts Splendid Wine + Food Festival appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/08/museum-of-natural-history-hosts-splendid-wine-food-festival/
US voters mixed on Biden staying in race
date: 2024-07-08, from: VOA News USA
U.S. President Joe Biden says he is staying in the race for reelection against former President Donald Trump after Biden struggled in their first debate. VOA correspondent Scott Stearns looks at what U.S. voters think about the president’s continuing candidacy.
https://www.voanews.com/a/u-s-voters-mixed-on-biden-staying-in-race-/7690026.html
Housing Authority of the City of Santa Barbara and the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation Celebrate Successful Conclusion of CASA Summer Camp Program
date: 2024-07-08, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Santa Barbara, CA, July 8, 2024 – The Housing Authority of the City of Santa Barbara (HACSB), in collaboration with the Santa Barbara Trust
The post Housing Authority of the City of Santa Barbara and the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation Celebrate Successful Conclusion of CASA Summer Camp Program appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Why AI Web Scraping (Mostly) Doesn’t Bother Me
date: 2024-07-08, from: TidBITS blog
Despite the seemingly universal outrage about tech companies scraping the open Web to train their models, Adam Engst finds himself largely unperturbed.
https://tidbits.com/2024/07/08/why-ai-web-scraping-mostly-doesnt-bother-me/
NASA, Boeing Provide Next Update on Space Station Crew Flight Test
date: 2024-07-08, from: NASA breaking news
Leadership from NASA and Boeing will participate in a media briefing at 12:30 p.m. EDT Wednesday, July 10, to discuss the agency’s Crew Flight Test at the International Space Station. Audio of the media teleconference will stream live on the agency’s website: https://www.nasa.gov/nasatv Participants include: Media interested in participating must contact the newsroom at NASA’s […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-boeing-provide-next-update-on-space-station-crew-flight-test/
Biden to meet new British PM Starmer on Wednesday
date: 2024-07-08, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — U.S. President Joe Biden will hold his first face-to-face talks with Britain’s new Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the White House on Wednesday, the White House said Monday.
Biden also will host an event Thursday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the NATO summit, which is taking place this week in Washington, national security adviser John Kirby told reporters.
Biden plans to “underscore the importance of continuing to strengthen the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom” in his meeting with Starmer, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
She said the two leaders would have the opportunity to discuss U.S.-U.K. cooperation across a range of issues from Ukraine to the Israel-Hamas war, and ensuring that Iran does not obtain nuclear weapons, as well as confronting Iranian-backed Houthi threats to commercial shipping.
The leaders also will discuss furthering cooperation in areas such as protecting advanced technologies and developing climate and clean energy solutions.
https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-to-meet-new-british-pm-starmer-on-wednesday-/7690009.html
Park benches and grandmothers: Zimbabwe’s novel mental health therapy spreads overseas
date: 2024-07-08, from: VOA News USA
Harare, Zimbabwe — After her son, the family’s shining light and only breadwinner, was arrested last year, Tambudzai Tembo went into meltdown. In Zimbabwe, where clinical mental health services are scarce, her chances of getting professional help were next to zero. She contemplated suicide.
“I didn’t want to live anymore. People who saw me would think everything was OK. But inside, my head was spinning,” the 57-year-old said. “I was on my own.”
A wooden bench and an empathetic grandmother saved her.
Older people are at the center of a homegrown form of mental health therapy in Zimbabwe that is now being adopted in places like the United States.
The approach involves setting up benches in quiet, discreet corners of community clinics and in some churches, poor neighborhoods and at a university. An older woman with basic training in problem-solving therapy patiently sits there, ready to listen and engage in a one-on-one conversation.
The therapy is inspired by traditional practice in Zimbabwe in which grandmothers were the go-to people for wisdom in rough times. It had been abandoned with urbanization, the breakdown of tight-knit extended families and modern technology. Now it is proving useful again as mental health needs grow.
“Grandmothers are the custodians of local culture and wisdom. They are rooted in their communities,” said Dixon Chibanda, a psychiatry professor and founder of the initiative.
“They don’t leave, and in addition, they have an amazing ability to use what we call ‘expressed empathy’… to make people feel respected and understood.”
Last year, Chibanda was named the winner of a $150,000 prize by the U.S.-based McNulty Foundation for revolutionizing mental healthcare. Chibanda said the concept has taken root in parts of Vietnam, Botswana, Malawi, Kenya and Tanzania and is in “preliminary formative work” in London.
In New York, the city’s new mental health plan launched last year says it is “drawing inspiration” from what it calls the Friendship Bench to help address risk factors such as social isolation. The orange benches are now in areas including Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx.
In Washington, the organization HelpAge USA is piloting the concept under the DC Grandparents for Mental Health initiative, which started in 2022 as a COVID-19 support group of people 60 and above.
So far, 20 grandmothers have been trained by a team from Friendship Bench Zimbabwe to listen, empathize and empower others to solve their problems, said Cindy Cox-Roman, the president and chief executive of HelpAge USA.
Benches will be set up at places of worship, schools and wellness centers in Washington’s low-income communities with people who “have been historically marginalized and more likely to experience mental health problems,” she said.
Cox-Roman cited fear and distrust in the medical system, lack of social support and stigma as some of the factors limiting access to treatment.
“People are hurting, and a grandmother can always make you feel better,” she said.
More than one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.
“The mental health crisis is real. Where it’s a real crisis after the pandemic is that many clinicians have dropped out of the workforce,” said Dr. Jehan El-Mayoumi, who works as an expert with HelpAge USA and is a founding director of the health equity Rodham Institute at Georgetown University. She has struggled to get psychiatrists for acutely suicidal patients.
El-Mayoumi said the Zimbabwean concept provides people with “someone you can trust, open up your heart to, that you can tell your deepest secrets [and] that requires trust, so that’s what’s so wonderful about the Friendship Bench.”
The idea was born out of tragedy. Chibanda was a young psychiatrist, and one of just over 10 in Zimbabwe in 2005. One of his patients desperately wanted to see him, but she could not afford the $15 bus fare. Chibanda later learned that she had killed herself.
“I realized that I needed to have a stronger presence in the community,” Chibanda said. “I realized that actually one of the most valuable resources are these grandmothers, the custodians of local culture.”
He recruited 14 grandmothers in the neighborhood near the hospital where he worked in the capital, Harare, and trained them. In Zimbabwe, they get $25 a month to help with transport and phone bills.
The network, which now partners with the health ministry and the World Health Organization, has grown to over 2,000 grandmothers across the country. Over 200,000 Zimbabweans sat on a bench to get therapy from a trained grandmother in 2023, according to the network.
Siridzayi Dzukwa, the grandmother who talked Tembo out of suicide, made a home follow-up visit on a recent day. Using a written questionnaire, she checked on Tembo’s progress. She listened as Tembo talked about how she has found a new lease on life and now sells vegetables to make ends meet.
Dzukwa has become a recognizable figure in the area. People stop to greet and thank her for helping them. Some ask for a home visit or take down her number.
“People are no longer ashamed or afraid of openly stopping us on the streets and ask us to talk,” she said. “Mental health is no longer something to be ashamed of.”
New parents in Baltimore could get $1,000 ‘baby bonus’ under new initiative
date: 2024-07-08, from: VOA News USA
BALTIMORE — New parents in Baltimore could receive a $1,000 “baby bonus” if voters approve a proposal that aims to help reduce childhood poverty from birth with a modest one-time cash payment.
A group of Baltimore teachers is behind the effort. Organizers recently secured the necessary 10,000 signatures to bring the question to voters as a ballot initiative in November. Their campaign relied on extensive canvassing efforts and a cute logo: a flying cartoon stork with a bag of money in its beak.
The proposal is loosely modeled on a program implemented this year in Flint, Michigan, where women receive $1,500 during mid-pregnancy and $500 per month for the first year after giving birth. Officials said the Flint program was the first of its kind in the U.S.
Countries in Europe and Asia have experimented with larger cash payments, but those programs are meant to encourage more people to have more kids, not address child poverty. Italy, which has one of the world’s lowest birth rates, provides baby bonus checks and other benefits aimed at increasing the population.
Organizers behind the Baltimore campaign say more systemic change is needed on a national level to help lift families out of poverty, but giving new parents a modest financial boost could prove an important first step.
“If we’re going to spend a limited amount of money, where do you get the most bang for your buck? Research says at birth,” said Nate Golden, a high school math teacher who helped found the Maryland Child Alliance, which is pushing for the ballot initiative. “This could literally have a lifelong impact on a kid.”
Golden said he also hopes the program will demonstrate to elected leaders in Baltimore and beyond that there’s a real appetite among voters for implementing policies that help vulnerable children succeed.
The issue is particularly urgent in Baltimore, where an estimated 31% of school-aged children are experiencing poverty, according to census data. Nationally, childhood poverty fell during the pandemic thanks to federal relief programs, but it has since climbed again to about 12% in 2022.
It’s incredibly hard for the poor to move up the economic ladder, especially among communities of color. Research shows that most American children born into the lowest income bracket will remain at roughly the same socioeconomic status for the rest of their lives.
Golden said he sees similar scenarios playing out in his classroom every school year — with students who are experiencing homelessness, food insecurity, gun violence and countless other challenges.
“When you see what they’re going through outside school, I’m still going to demand their best in the classroom but it’s just not enough,” he said. “We have to take care of these underlying needs before we can get kids to focus on learning.”
If the ballot initiative is approved, all new parents in Baltimore will receive a one-time payment of at least $1,000.
An estimated 7,000 children are born in Baltimore each year, so the program would cost about $7 million annually, which is roughly 0.16% of the city’s annual operating budget, according to supporters. The initiative won’t result in higher taxes, but it will be up to Baltimore’s City Council to allocate funds if it passes.
Advocates say taking a blanket approach to distributing the funds ensures that no one falls through the cracks. It also means some of the money goes to affluent parents who don’t need assistance, but Golden said it’s worth including them to avoid leaving out the poorest families.
Considering the payments are relatively small, the universal approach makes sense because researching and developing a qualification system could add significant costs and delay implementing the program, said Christina DePasquale, associate professor of economics at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.
Above all, DePasquale said, the initiative will raise awareness about childhood poverty
and could lead to more comprehensive changes down the road.
“It’s worthwhile in the sense that it gets people thinking about it,” she said. “It’s something to build off of. Even if you don’t have something perfect, the less perfect version of it is better than not having it at all.”
While no one contends that $1,000 is a life-changing amount of money, it could help cover some of the many costs that come with having a baby, including paying for diapers, formula, strollers, cribs and more. And for new parents living on society’s margins, that could make a real difference, said Nadya Dutchin, executive director of the Baltimore-based organization ShareBaby, which distributes free diapers and other baby essentials.
“I don’t think people really pay enough attention to the material insecurities that contribute to parental stress,” she said. “If you don’t have enough money to purchase diapers to keep your child dry, safe and healthy, you’re going to be stressed and your baby is going to be stressed.”
She said requests for supplies increased a huge amount last year amid rising inflation and stagnant wages.
The largest federal program aimed at addressing childhood poverty is the child tax credit, which was temporarily expanded during the pandemic. Although shown to be effective, advocates say it leaves out some families because of necessary paperwork and qualification requirements.
NASA to Cover Northrop Grumman’s 20th Cargo Space Station Departure
date: 2024-07-08, from: NASA breaking news
Northrop Grumman’s uncrewed Cygnus spacecraft is scheduled to depart the International Space Station on Friday, July 12, five and a half months after delivering more than 8,200 pounds of supplies, scientific investigations, commercial products, hardware, and other cargo to the orbiting laboratory for NASA and its international partners. This mission was the company’s 20th commercial […]
Windows Notepad gets spell check. Only took 41 years
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Purists needn’t worry – you can turn it off
As text editors go, Microsoft’s Notepad has never been big on creature comforts. But after more than 41 years, Redmond has finally seen fit to bestow its humblest of utilities with spell check and auto-correct.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/it_only_took_41_years/
Hydropower Is Surging in China
date: 2024-07-08, from: Heatmap News
It’s raining again in China. Reservoirs are filling, and the country’s massive hydropower complex is generating power at closer to normal capacity after years of drought. This could mean that China’s emissions of greenhouse gases — the largest in the world — may be peaking, or even already have peaked. And as goes China’s emissions, so go the world’s.
Hydro generation has grown 16% through May of this year compared to January through May of last year, according to a Reuters analysis of Chinese government statistics. “Hydro storage is about as good as it’s ever been” in China, Alex Turnbull, an investor and energy researcher based in Singapore, told me.
China produces almost 30% of the world’s hydropower, but output in the
country has fallen in recent years due to declines in rainfall. China
produced some 1,226 terawatt hours of hydro power in 2023, according to
the
2024
Statistical Review of World Energy, down about 5% from 1,298 in
2022 and down substantially from the recent maximum output of 1,322 in
2020. From 2013 to 2023, Chinese hydro output grew by about a third, a 3
percent annual growth rate, during that same period,
wind
output has grown by over 500%. Solar output, meanwhile,
increased by nearly a
factor
of 70.
Even in spite of this phenomenal growth in wind and solar capacity, hydropower is still China’s largest source of clean energy, according to the clean energy think tank Ember, responsible for 13% of its electricity generation. Almost two-third comes from fossil fuels, largely coal.
The country’s 2022 drought
wreaked
havoc on China’s economy, with factories going idle for want of
power and cities shutting off lights in order to conserve. Globally,
hydropower output hit a five-year low in 2023, according to Ember,
largely on the back of China’s slump. This meant increased global coal
usage, driving up overall power sector emissions by 1% and preventing
what would have otherwise been a fall in global power
emissions.
“The expectation with more hydro coming back on line is much less coal generation,” Jeremy Wallace, a professor of China studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Heatmap contributor, told me.
The water level in the Yangtze River has risen in the past few weeks due to heavy rainfall, Reuters reported, which is not an unalloyed good — it could also mean more flooding and landslides throughout the summer, government meteorologists projected. Floods in the Yangtze and its tributaries are recurring and tremendous risks in China. Floods in 2011 caused by heavy rain following a drought killing around 200 people and displaced hundreds of thousands.
China accounts for about 26% of global emissions, so if its emissions
have indeed peaked, that would be very good news for the rest of the
world. “China’s economy is growing and it’s using more electricity,”
Wallace told me, “but almost all of that electricity growth has
been from clean sources.”
China’s carbon dioxide emissions fell slightly in March of this year after rising steadily following the end of its zero-Covid policy in 2022, according to an analysis for CarbonBrief by Lauri Myllyvirta, a senior fellow at Asia Society Policy Institute and lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. That is due in part to the government’s investments in non-emitting energy — 423 terawatt hours per year installed in 2023 alone, “equal to the total electricity consumption of France,” per Myllyvirta’s analysis — and in other part to a transformation in its industrial balance.
Over the past few years, China’s economic engine has shifted from urban construction, dependent on emissions-heavy steel and cement, towards relatively less carbon-intensive manufacturing, Wallace said.
Turnbull shared a similar take. “All the sectors which comprised all the ferocious power demand growth” are “going down” or are “flat to down-ish,” he said, referring to industrial sectors like steel. Meanwhile, “the demand side doesn’t look like it’s growing anywhere near like it is before.”
“I think this is it,” Turnbull said. “This is the peak.”
https://heatmap.news/economy/china-floods-hydropower
New Approaches to Measuring Cognitive Changes in Parkinson’s Disease and Dementia with Lewy Bodies
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: RAND blog
Doctors and researchers are optimistic about the potential of future treatments for Parkinson’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. But available measures to test the efficacy of such treatments on cognition are lacking.
6 myths about homelessness in California
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The LAist
There’s a lot of misinformation floating around out there about homelessness in California. We use data to dispel several common myths.
https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/6-myths-about-houselessness-in-california
Child & Family Center Installs New Executive Board
date: 2024-07-08, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Child & Family Center held its annual board installation on Thursday, June
https://scvnews.com/child-family-center-installs-new-executive-board/
World’s largest collection of Shakespeare’s First Folios goes on display
date: 2024-07-08, from: VOA News USA
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-08, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Box shadow CSS generator, written by AI.
https://tools.simonwillison.net/box-shadow
Travel Through Barbieland at London’s Design Museum
date: 2024-07-08, from: Smithsonian Magazine
A new exhibition traces the evolution of one of the world’s most famous dolls over six decades
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/barbieland-takes-over-londons-design-museum-180984664/
Excessive Heat Warning Issued for SCV
date: 2024-07-08, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Los Angeles County Health Officer has issued an excessive heat warning in the Santa Clarita Valley Tuesday through Thursday as high temperatures have been forecast
https://scvnews.com/excessive-heat-warning-issued-for-scv-2/
30 Years Ago: STS-65 Lifts Off
date: 2024-07-08, from: NASA breaking news
The space shuttle Columbia launches from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 8, 1994. This was the second flight of International Microgravity Laboratory (IML-2), carrying more than twice the number of experiments and facilities as IML-1. The crew split into two teams to perform around-the-clock research. More than 80 experiments, […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/30-years-ago-sts-65-lifts-off/
Citigroup to cease operations in Haiti after 50 years
date: 2024-07-08, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/citigroup-to-cease-operations-in-haiti-after-50-years/7689814.html
Did the Extinction of the Dinosaurs Pave the Way for Grapes?
date: 2024-07-08, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Newly discovered fossils in South America hint at the evolution and proliferation of grapes around the world
NASA’s Neurodiversity Network Interns Speak at National Space Development Conference
date: 2024-07-08, from: NASA breaking news
Two high school interns funded by NASA’s Neurodiversity Network (N3) presented their work from Summer 2023 at the recent National Space Society (NSS) International Space Development Conference (ISDC-2024), held in Los Angeles, CA (May 23-26, 2024). Both interns were mentored by Dr. Pascal Lee, Planetary Scientist at the SETI Institute and Chair of the Mars […]
General Motors to Pay $146 Million For Excess Emissions
date: 2024-07-08, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Almost six million vehicles were emitting over 10 percent more carbon dioxide on average than compliance reports said they were
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-08, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Substack rival Ghost federates its first newsletter. (Really good hype.)
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/08/substack-rival-ghost-federates-its-first-newsletter/
Peloton faces lawsuit over claims it pedaled past privacy
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Chat widget allegedly fed data to third party, which used it to train AI without telling customers
Peloton is pedaling toward a court date after a California judge denied its bid to dismiss a lawsuit that alleges the pandemic darling violated the US state’s privacy laws – by allowing a third party to intercept and record chat records between Peloton reps and customers without their consent.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/peloton_to_face_proposed_classaction/
US seeks to boost scrutiny on property deals near military facilities
date: 2024-07-08, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The United States plans to broaden oversight of foreigners’ real estate transactions on properties close to military installations, the Treasury Department said Monday, as concerns involving Chinese land purchases grow.
“President [Joe] Biden and I remain committed to using our strong investment screening tool to defend America’s national security, including actions that protect military installations from external threats,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement.
Under a proposed rule, more than 50 facilities will be added to a list of sites where surrounding property transactions may be reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) — taking the total figure to 227.
CFIUS’s jurisdiction covers land purchases as well.
The concern is that a foreigner’s purchase or lease of certain properties could allow them to collect intelligence or “expose national security activities” to foreign surveillance risks, the Treasury noted.
A senior Treasury official said CFIUS’s jurisdiction was “country-agnostic” and did not specify if the latest rule was aimed at quelling concerns directed at specific countries like China or Russia.
In May, U.S. authorities announced that a Chinese-owned crypto firm was barred from using land near a strategic U.S. nuclear missile base, over national security concerns.
MineOne Partners Limited was ordered to divest from land it bought in 2022, which sat less than a mile from Wyoming’s Francis E. Warren Air Force Base — home to Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles.
CFIUS had also raised concerns about the installation of “specialized” crypto mining equipment on the land which is “potentially capable of facilitating surveillance and espionage activities.”
Lessons from Afghanistan for NATO’s New Ukraine Command
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: RAND blog
One of the clear lessons from Afghanistan is that NATO is unable to execute operations without U.S. leadership. Ultimately, the level of Western support for Ukraine—and its effectiveness—will rise and fall based on U.S. policy and commitment, just as it did in Afghanistan.
Apple Intelligence for Siri in Spring 2025
date: 2024-07-08, from: Michael Tsai
William Gallagher: While many Apple Intelligence features will roll out with iOS 18 during the remainder of 2024, its much-awaited revamp of Siri will wait until iOS 18.4 in 2025.[…]Before then, there will be a new design to Siri. That will presumably include how Apple has shown that invoking Siri will bring a flare around […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/07/08/apple-intelligence-for-siri-in-spring-2025/
Ivory 2.0
date: 2024-07-08, from: Michael Tsai
Niléane: Now, in the app’s redesigned Hashtags tab, you can create a list that contains up to four hashtags, and you can even exclude specific hashtags if you’re looking to fine-tune the resulting timeline. […] The other big improvement in Ivory 2.0 is its redesigned share sheet extension for creating posts. It is now fully-featured, […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/07/08/ivory-2-0/
Signal for Mac’s “Encrypted” Database
date: 2024-07-08, from: Michael Tsai
Signal: Storing messages outside of your active Signal device is not supported. Messages are only stored locally. An iTunes or iCloud backup does not contain any of your Signal message history. This makes it private on iOS because other apps can’t access the message database. But the same design doesn’t work so well with the […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/07/08/signal-for-macs-encrypted-database/
Epic Games Store Temporarily Allowed
date: 2024-07-08, from: Michael Tsai
Epic Games: Apple has informed us that our previously rejected Epic Games Store notarization submission has now been accepted. Eric Slivka (Hacker News): Apple today said it has approved the third-party Epic Games Store in the European Union, allowing the Fortnite developer to launch its alternative app marketplace in those countries, reports Reuters. Is running […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/07/08/epic-games-store-temporarily-allowed/
Filming in Santa Clarita Includes Six Productions
date: 2024-07-08, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The city of Santa Clarita’s Film Office has released the list of six productions currently filming in the Santa Clarita Valley for the week of Monday, July 8 - Sunday, July
https://scvnews.com/filming-in-santa-clarita-includes-six-productions-5/
July 11: CUSD to Discuss Chiquita Canyon Landfill Community Concerns
date: 2024-07-08, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Castaic Union School District Governing Board will hold its regular meeting Thursday, July 11, at 6 p.m
https://scvnews.com/cusd-to-discuss-chiquita-canyon-landfill-community-concerns/
View From the Nuba Mountains: An Interview with Kuna
date: 2024-07-08, from: Care
<p>An interview with Kuna (a pseudonym for her protection), a Nuba diaspora returnee currently displaced within Sudan due to the ongoing war between the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces.</p>Ken Striplin | Conservative Budget Practices Paying Off
date: 2024-07-08, from: SCV New (TV Station)
I am pleased to say that during our last City Council meeting in June, our City Council adopted yet another on-time, balanced budget for the 2024/25 Fiscal Year
https://scvnews.com/ken-striplin-conservative-budget-practices-paying-off/
Apple reverses course to approve Epic Games Store on iOS in EU
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Arguments over buttons set to continue while European Commission looks on
Apple performed an abrupt U-turn over the weekend to approve the Epic Games Store in the European Union.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/apple_epic_u_turn/
US radio host resigns over Biden interview
date: 2024-07-08, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-radio-host-resigns-over-biden-interview-/7689550.html
Happy Birthday, Meatball! NASA’s Iconic Logo Turns 65
date: 2024-07-08, from: NASA breaking news
On July 15, 2024, NASA’s logo is turning 65. The iconic symbol, known affectionately as “the meatball,” was developed at NASA’s Lewis Research Center in Cleveland (now called NASA Glenn). Employee James Modarelli, who started his career at the center as an artist and technical illustrator, was its chief designer. The red, white, and blue […]
https://www.nasa.gov/general/happy-birthday-meatball-nasas-iconic-logo-turns-65/
You Can Buy Four Drawings by a Young Queen Victoria
date: 2024-07-08, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The sketches, which are heading to auction this week, showcase the teenage royal’s devotion to the arts
NASA Mission to Study Mysteries in the Origin of Solar Radio Waves
date: 2024-07-08, from: NASA breaking news
NASA’s CubeSat Radio Interferometry Experiment, or CURIE, is scheduled to launch July 9, 2024, to investigate the unresolved origins of radio waves coming from the Sun. Scientists first noticed these radio waves decades ago, and over the years they’ve determined the radio waves come from solar flares and giant eruptions on the Sun called coronal […]
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-08, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
MSNBC interview with President Biden, this morning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aziuR76Cek
EU Competition Commissioner hints at Nvidia GPU probe, refers to ‘huge bottleneck’
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
CUDA, woulda, shoulda be first port of call for AI slingers, but does it respect its own dominance?
The European Union’s Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager reckons there is a “huge bottleneck” in the supply of Nvidia’s GPUs - but her department has yet to make any decision on whether it needs to take regulatory action over this.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/eu_competition_commissioner_hints_at/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-08, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Supreme Court’s Radical Immunity Ruling Shields Lawbreaking Presidents and Undermines Democracy.
What Is Machine Learning?
date: 2024-07-08, from: Quanta Magazine
Neural networks and other forms of machine learning ultimately learn by trial and error, one improvement at a time.The post What Is Machine Learning? first appeared on Quanta Magazine
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-machine-learning-20240708/
What matters
date: 2024-07-08, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
The only goal that really matters is building a stable, informed,
democratic, inclusive, equitable, peaceful society where everyone has
the opportunity to live a good life. One where we care for our
environment, where we champion democracy, science, education, and art,
where equality for all is seen as a virtue, where truth is spoken to
power, and where nobody can fall through the cracks.
Let’s
get there together.
https://werd.io/2024/what-matters-1
Japan-NATO Ties: For What End?
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: RAND blog
It is commonly believed that stronger Japan-NATO cooperation benefits both sides. But this begs an important question: Why? What are the practical areas of cooperation for Japan-NATO ties?
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/07/japan-nato-ties-for-what-end.html
Internet Archive blames ‘environmental factors’ for overnight outages
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Power failure rather than lawyers to blame for Wayback Machine wandering off
The Internet Archive took a tumble overnight after “environmental factors” downed the Wayback Machine, leaving archive.org wobbling in a way that might bring a smile to the faces of certain publishers wishing for its demise.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/internet_archive_suffers_a_wobble/
3 Takeaways From Our SunZia Investigation
date: 2024-07-08, from: Heatmap News
How hard is it to build big clean-energy infrastructure in America? Look at SunZia.
When completed, the more-than-500-mile power line is meant to ferry electricity from a massive new wind farm in New Mexico to the booming power markets of Arizona and California. When finally built, SunZia will be the largest renewable project in the United States, if not the Western Hemisphere.
But as I detail in a recent investigation for Heatmap, it has taken too long — much too long — to build. Nearly two decades have elapsed since a project developer first asked the federal government for permission to build SunZia.
Since it was first proposed, SunZia has endured seemingly endless environmental studies and lawsuits. It has been bought, sold, and bargained over. The end result is that a project first conceived in 2006 — which was expected to operate in 2013 — is now due to open in 2026.
That is a massive problem, because confronting climate change will require the country to build dozens of new long-distance power lines like SunZia. If the United States wants to meet its Paris Agreement goal by 2050, then it will have to triple the size of its power grid in just 26 years, according to Princeton’s Net Zero America study. (That research was led by Jesse Jenkins, who co-hosts Heatmap’s “Shift Key” podcast with me.)
The country is not on track to meet that goal. My story on SunZia set out to determine why.
Here are three major takeaways from my investigation:
- Transmission projects face more obstacles than fossil fuel projects
— even in the eyes of self-described environmentalists.
At a fundamental level, a power line and a natural gas pipeline aren’t so different: Both move a large amount of energy over a long distance.
Yet it is much easier to build a natural gas pipeline than a transmission line, and they face very different regulatory hurdles in America. When a company proposes a new transmission line, it must get permission from every state whose borders it plans to cross. This can result in an arduous, years-long process of application, study, and approval.
That same obstacle does not hinder gas developers. When a company proposes a new natural gas pipeline, it can get many of its permits handled by a single federal agency, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC is a one-stop shop for gas pipeline developers, organizing and granting state-level permits through a streamlined process.
(To be sure, natural gas pipelines sometimes need permits from other federal agencies — such as the Bureau of Land Management — before they can begin construction. But transmission developers need to get permits from those other federal agencies, too.)
But not all of the obstacles are regulatory. Transmission and renewable projects simply look different than pipelines, which can make environmentalists and the public more skeptical of them. Even though pipelines can leak or spill, they can be buried or built closer to the ground than power lines, and therefore pose less of a visual disturbance to the landscape.
In recent years, much of the controversy around SunZia has focused on the San Pedro Valley, a gorgeous desert landscape northeast of Tucson, Arizona. SunZia must pass through the valley to connect to a power station near Phoenix.
Two Native American tribes — the Tohono O’odham Nation and the San Carlos Apache Tribe — sued to block SunZia last year. They argue that the valley has cultural value and must be preserved intact and undiminished.
But the valley is already home to a large natural gas pipeline, mostly — but not entirely — buried underground. (The pipeline is on pylons near Redington, Arizona, where it crosses the San Pedro River.)
In an interview, a leader at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmentalist group that joined the tribes’ lawsuit, said that SunZia’s proposed power line is problematic in part because it will be so tall.
“There are no 200-foot large power lines going through the San Pedro Valley,” Robin Silver, the leader, told me. “The gas pipeline doesn’t have 200 foot towers.”
If environmentalists focus on a project’s visual prominence, then pipelines will virtually always win out over transmission lines.
A federal judge dismissed the tribes’ lawsuit last month. A representative of the Tohono O’odham Nation did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
- A better relationship between conservationists and clean energy
developers is possible.
In permitting debates, conservationists and clean energy developers can often become enemies. Traditional conservationists seek to slow down the permitting process as much as possible and move a project away from a treasured or sensitive area, while developers and climate hawks want to build clean energy infrastructure quickly and efficiently.
These fights often play out as costly lawsuits over the National Environmental Policy Act, a 1970 law that requires the government to study the environmental impact of every decision that it makes. Advocates and opponents wind up battling in court over whether or not a project’s environmental impact has been sufficiently studied.
That’s not what happened with SunZia. Some environmentalists and traditional conservation groups, such as the Audubon Society, now praise SunZia’s process.
It wasn’t always that way. During the early 2010s, SunZia’s proposal to cross the Rio Grande in New Mexico was just as controversial as its San Pedro Valley route. The project’s developer wanted to build power lines near a site where tens of thousands of migratory birds, including sandhill cranes, spend the winter.
That changed after the Defense Department forced a major rethink of the line in 2018. Soon after that, Pattern Energy, a San Francisco-based energy developer, took over the project.
Pattern took a different approach than its predecessor and partnered with environmental groups to learn how it could build the power line in the least intrusive way.
It conducted original research on how sandhill cranes fly, and — based on that research — moved the power line to the place where it would interfere with birds the least. It also purchased and donated an old farm property and the accompanying water rights so a wildlife refuge could rebuild habitat for the birds.
Pattern also agreed to illuminate the transmission line with an experimental infrared system to make it more visible to birds.
These changes, which also allowed Pattern to avoid a Defense Department site, were so extensive that it had to apply for a new federal permit.
“Pattern being a company that was willing to have discussions with us in good faith — and that conversation happening before the re-permitting process — was, I think, really important,” Jon Hayes, a wildlife biologist and the executive director of Audubon Southwest, told me.
- But someone has to facilitate it.
This collaborative relationship was possible in part because it was facilitated by Senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat who represents New Mexico.
Heinrich, a climate hawk and the son of a utility worker, had long championed the SunZia project. So when the project ran into obstacles, he pushed the developer, environmentalists, and the Pentagon to negotiate over a better solution. His office remained deeply involved in the process throughout the 2010s, ultimately helping to broker an agreement over the Rio Grande that all parties supported.
“I firmly believe that when we work together, we can build big things in this country,” Heinrich told me in a statement.
Silver, the Center for Biological Diversity leader, told me that Heinrich’s involvement is the principal reason why SunZia has been praised in New Mexico but criticized in Arizona.
The Grand Canyon State doesn’t have elected officials who were willing to get involved in SunZia and push for a mutually beneficial solution, he said. (For much of the 2010s, Republicans held both of the state’s Senate seats.)
But a project’s ultimate success cannot rest on the quality or curiosity of its senators. Martin Heinrich, as a climate solution, doesn’t scale, and not every clean energy project will have a federal chaperone.
What’s more, America’s existing permitting system — which is channeled through its adversarial legal system — practically discourages cooperation. It pushes developers and their opponents to pursue aggressive and expensive legal campaigns against each other. These campaigns burn huge amounts of time and millions of dollars in legal fees — money that could be spent on decarbonizing the economy.
In order to meet America’s climate goals, developers must build dozens of projects like SunZia, all around the country, in the years to come. That will not happen under today’s permitting system. The country needs something better.
https://heatmap.news/economy/sunzia-transmission-heinrich-pattern-energy
Vape Shop Owners Face Federal Charges for Selling Boner Pills as ‘Amazing Honey’
date: 2024-07-08, from: 404 Media Group
Z Smoke Shop in Florida was allegedly selling mislabeled Viagra and Cialis, as well as candy and snack that violated major brands’ trademarks, a federal indictment says.
NextSTEP Q: CIS Capability Studies III – Lunar User Terminals & Network Orchestration and Management System
date: 2024-07-08, from: NASA breaking news
Solicitation Number: NNH16ZCQ001K-1_Appendix-Q July 8, 2024 – Solicitation Released Solicitation Overview NASA’s long-term vision to provide for a resilient space and ground communications and navigation infrastructure in which space mission users can seamlessly “roam” between an array of space-based and ground-based networks has been bolstered by innovative studies delivered by industry through the Next Space […]
Editorial Note: On Medicine and the Body in Tech
date: 2024-07-08, from: Care
<p>Editorial Note from Editor Khadijah Abdurrahman for Logic(s) Issue 21</p>https://logicmag.io/issue-21-medicine-and-the-body/editorial-note-on-medicine-and-the-body-in-tech
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-08, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The problem isn't that Biden might die, the problem is that even if he were to win, we'll be right back here in another four years, and at that time we will have to grapple with an even more dire situation.
http://scripting.com/2024/07/08.html#a141318
Scalpers Work With Hackers to Liberate Ticketmaster’s ‘Non-Transferable’ Tickets
date: 2024-07-08, from: 404 Media Group
Scalpers have reverse-engineered how Ticketmaster creates tickets, and are now generating and selling them on their own parallel infrastructure.
Californians rank 5th-best in US at bill paying
date: 2024-07-08, from: San Jose Mercury News
Between 2014 and 2023, an average 1.71% of California’s combined debts were 90 days or more late.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/08/californians-rank-5th-best-in-us-at-bill-paying/
NASA’s Begoña Vila Awarded 2024 Galician Excellence Award
date: 2024-07-08, from: NASA breaking news
Begoña Vila, an instrument systems engineer from KBR who worked on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, has been selected to receive the 2024 Galician Excellence Title in the Sciences and Medicine Category for her career and work on Webb. This award comes from the Spanish Association of Galician Entrepreneurs of Catalonia (AEGA-CAT), a civic and social […]
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-begona-vila-awarded-2024-galician-excellence-award/
Microsoft forgets about SwiftKey’s support site
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Injecting Copilot branding will not make TLS certificates auto-renew
Another Microsoft certificate has expired, leaving SwiftKey users that are seeking support faced with an alarming certificate error.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/microsoft_swiftkeys_cert_expires/
When a job opportunity is actually a scam
date: 2024-07-08, from: Marketplace Morning Report
You may have gotten the unsolicited texts, LinkedIn messages or other offers from scammers posing as recruiters. The may even have a legitimate-looking listing on a job hiring site. You have a virtual interview, then the recruiter starts asking for personal information like your Social Security number to fill out “employment paperwork” — but actually they’re stealing your identity. Plus, examining the Sahm Rule and use of the U.S. dollar in Lebanon.
Design and build the next version of OSNews
date: 2024-07-08, from: OS News
Despite being live since 1997, OSNews has had fairly few redesigns in the grand scheme of things. If my memory serves me correctly, we’ve had a grand total of 6 designs, and we’re currently on version 6, introduced about 5 years ago because of unpleasant reasons. It’s now 2024, and for a variety of reasons, we’re looking to work towards version 7 of our almost 30 year old website, and we need help. I have a very clear idea of what I want OSNews 7 to be like – including mockups. The general goals are making the site visually simpler, reducing our dependency on WordPress extensions, and reducing the complexity of our theme and website elements to make it a bit easier for someone like me to change small things without breaking anything. Oh and a dark mode that works. Note that we’re not looking to change backends or anything like that – WordPress will stay. If you have the WordPress, design, and developer skills to make something like this a reality, and in the process shape the visual identity of one of the oldest continuously running technology news websites in the world, send me an email.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140175/design-and-build-the-next-version-of-osnews/
Will two San Jose scaredy cats ever overcome their fears?
date: 2024-07-08, from: San Jose Mercury News
Two kittens adopted from an animal rescue continue to be frightened of loud noises and sudden appearances. Can their owner do anything to help calm them?
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/08/will-two-san-jose-scaredy-cats-ever-overcome-their-fears/
Wish You Were Here: Atop camels in the Sahara Desert
date: 2024-07-08, from: San Jose Mercury News
A 16-day trip through Morocco brought all sorts of adventures for this Mill Valley couple.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/08/wish-you-were-here-atop-camels-in-the-sahara-desert/
Biden tells lawmakers he’s running and to end talk of a swap
date: 2024-07-08, from: San Jose Mercury News
President Joe Biden pledged to fellow Democrats he will remain in the 2024 presidential race, seeking to quell an intraparty revolt against his campaign.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/08/biden-tells-lawmakers-hes-running-time-to-end-talk-of-swap-2/
US-China chip wars ‘mainly ideological’ says ex-ASML boss
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
And it’ll be decades before things settle down again
Former ASML boss Peter Wennink says the US-China “chip wars” are mainly ideological in nature, and is warning it will likely take decades for the dispute to play out.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/us_china_chip_wars_ideological/
Travel Troubleshooter: I tried to cancel my ticket to Argentina. Can you find my refund?
date: 2024-07-08, from: San Jose Mercury News
When Aerolineas Argentinas changes Christina Skinner’s flight schedule by nine hours, she asks the carrier to cancel her ticket and issue a refund. Its response: silence. What should she do?
South Bay property values suffer slowing growth as real estate flops
date: 2024-07-08, from: San Jose Mercury News
South Bay property values have begun to wobble due to a steadily weakening commercial real estate market.
TasteFood: Top this easy grilled pizza with summer corn, poblano chiles
date: 2024-07-08, from: San Jose Mercury News
This pizza is inspired by Mexican street corn. It’s prepared on the grill, which not only keeps the heat outdoors, but lends crucial charred flavor to the crust. Grill the corn ears first to develop their flavor and start the charring process. When fresh corn is in season, the kernels are crisp, juicy and milky-sweet. […]
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/08/tastefood-corny-pizza/
Are solar panels a good investment? New Berkeley study offers an answer
date: 2024-07-08, from: San Jose Mercury News
A study of 500,000 homes found savings of about $700 a year, when all the costs and benefits were included.
Entering text in the terminal is complicated
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: Julia Evans
https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/07/08/readline/
Taylor Swift Is in Her Museum Era
date: 2024-07-08, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The singer’s costumes and memorabilia are the subject of an upcoming exhibition at London’s V&A Museum
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/taylor-swift-is-in-her-museum-era-180984663/
📖 A Psalm for the Wild-Built
date: 2024-07-08, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
<div class="known-bookmark">
<div class="e-content">“You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.”
I tend to read whatever the opposite of cozy science fiction is: angry and worried about the world, building tension from speculative extrapolations of what could go wrong. This, on the other hand, is science fiction that encourages you to just chill for a minute.
I don’t know if I could read a lot of this, because I am angry and worried about the world, and reading other peoples’ words along the same lines is cathartic. But the message here — that you don’t need to justify yourself, that you can just be — is soothing, and was necessary for me. And it’s all done with wit and care. What a delightful novella.
<p>[<a href="https://bookshop.org/a/7949/9781250236210">Link</a>]</p>
</div>
</div>https://werd.io/2024/-a-psalm-for-the-wild-built
NASA’s fungus could be used to build future homes on the Moon . . . or Mars
date: 2024-07-08, from: San Jose Mercury News
Shipped as spores, the fungus could grow into houses, garages, sheds and furniture.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/08/nasas-fungus-could-build-future-homes-in-space/
Avast secretly gave DoNex ransomware decryptors to victims before crims vanished
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Good riddance to another pesky tribe of miscreants
Updated Researchers at Avast have provided decryptors to DoNex ransomware victims on the down-low since March after discovering a flaw in the crims’ cryptography, the company confirmed today.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/avast_secretly_gave_donex_ransomware/
Is college worth it? Poll finds Americans increasingly skeptical
date: 2024-07-08, from: San Jose Mercury News
Most say U.S. higher education is heading in the wrong direction.
It’s Time to Review June’s Global Warming Stats
date: 2024-07-08, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Nearly 12 inches of rain fell over six hours in Mumbai this morning • Extreme storms on the South African coast are causing shipping delays • July 4 fireworks sparked a forest fire in New Jersey that burned thousands of acres.
THE TOP FIVE
- June marked another month of record-breaking heat
Last month was both the hottest June ever recorded, and the 12th month in a row in which average global temperatures broke the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold. Between July 2023 and June 2024, the Earth’s temperature was 1.64 degrees Celsius (or about 3 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the pre-industrial average. Global sea surface temperatures were also remarkably warm, averaging 20.85 degrees Celsius, or 69.53 degrees Fahrenheit.
C3S
“This is more than a statistical oddity and it highlights a large and continuing shift in our climate,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which produced the data. “Even if this specific streak of extremes ends at some point, we are bound to see new records being broken as the climate continues to warm. This is inevitable, unless we stop adding greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the oceans.”
Meanwhile, 10% of the country’s population remains under excessive heat warnings as an extreme heat wave grips states up and down the west coast. “Dozens of daily record high temperatures are forecast to be tied or broken into the work week,” the National Weather Service said. In Phoenix, Arizona, heat-related deaths have nearly doubled this year compared to last.
- Hurricane Beryl makes landfall in Texas
Hurricane Beryl made landfall on the Texas Gulf Coast this morning as a category 1 storm with top sustained winds of 80 miles per hour. Up to 15 inches of rain could fall on the region, and flooding and dangerous storm surge are expected. More than 100,000 customers are already without power. The storm is also affecting oil and gas operations: The state’s largest ports – including Corpus Christi, the top crude oil export hub in the country – halted all cargo operations and some natural gas storage facilities also closed in preparation for the storm. Beryl killed at least 11 people in the Caribbean over the last week and left islands in ruins. It became the earliest category 5 storm ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean. Researchers published a report on Friday concluding that human driven climate change likely made Beryl stronger and wetter.
- ESG lawsuit could be an ‘early harbinger’ of post-Chevron litigation
A lawsuit playing out this week in a New Orleans appeals court could be the first test of how courts will treat regulations set by federal agencies after the Supreme Court overturned a 40-year-old precedent, known as the Chevron deference, that deferred to agencies’ interpretations of their own mandates. In this particular case, 25 Republican-led states are challenging a rule from the U.S. Department of Labor that says employee retirement plans can consider ESG factors when deciding where to invest. Conservatives have argued this amounts to politicizing investment decisions. A Texas judge refused to block the rule in 2022, citing Chevron, but now the landscape looks very different. “The trial court expressly relying on Chevron in upholding the ESG regulation … puts this case on track to be an early harbinger of how courts will address pending cases,” said Julie Stapel, a lawyer with the firm Morgan Lewis & Bockius. The court will begin to hear arguments tomorrow. The fall of Chevron is expected to make it harder for federal agencies to regulate environmental hazards like air and water pollution.
- Britain’s brand-new government greenlights onshore wind
The U.K. has scrapped its ban on onshore wind farms just days after a new Labour government came into power. The ban came into effect in 2015, and was part of a planning policy that required onshore wind projects to prove local communities did not object to new turbines. The new chancellor, Rachel Reeves, called the rule “absurd.” The Labour Party has pledged to double onshore wind energy by 2030 and decarbonize the power sector completely on that same time frame.
How and when Britain goes green matters on a global scale. “Britain is one of history’s major climate polluters,” as The New York Times explained. “It’s where the Industrial Revolution began in the 18th century, giving rise to a global economy driven by coal, oil and gas and with it, the emissions of planet-heating greenhouse gases. So the speed and scale of Britain’s energy transition is likely to be closely watched by other industrialized countries and emerging economies alike.”
- NASCAR unveils its first electric racecar
NASCAR showed off its first electric racecar in Chicago over the weekend. The ABB NASCAR EV Prototype was developed as part of a partnership between NASCAR, Chevrolet, Ford, Toyota, and electrification company ABB. It hasn’t been driven much yet, and there’s no plan to get rid of gas-powered racers any time soon (in fact NASCAR says it is “committed to the historic role of the combustion engine in racing”), but the prototype is intended to “gauge fan interest in electric racing,” according to The Associated Press. “As more and more customers are buying all-electric vehicles, there will be, we believe, a growing number of people that want to watch full electric racing,” said Mark Rushbrook, global director of Ford Performance Motorsports.
NASCAR
THE KICKER
There are now more than 800 carbon removal startups.
https://heatmap.news/climate/june-temperature-climate-change
Getting the most out of TWM, X11’s default window manager
date: 2024-07-08, from: OS News
Graham’s TWM page has been around for like two decades or so and still isn’t even remotely as old as TWM itself, and in 2021 they published an updated version with even more information, tips, and tricks for TWM. The Tab Window Manager finds its origins in the lat 1980s, and has been the default window manager for the X Windowing System for a long time, now, too. Yet, few people know it exists – how many people even know X has a default window manager? – and even fewer people know you can actually style it, too. OK, so TWM is fairly easy to configure but alot of people, upon seeing the default config, scream ‘Ugh, thats awful!’ and head off to the ports tree or their distro sources in search of the latest and greatest uber desktop environment. There are some hardcore TWM fans and mimimalists however who stick around and get to liking the basic feel of TWM. Then they start to mod it and create their own custom dekstop. All part of the fun in Unix :). ↫ Graham’s TWM page I’ll admit I have never used TWM properly, and didn’t know it could be themed at all. I feel very compelled to spend some time with it now, because I’ve always liked the by-now classic design where the right-click desktop menu serves as the central location for all your interactions with the system. There are quite a few more advanced, up-to-date forks of TWM as well, but the idea of sticking to the actual default X window manager has a certain charm. I almost am too afraid to ask, because the answer on OSNews to these sorts of questions is almost always “yes” – do we have any TWM users in the audience? I’m extremely curious to find out if TWM actually has a reason to exist at this point, or if, in 2024, it’s just junk code in the X.org source repository, because I’m looking at some of these screenshots and I feel a very strong urge to give it a serious go.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140172/getting-the-most-out-of-twm-x11s-default-window-manager/
Brit council gives Oracle another £10M for professional services amid ERP fallout
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Birmingham struggles to get current version of Fusion fit for purpose
Troubled Birmingham City Council, which was declared effectively bankrupt last year owing in part to a disastrous Oracle implementation, has awarded the tech giant £10 million ($12.8 million) for additional professional services.…
The Official Radare2 Book
date: 2024-07-08, from: Tilde.news
A brief summary of click-to-raise and drag-and-drop interaction on X11 and Wayland
date: 2024-07-08, from: OS News
The goal is to be able to drag an icon from a background window without immediately raising that window and obscuring the drop target window when using the click-to-focus mode. This is a barebones description of what needs to happen. It assumes familiarity with code, protocols, etc. as needed. ↫ Quod Video The articles describes how to get there using both X and Wayland, and it’s clear there’s still quite a bit of work to do. At least on my KDE Wayland setups, the way it works now is that when I click to drag an icon from a lower Dolphin window to a higher one, it brings the lower window forward, but then, when I hover for a bit over the other window, it brings it back up. Of course, this only works if the destination window remains at least partially visible, which might not always be the case. For usability’s sake, there needs to be an option to start a drag operation from one window to the next without altering the Z-order.
A powerful new player in Hollywood
date: 2024-07-08, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Paramount Global, which owns Paramount Studios, CBS and more, has agreed to merge with Skydance Media, the source of some of Paramount’s biggest films. The deal will cost Skydance and its founder David Ellison $8 billion and would cement Ellison’s position as a Hollywood mogul. We’ll unpack. Plus, more Americans are traveling abroad thanks to a strong U.S. dollar. And there’s more people looking for work, but it’s taking them longer to find jobs.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/a-powerful-new-player-in-hollywood
Fraud guilty plea flies from Boeing to swerve courtroom over 737 Max crashes
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Attorney for families of victims files objection
Boeing has agreed to plead guilty to criminal fraud charges related to deadly 737 Max crashes, according to a Sunday night court filing from the US Department of Justice (DoJ).…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/boeing_guilty_fraud_charge/
Review of prescribed fires finds gaps in key areas as US Forest Service looks to improve safety
date: 2024-07-08, from: VOA News USA
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Two years after the U.S. Forest Service sparked what would become the largest and most destructive wildfire in New Mexico’s recorded history, independent investigators say there are gaps that need to be addressed if the agency is to be successful at using prescribed fire as a tool to reduce risk amid climate change.
The investigation by the Government Accountability Office was requested by U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández after communities in her district were ravaged in 2022 by the Hermit’s Peak-Calf Canyon Fire.
The congresswoman wanted to know what factors the Forest Service had identified as contributing to the escape of prescribed fires over the last decade and whether the agency was following through with reforms promised after a pause and review of its prescribed burn program.
The report made public Monday notes there were 43 escapes documented between 2012 and 2021 out of 50,000 prescribed fire projects. That included blazes in national forests in more than a dozen states, from the California-Nevada border to Utah, New Mexico, Idaho, North Carolina and Arkansas.
With the U.S. Forest Service and other land management agencies tapping into federal infrastructure and inflation reduction funding to boost the number of prescribed burn operations over the next 10 years, Leger Fernández said it’s more important than ever to ensure they are doing it safely.
The congresswoman was visiting northern New Mexico over recent days, appreciating how things have greened up with summer rains. But the forests are still tinder boxes, she said.
“We need to address our forest, but we need to do it in a responsible way,” she told The Associated Press. “When you play with fire, there is no margin for error.”
The Forest Service ignites about 4,500 prescribed fires each year, reducing fuels on about 1.3 million acres. It’s part of a multi-billion dollar cleanup of forests choked with dead trees and undergrowth.
There have been mixed results as federal land managers have fallen behind on some projects and skipped over some highly at-risk communities to work in less threatened ones, according to a 2023 AP review of data, public records and congressional testimony.
However, the Forest Service said in a response to the GAO that it is making progress and generally agrees with the findings made public Monday. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore wrote that his agency will create and implement a corrective action plan to address the gaps.
Moore also noted 2023 marked a record year for treatments of hazardous fuels on forest lands and his agency was on track to offer more training to build up crews who can specialize in prescribed burn operations.
“The agency is using every tool available to reduce wildfire risk at a pace and scale which will make a difference within our current means,” Moore wrote.
The GAO reviewed volumes of documents over several months, interviewed forest officials and made site visits over many months. The investigation found the Forest Service has taken steps toward implementing several immediate recommended changes following the Hermit’s Peak-Calf Canyon Fire. That included developing a national strategy for mobilizing resources for prescribed fire projects.
There were dozens of other actions the agency identified as part of its 2022 review, but the GAO found “important gaps remain” as the Forest Service hasn’t determined the extent to which it will implement the remaining actions, including how or when.
The GAO is recommending the Forest Service develop a plan for implementing the reforms, set goals, establish a way to measure progress and ensure it has enough resources dedicated to day-to-day management of the reform effort. It also pointed out that the Forest Service in agency documents recognized the reforms will require major changes to practices and culture.
Leger Fernández said she hopes change will come quickly because wildfires are becoming more expensive and more dangerous.
“They are killer fires now. They move very fast, and people cannot get out of the way fast enough,” she said. “And I think that kind of massive emergency that they are will lead to faster change than you might normally see in a large federal bureaucracy.”
How France’s election shock could shake up its economy
date: 2024-07-08, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: France is facing political gridlock after a left-wing alliance emerged as the surprise winner of France’s snap election. The coalition secured the most seats but no outright majority. Also on the program: Trust in Lebanon’s financial system is at an all-time low, after a banking collapse and hyperinflation. Plus, Samsung is experiencing its first-ever strike in South Korea the over pay and holidays.
Third time was the charm for SingleStore in the cloud, CEO says
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Apache Iceberg support makes it a good option for a transactional layer over data lakes, he tells The Register
SingleStore, the database that promises analytics and transactions on a single system, took three attempts to get its technology working in the cloud, CEO Raj Verma admitted to The Register.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/singlestore_cloud_business/
Build Clean Energy on Dirty Land, These Researchers Say
date: 2024-07-08, from: Heatmap News
There are some things money can’t buy, and it seems a clean power grid is one of them. Despite authorizing billions of dollars to subsidize renewable energy development through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Biden administration remains off track to reach its target of 100% clean electricity by 2035. Even after a banner year in which domestic investment hit $303 billion and the US added 32.3 gigawatts of new clean electricity capacity, the country is still building renewable energy at only half the rate that is needed.
Among the barriers holding up clean energy deployment, local opposition looms large. As developers seek out new sites on which to build wind and solar, they are repeatedly finding themselves at odds with neighbors who object to their projects on aesthetic, economic, or political grounds. Whether through formal laws or protracted permitting processes, these objections have begun to have a noticeable effect on the pace of renewable energy adoption. In a recent survey by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, wind and solar developers reported seeing roughly a third of their siting applications canceled over the five years prior, with two of the most common reasons being “community opposition” and “local ordinances or zoning.”
But what if the solution to this impasse has been hiding in plain sight — or more accurately, behind a chain link fence?
The U.S. has around 270 million acres of so-called “marginal land,” a designation that includes retired mines, closed landfills, former industrial facilities, brownfield sites, and depleted or unproductive farmland. That’s around twice the land area that would be required for a renewables-and-nuclear-only power grid, the most land-intensive net-zero scenario modeled by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. These neglected properties are more than just an eyesore for neighbors — they also represent wasted prospects for economic development, and in many cases pose a contamination risk to the local environment. To law professors Alexandra Klass and Hannah Wiseman, however, they are an opportunity in disguise.
In their new paper, forthcoming in the Minnesota Law Review, Klass and Wiseman (of the University of Michigan and Penn State, respectively) propose directing the bulk of new clean energy development to these marginal lands. It’s a concept they call “repurposed energy,” and it offers a way to, in one fell swoop, avert local objections, reclaim unproductive land, and create new opportunities for economically dislocated communities.
It’s not a new concept — since 2008, the Environmental Protection Agency’s RE-Powering America’s Land Initiative has offered funding to developers looking to build renewable energy on potentially contaminated land.
What the new paper proposes, however, is a greater convergence of public benefits on this specific subset of projects, which Klass views as a down payment on societal acceptance. “If you can come up with a project that’s going to have community support, that means you can actually build it,” she told me. “And that’s worth paying a little extra money up front.”
Consider some of the most common objections to renewable energy siting: that it ruins the view, disrupts habitats, or occupies valuable farmland. Each would seem to carry less weight when applied to, say, an abandoned mine instead of a pristine coastline. Throw in low purchase prices, pre-existing transmission lines at retired coal or gas power plants, and the chance to direct jobs and revenue to low-income communities (where contaminated properties are disproportionately located), and you’ve got, in theory, an attractive site for a solar or wind farm.
In spite of these upsides, practical examples of repurposed energy remain few and far between. Only 0.7% of the renewable energy capacity installed in the United States since 1997 has been on reclaimed land, according to EPA data. That’s because, faced with the possibility of extravagant cleanup costs and liability for prior contamination, most developers prefer to take their chances with a greenfield.
Klass and Wiseman propose a set of policy changes that could, they hope, spur a renewable energy renaissance on marginal lands. First, there are some existing incentives for repurposed energy they propose expanding. Certain state funding programs – like Massachusetts’ SMART Program – and streamlined permitting processes – like New York’s Build-Ready Program – could offer a template for other states seeking to accelerate redevelopment of their own brownfields. Layering more such benefits on top of federal funding opportunities like the IRA’s Energy Infrastructure and Reinvestment Program, they contend, could help stimulate broader interest from developers.
Second, they offer a set of new, more ambitious reforms to entice clean energy companies onto marginal lands. Among them:
- Giving the Department of Energy direct permitting authority over repurposed energy would require an act of Congress, but could accelerate approvals. Klass and Wiseman point out that many sites containing hazardous chemicals may already be in the federal regulatory sphere.
- The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission could direct regional transmission organizations to grant repurposed energy projects priority in interconnection queues, bypassing a lengthy part of the development timeline.
- State offices that oversee brownfield cleanup and development could establish separate divisions for repurposed energy, better equipping them to deal with and resolve clean energy developers’ unique needs.
Klass sees the paper as a timely contribution at a critical juncture for the renewable energy industry. “We’re at an important moment in time where there’s a lot of federal funding available,” she told me. “But we are not on track to build the amount of clean energy we need to meet our targets.” By focusing support on repurposed energy, she thinks policymakers may be able to erode some of the sociopolitical barriers holding back the industry.
There is evidence to support this belief. A 2021 study found that objections to wind farms tended to fade when the infrastructure was sited in areas with fewer lakes, hills, or other features of aesthetic or recreational value, suggesting that plants sited on already-disturbed land might indeed arouse less opposition. “You start with these types of projects that we hope will engender less community opposition and provide more community benefits,” Klass said. “Maybe you scale it up later, maybe you don’t. But it allows a pathway through some of this local opposition.”
It’s a view that resonates in the industry, although that doesn’t make this kind of development easy. Jonathan Mancini is the senior vice president of solar project development at Ameresco, which has built solar on around 20 landfills across the United States. He told me that sites with soil contamination are capped with an impermeable barrier to prevent the hazardous material from spreading, and building a solar farm on top requires using bespoke racking systems that won’t penetrate that cap. On top of that, would-be developers have to employ third-party engineers to monitor the cap’s integrity and undergo additional reviews by state regulators to ensure that the weight of the solar system will not damage it. “Currently, the permitting timeline for such projects takes up to three years to complete,” he told me.
Dedicated state support in places like Massachusetts, Illinois, and Maryland has helped Ameresco alleviate some of the costs. “Utility programs or state administered programs do incentivize the use of these types of projects,” Mancini said. But he noted that more support would be helpful to overcome the barriers repurposed energy projects face. “Additional policy measures at the local and/or state level would make these projects move faster through permitting and approval.”
Michael Gerrard, the founder of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and one of the country’s foremost environmental lawyers, thinks the idea could accelerate clean energy deployment. “Local opposition is one of the most important impediments [to renewable energy],” he pointed out to me. By undercutting aesthetic and land use concerns, repurposed energy could “have a very positive impact finding ways to reduce that,” he said.
Gerrard also noted, however, that local opposition is not the only barrier to renewable energy development. In addition to more stringent permitting requirements, “transmission, interest rates, supply chains, local content restrictions, workforce shortages — all of those are impediments,” he said. Repurposed energy is no magic bullet, he added, but it doesn’t have to be. “We need a lot of magic buckshot,” he said, “and this article proposes quite a few pellets.”
https://heatmap.news/climate/clean-energy-brownfield
Fear of commodity chip flood sparks EU probe into China’s silicon ambitions
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
They’re cranking ’em out like there’s no tomorrow
The European Commission is said to be sounding out chipmakers in the region about China’s expanding production of commodity silicon, which has sparked concerns that it could flood the global market.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/eu_china_commodity_chips/
Beryl downgraded to tropical storm after it slammed ashore in Texas
date: 2024-07-08, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/hurricane-beryl-makes-texas-landfall/7689038.html
PiDP-10 | #MagPiMonday
date: 2024-07-08, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
Oscar Vermeulen is back with his most ambitious retro kit yet. PJ Evans returns to the space age.
The post PiDP-10 | #MagPiMonday appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/pidp-10-magpimonday/
Breaking the rules is in big tech’s blood – now it’s time to break the habit
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Microsoft: All your data are belong to us? World: That’s so last century
Opinion Microsoft’s journey through intellectual property has been a multi-year saga that makes Game of Thrones look like a haiku.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/opinion_column_ai_ip/
Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
That’s not an outage … that’s an outage
Who, Me? G’day readers, and welcome once again to The Register’s reader-submitted column of cold comfort that we call Who, Me? where you find out that everyone – even clever clogs like you – makes mistakes.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/who_me/
Why The IRS Went Soft On Crime
date: 2024-07-08, from: The Lever News
The nation’s tax agency stopped pursuing tax crime from corporations and the ultrarich — what happened?
https://www.levernews.com/why-the-irs-went-soft-on-crime/
NATO Summit in Washington: RAND Experts Weigh In
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: RAND blog
What will define the next 75 years of the NATO? We asked 30 RAND researchers about the major challenges facing the alliance today—and what opportunities NATO could seize to help secure its future. Here’s what they said.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/07/nato-summit-in-washington-rand-experts-weigh-in.html
Today in SCV History (July 8)
date: 2024-07-08, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1997 – Santa Clarita City Council adopts initial Newhall Redevelopment Plan. [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-july-8/
NATO chief: Quickest way to end Ukraine war is to lose it; but won’t bring peace
date: 2024-07-08, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — As NATO prepares to convene on Tuesday a three-day summit in Washington to celebrate its 75th birthday, the alliance is reinforcing its support for Ukraine in the ongoing war with Russia.
During a news conference with a handful of reporters Sunday previewing the summit, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said all NATO members want peace, and that can be achieved if Russian President Vladimir Putin understands he cannot win on the battlefield.
“The quickest way to end this war is to lose the war,” he said. “But that that will not bring peace. That will bring occupation.”
Stoltenberg outlined key measures NATO would take, including the establishment of a dedicated command in Germany, enhanced financial and military aid, and bilateral security agreements.
Stoltenberg emphasized these initiatives while addressing the complexities of Ukraine’s potential NATO membership and the alliance’s united front against Russian aggression.
The precise language of the final agreement of the summit regarding Ukraine’s NATO membership is still under negotiation, he said.
In April, Stoltenberg said the alliance did not expect to offer Ukraine NATO membership during the summit, but rather a “bridge” to membership.
At the summit, that “bridge” will encompass five essential components:
Security assistance command: NATO is setting up a new command in Germany, with logistical hubs in Eastern Europe, to coordinate international security assistance for Ukraine. This will involve 700 personnel led by a three-star NATO general, according to Stoltenberg.
Stoltenberg said there have been differences among allies about “the approach or types of weapons Ukraine should be delivered.” Those differences create bureaucratic delays, and the goal is to make delivery faster and easier.
“This new command will have a very robust mandate, so there will be no need for consensus on each and every delivery,” he said.
Financial pledge: Since February 2022, NATO allies have provided around $43 billion annually in military support to Ukraine. The upcoming summit is expected to extend this commitment for another year, laying a foundation for future support.
Immediate weapon deliveries: Announcements on delivering more weapons and ammunition, particularly air defense systems, are anticipated at the summit to bolster Ukraine’s defense.
While the secretary-general did not offer specifics, a senior U.S. official indicated that announcements can be expected from NATO allies this week regarding the provision of F-16 aircraft to Ukraine.
Bilateral security agreements: Twenty NATO allies will have signed bilateral security agreements with Ukraine by the start of the summit, offering additional security guarantees and reinforcing collaborative defense efforts.
Interoperability: Efforts are underway to align Ukrainian armed forces with NATO standards, including a joint training center in Poland and programs on military acquisitions and procurement.
Hungary won’t participate or obstruct
Stoltenberg addressed concerns about Hungary’s stance on Russia’s war in Ukraine and its potential to block NATO decisions.
He recounted a recent visit to Budapest, where he secured an agreement with Prime Minister Viktor Orban ensuring that Hungary will not obstruct the proposed support measures for Ukraine.
Budapest will not participate in the new NATO security assistance command for Ukraine but will fulfill its other NATO obligations and contribute to the common budget, Stoltenberg said.
The secretary general highlighted NATO’s diverse engagements with Moscow even after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
He noted a recent conversation between U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov, underscoring the routine nature of such contacts.
Stoltenberg said NATO must function cohesively in developing new defense strategies, emphasizing unity despite differing perspectives, such as those represented by leaders like Orban.
Future relationship with the US
Stoltenberg is confident that the United States would continue to be a staunch NATO ally regardless of future election outcomes, attributing past criticisms by former president Donald Trump primarily to defense spending issues rather than NATO itself.
He emphasized that any secretary-general must be able to work with all leaders within the alliance, comparing NATO to a big family that every now and then has arguments and disagreements.
Stoltenberg recounted his experience working with presidents Barak Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden, noting that despite differing political leadership, the U.S. has remained a steadfast and committed NATO ally.
Copilot+ PCs software compatibility issues left to you to sort out, with help from crowdsourcers
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Samsung warned users, but the PC industry’s big players hardly mention the possibility of problems
Buyers worried a Copilot+ PC based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X SoCs might not run software that matters to them are being directed to two community-run sites that crowdsource lists of incompatible code.…
Boeing accepts plea deal to avoid criminal trial over 737 Max crashes
date: 2024-07-08, from: VOA News USA
Selfie-based authentication raises eyebrows among infosec experts
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Vietnam now requires it for some purchases. It may be a fraud risk in Singapore. Or ML could be making it safe
The use of selfies to verify identity online is an emerging trend in some parts of the world since the pandemic forced more business to go digital. Some banks – and even governments – have begun requiring live images over Zoom or similar in order to participate in the modern economy. The question must be asked, though: is it cyber smart?…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/selfie_authentication_security/
China plans to boost national compute capacity thirty percent by 2025
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
From 230 Exaflops to 300, with Tesla a part of the plan for energy storage, - and cars
China has offered a glimpse at the processing power of its national compute capacity, and pointed to plans to grow it by 30 percent this year alone.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/china_compute_capacity_boost/
Not-so-OpenAI allegedly never bothered to report 2023 data breach
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Also: F1 authority breached; Prudential victim count skyrockets; a new ransomware actor appears; and more
security in brief It’s been a week of bad cyber security revelations for OpenAI, after news emerged that the startup failed to report a 2023 breach of its systems to anybody outside the organization, and that its ChatGPT app for macOS was coded without any regard for user privacy.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/infosec_in_brief/
US troops leave Niger base at Niamey
date: 2024-07-08, from: VOA News USA
Niamey, Niger — U.S. troops have completed a withdrawal from their base in Niger’s capital of Niamey and will fully depart from Agadez in the north before a Sept. 15 deadline set by the country’s military rulers, both countries said Sunday.
Niger’s military leaders scrapped a military cooperation deal with Washington in March, after seizing power in a July 2023 coup.
The United States had around 650 soldiers in Niger as part of anti-jihadist missions in several Sahel nations of West Africa, including a major drone base near Agadez.
“The defense ministry of Niger and the U.S. Defense Department announce that the withdrawal of American forces and equipment from the Niamey base 101 is now completed,” the two countries said in a statement.
A final flight carrying U.S. troops was due to leave Niamey late Sunday.
The U.S. presence had stood at around 950 troops, and 766 soldiers have left Niger since the military ordered their departure, AFP learned at a ceremony at the base attended by Niger’s army chief of staff Maman Sani Kiaou and US General Kenneth Ekman.
“American forces are now going to focus on quitting airbase 201 in Agadez,” the statement said, insisting that the withdrawal would be completed by September 15 as planned.
Niger had already ordered the withdrawal of troops from France, the former colonial power and traditional security ally, and has strengthened ties with Russia which has provided instructors and equipment.
On Saturday, Germany’s defense ministry also said it would end operations at its airbase in Niger by August 31 following the breakdown of talks with military leaders.
A similar shift has taken place in neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso, which are also ruled by military leaders and faced with violence from jihadist groups.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-troops-leave-niger-base-at-niamey/7688912.html
Epistemic calibration and searching the space of truth
date: 2024-07-08, from: The Sephist blog
I’ve long been enamored by DALL-E 2’s specific flavor of visual creativity. Especially given the text-to-image AI system’s age, it seems to have an incredible command over color, light and dark, the abstract and the concrete, and the emotional resonance that their careful combination can conjure.
I picked these twelve images out of a much larger batch I generated with DALL-E 2 automatically by combining some randomly generated subjects with one of a few pre-written styles suffixes like “watercolor on canvas.”
Notice the use of shadows behind the body in the first image and the
impressionistic use of color in the third image in the first row. I also
love the softness of the silhouette in the top right, and the cyclops
figure that seems to emerge beyond the horizon in the second row. Even
in the most abstract images in this grid, the choice of color and
composition result in something I would personally find not at all out
of place in a gallery. There is surprising variety, creativity, and
depth to these images, especially considering most of the prompts are as
simple as giving form to metaphor, watercolor on canvas or
a cozy bedroom, still life composition.
When I try to create similar kinds of images with what I believe to be the state-of-the-art text-to-image system today, Midjourney v6, here’s what I get with similar prompts.
These images are beautiful in their own right, and in their detail and realism they are impressive. I’m regularly stunned by the quality and realism in images generated by Midjourney. This isn’t meant to be another “AI-generated images aren’t artistic” post.
However, there is a very obvious difference in the styles of these two systems. After having generated a few hundred images from both systems, I find DALL-E 2 to be regularly:
- surprising and creative with its use of color and contrast;
- usually focused on a single subject, with one or few things going on in the frame;
- quite inventive in how it interprets ambiguous or open-ended prompts, often bringing in varied appropriate subjects on its own.
By contrast, Midjourney’s images are biased towards:
- a lot of detail all the time, almost as if the system really wants to put every single pixel to use;
- pretty uniform, flat use of color compared to DALL-E 2’s;
- literal interpretations of the prompt, with a tendency to have the image always be “about” something concrete with little room for ambiguity.
Though Midjourney v6 is the most capable system like this in my experience, I encounter these same stylistic biases when using any modern model from the last couple of years, like Stable Diffusion XL and its derivatives, Google’s Imagen models, or even the current version of DALL-E (DALL-E 3). This is a shame, because I really like the variety and creativity of outputs from DALL-E 2, and it seems no modern systems are capable of reproducing similar results.
I’ve also done some head-to-head comparisons, including giving Midjourney examples of images from which it could transfer the style. Though Midjourney v6 successfully copies the original image’s style, it still has the hallmark richness in detail, as well as a clear tendency towards concrete subjects like realistic human silhouettes:
Though none of this is a scientifically rigorous study, I’ve heard similar sentiments from other users of these systems, and observed similar “un-creative” behavior from modern language models like ChatGPT. In particular, I found this study of distribution of outputs before and after preference tuning on Llama 2 models interesting, because I think they successfully quantify the bland “ChatGPT voice” and show some concrete ways that reinforcement learning has produced accidental attractors in the model’s output space.
Why does this happen?
There are a few major differences between DALL-E 2 and other systems that we could hypothetically point to:
- They’re trained on very different datasets.
- DALL-E 2 never underwent any preference tuning, where the other models have.
- DALL-E 2 is the only pixel-space image diffusion model still in wide use. All other models perform diffusion in a compressed latent space, which may hamper things like the diversity of color palette.
After thinking about it a bit and playing with some open source models, I think there are two big things going on here.
The first is that humans simply prefer brighter, more colorful, more detailed images when asked to pick a “better” visual in a side-by-side comparison, even though they would not necessarily prefer a world in which every single image was so hyper-detailed and hyper-colorful. So when models are tuned to human preferences, they naturally produce these hyper-detailed, hyper-colorful sugar-pop images.
The second is that when a model is trained using a method with feedback loops like reinforcement learning, it tends towards “attractors”, or preferred modes in the output space, and stops being an accurate model of reality in which every concept is proportionately represented in its output space. Preference tuning tunes models away from being accurate reflections of reality into being greedy reward-seekers happy to output a boring response if it expects the boring output to be rated highly.
Let’s investigate these ideas in more detail.
- Are we comparing outputs, or comparing worlds?
If you’ve ever walked into an electronics store and looked at a wall full of TVs or listened to headphones on display, you’ll notice they’re all tuned to the brightest, loudest, most vibrant settings. Sometimes, the colors are so vibrant they make pictures look a bit unrealistic, with perfectly turquoise oceans and perfectly tan skin.
In general, when asked to compare images or music, people with untrained eyes and ears will pick the brightest images and the loudest music. Bright images create the illusion of vibrant colors and greater detail, and make other images that are less bright seem dull. Loud music has a similar effect, giving rise to a “loudness war” on public radio where tracks compete to catch listeners’ attention by being louder than other tracks before or after it.
Now, we are also in a loudness war of synthetic media.
Another way to think about this phenomenon is as a failure to align what we are asking human labelers to compare with what we actually want to compare.
When we build a preference dataset, what we should actually be asking is, “Is a world with a model trained on this dataset preferable to a world with a model trained on that dataset?” Of course, this is an intractable question to ask, because doing so would require somehow collecting human labels on every possible arrangement of a training dataset, leading to a combinatorial explosion of options. Instead, we approximate this by collecting human preference signals on each individual data point. But there’s a mismatch: just because humans prefer a more detailed image in one instance doesn’t mean that we’d prefer a world where every single image was maximally detailed.
- Building attractors out of world models
Preference tuning methods like RLHF and DPO are fundamentally different from the kind of supervised training that goes on during model pretraining or a “basic” fine-tuning run with labelled data, because methods like RL and DPO involve feeding the model’s output back into itself, creating a feedback loop.
Whenever there are feedback loops in a system, we can study its dynamics — over time, as we iterate towards infinity, does the system settle into some state of stability? Does it settle into a loop? Does it diverge, accelerating towards some limit?
In the case of systems like ChatGPT and Midjourney, these models appear to converge under feedback loops into a few attractors, parts of the output space that the model has deemed reliably preferred, “safe” options. One attractor, for example, is a hyper-realistic detailed style of illustration. Another seems to be a fondness for geometric lines and transhumanist imagery when asked to generate anything abstract and vaguely positive.
I think recognizing this difference between base models and feedback-tuned models is important, because this kind of a preference tuning step changes what the model is doing at a fundamental level. A pretrained base model is an epistemically calibrated world model. It’s epistemically calibrated, meaning its output probabilities exactly mirror frequency of concepts and styles present in its training dataset. If 2% of all photos of waterfalls also have rainbows, exactly 2% of photos of waterfalls the model generates will have rainbows. It’s also a world model, in the sense that what results from pretraining is a probabilistic model of observations of the world (its training dataset). Anything we can find in the training dataset, we can also expect to find in the model’s output space.
Once we subject the model to preference tuning, however, the model transforms into something very different, a function that greedily and cleverly finds a way to interpret every input into a version of the request that includes elements it knows is most likely to result in a positive rating from a reviewer. Within the constraints of a given input, a model that’s undergone RLHF is no longer an accurate world model, but a function whose sole job is to find a way to render a version of the output that’s super detailed, very colorful, extremely polite, or whatever else the model has learned will please the recipient of its output. These reliably-rewarded concepts become attractors in the model’s output space. See also the apocryphal story about OpenAI’s model optimized for positive outputs, resulting in inescapable wedding parties.
Today’s most effective tools for producing useful, obedient models irreversibly take away something quite valuable that base models have by construction: its epistemic calibration to the world it was trained on.
Interpretable models enable useful AI without mode collapse
Though I find any individual output from ChatGPT or Midjourney useful and sometimes even beautiful, I can’t really say the same about the possibility space of outputs from these models at large. In tuning these models to our pointwise preferences, it feels like we lost the variety and creativity that enable these models to yield surprising and tasteful outputs.
Maybe there’s a way to build useful AI systems without the downsides of mode collapse.
Preference tuning is necessary today because of the way we currently interact with these AI systems, as black boxes which take human input and produce some output. To bend these black boxes to our will, we must reprogram their internals to want to yield output we prefer.
But there’s another growing paradigm for interacting with AI systems, one where we directly manipulate concepts within a model’s internal feature space to elicit outputs we desire. Using these methods, we no longer have to subject the model to a damaging preference tuning process. We can search the model’s concept space directly for the kinds of outputs we desire and sample them directly from a base model. Want a sonnet about the future of quantum computing that’s written from the perspective of a cat? Locate those concepts within the model, activate them mechanistically, and sample the model outputs. No instructions necessary.
Mechanistic steering like this is still early in research, and for now we have to make do with simpler tasks like changing the topic and writing style of short sentences. But I find this approach very promising because it could give us a way to make pretrained models useful without turning them into overeager human-pleasers that fall towards an attractor at the first chance they get.
Furthermore, sampling directly from a model’s concept space allows us to rigorously quantify qualities like diversity of output that we can’t control well in currently deployed models. Want variety in your outputs? Simply expand the radius around which you’re searching in the model’s latent space.
This world — directly interacting with epistemically calibrated models — isn’t incompatible with Midjourney-style hyper-realistic hyper-detailed images either. Perhaps when we have in our hands a well-understood, capable model of the world’s images we’ll find not only all the abstract images from DALL-E 2 and all the intricate illustrations from Midjourney, but an uncountable number of styles and preferences in between, as many as we have time to enumerate as we explore its vast space of knowledge.
https://thesephist.com/posts/epistemic-calibration/
A decade after collapsing, crypto exchange Mt Gox repays some investors
date: 2024-07-08, updated: 2024-07-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Plus: Samsung strike; India likely upping chip subsidies; Asian nations link payment schemes
Asia In Brief Mt Gox, the Japanese crypto exchange that dominated trading for a brief time in the early 2010s before collapsing amid the disappearance of nearly half a billion dollars worth of the digicash, likely as a result of its own shoddy software, has said it will start to repay some investors – in Bitcoin.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/asia_tech_news_roundup/
Advent of Computing: Episode 135 - XENIX
date: 2024-07-08, from: Tilde.news
https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-135-xenix
Biden hits campaign trail as Democrats fret about his candidacy
date: 2024-07-08, from: VOA News USA
My fears about AI are not what you think
date: 2024-07-08, from: Ze Iaso’s blog
A clip from a longer stream VOD where I run through my fears with the AI industry
https://xeiaso.net/videos/2024/ai-fears/
Web GUI and Deno
date: 2024-07-08, from: Robert’s Ramblings
My notes on two Web GUI modules available for Deno.
https://rsdoiel.github.io/blog/2024/07/08/webgui_and_deno.html
Players Celebrate Mod That Deletes Homeless People in Cities: Skylines II
date: 2024-07-07, from: 404 Media Group
“Bye Bye Homeless” fixes a bug in the city building game by deleting homeless people that players couldn’t evict or find new housing for.
https://www.404media.co/players-celebrate-mod-that-deletes-homeless-people-in-cities-skylines-ii/
New Orleans Essence Festival wraps up 4-day celebration of Black culture
date: 2024-07-07, from: VOA News USA
New Orleans, Louisiana — For 30 years, the Essence Festival of Culture has brought together people from all walks of life and from around the world to connect through conversation, shared experiences and, of course, music.
The nation’s largest annual celebration of Black culture was set to end Sunday with musical performances by Janet Jackson and a special tribute to Frankie Beverly & Maze, the soul band that closed the event for the festival’s first 15 years. Beverly, now 77, has said he is stepping away from performing live, and the group has been on a farewell tour.
Others scheduled to perform included Victoria Monet, Teedra Moses, Tank and the Bangas, Dawn Richard, SWV, Jagged Edge, Bilal and Anthony Hamilton.
Barkue Tubman-Zawolo, chief of staff, talent and diasporic engagement for Essence Ventures, told The Associated Press the festival helps connect the global Black community.
“Historically, as Black people, sometimes we’re not sure where our heritage comes from,” Tubman-Zawolo said. “America is just one place. But within America there’s a melting pot of different Black cultures: Africa, Latin, Europe, the Caribbean. Understanding that allows our power to be even greater.”
Tubman-Zawolo said those connections could be seen throughout this year’s Film Festival, held at the city’s convention center, where fans heard from storytellers from Nigeria, Ghana and the Caribbean “who are targeting our stories about us, for us, globally.”
She noted similar connections through the Food and Wine stage, where discussions highlighted Caribbean and African cuisine; the Soko Market Place, where vendors from all over the world shared their craft; and on the Caesars Superdome stage, which spotlighted Caribbean and African artists including Machel Montano of Trinidad and Ayra Starr of Nigeria.
“All of that occurred over four days,” Tubman-Zawolo said. “But the beauty of it is, it doesn’t stay here. (Fans) take it with them.”
New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell said this year’s “We Love Us” theme was appropriate.
“This whole ‘We Love Us’ theme brought us together to build communities,” she said.
The festival’s impact on the city and state has surpassed $300 million, with more than 500,000 people visiting since 1994.
Essence started the festival as a way to celebrate 25 years of the magazine’s history.
“The locals are being incorporated in a manner that we can see and touch and feel and smell. That has been a part of the evolution of Essence,” Cantrell said.
The event’s current contract ends in 2026, but Essence Ventures CEO Caroline Wanga has said the festival’s “forever home” is New Orleans.
“That’s what we believe as well,” Cantrell said. “We have a foundation that’s been laid over 30 years. The city is always ready and prepared to host this event and more. I think staying in New Orleans is the best fit and best marriage, the best partnership.”
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Why is the pundit class so desperate to push Biden out of the race?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/06/biden-trump-race-rebecca-solnit
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Republicans are finally saying it out loud — your mind and body are government property.
https://claudialong.substack.com/p/all-your-bodies-are-belong-to-us?r=ejkct&triedRedirect=true
Progress of 3-acre San Martin brush fire stopped
date: 2024-07-07, from: San Jose Mercury News
Cal fire officials initially reported the blaze on social media early Sunday afternoon.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/07/progress-of-3-acre-san-martin-brush-fire-stopped/
SF Giants’ Logan Webb, Heliot Ramos earn first All-Star selections
date: 2024-07-07, from: San Jose Mercury News
Logan Webb and Heliot Ramos were both named to the 2024 National League All-Star team — and both might have an opportunity to start, too
Peter Easthope commented on issue #141 at Felix Oliver Friedrich / Oberon A2
date: 2024-07-07, updated: 2024-07-07, from: Oberon A2 at CAS
@fnec.ece · 6 days ago
Hi, I have corrected the problem for oberon subsystem in the MyUnix.KbdMouse.Mod file. Could you test after HotKeys disabled?
I'm trying Günther's 10272 on Debian 12, 64 bit.
Disabled setting in Configuration.XML.
<!– Setting name="Hotkey
support" value="Hotkeys.Open"/–>
After compiling your MyUnix.KbdMouse.Mod, disabling HotKeys and rebooting, the Oberon subsysem allows placement of the star marker. The <delete> key has no visible effect. These lines appear in the console which started the system.
Autostart: executing WMNavigate.Open -vs -n 1 0 0 Navigation:TaskList
{P cpuid= 0, pid= 56 ETH Oberon / LinuxA2 (64-bit, Rev. 10272)}
Modules.Module in Oberon-Configuration.@ConstSections: error: incompatible
Modules.Module in Oberon-Configuration.@ConstSections: error: incompatible
Modules.Module in Oberon-Configuration.@ConstSections: error: incompatible
Modules.Module in Oberon-Configuration.@ConstSections: error: incompatible
Modules.Module in Oberon-Mail.@ConstSections: error: incompatible
Modules.Module in Oberon-Mail.@ConstSections: error: incompatible
Modules.Module in Oberon-NetSystem.@ConstSections: error: incompatible
Modules.Module in Oberon-NetSystem.@ConstSections: error: incompatible
could not get module while importing Oberon-NetSystem
Oberon-NetSystem.@Module in Oberon-TelnetGadgets.@ConstSections: error: unresolved
Modules.Module in Oberon-NetSystem.@ConstSections: error: incompatible
could not get module while importing Oberon-NetSystem
Oberon-NetSystem.@Module in Oberon-TelnetGadgets.@ConstSections: error: unresolved
{P cpuid= 0, pid= 61 Oberon started}64 bit A2 attempted to use executables compiled for 32 bit A2?
Sorry, could not insert xml statements.
No problem. Caught your meaning. The less than character can be expressed by <nowiki><</nowiki> or by <.
Thanks for the help, … P.
https://gitlab.inf.ethz.ch/felixf/oberon/-/issues/141#note_193237
Athletics rookie closer Mason Miller selected as Oakland’s last All-Star
date: 2024-07-07, from: San Jose Mercury News
Rookie closer Mason Miller was announced Sunday as the Athletics’ lone All-Star – and presumably their last as an Oakland-based ballclub.
US envoy expresses regret over alleged military sex crimes in Okinawa
date: 2024-07-07, from: VOA News USA
Tokyo — U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel expressed regret Saturday for the handling of two cases of sexual assaults allegedly committed by American military personnel on Okinawa, which have again stoked resentment of the heavy U.S. troop presence on the strategic island in Japan’s far southwest.
The issue broke out late last month, triggering an uproar over reports that two American service members had been charged with sexual assaults months earlier.
Both cases were first reported in local media in late June. In one arrest made in March, a member of the U.S. Air Force was charged with the kidnapping and sexual assault of a teenager, and while in May a U.S. Marine was arrested on charges of attempted rape resulting in injury. Further details about the alleged victims were not released.
Okinawa police said they did not announce the cases out of privacy considerations related to the victims. The Foreign Ministry, per police decision, also did not notify Okinawa prefectural officials.
The cases are a reminder to many Okinawans of the 1995 rape of a 12-year-old girl by three U.S. service members, which sparked massive protests of the U.S. presence. It led to a 1996 agreement between Tokyo and Washington to close a key U.S. air base, although the plan has been repeatedly delayed due to protests at the site designated for its replacement on another part of the island.
Emanuel said he deeply regretted what happened to the individuals, their families and their community, but fell short of apologizing. “Obviously, you got to let the criminal justice process play out. But that doesn’t mean you don’t express on a human level your sense of regret.”
“We have to do better,” he said, adding that the U.S. military’s high standards and protocols for education and training of its troops was “just not working.”
Emanuel said the U.S. may be able to propose measures to improve training and transparency with the public at U.S.-Japan foreign and defense ministers’ security talks expected later this month in Tokyo.
On Friday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said the Japanese authorities would do their utmost to provide more prompt disclosures of alleged crime related to U.S. military personnel on Okinawa while protecting victims’ privacy.
The cases could be a setback for the defense relationship at a time when Okinawa is seen increasingly important in the face of rising tensions with China.
Some 50,000 U.S. troops are deployed in Japan under a bilateral security pact, about half of them on Okinawa, where residents have long complained about heavy U.S. troop presence and related accidents, crime and noise.
Emanuel commented on the issue while visiting Fukushima, on Japan’s northeast coast.
Earlier Saturday, the ambassador visited the nearby town of Minamisoma to join junior surfers and sample locally-caught flounder for lunch, aiming to highlight the safety of the area’s seawater and seafood amid ongoing discharges of treated and diluted radioactive water from the tsunami-ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
China has banned Japanese seafood over the discharges, a move Emanuel criticized as unjustified.
Scammers swipe billions from Americans every year, many getting away with it
date: 2024-07-07, from: VOA News USA
Small brush fire breaks out in Newhall
date: 2024-07-07, from: The Signal
A brush fire dubbed the Margo Fire broke out near the intersection of Valle Del Oro and Trumpet Drive in Newhall on Sunday afternoon, according to the L.A. County Fire […]
The post Small brush fire breaks out in Newhall appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/small-brush-fire-breaks-out-in-newhall/
Biden campaigns through Pennsylvania as his team quietly braces for more Democratic defections
date: 2024-07-07, from: San Jose Mercury News
Some Democrats are mounting efforts to stand by the president and return the focus to Donald Trump and the danger they say he poses to the country and democracy.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The Self-Satisfied and Often Wrong Media Frenzy.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/07/07/the-self-satisfied-and-often-wrong-media-frenzy/
Trinity announces new baseball coach
date: 2024-07-07, from: The Signal
Trinity Classical Academy has announced Justin Stark as the new head coach for the Knights baseball program. Stark takes over a thriving program from former coach Trevor Brown as the […]
The post Trinity announces new baseball coach appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/trinity-announces-new-baseball-coach/
Biden’s reelection bid faces consequential week
date: 2024-07-07, from: VOA News USA
This coming week could be consequential for U.S. President Joe Biden’s reelection bid as voices continue to grow for him to leave the race amid concern over his age and capacity to lead. So far however, he still has the support of many of his peers, even as they acknowledge Democratic voters’ worries. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias reports.
https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-reelection-bid-faces-consequential-week/7688508.html
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-07-07, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
I do regret my naïveté saying for years “one state or two state solutions”.
The two state solution is merely gold-plating the turd of extermination.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112747071664046569
Biden hits campaign trail as Democrats fret about his candidacy
date: 2024-07-07, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/7688505.html
SF Giants drop series to Guardians as Hjelle allows crucial home run
date: 2024-07-07, from: San Jose Mercury News
The Giants had an opportunity to win a third straight series, but Sean Hjelle allowed a crucial three-run homer that decided the game.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
I would like to marry the Philadelphia Inquirer.
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/editorials/trump-verbal-miscues-presidential-debate-20240706.html
Should Celebrini and Smith be the Sharks’ top two centers this season?
date: 2024-07-07, from: San Jose Mercury News
Macklin Celebrini and Will Smith figure to provide a significant boost to the San Jose Sharks this season.
Polls: French leftists win most seats in legislative elections, beating back far-right surge
date: 2024-07-07, from: San Jose Mercury News
The projections put President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance in second, no longer in control of parliament, and the bruised far right in third.
Warriors make historic six-team trade official as Klay Thompson joins Mavericks
date: 2024-07-07, from: San Jose Mercury News
Kyle Anderson and Buddy Hield are heading to the Warriors as part of the first six-team trade in NBA history.
Two dead in Bay Area freeway crashes on I-280, I-580
date: 2024-07-07, from: San Jose Mercury News
Both motorists died at the scene, the California Highway Patrol said.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/07/two-dead-in-bay-area-freeway-crashes-on-i-280-i-580/
‘Despicable Me 4’ debuts, raking in $122.6 million since opening Wednesday
date: 2024-07-07, from: VOA News USA
New York — After a historically bad first half of the year, the box office is suddenly booming.
“Despicable Me 4,” the Illumination Animation sequel, led the way over the holiday weekend with $75 million in ticket sales Friday through Sunday and $122.6 million since opening Wednesday, according to studio estimates Sunday.
The Independence Day holiday weekend haul for the Universal Pictures’ release further extends the considerable box-office reign of the Minions, arguably the most bankable force in movies today. And it also kept a summer streak going for Hollywood.
Though overall ticket sales were down more than 40% from levels prior to the COVID 19 pandemic, heading into the summer moviegoing season, theaters have lately seen a succession of hits. After Sony’s “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” outperformed expectations, Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” rapidly cleared $1 billion in ticket sales worldwide, making it the first release since “Barbie” to reach that mark. Last weekend, the Paramount prequel “A Quiet Place: Day One” also came in above expectations.
With “Deadpool & Wolverine” tracking for a $160 million launch later this month, Hollywood’s summer is looking up.
“If you look at the mood of the industry about eight weeks ago, very different than today,” says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore. “The song says what a difference a day makes. What a difference a month has made.”
It helps to have the Minions at your disposal. Since first debuting in the 2010 original “Despicable Me,” each entry of the franchise — including two sequels and two “Minions” spinoffs — has seemingly guaranteed to gross around $1 billion. The four previous movies all made between $939 million (2022’s “Minions: Rise of Gru”) and $1.26 billion (2015’s “Minions”) globally.
That run has helped give Illumination founder and chief executive Chris Meledandri one of the most enviable track records in Hollywood. “Despicable Me 4,” directed by Chris Renaud and Patrick Delage, returns the voice cast led by Steve Carell and Kristen Wiig and doubles down on more Minion mayhem. Reviews (54% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) weren’t particularly good for the latest installment, which includes a witness protection plot and a group of Minions transformed into a superhero squadron. But in their 12-year run, little has slowed down the Minions.
“This is one of the most beloved franchises, quite frankly, in the history of film, and certainly animation,” said Jim Orr, distribution chief for Universal. “Chris Meledandri and Illumination have their finger on the pulse of what families and audiences around the world want to see.”
Family movies are powering the box office. “Despicable Me 4” performed strongly despite the still considerable drawing power of “Inside Out 2.” In its fourth weekend of release, the Pixar sequel added another $30 million domestically and $78.3 million overseas.
“Inside Out 2,” with $1.22 billion in ticket sales thus far, is easily the year’s biggest hit and fast climbing up the all-time ranks for animated releases. It currently ranks as the No. 5 animated release worldwide.
Instead of cannibalizing the opening weekend for “Despicable Me 4,” “Inside Out 2” may have helped get families back in the habit of heading to theaters.
“What happened, I think, is the release calendar finally settled into a nice rhythm,” said Dergarabedian, referencing the jumbled movie schedule from last year’s strikes. “It’s all about momentum.”
The continued strong sales for “Inside Out 2” were enough to put the film in second place for the domestic weekend. Last week’s top new film, “A Quiet Place: Day One,” slid to third with $21 million in its second weekend, with another $21.1 million from overseas theaters. That was a steep decrease of 60%, though the Paramount prequel has amassed $178.2 million worldwide in two weeks.
The run of hits has caused some studios to boost their forecasts for the summer movie season. Heading into the most lucrative season at theaters, analysts were predicting a $3 billion summer, down from the more typical $4 billion mark. Now, closer to $3.4 billion appears likely.
The weekend’s other top new release was Ti West’s “MaXXXine,” the third in a string of slasher films from A24 starring Mia Goth. In 2,450 locations, “MaXXXine” collected $6.7 million in ticket sales, a franchise best. The film, which follows “X” and “Pearl” (both released in 2022), stars Goth as a 1980s Hollywood starlet being hunted by a killer known as the Night Stalker.
Angel Studios, which last year released the unexpected summer hit “Sound of Freedom,” struggled to find the same success with its latest Christian film, “Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot.” It debuted with $3.2 million.
Kevin Costner’s big-budget gamble, “Horizon: An American Saga,” didn’t do much to turn around its fortunes in its second weekend. The first chapter in what Costner hopes will be a four-part franchise – including a chapter two Warner Bros. will release in August – earned $5.5 million in its second weekend. The film, which cost more than $100 million to make, has grossed $22.2 million in two weeks.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
“Despicable Me 4,” $75 million.
“Inside Out 2,” $30 million.
“A Quiet Place Day One,” $21 million.
“MaXXXine,” $6.7 million.
“Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” $6.5 million.
“Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter 1,” $5.5 million.
“Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot,” $3.2 million.
“Kaiki 2898,” $1.8 million.
“The Bikeriders,” $1.3 million.
“Kinds of Kindness,” $860,000.
‘Nothing Will be Protected’ — How California Environmentalists Killed a ‘Green’ Energy Bill
date: 2024-07-07, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Supporters said it would have helped free the state from fossil fuels and make the grid more reliable, but opponents feared it would damage state parks.
The post ‘Nothing Will be Protected’ — How California Environmentalists Killed a ‘Green’ Energy Bill appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
"Second American Revolution will be bloodless, if the left allows it to be."
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4753439-heritage-leader-second-american-revolution/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Is Kamala Harris Underrated?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/05/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-kamala-harris.html
Is it time to cool off? Bay Area temperatures still above normal this week but working their way down
date: 2024-07-07, from: San Jose Mercury News
Saturday’s temperature of 111 in Livermore broke the city’s mark of 110 set on July 6, 1905.
One Simple Question
date: 2024-07-07, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
“How often do you go to State Street since the road was closed?”
The post One Simple Question appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/07/one-simple-question/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Manton Reece: ActivityPub paper cuts.
https://www.manton.org/2024/07/07/activitypub-paper-cuts.html
Hot take: social platforms should disallow special character growth hacking
date: 2024-07-07, from: Chris Heilmann
Over the last few years something magical has happened without much fanfare: social media platforms and operating systems automatically translate text content for us. Having spent a lot of time traveling around conferences, I amassed a lot of people I follow who do not speak or write like me. And whilst it was fun following […]
Evacuations Ordered on Figueroa Mountain Road in Lake Fire
date: 2024-07-07, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Three cabins were damaged or destroyed below Figueroa Campground; Figueroa Mountain Fire Station still standing.
The post Evacuations Ordered on Figueroa Mountain Road in Lake Fire appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/07/evacuations-ordered-on-figueroa-mountain-road-in-lake-fire/
7 ways to reduce energy bills during summer heat
date: 2024-07-07, from: The Signal
With temperatures forecasted to run at least 2 degrees higher than historical averages across more than half the country, according to projections from AccuWeather, heat waves may lead to soaring […]
The post 7 ways to reduce energy bills during summer heat appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/7-ways-to-reduce-energy-bills-during-summer-heat/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-07-07, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
I should add that once you have this volume of photos, Apple Photos really shines - for searching events, people, locations, themes, memories; and also to search text of screenshots and memes.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112746275704496953
Regain flexibility after age 50
date: 2024-07-07, from: The Signal
Flexibility and fitness go hand in hand. Ensuring the body is flexible can help individuals avoid injury during exercise. Yogapedia indicates flexibility refers to the ability of a joint to […]
The post Regain flexibility after age 50 appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/regain-flexibility-after-age-50/
Staying safe during summer vacations: 5 tips for traveling with health conditions
date: 2024-07-07, from: The Signal
From staycations and road trips to Caribbean getaways and coastal cruises, summertime offers the chance to escape and unwind with a much needed (and deserved) vacation. However, for people living […]
The post Staying safe during summer vacations: 5 tips for traveling with health conditions appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
Beat the outside heat by playing indoors
date: 2024-07-07, from: The Signal
While much of the country is sweltering in record breaking heat, for the Santa Clarita Valley, we call it “a regular summer day.” As the calendar counts down to “real […]
The post Beat the outside heat by playing indoors appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/beat-the-outside-heat-by-playing-indoors/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-07-07, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Two things I just learned:
- the iCloud storage is in addition to your AppleOne subscription, so
I don’t need to buy the 6 TB tier yet, I only have to buy the additional
2TB to extent the 2TB I have from AppleOne.
- you can share the storage with your family (our family is 5, not sure if Apple Storage is Utah-friendly)
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112746147803568530
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-07-07, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
I wonder how your photo library compares to mine?
I always loved photos, but taking pictures and videos of the kids took this to another level.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112746110456638924
Changing Lives
date: 2024-07-07, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Thank you for the touching and encouraging cover story by Isabelle Walker with amazing photographs by David Sand.
The post Changing Lives appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/07/changing-lives/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-07-07, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Cutting it close:
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112746082195834579
Texas coastal residents told to expect power outages, flooding as Beryl moves closer to landfall
date: 2024-07-07, from: VOA News USA
MATAGORDA, TEXAS — Beryl began lashing Texas with rain and intensifying winds Sunday as coastal residents boarded up windows, left beach towns under evacuation orders and prepared for the powerful storm that has already cut a deadly path through parts of Mexico and the Caribbean.
Although Beryl remained a tropical storm Sunday as it churned toward Texas, it threatened to potentially regain hurricane strength in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico before making landfall early Monday. The storm was projected to come ashore in the middle of the Texas coast around Matagorda Bay, an area about 161 kilometers (100 miles) south of Houston, but officials cautioned the path could still change.
Texas officials warned the storm would cause power outages and flooding but also expressed worry that not enough coastal residents and beach vacationers in Beryl’s path were heeding warnings to leave.
“One of the things that kind of trigger our concern a little bit, we’ve looked at all of the roads leaving the coast and the maps are still green,” said Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who is serving as the state’s acting governor while Gov. Greg Abbott is traveling overseas. “So we don’t see many people leaving.”
Along the Texas coast, many residents and business owners took the typical storm precautions, but also expressed uncertainty about the storm’s intensity.
In Port Lavaca, Jimmy May fastened plywood over the windows of his electrical supply company and said he wasn’t concerned about the possible storm surge. He recalled that his business had escaped flooding in a previous hurricane that brought a 6-meter storm surge.
“In town, you know, if you’re in the low-lying areas, obviously, you need to get out of there,” he said.
At the nearby marina, Percy Roberts showed his neighbor Ken Waller how to properly secure his boat as heavy winds rolled in from the bay Sunday evening.
“This is actually going to be the first hurricane I’m going to be experiencing,” Waller said, noting that he’s a little nervous but feels safe following Roberts’ lead. “Pray for the best but expect the worst, I guess.”
Farther down the coast in Freeport, Mark Richardson, a 64-year-old retiree, said homeowners were busy “trying to tie everything down” and worried that Beryl had people unsure about where along the Texas coast it would make landfall. He spent Sunday morning on the beach and said ocean swells were quickly rising.
“The ocean is getting very angry, very fast,” he said.
The earliest storm to develop into a Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic, Beryl caused at least 11 deaths as it passed through the Caribbean on its way to Texas. The storm ripped off doors, windows and roofs with devastating winds and storm surge fueled by the Atlantic’s record warmth.
Three times in its one week of life, Beryl has gained 56 kph in wind speed in 24 hours or less, the official weather service definition of rapid intensification.
Beryl’s explosive growth into an unprecedented early whopper of a storm shows the literal hot water of the Atlantic and Caribbean, and what the Atlantic hurricane belt can expect for the rest of the storm season, experts said.
Texas officials warned people along the entire coastline to prepare for possible flooding, heavy rain and wind. The hurricane warning extended from Baffin Bay, south of Corpus Christi, to Sargent, south of Houston.
Beryl lurked as another potential heavy rain event for Houston, where storms in recent months have knocked out power across the nation’s fourth-largest city and flooded neighborhoods. A flash flood watch was in effect for a wide swath of the Texas coast, where forecasters expected Beryl to dump as much as 25 centimeters of rain in some areas.
Potential storm surges between 1.22 and 2.13 meters above ground level were forecast around Matagorda. The warnings extended to the same coastal areas where Hurricane Harvey came ashore in 2017 as a Category 4 hurricane, far more powerful than Beryl’s expected intensity by the time the storm reaches landfall.
Those looking to catch a flight out of the area could find that option all but impossible as Beryl closed in. Hundreds of flights from Houston’s two major commercial airports had been delayed by midafternoon Sunday and dozens more canceled, according to FlightAware data.
In Corpus Christi, officials asked visitors to cut their trips short and return home early if possible. Residents were advised to secure homes by boarding up windows if necessary and using sandbags to guard against possible flooding.
The White House said Sunday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had sent emergency responders, search-and-rescue teams, bottled water, and other resources along the coast.
Several coastal counties called for voluntary evacuations in low-lying areas that are prone to flooding. Local officials also banned beach camping and urged tourists traveling on the Fourth of July holiday weekend to move recreational vehicles from coastal parks.
Beryl earlier this week battered Mexico as a Category 2 hurricane, toppling trees but causing no injuries or deaths before weakening to a tropical storm as it moved across the Yucatan Peninsula.
Before hitting Mexico, Beryl wrought destruction in Jamaica, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Barbados. Three people were reported dead in Grenada, three in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, three in Venezuela and two in Jamaica.
Beryl would be the 10th hurricane to hit Texas in July since 1851 and the fourth in the last 25 years, according to Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach.
A friendly guide to containerization for AI work
date: 2024-07-07, updated: 2024-07-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Save the headaches, ship your dependencies
Hands on One of the biggest headaches associated with AI workloads is wrangling all of the drivers, runtimes, libraries, and other dependencies they need to run.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/07/containerize_ai_apps/
fnec ece commented on issue #141 at Felix Oliver Friedrich / Oberon A2
date: 2024-07-07, updated: 2024-07-07, from: Oberon A2 at CAS
Sorry, could not insert xml statements.
https://gitlab.inf.ethz.ch/felixf/oberon/-/issues/141#note_193236
fnec ece commented on issue #141 at Felix Oliver Friedrich / Oberon A2
date: 2024-07-07, updated: 2024-07-07, from: Oberon A2 at CAS
What happens if you don't load HotKeys module at Autostart section of Configuration.XML;
To comment, change this:
To:
https://gitlab.inf.ethz.ch/felixf/oberon/-/issues/141#note_193235
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The US supreme court just basically legalized bribery.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Heather Cox Richardson On This Moment In American History. #mustwatch
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Wnw6JmXOzpk
Can’t get enough of California? Try hopping into this Huell Howser livestream
date: 2024-07-07, updated: 2024-07-07, from: The LAist
PBS SoCal is trying out a new experiment by streaming Howser’s Visiting on YouTube, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
An Alaska tourist spot will vote whether to ban cruise ships on Saturdays to give locals a break
date: 2024-07-07, from: VOA News USA
JUNEAU, Alaska — Each year, a crush of tourists arrives in Alaska’s capital city on cruise ships to see wonders like the fast-diminishing Mendenhall Glacier. Now, long-simmering tensions over Juneau’s tourism boom are coming to a head over a new voter initiative aimed at giving residents a respite from the influx.
A measure that would ban cruise ships with 250 or more passengers from docking in Juneau on Saturdays qualified for the Oct. 1 municipal ballot, setting the stage for a debate about how much tourism is too much in a city that is experiencing first-hand the impacts of climate change. The measure would also ban ships on July 4, a day when locals flock to a downtown parade.
The “ship-free Saturdays” initiative that qualified last week will go to voters unless the local Assembly enacts a similar measure by Aug. 15, which is seen as unlikely.
Juneau, accessible only by water or air, is home to the Mendenhall Glacier, a major draw for the cruise passengers who arrive on multi-story ships towering over parts of the modest downtown skyline. Many residents of this city of about 32,000 have concerns about increased traffic, congested trails and the frequent buzz of sight-seeing helicopters transporting visitors to the Mendenhall and other glaciers.
Deborah Craig, who has lived in Juneau for decades, supports ship-free Saturdays. Craig, who lives across the channel from where the ships dock, often hears their early-morning fog horns and broadcast announcements made to passengers that are audible across the water.
The current “overwhelming” number of visitors diminishes what residents love so much about Juneau, she said.
“It’s about preserving the lifestyle that keeps us in Juneau, which is about clean air, clean water, pristine environment and easy access to trails, easy access to water sports and nature,” she said of the initiative.
“There’s this perception that some people are not welcoming of tourists, and that’s not the case at all,” Craig said. “It’s about volume. It’s about too much — too many in a short period of time overwhelming a small community.”
The current cruise season runs from early April to late October.
Opponents of the initiative say limiting dockings will hurt local businesses that rely heavily on tourism and could invite lawsuits. A voter-approved limit on cruise passenger numbers in Bar Harbor, Maine, another community with a significant tourism economy, was challenged in federal court.
Laura McDonnell, a business leader who owns Caribou Crossings, a gift shop in Juneau’s downtown tourist core, said she makes 98% of her annual revenue during the summer season.
Tourism is about all the “local businesses that rely on cruise passengers and our place in the community,” said McDonnell, who is involved in Protect Juneau’s Future, which opposes the initiative.
Some schools recently closed due to factors including declining enrollment, while the regional economy faces challenges, she said.
“I think that as a community, we really need to look at what’s at stake for our economy,” she said. “We are not in a position to be shrinking our economy.”
The cruise industry accounted for $375 million in direct spending in Juneau in 2023, most of that attributable to spending by passengers, according to a report prepared for the city by McKinley Research Group LLC.
After a two-year pandemic lull, cruise passenger numbers rose sharply in Juneau, hitting a record of more than 1.6 million in 2023. Under this year’s schedule, Sept. 21 will be the first day since early May with no large ships in town.
The tourism debate is polarizing, and the city has been trying to find a middle ground, said Alexandra Pierce, Juneau’s visitor industry director. But she noted there also needs to be a regional solution.
If the Juneau initiative passes, it will impact other, smaller communities in southeast Alaska because the ships, generally on trips originating in Seattle or Vancouver, Canada, will have to go somewhere if they can’t dock in Juneau on Saturdays, she said.
Some residents in Sitka, south of Juneau, are in the early stages of trying to limit cruise visitation to that small, island community, which is near a volcano.
Juneau and major cruise lines, including Carnival Corp., Disney Cruise Line, Norwegian Cruise Line and Royal Caribbean Group, agreed to a limit of five large ships a day, which took effect this year. They more recently signed a pact, set to take effect in 2026, seeking a daily limit of 16,000 cruise passengers Sundays through Fridays and 12,000 on Saturdays.
Pierce said the overall goal is to keep total cruise passenger visitation around 1.6 million, and to even out daily numbers of visitors that can spike to about 18,000 on the busiest days and feel “a bit suffocating.” Juneau traditionally has been the most popular cruise port in the state.
A number of projects around Juneau are expected to help make existing cruise numbers feel less impactful. Those include plans for a gondola at the city-owned ski area and increased visitor capacity at the Mendenhall Glacier recreation area, she said.
Renée Limoge Reeve, vice president of government and community relations for the trade group Cruise Lines International Association Alaska, said the agreements signed with the city were the first of their kind in Alaska.
The best strategy is “ongoing, direct dialogue with local communities” and working together in a way that also provides a predictable source of income for local businesses, she said.
Protect Juneau’s Future, led by local business leaders, said the success of the ballot measure would mean a loss of sales tax revenue and millions of dollars in direct spending by cruise passengers. The group was confident voters would reject the measure, its steering committee said in a statement.
Karla Hart, a sponsor of the initiative and frequent critic of the cruise industry, said the threat of litigation has kept communities from taking steps to limit cruise numbers in the past. She was heartened by legal wins this year in the ongoing fight over the measure passed in Bar Harbor, a popular destination near Maine’s Acadia National Park.
She believes the Juneau initiative will pass.
https://www.voanews.com/a/7688193.html
Torrid heat bakes millions in large swaths of US, setting records and fanning wildfires
date: 2024-07-07, from: VOA News USA
Las Vegas — Roughly 130 million people were under threat over the weekend and into next week from a long-running heat wave that broke or tied records with dangerously high temperatures and is expected to shatter more from East Coast to West Coast, forecasters said.
Ukiah, north of San Francisco, hit 117 degrees Fahrenheit (47 degrees Celsius) on Saturday, breaking the city’s record for the date and tying its all-time high. Livermore, east of San Francisco, hit 111 F (43.8 C), breaking the daily maximum temperature record of 109 F (42.7 C) set more than a century ago in 1905.
Las Vegas tied the record of 115 F (46 C), last reached in 2007, and Phoenix topped out at 114 F (45.5 C), just shy of the record of 116 F (46.7 C) dating to 1942.
The National Weather Service said it was extending the excessive heat warning for much of the Southwest through Friday.
“A dangerous and historic heatwave is just getting started across the area, with temperatures expected to peak during the Sunday-Wednesday timeframe,” the National Weather Service in Las Vegas said in an updated forecast.
In Las Vegas, where the mercury hit 100 F (37.7 C) by 10:30 a.m., Marko Boscovich said the best way to beat the heat is in a seat at a slot machine with a cold beer inside an air-conditioned casino.
“But you know, after it hits triple digits it’s about all the same to me,” said Boscovich, who was visiting from Sparks, Nevada to see a Dead & Company concert Saturday night at the Sphere. “Maybe they’ll play one of my favorites — ‘Cold Rain and Snow.’”
In more humid parts of the country, temperatures could spike above 100 F (about 38 C) in parts of the Pacific Northwest, the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast, said Jacob Asherman, a weather service meteorologist.
Heat records shattered across the Southwest
Meteorologists predicted that temperatures would be near daily records in the region through most, if not all, of the coming week, with lower desert highs reaching 115 to 120 degrees F (46.1 to 48.8 C).
Rare heat advisories were extended even into higher elevations including around Lake Tahoe, on the border of California and Nevada, with the National Weather Service in Reno, Nevada, warning of “major heat risk impacts, even in the mountains.”
“How hot are we talking? Well, high temperatures across (western Nevada and northeastern California) won’t get below 100 degrees (37.8 C) until next weekend,” the service posted online. “And unfortunately, there won’t be much relief overnight either.”
Indeed, Reno hit a high of 104 F (40 C) on Saturday, smashing the old record of 101 F (38.3 C).
More extreme highs are in the near forecast, including 129 F (53.8 C) for Sunday at Furnace Creek, California, in Death Valley National Park, and then around 130 F (54.4 C) through Wednesday.
The hottest temperature ever officially recorded on Earth was 134 F (56.67 C) in July 1913 in Death Valley, eastern California, though some experts dispute that measurement and say the real record was 130 F (54.4 C), recorded there in July 2021.
The worst is yet to come across the West and mid-Atlantic
Triple-digit temperatures are likely in the West, between 15 and 30 F (8 and 16 C) higher than average into next week, the National Weather Service said.
The Eastern U.S. also was bracing for more hot temperatures. Baltimore and others parts of Maryland were under an excessive heat warning as heat index values could climb to 110 F (43 C), forecasters said.
“Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors,” read a National Weather Service advisory for the Baltimore area. “Young children and pets should never be left unattended in vehicles under any circumstances.”
Deaths are starting to mount
In Arizona’s Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix, there have been at least 13 confirmed heat-related deaths this year, along with more than 160 other deaths suspected of being related to heat that are still under investigation, according to a recent report.
That does not include the death of a 10-year-old boy last week in Phoenix who suffered a “heat-related medical event” while hiking with family at South Mountain Park and Preserve, according to police.
California wildfires fanned by low humidity, high temperatures
Firefighters dispatched aircraft and helicopters to drop water or retardant on a series of wildfires in California.
In Santa Barbara County, northwest of Los Angeles, the Lake Fire has scorched more than 19 square miles (49 square kilometers) of grass, brush and timber. Firefighters said the blaze was displaying “extreme fire behavior” and had the “potential for large growth” with high temperatures and low humidity.
Festival revelers meet the heat with cold water and shade
At the Waterfront Blues Festival in Portland, Oregon, music fans coped by drinking cold water, seeking shade or freshening up under water misters. Organizers of the weekend revelries also advertised free access to air conditioning in a nearby hotel.
Angelica Quiroz, 31, kept her scarf and hat wet and applied sunscreen.
“Definitely a difference between the shade and the sun,” Quiroz said Friday. “But when you’re in the sun, it feels like you’re cooking.”
David Hegg | Dependent Independence
date: 2024-07-07, from: The Signal
By David Hegg Once again, Independence Day has brought summer into reality. In my growing-up years near Canada, July 4 always seemed to be the first day it was hot […]
The post David Hegg | Dependent Independence appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/david-hegg-dependent-independence/
Bill Lyons | But Cusack Was Great in ‘Sixteen Candles’
date: 2024-07-07, from: The Signal
The Signal did it again! While honoring obscure actors like John Cusack and Mary Stuart Masterson, your column (“Today in History”) omitted mention of my favorite African immigrant: Elon Musk, […]
The post Bill Lyons | But Cusack Was Great in ‘Sixteen Candles’ appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/bill-lyons-but-cusack-was-great-in-sixteen-candles/
Rob Kerchner | Overlooking the Evils of Marxism
date: 2024-07-07, from: The Signal
For their crimes Nazis are routinely — and appropriately — denounced by everyone, including leftists, who eagerly ignore the even worse crimes of Marxists. But it’s not just leftists who […]
The post Rob Kerchner | Overlooking the Evils of Marxism appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/rob-kerchner-overlooking-the-evils-of-marxism/
Pavi Premadasan | Mall Needs a Shot in the Arm
date: 2024-07-07, from: The Signal
I’m writing to talk about the number of shops closing in the Valencia Town Center mall. As someone who’s grown up in Santa Clarita, it’s really sad to see so […]
The post Pavi Premadasan | Mall Needs a Shot in the Arm appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/pavi-premadasan-mall-needs-a-shot-in-the-arm/
NATO to discuss Russia-North Korea military cooperation
date: 2024-07-07, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The NATO summit scheduled for this week will include a discussion among the allies about strengthening security ties with South Korea and Japan against deepening military cooperation between Russia and North Korea, experts said.
The leaders of 32 NATO members will convene in Washington July 9 to 11 to discuss ways to provide continued military support to Ukraine to help it defend itself against Russia, which invaded more than two years ago.
Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea — sometimes referred to as the Indo-Pacific 4 or IP4 — are invited to the NATO summit. The United States, Japan and South Korea plan to meet on the sidelines of the summit.
Among the items that analysts expect NATO to discuss with Japan and South Korea is the growing military cooperation between Russia and North Korea.
“The Russian-North Korean agreement is a problem for both NATO countries and for the countries in the Northeast Asia,” said Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation.
“I expect that it will be discussed at this meeting. It may become a critical aspect of the meeting, if, by that time, intelligence is saying that North Korea is sending many military personnel to support Russia in Ukraine,” Bennett said.
After Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed a mutual defense pact in Pyongyang last month, some speculated that North Korea could dispatch army engineers to Russian-occupied Donetsk to rebuild the war-torn region.
Pentagon press secretary Major General Patrick Ryder said at a press conference on June 25 that the U.S. is keeping an eye on a possible dispatch of troops but warned North Korea about sending military forces, saying they would be “cannon fodder in an illegal war against Ukraine.”
North Korea on June 27 renewed its support for Russia’s war against Ukraine, saying, “We will always be on the side of the Russian army” in “the war of justice.”
Both Washington and Seoul have estimated that Pyongyang sent about 10,000 containers of munitions to Russia. Moscow and Pyongyang denied arms exchanges between the two.
But in the defense pact that Putin and Kim signed last month, they agreed to set up ways to bolster their defense capabilities and openly announced possible military and technical cooperation.
“NATO members will discuss the implications of closer Russia-North Korea relations and how best to respond, including in terms of risks and opportunities,” said Matthew Brummer, a professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo.
“Risks primarily include material outcomes, such as how North Korea involvement will come to bear on warfighting in Ukraine. But there are also opportunities to be exploited, including how to use increased North Korea involvement to drive a wedge between China and Russia,” he said.
“The reemerging axis between China, Russia and North Korea has most certainly precipitated the security link between Europe and Asia. As a result, I expect increased NATO involvement in East Asia, especially with Japan, which is the world’s greatest latent military power,” Brummer said.
Beijing said that it is keeping “a close eye” on the NATO summit and that it hopes the summit does not “target any third party.”
Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told VOA on Tuesday that “the Asia-Pacific lies beyond the geographical scope of the North Atlantic” and that “NATO’s attempt to make eastward inroads into the Asia-Pacific will inevitably undermine regional peace and stability.”
“The countries and people in this region are on high alert against this and firmly oppose any words or actions designed to bring military blocs into this region and stoke division and confrontation,” he said.
The U.S. State Department did not respond to an inquiry by VOA’s Korean Service seeking a response to Beijing’s comments.
Luis Simon, director of the Elcano Royal Institute in Brussels, Belgium, said he would not rule out NATO countries conducting joint military exercises with its East Asian partners “in the Korean Peninsula context rather than in a China context” because it offers “diplomatically an easier entry point.”
At the same time, he said, “It will be more with NATO allies rather than the NATO as a whole because NATO as a whole is very clear about being laser focused” on defending Ukraine.
The Japan Air Self-Defense Force announced on June 25 that it will hold a series of joint drills in July with Germany, Spain and France — all NATO members.
David Maxwell, vice president of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy, also said that bilateral arrangements between South Korea and individual NATO countries could be possible as “a number of NATO countries are member states of the United Nations Command.”
The U.N. Command is a multinational military body created during the Korean War of 1950-53 to defend against North Korean aggression.
Some analysts said there are limits to NATO’s involvement in the Indo-Pacific.
“Most of the countries in NATO are focused on the Atlantic area, and those who have projection capabilities” that can go beyond that “have rather small ones,” said Barry Posen, Ford international professor of political science at MIT.
William Ruger, a nonresident senior fellow at Defense Priorities, said U.S. “capabilities, material and policy bandwidth” are not sufficient to deal with the security of both Europe and Asia.
https://www.voanews.com/a/nato-to-discuss-russia-north-korea-military-cooperation/7685616.html
Today in SCV History (July 7)
date: 2024-07-07, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1949 – Incorporation of Castaic Saddle Club; holds rodeos near future Castaic Lake (lower lagoon) [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-july-7/
Sizzling sidewalks, unshaded playgrounds pose risk of burns
date: 2024-07-07, from: VOA News USA
PHOENIX, Arizona — Ron Falk lost his right leg, had extensive skin grafting on the left one and is still recovering a year after collapsing on the searing asphalt outside a Phoenix convenience store where he stopped for a cold soda during a heat wave.
Now using a wheelchair, the 62-year-old lost his job and his home. He’s recovering at a medical respite center for patients with no other place to go; there he gets physical therapy and treatment for a bacterial infection in what remains of his right leg, which is too swollen to use the prosthesis he’d hoped would help him walk again.
“If you don’t get somewhere to cool down, the heat will affect you,” said Falk, who lost consciousness due to heat stroke. “Then you won’t know what’s happening, like in my case.”
Sizzling sidewalks and unshaded playgrounds pose risks for surface burns as air temperatures reach new summertime highs in Southwest U.S. cities such as Phoenix, which just recorded its hottest June on record. The average daytime high was 43 degrees Celsius (109.5 degrees Fahrenheit), without a single 24-hour high below 37.7 Celsius (100 Fahrenheit).
Young children, older adults and homeless people are especially at risk for contact burns, which can occur in seconds when skin touches a surface of 82 C (180 F).
Since the beginning of June, 50 people have been hospitalized with such burns, and four have died at Valleywise Health Medical Center in Phoenix, which operates the Southwest’s largest burn center, serving patients from six states, according to its director, Dr. Kevin Foster. About 80% were injured in metro Phoenix.
Last year, the center admitted 136 patients for surface burns from June through August, up from 85 during the same period in 2022, Foster said. Fourteen died. One out of five were homeless.
“Last year’s record heat wave brought an alarming number of patients with life-threatening burns,” Foster said of a 31-day period with temperatures at or above 43 C (110 F) during Phoenix’s hottest summer.
In Las Vegas, which regularly sees summertime highs in the triple digits, 22 people were hospitalized in June alone at the University Medical Center’s Lions Burn Care Center, said spokesperson Scott Kerbs. That’s nearly half as many as the 46 hospitalized during all three summer months last year.
As in Phoenix, the desert sun punishes Las Vegas for hours every day, frying outdoor surfaces such as asphalt, concrete and metal doors on cars and playground equipment such as swings and monkey bars.
Contact with pavement
Surface burn victims often include children injured walking barefoot on concrete or touching hot surfaces, adults who collapsed on a sidewalk while intoxicated, and older people who fell on the pavement due to heat stroke or another medical emergency.
Some don’t survive.
Thermal injuries were among the main or contributing causes of last year’s 645 heat-related deaths in Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix.
One victim was an 82-year-old woman with dementia and heart disease admitted to a suburban Phoenix hospital after being found on the scorching pavement on an August day that hit 41.1 C (106 F).
With a body temperature of 40.5 C (105 F), the woman was rushed to the hospital with second-degree burns on her back and right side, covering 8% of her body. She died three days later.
Many surface burn patients also suffered potentially fatal heat stroke.
Valleywise hospital’s emergency department recently adopted a new protocol for all heat stroke victims: submerging patients in a bag of slushy ice to quickly bring down body temperature.
Recovery for those with skin burns was often lengthy, with patients undergoing multiple skin grafts and other surgeries, followed by months of recovery in skilled nursing or rehabilitation facilities.
Bob Woolley, 71, suffered second- and third-degree burns to his hands, arms, leg and torso after he stumbled onto the broiling backyard rock garden at his Phoenix home while wearing only swim trunks and a tank top.
“The ordeal was extremely painful; it was almost unbearable,” said Woolley, who was hospitalized at the Valleywise burn center for several months. He said he considers himself “95% recovered” after extensive skin grafts and physical therapy and has resumed some former activities such as swimming and motorcycle riding.
Children among the burned
Some burn victims in Phoenix and Las Vegas were children.
“In many cases, this involves toddlers walking or crawling onto hot surfaces,” Kerbs said of those hospitalized at the Las Vegas center.
Foster said about 20% of the hospitalized and outpatient skin-burn victims seen at the Phoenix center are children.
Small children aren’t fully aware of the harm a sizzling metal door handle or a scorching sidewalk can cause.
“Because they’re playing, they don’t pay attention,” said urban climatologist Ariane Middel, an assistant professor at Arizona State University who directs the SHaDE Lab, a research team that studies the effects of urban heat.
“They may not even notice that it’s hot.”
In measuring surface temperatures of playground equipment, the team found that in 37.7-degree C (100 F) weather without shade, a slide can heat up to 71.1 C (160 F), but a covering can bring that down to 43.8 C (111 F). A rubber ground cover can hit as high as 86.6 C (188 F), a handrail can heat up to 48.8 C (120 F) and concrete can reach 55.5 C (132 F).
Many metro Phoenix parks have covered picnic tables and plastic fabric stretched over play equipment, keeping metal or plastic surfaces up to 30 degrees Fahrenheit cooler. But plenty do not, Middel said.
She said cooler wood chips are better underfoot than rubber mats, which were designed to protect kids from head injuries but soak up heat in the broiling sun. Like rubber, artificial turf gets hotter than asphalt.
“We need to think about alternative surface types, because most surfaces we use for our infrastructure are heat sponges,” Middel said.
Pets in danger, too
Hot concrete and asphalt also pose burn risks for pets.
Veterinarians recommend dogs wear booties to protect their paws during outdoor walks in summer or keeping them on cooler grassy areas. Owners are also advised to make sure their pets drink plenty of water and don’t get overheated. Phoenix bans dogs from the city’s popular hiking trails on days the National Weather Service issues an excessive heat warning.
Recovering at Phoenix’s Circle the City, a respite care facility he was sent to after being released from Valleywise’s burn unit, Falk said he never imagined the Phoenix heat could cause him to collapse on the broiling asphalt in his shorts and T-shirt.
Because he wasn’t carrying identification or a phone, no one knew where he was for months. He has a long road ahead but still hopes to regain part of his old life, working for a concessionaire for entertainment events.
“I kind of went into a downward spiral,” Falk said. “I finally woke up and said, ’Hey, wait, I lost a leg.’ But that doesn’t mean you’re useless.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/sizzling-sidewalks-unshaded-playgrounds-pose-risk-of-burns/7683749.html
Pongamia trees offer renewable energy, plant-based protein
date: 2024-07-07, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/pongamia-trees-offer-renewable-energy-plant-based-protein/7688123.html
North Dakota tribe goes back to its roots with a massive greenhouse operation
date: 2024-07-07, from: VOA News USA
BISMARCK, North Dakota — A Native American tribe in North Dakota will soon grow lettuce in a giant greenhouse complex that when fully completed will be among the country’s largest, enabling the tribe to grow much of its own food decades after a federal dam flooded the land where they had cultivated corn, beans and other crops for millennia.
Work is ongoing on the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation’s 1.3-hectare greenhouse that will make up most of the Native Green Grow operation’s initial phase. However, enough of the structure will be completed this summer to start growing leafy greens and other crops such as tomatoes and strawberries.
“We’re the first farmers of this land,” Tribal Chairman Mark Fox said. “We once were part of an Aboriginal trade center for thousands and thousands of years because we grew crops — corn, beans, squash, watermelons — all these things at massive levels, so all the tribes depended on us greatly as part of the Aboriginal trade system.”
The tribe will spend roughly $76 million on the initial phase, which also will include a warehouse and other facilities near the tiny town of Parshall. It plans to add to the growing space in the coming years, eventually totaling about 5.9 hectares, which officials say would make it one of the world’s largest facilities of its type.
The tribe’s fertile land along the Missouri River was inundated in the mid-1950s when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the Garrison Dam, which created Lake Sakakawea.
Getting fresh produce has long been a challenge in the area of western North Dakota where the tribe is based, on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. The rolling, rugged landscape — split by Lake Sakakawea — is a long drive from the state’s biggest cities, Bismarck and Fargo.
That isolation makes the greenhouses all the more important, as they will enable the tribe to provide food to the roughly 8,300 people on the Fort Berthold reservation and to reservations elsewhere. The tribe also hopes to stock food banks that serve isolated and impoverished areas in the region, and plans to export its produce.
Initially, the MHA Nation expects to grow nearly 907,000 kilograms of food a year and for that to eventually increase to 5.4 million to 6.4 million kilograms annually. Fox said the operation’s first phase will create 30 to 35 jobs.
The effort coincides with a national move to increase food sovereignty among tribes.
Supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic led tribes nationwide to use federal coronavirus aid to invest in food systems, including underground greenhouses in South Dakota to feed the local community, said Heather Dawn Thompson, director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Tribal Relations. In Oklahoma, multiple tribes are running or building their own meat processing plant, she said.
The USDA promotes its Indigenous Food Sovereignty Initiative, which “really challenges us to think about food and the way we do business at USDA from an Indigenous, tribal lens,” Thompson said. Examples include Indigenous seed hubs, foraging videos and guides, cooking videos and a meat processing program for Indigenous animals.
“We have always been a very independent, sovereign people that have been able to hunt, gather, grow and feed ourselves, and forces have intervened over the last century that have disrupted those independent food resources, and it made it very challenging. But the desire and goal has always been there,” said Thompson, whose tribal affiliation is Cheyenne River Sioux.
The MHA Nation’s greenhouse plans are possible in large part because of access to potable water and natural gas resources.
The natural gas released in North Dakota’s Bakken oil field has long been seen by critics as a waste and environmental concern, but Fox said the tribal nation intends to capture and compress that gas to heat and power the greenhouse and process into fertilizer.
Flaring, in which natural gas is burned off from pipes that emerge from the ground, has been a longtime issue in the No. 3 oil-producing state.
North Dakota Pipeline Authority Director Justin Kringstad said that key to capturing the gas is building needed infrastructure, as the MHA Nation intends to do.
“With those operators that are trying to get to that level of zero, it’s certainly going to take more infrastructure, more buildout of pipes, processing plants, all of the above to stay on top of this issue,” he said.
The Fort Berthold Reservation had nearly 3,000 active wells in April, when oil production totaled 203,000 barrels a day on the reservation. Oil production has helped the MHA Nation build schools, roads, housing and medical facilities, Fox said.
Rooker, Schuemann hit 3-run homers in Athletics’ 19-8 rout of Orioles
date: 2024-07-07, from: San Jose Mercury News
The A’s homered in each of the first four innings for the first time since 2003.
‘Ready to come out?’ Scientists emerge after year ‘on Mars’
date: 2024-07-07, from: VOA News USA
washington — The NASA astronaut knocks loudly three times on what appears to be a nondescript door and calls cheerfully: “You ready to come out?”
The reply is inaudible, but beneath his mask he appears to be grinning as he yanks the door open, and four scientists who have spent a year away from all other human contact, simulating a mission to Mars, spill out to cheers and applause.
Anca Selariu, Ross Brockwell, Nathan Jones and team leader Kelly Haston have spent the past 378 days sealed inside the “Martian” habitat in Houston, Texas, part of NASA’s research into what it will take to put humans on the Red Planet.
They have been growing vegetables, conducting “Marswalks,” and operating under what NASA terms “additional stressors,” such as communication delays with “Earth,” including their families; isolation and confinement.
It’s the kind of experience that would make anyone who lived through pandemic lockdowns shudder, but all four were beaming as they reemerged Saturday, their hair slightly more unruly and their emotion apparent.
“Hello. It’s actually so wonderful just to be able to say hello to you,” Haston, a biologist, said with a laugh.
“I really hope I don’t cry standing up here in front of all of you,” Jones, an emergency room doctor, said as he took to the microphone, and nearly doing just that several moments later as he spotted his wife in the crowd.
The habitat, dubbed Mars Dune Alpha, is a 3D-printed, 160-square-meter facility, complete with bedrooms, a gym, common areas, and a vertical farm for growing food.
An outdoor area, separated by an airlock, is filled with red sand and is where the team donned suits to conduct their “Marswalks,” though it is still covered rather than being open air.
“They have spent more than a year in this habitat conducting crucial science, most of it nutrition-based and how that impacts their performance … as we prepare to send people on to the Red Planet,” Steve Koerner told the crowd. Koerner is the deputy director at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
“I’m very appreciative,” he added.
This mission is the first of a series of three planned by NASA, grouped under the title CHAPEA — Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog.
A yearlong mission simulating life on Mars took place in 2015-2016 in a habitat in Hawaii, and although NASA participated in it, it was not at the helm.
Under its Artemis program, America plans to send humans back to the Moon to learn how to live there long-term to help prepare a trip to Mars, sometime towards the end of the 2030s.
https://www.voanews.com/a/ready-to-come-out-scientists-emerge-after-year-on-mars-/7688101.html
Lake Fire More Than Doubles in Size in Santa Barbara Backcountry
date: 2024-07-07, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
[Update] Evacuation orders made on portions of Figueroa Mountain Road.
The post Lake Fire More Than Doubles in Size in Santa Barbara Backcountry appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Sharks ticket, jersey sales surge after Celebrini signing, team exec says
date: 2024-07-07, from: San Jose Mercury News
Ticket sales for San Jose Sharks’ Oct. 31 game against Chicago Blackhawks are surging – as is demand for No. 71 Macklin Celebrini jerseys – team president says
Rescuers save hikers who became trapped on Daly City cliff
date: 2024-07-07, from: San Jose Mercury News
The hikers became stuck near Westline Drive, a walking path near Mussel Rock Park that overlooks the Pacific Ocean.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/06/rescuers-save-hikers-who-became-trapped-on-daly-city-cliff/
Guards, Bolden and Bronny: Takeaways from Day 1 of the California Classic
date: 2024-07-07, from: San Jose Mercury News
The Warriors routed Miami in Anthony Vereen’s first game as head coach.
A Reformed Environmental Policy Paradigm
date: 2024-07-07, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
There is perhaps nothing more counterproductive in public policy than when good people promote policies that have the opposite effect of what they intend.
The post A Reformed Environmental Policy Paradigm appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/06/a-reformed-environmental-policy-paradigm/
Leaving Elicit
date: 2024-07-07, from: Maggie Appleton blog
https://maggieappleton.com/leaving-elicit
Full Circle Weekly News 373
date: 2024-07-07, from: Full Circle Magazine
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Google announced the winners of the Open Source Peer Bonus 2024 award:
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GNOME now supports Wayland-only builds and improves tablet support:
Credits
- Host: @bardictriad, @zaivala
- Bumper: Canonical
- Theme Music: From The Dust - Stardust
- https://soundcloud.com/ftdmusic
- CC BY 4.0