News gathered 2024-08-03

ATLANTA, GEORGIA — Former President Donald Trump returns Saturday to Georgia, which he lost four years ago, to campaign in a state that Democrats and Republicans see as up for grabs yet again.

Trump’s 5 p.m. event alongside his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, comes just days after Vice President Kamala Harris rallied thousands in the same basketball arena at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

Both parties are focusing on Georgia, a Sun Belt battleground that Democrats had signaled just two weeks ago they would sideline in favor of a heavier focus on the Midwestern “blue wall” states. President Joe Biden’s decision to end his campaign and endorse Harris fueled Democratic hopes of an expanded electoral map.

“The momentum in this race is shifting,” Harris told a cheering, boisterous crowd on Tuesday. “And there are signs Donald Trump is feeling it.”

Biden beat Trump in the state by 11,779 votes in 2020. Trump pressured Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to change the outcome. Trump was later indicted in Georgia for his efforts to overturn the election, but the case remains on hold while courts decide whether the Fulton County district attorney can continue to prosecute it.

In announcing Saturday’s rally, the Trump campaign accused Harris of costing Georgians money due to inflation and higher gas prices, which have risen from pandemic-era lows at the end of the Trump administration. The campaign also noted the case of Laken Riley, a nursing student from the state who was killed while jogging in a park on February 22. A Venezuelan citizen has been indicted on murder charges in her death.

Trump and his allies have repeatedly labeled Harris the current administration’s “border czar,” a reference to her assignment leading White House efforts on root causes of migration.

But in recent days, Trump has lobbed false attacks about Harris’ race and suggested she misled voters about her identity. Harris has stated for years in public life that she is Black and Indian American.

At her rally in Atlanta, Harris called Trump and Vance “plain weird” — a lane of messaging seized on by many other Democrats of late — and taunted Trump for wavering on whether he’d show up for their upcoming debate, currently on the books for September 10 on ABC.

Saying earlier that he would debate Harris, Trump has more recently questioned the value of a meetup, calling host network ABC News “fake news,” saying he “probably” will debate Harris, but he “can also make a case for not doing it.”

The fact that Harris and Trump have been focusing resources on Georgia underscores the state’s renewed significance to both parties come November. Going to Atlanta puts Trump in the state’s largest media market, including suburbs and exurbs that were traditional Republican strongholds but have become more competitive as they’ve diversified and grown in population.

In a strategy memo released after Biden left the race, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon — who held the same role for Biden — reaffirmed the importance of winning the traditional Democratic blue wall trio of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania but also argued that Harris’ place atop the ticket “opens up additional persuadable voters” and described them as “disproportionately Black, Latino and under 30” in places like Georgia.

Next week, along with her eventual running mate, Harris plans to visit that Midwestern trifecta, along with North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada. On Friday, she will make another stop in Georgia.

Call for startups

I don’t invest any more, but here are some areas I’d be interested to see startups explore:

The hallway track for remote and hybrid teams. One reason many companies are enacting return to office policies is to re-establish cross-pollination across teams. Yes, a strong, intentional remote culture would render that moot, but not every company has that. So what does it look like to build scaffolding that goes beyond the water cooler and intentionally surfaces ideas and reactions across teams, including across timezones? Slack is a set of chatrooms at heart — what if you optimize for asynchronous reflection and building on ideas, not just real-time discussion?

Composable, local AI made easy. There are lots of use cases for AI in the enterprise, but for many high-value use cases sharing data with centralized services owned by OpenAI, Microsoft, or Google isn’t tenable. Sensitive data needs to be treated carefully, and protective contract terms often aren’t enough (consider what happens when a provider is subpoenaed, for example). Let’s make building AI tools that don’t share data beyond your local computer incredibly easy, even for people who can’t code.

Pro tools for the fediverse. The fediverse is going to continue to grow, in part because of the maturity of its underlying technology, and in part because countries across the world are tightening anti-monopoly rules, creating strong business reasons to adopt open standards and interoperability. Many fediverse platforms and services don’t meet the needs of larger organizations or professional use cases, due to the wrong mix or features or a more technical user experience. How can startups remove friction from taking advantage of the fediverse, and add ecosystem tools that grow in value as more users onboard? (By the way, I still think an API service that helps people build tools on the fediverse has legs.)

Substack (or Ghost) for indie and open source developers. Substack and Ghost have paved the way for a kind of journalist entrepreneur who can launch a subscription and make a living by themselves. What if we could do the same thing for indie developers who wanted to support their work? Imagine built-in subscriptions connected to a social discovery mechanism where developers recommend other developers’ work: a network that makes it far easier for developers to make a living from doing what they love independently. This is particularly important in a world where many developers have left big cities and are resisting return to office mandates: going it alone could be a viable alternative. Kickstarter et al let people support a project; this would allow you to support the creator, with more network effects and built-in software integrations than something like a Patreon.

Metrics in a box. A tool that connects to your analytics, payment processor, newsletter tool, etc, and automatically gives you insights, generates actionable reports on your preferred cadence, and answers questions without you needing to deal with schemas, configure specific views, or make queries yourself. You could refine its outputs by giving it feedback in natural language, and ask questions using the same. Another way of putting this: what if your in-house data analyst was software that you didn’t need to configure?

Redefine the US rail experience. Private rail cars (or — more ambitiously — whole trains?) that operate a bit like a WeWork: luxury accommodations, high-bandwidth satellite wifi, phone call booths, desks, private rooms with comfortable beds. Make it easy to choose to take a long-distance train instead of a flight without sacrificing comfort or connectivity. High-speed rail is great and important, and such a business would expand to get there, but in the meantime this experience would make the longer travel time matter a great deal less, while helping business travelers to lower their carbon footprint. One can imagine this initially working best between destinations like Miami and New York, or San Francisco and LA, but the real goal would be nationwide. (Hey, dream big.)

Magic for the elderly. A lot of people swear by services like Magic’s executive assistant offering: a way for executives and entrepreneurs to get remote help with doing important work. But we all need help as we get older. What does it look like for older people to get their own executive assistants to help them with administration and life’s daily chores?

Open bookkeeping and administration for distributed groups. There’s plenty of bookkeeping and administration software out there. Most of it is understandably privacy-focused, allowing very few people to access your sensitive information. But what happens if you’re part of a group — an extended family managing a house, say, or a loose co-operative — that needs to have a shared view of their finances and administration? There’s very little for them beyond, say, Open Collective, which is for a very specific kind of organizational unit. What does it look like for a group to share and stream their finances and decisions?

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It’s been six years (gulp) since I last invested in a startup as part of any kind of fund, but I’m still excited by the idea and the ethos of startups. While there are plenty of bad businesses out there (for any definition of “bad”), the idea of a group of people getting together and trying to build a new, useful product as part of a sustainable business engine really appeals to me. There’s definitely a part of me that wishes I still could make financial bets into ventures. (Let’s be clear: I could never have invested in an idea like reinventing rail travel. That wasn’t my area. But wouldn’t it be cool?)

I really like Homebrew’s investment process statement, which is very close to how I’d want to do it too (commit the time and energy to help build an ethical, enduring, high-quality business). And this piece in particular stands out to me:

We invest in mission-driven founders who embrace big – big ideas, big impact, big risk.

The combination of real mission, impact, and risk is important. That’s where the exciting stuff is.

Greylock, the veteran Silicon Valley venture capital firm, recently put out a call for startups that was all AI, all the time. Long-time readers will know that I have a contrarian take on that — and that I worry AI is sucking oxygen away from other, genuinely useful products that could form the basis of great businesses. I also don’t shy away from AI completely: there are real applications for the technology that will linger long after the hype cycle has died down. Still, their post was the inspiration for this one: I think there are more interesting, broader, longer-term trends that are worth paying attention to.

What are you excited by? If you were an investor — or if you are — what would you be keeping your eye out for?

Impressive

Aerosmith ends touring, citing permanent damage to singer’s voice

LOS ANGELES — Aerosmith says Steven Tyler’s voice has been permanently damaged by a vocal cord injury last year and the band will no longer tour.

The iconic band behind hits such as “Love in an Elevator” and “Livin’ on the Edge” posted a statement Friday announcing the cancellation of remaining dates on its tour and provided an update on Tyler’s voice.

“He has spent months tirelessly working on getting his voice to where it was before his injury. We’ve seen him struggling despite having the best medical team by his side. Sadly, it is clear that a full recovery from his vocal injury is not possible,” the statement said. “We have made a heartbreaking and difficult, but necessary, decision — as a band of brothers — to retire from the touring stage.”

Tyler announced he injured his vocal cords in September during a show on the band’s Peace Out: The Farewell Tour. Tyler said in an Instagram statement at the time that the injury caused bleeding but that he hoped the band would be back after postponing a few shows.

Tyler’s soaring vocals have powered Aerosmith’s massive catalog of hits since its formation in 1970, including “Dream On,” “Walk This Way” and “Sweet Emotion.” They were near the start of a 40-date farewell tour when Tyler was injured.

“We’ve always wanted to blow your mind when performing. As you know, Steven’s voice is an instrument like no other,” the band said in Friday’s statement to fans.

“It has been the honor of our lives to have our music become part of yours,” the band said. “In every club, on every massive tour and at moments grand and private you have given us a place in the soundtrack of your lives.”

Aerosmith is a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee and a four-time Grammy-winning band. In addition to Tyler, its members are Joe Perry, Brad Whitford, Tom Hamilton and Joey Kramer.

As recruiting rebounds, US Army expands basic training for modern warfare

WASHINGTON — Buoyed by an increase in recruiting, the U.S. Army will expand its basic combat training in what its leaders hope reflects a turning point as it prepares to meet the challenges of future wars.

The added training will begin in October and comes as the Army tries to reverse years of dismal recruiting when it failed to meet its enlistment goals. New units in the U.S. states of Oklahoma and Missouri will train as many as 4,000 recruits every year.

Army leaders are optimistic they will hit their target of 55,000 recruits this year and say the influx of new soldiers forced them to increase the number of training sites.

“I am happy to say last year’s recruiting transformation efforts have us on track to make this year’s recruiting mission, with thousands awaiting basic training” in the next year, U.S. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said. Adding the two new locations, she said, is a way to get the soldiers trained and into units quickly, “with further expansion likely next spring if our recruiting numbers keep improving.”

The expanded training is part of a broader effort to restructure the Army so that it is better able to fight against a sophisticated adversary such as Russia or China. The U.S. military spent much of the past two decades battling insurgent groups in Iraq and Afghanistan rather than fighting a broader war with another high-tech, more capable nation.

Brigadier General Jenn Walkawicz, head of operations for the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, said there will be two new training companies at Fort Sill in Oklahoma and two at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri.

Driving the growth is the successful Future Soldier Prep Course, which was created at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, in August 2022 as a new way to bolster enlistments. That program gives lower-performing recruits up to 90 days of academic or fitness instruction to help them meet military standards and move on to basic training.

Created two years ago, the program has been cited as a key reason Army leaders expect that this fall they will reverse several years of recruiting shortfalls. In the budget year that ended September 30, the Army brought in a bit more than 50,000 recruits, falling far short of the publicly stated “stretch goal” of 65,000.

The Army has 151 training companies overall that work with recruits at Fort Jackson and Fort Moore, Georgia, in addition to the 15 training companies assigned to the prep course. Army leaders have expanded the prep course, which is expected to bring in nearly 20,000 recruits this budget year, and that total is expected to spike in 2025.

Due to the Army’s recruiting struggles, the number of recruits going through basic training dropped in recent years. As a result, the 15 training units, which total 27 soldiers each, including 16 drill sergeants, were available for the prep course. But as the prep course grows, those units are not available to do basic training.

“We don’t want to mess with that because right now that formula’s working and it’s provided a lot of value for the Army,” Walkawicz said. So, the Army is creating the four new companies and has developed plans for more if needed.

She added that Fort Sill and Fort Leonard Wood have the infrastructure, barracks and room to accommodate the new units and could take more if needed. The costs of the program are limited because the Army already had the equipment and rooms, but there will be maintenance, food, staffing and other costs. Army officials did not provide a total price.

The move to add units is the latest change in what has been a tumultuous time for the Army. Coming out of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, when the service grew dramatically to fill the nation’s combat needs, the U.S. military began to see recruiting dip.

Unemployment has been low, corporate jobs pay well and offer good benefits, and, according to estimates, just 23% of people ages 17 to 24 are physically, mentally and morally qualified to serve without receiving some type of waiver. Moral behavior issues include drug use, gang ties or a criminal record.

Those problems were only amplified as the coronavirus pandemic took hold, preventing recruiters from meeting with students in person at schools, fairs and other public events.

In 2022, the Army fell 15,000 short of its enlistment goal of 60,000, and the other services had to dig deep into their pools of delayed entry candidates to meet their recruiting numbers. Then in 2023, the Army, Navy and Air Force all missed their recruitment targets. The Marine Corps and the tiny Space Force have consistently hit their goals.

Partly in response to the recruiting shortfalls, Army leaders slashed the size of the force by about 24,000, or almost 5%. They said many of the cuts were in already vacant jobs.

Paris Olympics: Simone Biles wins women’s vault final for a second time

Simone Biles captures her 10th career Olympic medal, her seventh gold, by winning the women’s vault.

Berkeley cellphone store owner sentenced to 6 years for killing friend in DUI crash

The defendant failed a sobriety test and police gave him a ride to his store, but later that evening he got behind the wheel and crashed, killing a friend.

Bay FC beats Club América in its final Summer Cup match

Maddie Moreau, Dorian Bailey score to lead Bay FC past Club América at PayPal Park.

Forecasters expect depression nearing Florida to become tropical storm

MIAMI, FLORIDA — A tropical depression over Cuba is growing better organized, forecasters said Saturday, and is likely to bring drenching rain and coastal flooding to much of Florida’s Gulf Coast.

The storm strengthened into a tropical depression late Friday and is expected to become a tropical storm by Saturday night, once it has maximum sustained winds of 63 kilometers per hour (39 miles per hour) or more. If the depression reaches tropical storm status, it would be named Debby, the fourth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season.

Circulation was centered just south of Cienfuegos, Cuba, on Saturday morning, but associated wind and thunderstorms were spread out over a broad region, including southern Florida, the Florida Keys and the Bahamas. One location in the middle of the Florida Keys island chain reported sustained winds of 48 kph (30 mph) on Saturday morning.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami forecasts that the depression will strengthen as it curves northward off the southwest Florida coast, where the water has been extremely warm, with temperatures approaching 33 degrees Celsius (92 Fahrenheit) this week.

Predictions show the system could come ashore as strong tropical storm late Sunday or early Monday and cross over northern Florida into the Atlantic Ocean, where it’s likely to remain a tropical storm threatening Georgia and the Carolinas early next week. Tropical storm warnings are posted for most of Florida’s west coast and the Dry Tortugas. A hurricane watch is posted for parts of the Big Bend area, recognizing that there is a chance that Debby could reach hurricane status before coming ashore.

Flat Florida is prone to flooding even on sunny days when so-called king tides surge in coastal areas. This storm is predicted to push up storm tides of 0.5 to 1.2 meters (2 to 4 feet) along most of Florida’s Gulf Coast, including Tampa Bay, with a higher tide of 3 to 5 feet predicted farther north in Florida’s sparsely populated Big Bend region, where the Florida peninsula bends westward into the state’s Panhandle region.

Tropical storms and hurricanes can also trigger river flooding and overwhelm drainage systems and canals. Forecasters are warning of 125 to 250 millimeters (5 to 10 inches) of rain, which could create “locally considerable” flash and urban flooding. Forecasters are also already warning of moderate flooding for some rivers along Florida’s West Coast.

Some of the heaviest rains could come next week in a region along the Atlantic Coast from Jacksonville, Florida, north through Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina.

People in some Florida cities on Friday filled sandbags to protect against possible flooding. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency for most Florida counties, extending from the Florida Keys up through Central Florida and the Tampa Bay region and into the western Panhandle.

Meanwhile, far off Mexico’s western coast, Hurricane Carlotta continued moving westward, deeper into the Pacific Ocean on Saturday, with top sustained winds reaching 145 kph (90 mph). The hurricane center said Carlotta may strengthen a little more but should begin losing strength on Sunday as it moves into an area of unfavorable winds and drier air. The storm is likely to dissipate into a remnant of thunderstorms in three to four days. No watches or warnings are in effect.

Paris Olympics: U.S. women’s soccer team edges Japan in extra time to reach semifinals

Trinity Rodman scores in extra time to lead U.S. over Japan in a quarterfinal at Paris Olympics.

Why the collapse of the Generative AI bubble may be imminent

Existential thoughts about Apple’s reliance on Services revenue

This is an interesting piece about how Apple’s services revenue is set to overtake its hardware business.

I’d go further. The beauty of Apple’s product line is that they’re comparatively well-made products that push the boundaries of user experience, bringing technology breakthroughs to a creative audience: as Jobs put it, “bicycles for the mind”. Customers (including me) accept higher prices because the products are exceptional, but that depends on a product line that is complete.

If the product offering is a higher-priced hardware device and premium monthly services on top of it, the investment starts to have diminishing returns. It’s a loss of focus on what made Apple great, and why people keep coming back to it. It’s greed, essentially: continuing to push the Apple user base further and further, assuming the breaking point is very far out.

That puts them at risk from being disrupted by someone else. Windows ain’t it, but at some point someone is going to come in with a really great set of hardware on an alternative stack. The question won’t be whether it beats Apple as-is, but simply whether it’s good enough at a lower price point. And then that company will grow their offerings, until before you know it, Apple has serious competition. It’s disruption 101, and the further Apple pushes out its expense and friction, the more susceptible it becomes.

Harris foreign policy would bring continuity with some distinct emphases

With Democratic nominee Kamala Harris set to face off with Republican Donald Trump for the U.S. presidency, Harris’ positions on military support to Israel and Ukraine; a rising China; and the migrant crisis at the southern border are under increased scrutiny. As VOA White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara reports, expect a continuation of Biden administration policies with a few shifts in emphasis.

Vallejo teen fatally shot in Oakland

A motive has not been released in the fatal shooting of a Vallejo teen Friday evening in Oakland

Hunger at Home helping more restaurants with food recovery efforts

Santana Row eateries among those contributing unused food to the San Jose nonprofit to help ease food insecurity in Silicon Valley.

Pin-demonium hits Paris: Inside the pin-trading market at the Olympics

The quest for pins has become an integral part of the Olympics, adding another layer of excitement to the Games.

East Palo Alto tenants demand property owners improve living conditions

Tenants, who unionized last month, say maintenance requests have gone unresolved for years.

Meet the artist whose job is to paint beach volleyball at the 2024 Olympics

While the photograph is about a specific moment, “the painting brings back the spirits of the event.”

Tahiti’s youth surf culture gets a boost as island hosts the Paris Olympics

While Teahupo’o has been a coveted destination for surfers from around the world for decades, it’s only in more recent years that local surf culture and talent among younger generations began to develop across Tahiti.

YOU LOVE TO SEE IT: Game On For Workers

Plus, cancer-causing chemicals might get banned, landlords can’t use tech to jack up rent, and climate-minded investors win a legal battle.

Using Illustration To Help Investigations Stay Grounded and Approachable

Taking inspiration from The Simpsons and Chevron commercials, we created an illustrated explainer to ground our storytelling

The Time Ranger | When President Ford Ditched the SCV

¿Como esta, yuppies? Come on, you bunk huggers. Best you climb down from those condos, ranchettes and townhouses. We’ve a most interesting ride through the unspoiled vistas of the Santa […]

DARPA suggests turning old C code automatically into Rust – using AI, of course

Now that’s a TRACTOR pull request

To accelerate the transition to memory safe programming languages, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is driving the development of TRACTOR, a programmatic code conversion vehicle.…

Suzette Martinez Valladares | Wanted: School Supply Tax Holiday

Parents are getting ready for back to school. In my household, we are already getting some back-to-school clothes shopping in, updating our school supplies and preparing for the year ahead. […]

Rick Barker | Put an End to This

In re: Man arrested on suspicion of trespassing, battery on a peace officer, July 2. Call me old fashioned or a far-right-winger, but to me when you assault or commit […]

Ron Perry | Medical Insurance for All

Kamala Harris, our illustrious Democratic nominee for president, is pushing for medical insurance for all. Everybody. Including Illegal aliens. Rich. Poor. Everyone! Ah but wait! How about members of Congress? […]

Larry Moore | Harris a Frightening Thought

God save us. Kamala Harris is now the frontrunner of the Democrat Party? That is a frightening thought. I would wager that the average voter in either party would be […]

Byron York | Harris and the DEI Question

A handful of Republicans have referred to Vice President Kamala Harris, now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, as a “DEI hire.” They were essentially saying that President Joe Biden […]

Servo enables parallel table layout

Another month, another chunk of progress for the Servo rendering engine. The biggest addition is enabling table rendering to be spread across CPU cores. Parallel table layout is now enabled, spreading the work for laying out rows and their columns over all available CPU cores. This change is a great example of the strengths of Rayon and the opportunistic parallelism in Servo’s layout engine. ↫ Servo blog On top of this, there’s tons of improvements to the flexbox layout engine, support generic font families like ‘sans-serif’ and ‘monospace’ has been added, and Servo now supports OpenHarmony, the operating system developed by Huawei. This month also saw a lot of work on the development tools.

Robert Lamoureux | Can I replace the garburator myself?

Question: Mr. Lamoureux, thank you for sharing your knowledge. I have one question for you, which I haven’t seen an answer to previously. Perhaps you’ve covered it and I missed […]

Today in SCV History (Aug. 3)

Minority farmers set for $2 billion from USDA after years of discrimination

COLUMBIA, Missouri — The Biden administration has doled out more than $2 billion in direct payments for Black and other minority farmers discriminated against by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the president announced Wednesday.

More than 23,000 farmers were approved for payments ranging from $10,000 to $500,000, according to the USDA. Another 20,000 who planned to start a farm but did not receive a USDA loan received between $3,500 and $6,000.

USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters that the aid “is not compensation for anyone’s loss or the pain endured, but it is an acknowledgment by the department.”

The USDA has a long history of refusing to process loans from Black farmers, approving smaller loans compared to white farmers, and in some cases foreclosing quicker than usual when Black farmers who obtained loans ran into problems.

National Black Farmers Association Founder and President John Boyd Jr. said the aid is helpful. But, he said, it’s not enough.

“It’s like putting a bandage on somebody that needs open-heart surgery,” Boyd said. “We want our land, and I want to be very, very clear about that.”

Boyd is still fighting a federal lawsuit for 120% debt relief for Black farmers that was approved by Congress in 2021. Five billion dollars for the program was included in the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package.

But the money never came. White farmers in several states filed lawsuits arguing their exclusion was a violation of their constitutional rights, which prompted judges to halt the program shortly after its passage.

Faced with the likelihood of a lengthy court battle that would delay payments to farmers, Congress amended the law and offered financial help to a broader group of farmers. A new law allocated $3.1 billion to help farmers struggling with USDA-backed loans and $2.2 billion to pay farmers who the agency discriminated against.

Wardell Carter, who is Black, said no one in his farming family got so much as access to a loan application since Carter’s father bought 34.4 hectares of Mississippi land in 1939. He said USDA loan officers would slam the door in his face. If Black farmers persisted, Carter said officers would have police come to their homes.

Without a loan, Carter’s family could not afford a tractor and instead used a horse and mule for years. And without proper equipment, the family could farm at most 16.2 hectares of their property — cutting profits.

When they finally received a bank loan to buy a tractor, Carter said the interest rate was 100%.

Boyd said he’s watched as his loan applications were torn up and thrown in the trash, been called racial epithets, and was told to leave in the middle of loan meetings so the officer could speak to white farmers.

“We face blatant, in-your-face, real discrimination,” Boyd said. “And I did personally. The county person who was making farm loans spat tobacco juice on me during a loan session.”

At 65, Carter said he’s too old to farm his land. But he said if he receives money through the USDA program, he will use it to get his property in shape so his nephew can begin farming on it again. Carter said he and his family want to pitch in to buy his nephew a tractor, too.

Simone Biles raises gymnastics bar so high that 5 skills bear her name

paris — It is not enough — it has never been enough — for Simone Biles to do gymnastics.

The 27-year-old American star has been intent almost from the start on pushing the sport in new directions by doing things that have never been done before. That could continue this week when she tries for her eighth Olympic medal in Paris.

Five elements currently bear her name in the Code of Points after she successfully completed them in an international competition: two on vault, two on floor exercise and one on balance beam.

She was just a teenager and recently minted national champion when Biles performed a tumbling pass at the 2013 world championships that she completes by doing a double layout with a half-twist at the end.

The move looks dangerous — Biles is essentially flying blind — but she and former coach Aimee Boorman came up with it because it was less taxing on her legs.

“It was almost kind of necessity is the mother of invention,” Boorman told The Associated Press in 2015. “Her calf was hurting. She had bone spurs in her ankles and she’s really good at floor with landings.”

Biles returned to the sport in 2018 following a two-year layoff after winning the all-around at the 2016 Olympics.

Not content to merely repeat herself, Biles began working on a triple-twisting, double flip that is now known simply as ” the triple-double.” She unveiled it while winning the 2019 U.S. Championships then did it again at the world championships a few months later when she won the fifth of her record six world all-around titles.

As with a lot of gymnastics elements, Biles took a Cheng vault and added another layer of difficulty — this one an extra half twist on a vault originally done by China’s Cheng Fei.

The vault requires Biles to do a round-off onto the vault, then a half-twist onto the table before doing two full twists. It entered the Code after she made it part of her routine at the 2018 world championships.

“I’m embarrassed to do floor and vault after something like that,” U.S. men’s gymnast Yul Moldauer said in 2018. “You see Simone do that and she’s smiling the whole time. How does she do that?”

The Yurchenko double pike had never been completed by a woman in competition, and few men have even tried. She began tinkering with it in 2021, but it’s in the last year that it has morphed into perhaps the most show-stopping thing done in the sport.

The vault asks Biles to do a round-off back handspring onto the table, then two backward flips in pike position with her hands essentially clasped to her knees. She does it with so much power, she can sometimes overcook it. At the U.S. Olympic trials last month, it drew a standing ovation.

“No, it’s not normal,” longtime coach Laurent Landi said after she drilled it at the 2023 U.S. Championships. “She’s not normal.”

For all of her explosive tumbling, Biles is a wonder on balance beam, too, where she can make doing intricate moves on a four-inch-wide piece of wood seem almost casual.

The same year she debuted the triple-double on floor, she added a double-twisting, double-tucked dismount off the beam. She stuck it at the 2019 world championships, though she has since taken it out of her repetoire.

The skill Biles submitted requires her to do a forward circle around the lower bar before turning a handstand into a 540-degree pirouette. USA Gymnastics teased the move on X ahead of the Games. She didn’t attempt it during the team or all-around competitions but still won gold in both.

Scholarships help graduates attend college outside Hawaii a year after wildfire

HONOLULU — College wasn’t on Keith Nove Baniqued’s mind after her family’s home burned down in a deadly wildfire that decimated her Hawaii town. The 17-year-old, who was 7 when she moved to Maui from the Philippines, was about to start her senior year of high school but shifted her focus to her family’s struggles to find a place to live amid the tragedy.

Nearly a year after the fire that destroyed thousands of other homes and killed 102 people in historic Lahaina, Baniqued is headed to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. And her family doesn’t have to worry about how to pay for it, thanks to $325,000 in college scholarships awarded Wednesday to 13 Lahainaluna High School graduates attending schools on the U.S. mainland.

“Even being a senior, I really didn’t know if I was going to pursue higher education anymore, only because I didn’t want to leave my family in the situation that we were in,” she recalled of her feelings after the fire.

Her school survived the blaze, but was closed for two months. The reopening restored a small sense of normalcy and reignited her dream to attend college beyond Hawaii’s shores. She also realized a college degree would put her in a better position to help her family’s long-term recovery.

She applied to colleges with nursing programs, channeled her feelings about surviving the fire into scholarship essays and decided she would attend UNLV — partly because its popularity among Hawaii students would make it feel a bit like home.

Using a grant from the Maui Strong Fund of the Hawaii Community Foundation, the Downtown Athletic Club of Hawaii is providing Baniqued and her 12 classmates with about $25,000 each — meant to cover out-of-state college costs after other scholarships and financial aid for the first year.

“A lifechanging opportunity like this can be beneficial to any Hawaii high school graduate, and even more so for Lahainaluna graduates and all they’ve gone through,” said Keith Amemiya, president of athletic club, which has been spearheading a fundraising campaign to support the Lahainaluna student-athletes and coaches whose homes were destroyed by the fire.

In a separate effort after the fire, the University of Hawaii announced scholarships for 2024 Lahainaluna graduates to attend any campus in the statewide system. Nearly 80% of a graduating class of 215 applied to UH campuses, according to school data. As of last week, 105 students had registered at a UH school, leading to a record-number of college-bound Lahainaluna graduates, school officials said, who expect that number to increase by mid-August.

Ginny Yasutake, a Lahainaluna counselor, reached out to Amemiya to see if there was a way to do something similar to the UH scholarship for student athletes who opted to leave Hawaii for college.

With help from the Hawaii Community Foundation, they found funding to help even students who weren’t athletes. Both organizations are committed to finding a way to provide the scholarships beyond freshman year of out-of-state college and also to underclassmen affected by the fire, Amemiya said.

“These scholarships kind of came in as a last-minute dream,” said Principal Richard Carosso.

And the Hawaii scholarships provided an opportunity to many who never thought college was even possible, he said.

Pursuing college highlights the resilience of a graduating class whose freshman year of high school was disrupted by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Carosso said.

Emily Hegrenes, headed to the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in her scholarship essay about how she had to find a way to train as a swimmer because the Lahaina Aquatic Center was closed in a restricted burn zone.

“But for my final high school season, I worked harder than ever to recruit enough swimmers to hold team practice at a pool forty-five-minutes away from my hometown,” she wrote. “With my Lahaina cap on, I proudly dove straight into my fears.”

Talan Toshikiyo, who plans to attend Oxnard College in California, said he aspires to become an engineer and attain financial stability because it was already difficult for Native Hawaiians like him, and other locals, to afford living in Hawaii before the fire.

“I hope Lahaina is not changed when I come back from the Mainland,” he wrote in his essay. “I dream one day all the rent in Maui will be lower so locals will be able to afford it and not have to move far far away.”

Heat deaths of people without air conditioning underscore inequity

PHOENIX, ARIZONA — Mexican farm worker Avelino Vazquez Navarro didn’t have air conditioning in the motor home where he died last month in Washington state as temperatures surged into the triple digits.

For the last dozen years, the 61-year-old spent much of the year working near Pasco, Washington, sending money to his wife and daughters in the Pacific coast state of Nayarit, Mexico, and traveling back every Christmas.

“If this motor home would have had AC and it was running, then it most likely would have helped,” said Franklin County Coroner Curtis McGary, who determined Vazquez Navarro’s death was heat-related, with alcohol intoxication as a contributing cause.

Most heat-related deaths involve homeless people living outdoors. But those who die inside without sufficient cooling also are vulnerable. They are typically older than 60, living alone and with a limited income.

Underscoring the inequities around energy and access to air conditioning as summers grow hotter, many victims are Black, Indigenous or Latino, such as Vazquez Navarro.

“Air conditioning is not a luxury, it’s a necessity,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association, which represents state energy assistance programs. “It’s a public health issue, and it’s an affordability issue.”

People living in mobile homes or in aging trailers and RVs are especially likely to lack proper cooling. Nearly a quarter of the indoor heat deaths in Arizona’s Maricopa County last year were in those kinds of dwellings, which are transformed into a broiling tin can by the blazing desert sun.

“Mobile homes can really heat up because they don’t always have the best insulation and are often made of metal,” said Dana Kennedy, AARP director in Arizona, where many heat-related deaths occur.

Research shows mobile home dwellers are particularly at risk in blistering hot Phoenix, where 45-degree Celsius (113 Fahrenheit) weather is forecast for this weekend.

“People are exposed to the elements more than in other housing,” said Patricia Solís, executive director of the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience at Arizona State University, who worked on mapping hot weather impacts on mobile home parks for a state preparedness plan.

Worse, some parks bar residents from making modifications that could cool their homes, citing esthetic concerns. A new Arizona law required parks for the first time this summer to let residents install cooling methods such as window units, shade awnings and shutters.

In Arizona’s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, 156 of 645 heat-related deaths last year occurred indoors in uncooled environments. In most cases, a unit was present but was not working, was without electricity or turned off, public health officials said.

One victim was Shirley Marie Kouplen, who died after being overcome by high temperatures inside her Phoenix mobile home amid a heat wave when the extension cord providing her electricity was unplugged.

Emergency responders recorded the 70-year-old widow’s body temperature at 41.7 C (107.1 F). Kouplen, who was diabetic and had high blood pressure, was rushed to a hospital, where she died.

Kouplen apparently was struggling financially, if the shabby condition of her mobile home was any indication. It still sits on Lot 60, surrounded by a chain-link fence with a locked gate and a dirt driveway overgrown with weeds.

It’s unclear how the cord got unplugged, if Kouplen had an electricity account or how she got her power.

“Losing your air conditioning is now a life-threatening event,” said Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler, who grew up in hot, humid Houston in the 1970s. “You didn’t want to lose your air conditioning, but it wasn’t going to kill you. And now it is.”

Arizona’s regulated utilities have been banned since 2022 from cutting off power during the summer, following the 2018 death of a 72-year-old woman after Arizona Public Service disconnected her electricity over a $51 debt.

Ann Porter, spokesperson for Arizona Public Service, which provides electricity to homes in the park where Kouplen lived, said “due to privacy concerns” the company could not say if she had an account at the time of her death or in the past. Porter said the utility does not cut power from June 1 to Oct. 15.

Arizona is among 19 states with shut-off protections, leaving about half of the U.S. population without safeguards against losing electricity during the summer, the National Energy Assistance Directors Association said in a new study.

Almost 20% of very-low-income families have no air conditioning at all, especially in places such as Washington state, where they weren’t commonly installed before climate-fueled heat waves grew increasingly stronger, more frequent and longer lasting.

In the Pacific Northwest, several hundred people died during a 2021 heat wave, prompting Portland, Oregon, to launch a program to provide portable cooling units to vulnerable, low-income people.

Chicago, better known for its cold winters, saw a heat wave kill 739 mostly older people over five days in 1995. Amid high humidity and temperatures over 37.7 C (100 F), most victims had no air conditioning or couldn’t afford to turn on their units.

In 2022, Chicago adopted a cooling ordinance after three women died in their apartments in a building for older adults on an unusually warm spring day. Certain residential buildings must now have at least one air-conditioned common area for cooling when the heat index exceeds 26.6 C (80 F) and cooling is unavailable in individual units.

Nonprofits in historically hotter areas such as Arizona also are trying to better address the inequities low-income people face during the sweltering summers. The Phoenix-based community agency Wildfire recently raised money to buy over $2 million worth of air conditioning equipment to help 150 households statewide over three years, Executive Director Kelly McGowan said.

Laws protect renters in some places. Phoenix landlords must ensure that air conditioning units cool to 28 C (82 F) or below and that evaporative coolers lower the temperature to 30C (86 F).

Palm Springs, California, and Las Vegas, Nevada, both desert cities, have ordinances requiring landlords to offer air conditioning in rental dwellings. Dallas, where temperatures can pass 43.3 C (110 F) in the summer, has a similar law.

But most renters pay their own electricity costs, leaving them to agonize whether they can afford to even turn on the cooling or how high to set the thermostat.

A new report estimates the average cost for U.S. families to keep cool from June to September will grow nationwide by 7.9% this year, from $661 in 2023 to $719 this summer.

Wolf noted the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which grants money to states to help families pay for heating and cooling, is underfunded, with 80% going to heat homes in winter.

The “blowing smoke up your ass” theory of AI

I love technology. I’m not obsessed with it but I do enjoy staying up to date with what’s happening in the tech world. This is both on the hardware and on the software side of things. Sadly, the current state of tech news is quite boring because it’s dominated by AI. AI this, AI that. New AI companies cropping up, old companies pivoting to AI, and companies that have no business being in the AI race announcing their AI strategies. It’s everywhere. And yet, there are PLENTY of examples of how bad this tech can be.

And yet, “people” keep being super optimistic. And when I say people, I mean mostly developers. Because that’s my current theory: the vast majority of the AI hype is driven by tech people who are struggling to realise that AI is most useful in their line of work. Every time people discuss AI the best example they can come up with for how useful these tools are is coding. AI tools are—allegedly—great if you need help coding something and you don’t know how to do it. Which is great, if you’re a developer.

The current state of AI is filled with mostly nonsense. Just look at what the big players are announcing. Google has tried to shove its stupid AI thing inside search results and has failed spectacularly and they’re now slowly retreating. Apple had an entire event dedicated to AI to announce a smarter Siri and some smart—allegedly—writing aid. Cool, I guess? OpenAi is announcing all sorts of tools that are cool tech demos but I can’t see why the population at large should be excited about any of that stuff.

I’m starting to believe that tech companies—and their VC companions—are drinking way too much of their own Kool-Aid because they fail to realise that the vast majority of the usefulness of AI tools can be found in the industries that work on said tools. At least that’s my current theory. But hey, I said it many times before, I’m a complete idiot and I’m happy to be proven wrong. If you have a different theory I want to hear it so get in touch or maybe ask your AI bot to get in touch with me.

Music to Lift the Spirit

Youth choruses from Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara and Young People’s Chorus of New York City unite for an upbeat show at the Marjorie Luke Theatre.

Maui fire lawsuit parties reach $4B global settlement, court filings say

HONOLULU — The parties in lawsuits seeking damages for last year’s Maui wildfires have reached a $4 billion global settlement, a court filing said Friday, nearly one year after the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century.

The term sheet with details of the settlement is not publicly available, but the liaison attorneys filed a motion Friday saying the global settlement seeks to resolve all Maui fire claims for $4.037 billion. The motion asks the judge to order that insurers can’t separately go after the defendants to recoup money paid to policyholders.

“We’re under no illusions that this is going to make Maui whole,” Jake Lowenthal, a Maui attorney selected as one of four liaisons for the coordination of the cases, told The Associated Press. “We know for a fact that it’s not going to make up for what they lost.”

Thomas Leonard, who lost his Front Street condo in the fire and spent hours in the ocean behind a seawall hiding from the flames, welcomed the news.

“It gives us something to work with,” he said. “I’m going to need that money to rebuild.”

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said in a statement that seven defendants will pay the $4.037 billion to compensate those who have already brought claims for the August 8, 2023, fires that killed 102 people and destroyed the historic downtown area of Lahaina on Maui.

Green said the proposed settlement is an agreement in principle and would “help our people heal.”

“My priority as governor was to expedite the agreement and to avoid protracted and painful lawsuits so as many resources as possible would go to those affected by the wildfires as quickly as possible,” he said in a statement.

“It will be good that our people don’t have to wait to rebuild their lives as long as others have in many places that have suffered similar tragedies,” Green said.

Hawaiian Electric CEO Sheelee Kimura said the settlement will allow the parties to move forward without the added challenges and divisiveness of litigation.

“For the many affected parties to work with such commitment and focus to reach resolution in a uniquely complex case is a powerful demonstration of how Hawaiʻi comes together in times of crisis,” Kimura said in a statement.

Hawaiian Electric said the settlement will help reestablish the company’s financial stability. It said payments would begin after final approval and were expected no earlier than the middle of next year.

Gilbert Keith-Agaran, a Maui attorney who represents victims, including families who lost relatives, said the amount was “woefully short.” But he said it was a deal plaintiffs needed to consider given Hawaiian Electric’s limited assets and potential bankruptcy.

Lowenthal noted there were “extenuating circumstances” that made lawyers worry the litigation would drag on for years.

Now that a settlement has been reached, more work needs to be done on next steps, like how to divvy up the amount.

“This is the first step to allowing the Maui fire victims to get compensation sooner than later,” Lowenthal said.

More than 600 lawsuits have been filed over the deaths and destruction caused by the fires, which burned thousands of homes and displaced 12,000 people. In the spring, a judge appointed mediators and ordered all parties to participate in settlement talks.

Four other defendants did not immediately respond to email messages or phone calls seeking comment. They are Maui County, Hawaiian Telcom, Kamehameha Schools — formerly known as Bishop Estate — and West Maui Land Co.

US colleges reembracing SAT as admissions requirement

The COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to administer the SAT exam to high school students worldwide. In response, US colleges and universities that required the exam for admissions made the test optional. Now, with the pandemic in the rearview mirror, a trend is growing in higher education to again require the SAT. VOA’s Robin Guess has the story.

Pentagon chief revokes plea deals with 3 Sept. 11 suspects

Washington — U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday scrapped a plea agreement with September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, just two days after the announcement of a deal that reportedly would have taken the death penalty off the table.

Deals with Mohammed and two alleged accomplices announced Wednesday had appeared to have moved their long-running cases toward resolution – but sparked anger among some relatives of those killed on September 11, 2001, as well as criticism from leading Republican politicians.

“I have determined that, in light of the significance of the decision to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused … responsibility for such a decision should rest with me,” Austin said in a memorandum addressed to Susan Escallier, who oversaw the case.

“I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024 in the above-referenced case,” the memo said.

The cases against the 9/11 defendants have been bogged down in pre-trial maneuverings for years, while the accused remained held at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba.

The New York Times reported this week that Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi had agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy in exchange for a life sentence, instead of facing a trial that could lead to their executions.

Much of the legal jousting surrounding the men’s cases has focused on whether they could be tried fairly after having undergone methodical torture at the hands of the CIA in the years after 9/11.

The plea agreements would have avoided that thorny issue, but they also sparked sharp criticism from political opponents of President Joe Biden’s administration.

Republican lawmaker Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to Austin that said the deals were “unconscionable,” while House Speaker Mike Johnson said they were a “slap in the face” to the families of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the September 11 attacks.

And Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, described the agreements as a “sweetheart deal with 9/11 terrorists,” saying during a campaign rally: “We need a president who kills terrorists, not negotiates with them.”

Mohammed was regarded as one of Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden’s most trusted and intelligent lieutenants before his March 2003 capture in Pakistan. He then spent three years in secret CIA prisons before arriving at Guantanamo in 2006.

The trained engineer – who has said he masterminded the 9/11 attacks “from A to Z” – was involved in a string of major plots against the United States, where he had attended university.

Bin Attash, a Saudi of Yemeni origin, allegedly trained two of the hijackers who carried out the September 11 attacks, and his U.S. interrogators also said he confessed to buying the explosives and recruiting members of the team that killed 17 sailors in an attack on the USS Cole.

After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, he took refuge in neighboring Pakistan and was captured there in 2003. He was then held in a network of secret CIA prisons.

Hawsawi is suspected of managing the financing for the 9/11 attacks. He was arrested in Pakistan on March 1, 2003, and was also held in secret prisons before being transferred to Guantanamo in 2006.

The United States used Guantanamo, an isolated naval base, to hold militants captured during the “War on Terror” that followed the September 11 attacks in a bid to keep the defendants from claiming rights under U.S. law.

The facility held roughly 800 prisoners at its peak, but they have since slowly been repatriated to other countries. Biden pledged before his election to try to shut down Guantanamo, but it remains open.

High heat expected in SCV starting Sunday

The Santa Clarita Valley is set to experience another period of high heat starting from Sunday to Wednesday, according to Kristan Lund, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. Lund […]

US military sending reinforcement to the Middle East

Washington — U.S. warships and fighter jets are headed to the Middle East and nearby areas to bolster American defenses in support of Israel, as both countries brace for a possible military strike by Iran.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin late Friday signed orders to move the additional assets and capabilities to the Middle East and parts of Europe, following pledges by Tehran and its proxies to take revenge for the killings this past week of a top Hezbollah commander in Lebanon and the Hamas terror group’s political leader on Iranian soil.

The U.S. moves include sending the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group to the Middle East, along with naval cruisers and destroyers capable of shooting down ballistic missiles.

In addition, the U.S. is sending an additional fighter squadron to the region and is taking steps to allow for the deployment of land-based missile defense capabilities.

The Pentagon did not say when the various ships and planes will be in place, but in a statement Friday it described the moves as necessary to “mitigate the possibility of regional escalation by Iran or Iran’s partners and proxies.”

The statement also said the movement of more military capabilities to the region aims “to improve U.S. force protection, to increase support for the defense of Israel, and to ensure the United States is prepared to respond to various contingencies.”

The new orders came just hours after Austin pledged additional support to Israel during a call with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

“The secretary reiterated ironclad support for Israel’s security and informed the minister of additional measures to include ongoing and future defensive force posture changes that the department will take to support the defense of Israel,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said during a briefing.

The Pentagon’s support for Israel since the October 7 Hamas terror attack “should leave Iran, Lebanese Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed terrorist groups with no doubt about U.S. resolve,” she said.

Tensions in the region have escalated significantly in the past week, following an Israeli strike in Lebanon that killed Fouad Shukur, Hezbollah’s top military commander, and the subsequent assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was in Tehran to celebrate the inauguration of Iran’s new president.

Israel has not publicly claimed responsibility for Haniyeh’s death, but Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, put the onus on Israel and called for retribution.

“The criminal, terrorist Zionist regime martyred our dear guest in our territory and has caused our grief, but it has also prepared the ground for a severe punishment,” Khamenei posted on the X social media platform.

Iranian officials said Thursday they planned to meet with representatives from Iran’s key proxies — including Hamas, Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis and militias in Iraq and Syria — to plan their next steps.

“How Iran and the resistance front will respond is currently being reviewed,” said Major General Mohammad Bagheri, Iran’s armed forces chief, speaking on Iranian state TV.

“This will certainly happen, and the Zionist regime [Israel] will undoubtedly regret it,” he added.

But U.S. officials, seeking to prevent the tensions from exploding into a regional war, have repeatedly signaled that Washington would not leave Israel undefended.

During a call Thursday between U.S. President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden “discussed efforts to support Israel’s defense against threats, including against ballistic missiles and drones, to include new defensive U.S. military deployments,” according to the U.S. readout.

U.S. defense officials Friday likewise emphasized Israel would not stand alone in the face of Iranian aggression.

“These are defensive capabilities,” Singh added. “All of our capabilities that we have there in the region are defensive and to send a message of deterrence.”

Besides the additional ships and warplanes headed to the Middle East, the Pentagon has a U.S. Marine Corps amphibious ready group with some 4,000 troops in the region.

The USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group is also in the Middle East but is expected to leave once the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group arrives.

This would not be the first time the U.S. has enhanced its defensive capabilities to help shield Israel from an Iranian attack.

This past April, the U.S. moved naval destroyers and other military assets into the region while coordinating with Britain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other allies in the Middle East to thwart a massive drone and missile barrage by Iran.

At the time, one U.S. official called the effort an “incredible military achievement.”

Whether the U.S. will be able to rely on a similar coalition to deter a second Iranian attack on Israel, however, is unclear.

Whether Iran and its proxies would attempt another aerial attack on Israel, after an estimated 99% of the missiles and drones that they launched in April failed to hit a target, is also unclear.

“Iran is currently in the process of making a difficult decision on how to respond to the targeting killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran,” said Robert Murrett, a retired U.S. vice admiral and deputy director of the Institute for Security Policy and Law at Syracuse University.

“Iran will likely carefully calibrate its response to the Israelis,” Murrett told VOA via email. “They [the Iranians] are fully aware of the regional implications of any direct or indirect attack on Israel with or without surrogates.”

In the meantime, the Pentagon insisted Friday that a further escalation between Iran and Israel “is not inevitable.”

“We do believe there is an off-ramp here, and that is that [Gaza] cease-fire deal,” between Israel and Hamas, Singh said.

Faces of the SCV: Young cancer survivor working hard to become a doctor himself

William Wofford was diagnosed with leukemia five days after his first birthday. In an attempt to help balance out the struggles and pain the family was going through at the […]

About State Street

We walk through, looking for what we’ve known to have been there, only to find those places are gone. I miss State Street.

Aug. 9: College of the Canyons Welcome Day

On Friday, Aug. 9, College of the Canyons will host Welcome Day to introduce the incoming class of freshman students, as well as prospective and continuing students, to the college before the start of the fall 2024 semester.

Old Santa Barbara Days?

Every year when it rolls around, I cringe that Fiesta is still called “Old Spanish Days.”

Saugus school district bond measure headed to ballot

Voters residing in the Saugus Union School District’s boundaries will decide in November on a $187 million bond measure to improve school facilities. The district’s governing board approved putting the […]

US Justice Department sues TikTok, claiming it violated kids’ privacy

Concert In the Park Convenient Transportation Options

The city of Santa Clarita’s Concerts in the Park series, presented by Logix Federal Credit Union will continue at Central Park, 27150 Bouquet Canyon Road, every Saturday through Aug. 24. As the final four weeks approach, residents are encouraged to explore convenient transportation options to make the concert experience more enjoyable

Heads Up for a Safe Start to the School Year| Ken Striplin

As the new school year begins, public safety remains a top priority in the Santa Clarita Valley

US pledges Israel will not stand alone if Iran attacks

washington — The United States is preparing to move troops and military capabilities to help defend Israel from a retaliatory strike by Iran.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin pledged the support during a call Friday with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, though U.S. defense officials said a decision on which units and capabilities would be shifted had not yet been made.

Tensions in the region have escalated significantly in the past week, following an Israeli strike in Lebanon that killed Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s top military commander, and the subsequent assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was in Tehran to celebrate the inauguration of Iran’s new president.

Israel has not publicly claimed responsibility for Haniyeh’s death, but Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, put the onus on Israel and called for retribution.

Iranian officials on Thursday said they planned to meet with representatives from Iran’s key proxies — including Hamas, Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis and militias in Iraq and Syria — to plan their next steps.

“How Iran and the resistance front will respond is currently being reviewed,” said General Mohammad Bagheri, Iran’s armed forces chief of staff, speaking on Iranian state TV.

“This will certainly happen, and the Zionist regime [Israel] will undoubtedly regret it,” he added.

But U.S. officials, seeking to prevent the tensions from exploding into a regional war, have repeatedly signaled that Washington would not leave Israel undefended.

U.S. defense officials Friday likewise emphasized Israel would not stand alone in the face of Iranian aggression.

“We will stand with Israel in their self-defense,” said the Pentagon’s Singh. “The [defense] secretary will be directing multiple, forthcoming force posture moves to bolster force protection for U.S. forces regionwide to provide elevated support to the defense of Israel.”

“These are defensive capabilities,” Singh added. “All of our capabilities that we have there in the region are defensive and to send a message of deterrence.”

The Pentagon says it already has a U.S. Marine Corps Amphibious Ready Group with some 4,000 troops in the region, along with the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group.

This would not be the first time the U.S. has enhanced its defensive capabilities to help shield Israel from an Iranian attack.

At the time, one U.S. official called the effort an “incredible military achievement.”

Whether the U.S. will be able to rely on a similar coalition to deter a second Iranian attack on Israel, however, is not clear.

Whether Iran and its proxies would attempt another aerial attack on Israel — after an estimated 99% of the missiles and drones that they launched in April failed to hit a target — is also unclear.

In the meantime, the Pentagon insisted Friday that a further escalation between Iran and Israel “is not inevitable.”

“We do believe there is an off-ramp here, and that is that [Gaza] cease-fire deal,” between Israel and Hamas,” Singh said.

Who did the West release in Thursday’s prisoner exchange?

Aug. 20: World Mosquito Day Vector Control Live Stream

This year, to commemorate World Mosquito Day on Aug. 20, 6-7:30 p.m. the Greater Los Angeles County Vector Control District will feature a zoom live stream, introducing the Vector Control team and educate the public about its critical role in protecting public health for over 70 years

San Francisco set to ban rent-hiking software algorithms

Automated price-fixing screwing over tenants? Fog off!

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors this week approved a ban on algorithmic price setting in the rental housing market, a measure targeting real estate management software from the likes of RealPage and Yardi that has been blamed in part for high rents.…

This Week in the IndieWeb

July 26 through August 2, 2024

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TUAW

TUAW(.com) (AKA The Unofficial Apple Weblog) was a long-lived technology media site and blog which shutdown in 2015 whose domain was purchased in 2024 and relaunched as a zombie site using slop articles based on its prior content and GenAI fake images of prior authors using their actual names.

indieweb-movie-club

IndieWeb Movie Club is a monthly movie themed blog carnival inspired by indieweb-carnival started in August 2024.

Created by Marksuth.dev on Wednesday with 5 more edits by sarajaksa.eu and tantek.com

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Bear Blog is a blog hosting service and open source platform describing itself as “no-nonsense”.

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US, Canada near agreement on commercial space ventures

US lawmaker calls Chinese sanctions ‘badge of honor’

Washington — Representative Jim McGovern, the most recent U.S. lawmaker to be put under Chinese sanctions, says he will wear the sanctions “as a badge of honor,” calling on the Chinese government to end its oppressive actions in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong in a statement emailed to VOA from the representative’s media office Friday.

“These absurd sanctions against me only serve to highlight how PRC leaders are afraid of free and open debate. They seek to punish and silence those who disagree with them. But the world is watching what they do, and people who care about human rights will not be silent,” he said in the statement.

China placed McGovern under sanctions Wednesday for frequently “interfering in China’s internal affairs.” In his politics, McGovern has taken on the Tibetan cause, sponsoring a bill advocating for a peaceful resolution of the China-Tibet dispute that President Joe Biden signed into law on July 12.

China views Tibet as an “inseparable part of China since ancient times,” despite supporters of the Tibetan Government in Exile and the Dalai Lama saying that Tibet has historically been independent. Chinese state-sponsored media Xinhua said McGovern’s Tibet-China Dispute Act “grossly interferes in China’s internal affairs,” violates international law and distorts historical facts to suppress China and encourage Tibetan separatist movements.

Framed as a response to McGovern’s efforts to undermine Chinese territorial sovereignty, the sanctions freeze the representative’s Chinese assets, prohibit organizations or individuals in China from engaging with him, and ban him and his family from entering Chinese territory, according to a publication from Xinhua.

McGovern, who represents the state of Massachusetts in the House of Representatives, has no assets or business dealings in China.

McGovern’s Tibet-China Dispute Act, gives the State Department increased authority to counter Chinese disinformation about Tibet and promotes the resumption of talks between Chinese leaders and the Dalai Lama. No such talks have occurred since 2010.

China stands accused of large-scale human rights abuses in Tibet, which the congressman hoped to alleviate with this legislation.

In a statement released on June 12 when the bill passed the House, McGovern said, “The People’s Republic of China has systematically denied Tibetans the right to self-determination and continues to deliberately erase Tibetan religion, culture and language.

“The ongoing oppression of the Tibetan people is a grave tragedy, and our bill provides further tools that empower both America and the international community to stand up for justice and peace,” he said.

Among the signees of the statement were House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, Senator Todd Young, McGovern and Senator Jeff Merkley.

China has sanctioned other U.S. representatives for their involvement in an issue that threatens Chinese territorial homogeneity. Over the last year, China has sanctioned Representative McCaul and former Representative Mike Gallagher over their support for Taiwan.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-02, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

This is by no means the most important thing about Swift, but the fact that you do not need to use semicolons to separate statements feels liberating.

I feel like I am punching cards every time I have to write code with semicolons.

Will Suburbanites Buy an EV If It’s a Chevy Equinox?

Take a quick look at the cars Americans buy and you’ll see the usual suspects that populate our parking lots: Full-size pickup trucks take their place at the top of the podium, while a few well-known sedans — and lots of SUVs and crossovers — round out the top 25. What you won’t see is much overlap with the big electric vehicle push.

The Tesla Model Y is there, an outlier in a field of mostly gas-guzzlers. The F-150 and Silverado trucks occupy spots one and two, and while Ford and Chevy have introduced fully electric versions of each, they haven’t been able to convince many pickup partisans to go EV. As for the thoroughbreds of the Target run that Americans buy in droves, a few come as plug-in hybrids, but there are no fully electric Nissan Rogues, Subaru Foresters, or Honda CR-Vs on offer.

Suddenly, though, here comes a familiar face. This summer, Chevrolet rolled out the Equinox EV, a battery-powered version of the small crossover that sells by the hundreds of thousands in its combustion configuration. And later this year it has promised to release a true entry-level version of this vehicle that starts around the magical $35,000 mark. The electrified Equinox is, on the one hand, painfully ordinary, just a battery-powered version of the car you see in the school drop-off line. Yet it might be the most important EV of the moment, and one that could tell us a lot about the success of GM’s electric fortunes and the true state of the American EV buyer.

Whether we’re truly in an EV funk depends on how you look at it. Sales aren’t growing as fast in 2024 as they did in 2023, but that’s largely because the industry leader, Tesla, got distracted from building new cars people actually want. EV sales didn’t spike into the stratosphere once more models hit the market, as some predicted, but that’s because such predictions were always specious. Whatever spin or narrative one puts on top of the car sales data, the question is basically this: Now that the early adopters have adopted, what will it take for the silent majority to buy electric cars?

Lots of those potential EV buyers are brand loyalists. They own a Subaru, and once they drive it into the ground, they’ll get another one. They are on their third Toyota RAV4. They are Chevy ’til they die. For some of them, the arrival of an EV in their favorite make or model might be the tipping point to try out the life electric. General Motors doesn’t have to sell all of its fans on the idea right away, either. Chevrolet sells more than 200,000 petrol-powered Equinoxes in a typical year. Moving just some of those people to electric power would be a difference-maker in American EV momentum.

There’s something about a well-known name, too. Ford tried to dust little sex appeal onto the Mustang Mach-E by putting the pony car’s name onto its electric crossover. But making an electric version of a Panera icon like the Equinox says something else. It’s an attempt to signal to the practicality-minded parents of America that it’s their turn to try an EV.

Detroit had hoped such logic would work when it electrified its money-makers, the full-size trucks. But the automakers ran into headwinds, in part because lots of pickup drivers belong to the “never EV” camp and thought this amounted to electrification being forced on them. People behind the wheel of a family crossover like the Equinox are less likely to see their vehicle as an extension of tribal identity. It’s a car, and if they can be convinced that an electric one can save them money or make life easier, a lot of them will probably take the plunge.

Then there’s the other reason to see the Equinox as an acid test: price. Well-equipped versions of the EV now arriving at Chevy dealerships cost well into the $40,000s. But the simpler 1LT version of the car that’s tipped to debut in the fall will start as low as $35,000. It’ll be eligible for the full $7,500 tax credit, taking the effective cost of the car down under $30,000 — effectively the same as the $28,6000 starting MSRP of the gas-burning Equinox.

This is territory where only smaller EVs like the Chevy Bolt and Nissan Leaf had been able to play. The Equinox, though, is no city compact, but rather a family crossover with a promised 319 miles of driving range. If it comes to fruition, it’s a hell of a value proposition compared to where the EV market has been, with most vehicles starting with 200-some miles of range and costing $40,000 or more, a point where not even $7,500 in Biden bucks made them cost-competitive with the perfectly ordinary cars that make up the bulk of American auto sales.

In other words, we’re about to find out whether money really was the issue holding back the EV revolution. If the EV Equinox doesn’t take off, then we can expect to hear more bugles of retreat in the form of headlines about automakers scaling back electrification and pushing more hybrids out of fear that the suburbs truly aren’t ready for the electric car. There’s a lot at stake for the EV push — and for Detroit, where GM has recommitted to reaching an all-electric future, eventually.

The Gig Is Up

Securing Virtual Machines on Apple Silicon

Howard Oakley: In addition to Sequoia VMs on Apple silicon Macs being able to use services such as iCloud using Apple ID, they now appear able to support full-strength FileVault when Apple ID is activated. This contrasts with FileVault supported by previous macOS guests, which appears comparable to that provided by Intel Macs without T2 […]

Unread RSS Reader for Mac

John Brayton: Unread for Mac is a native Mac app. The user interface is built with AppKit and a touch of SwiftUI. […] Like on iPhone and iPad, on Mac you can easily switch between showing feed text, webpage text, or both for an individual article. The latter is for feeds that contain only a […]

The Switch From File Paths to URLs

Quinn: I don’t think we ever documented this officially, but to understand this choice you have to look at the history of macOS. Traditional Mac OS did not use paths a lot. Rather, files were identified by an FSSpec, which contains a volume identifier, a directory ID, and a name. The directory ID was an […]

Snapshots Aren’t Backups

Howard Oakley: What is different is that restoring a whole volume from a snapshot is a one-way trip, and there is no undo. This is because snapshots subsequent to that used to restore from will be removed, and you won’t then be able to ‘roll forward’ to a later snapshot. That contrasts with a normal […]

Override xdg-open behavior with xdg-override

Most application on GNU/Linux by convention delegate to xdg-open when they need to open a file or a URL. This ensures consistent behavior between applications and desktop environments: URLs are always opened in our preferred browser, images are always opened in the same preferred viewer. However, there are situations when this consistent behavior is not desired: for example, if we need to override default browser just for one application and only temporarily. This is where xdg-override helps: it replaces xdg-open with itself to alter the behavior without changing system settings. ↫ xdg-override GitHub page I love this project ever since I came across it a few days ago. Not because I need it – I really don’t – but because of the story behind its creation. The author of the tool, Dmytro Kostiuchenko, wanted Slack, which he only uses for work, to only open his work browser – which is a different browser from his default browser. For example, imagine you normally use Firefox for everything, but for all your work-related things, you use Chrome. So, when you open a link sent to you in Slack by a colleague, you want that specific link to open in Chrome. Well, this is not easily achieved in Linux. Applications on Linux tend to use freedesktop.org’s xdg-open for this, which looks at the file mimeapps.list to learn which application opens which file type or URL. To solve Kostiuchenko’s issue, changing the variable $XDG_CONFIG_HOME just for Slack to point xdg-open to a different configuration file doesn’t work, because the setting will be inherited by everything else spwaned from Slack itself. Changing mimeapps.list doesn’t work either, of course, since that would affect all other applications, too. So, what’s the actual solution? We’d like also not to change xdg-open implementation globally in our system: ideally, the change should only affect Slack, not all other apps. But foremost, diverging from upstream is very unpractical. However, in the spirit of this solution, we can introduce a proxy implementation of xdg-open, which we’ll “inject” into Slack by adding it to PATH. ↫ Dmytro Kostiuchenko xdg-override takes this idea and runs with it: It is based on the idea described above, but the script won’t generate proxy implementation. Instead, xdg-override will copy itself to /tmp/xdg-override-$USER/xdg-open and will set a few $XDG_OVERRIDE_* variables and the $PATH. When xdg-override is invoked from this new location as xdg-open, it’ll operate in a different mode, parsing $XDG_OVERRIDE_MATCH and dispatching the call appropriately. I tested this script briefly, but automated tests are missing, so expect some rough edges and bugs. ↫ Dmytro Kostiuchenko I don’t fully understand how it works, but I get the overall gist of what it’s doing. I think it’s quite clever, and solves a very specific issue in a non-destructive way. While it’s not something most people will ever need, it feels like something that if you do need it, it will quickly become a default part of your toolbox or workflow.

US pauses humanitarian program for citizens of four countries

Aug. 14: Webinar Explores Effects of Cerebral Palsy

As part of a new webinar series on the effects of Cerebral Palsy, the Los Angeles County Commission on Disabilities along with the Los Angeles County Aging & Disabilities Department will host a webinar to provide insight on the different aspects of Cerebral Palsy.

UP Squared i12 Edge with Intel Core i7-1260P is now shipping

AAEON first showed off the Intel Core-powered UP Squared i12 Edge in October of last year. Now the company has units in stock and ready to ship. The i12 Edge is a compact PC that measures 130 x 94 x 68mm. It’s designed to be deployed in demanding environments, with operating temperatures between 32º and […]

🚶‍➡️⛰️ #211 - Many Paths Up The Mountain

NATO Can’t Be a One Trick Pony: The Future of NATO Crisis Prevention and Management

An enhanced commitment to crisis management for a new age of great power rivalry could better position NATO to promote stability by preventing emerging crises from becoming full-blown military conflicts.

Harris secures enough Democratic delegate votes to be nominee, chair says

WASHINGTON — U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has secured enough votes from delegates to become her party’s nominee for president, Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison said Friday.

The announcement was made before the online voting process ends on Monday, reflecting the breakneck speed of a campaign that is eager to maintain momentum after President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid and endorsed Harris as his successor less than two weeks ago.

Harris is poised to be the first woman of color at the top of a major party’s ticket, and she joined a call with supporters to say she is “honored to be the presumptive Democratic nominee.”

“It’s not going to be easy. But we’re going to get this done,” she said. “As your future president, I know we are up to this fight.”

Harrison pledged that Democrats “will rally around Vice President Kamala Harris and demonstrate the strength of our party” during their convention in Chicago later this month.

The Democratic National Committee did not provide details of the delegate vote count, including a number or state-by-state breakdowns, during a virtual event that had the flavor of a telethon, with campaign officials keeping tabs on a delegate-counting process whose result is a foregone conclusion.

No other candidate challenged Harris for the nomination, and she swiftly solidified Democratic support in the days after Biden endorsed her.

Democrats still plan a state-by-state roll call during the party’s convention, the traditional way that a nominee is chosen. However, that will be purely ceremonial because of the online voting.

As Harris prepares to face off with Republican nominee Donald Trump, her campaign is reorganizing its senior staff and bringing on a coterie of veterans of President Barack Obama’s successful campaigns.

David Plouffe will serve as a senior adviser focused on Harris’ pathway to the 270 Electoral College votes she needs to win the election. To take the role, he will stop consulting for TikTok, the social media app, as well as a podcast that he was hosting with Kellyanne Conway, the former Trump campaign manager, according to a person familiar with his plans.

In addition, Stephanie Cutter will advise on messaging and strategy, while Mitch Stewart will serve as senior adviser for battleground states. Brian Nelson, who until recently was an undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the Treasury Department, has shifted to the campaign to advise Harris on policy.

Despite the additions, many aspects of the campaign remain the same from when Biden was the candidate. Jen O’Malley Dillon still serves as chairwoman and will oversee the entire staff structure.

Other unchanged senior roles include Julie Chavez Rodriguez as campaign manager, Quentin Fulks as principal deputy campaign manager and Michael Tyler as communications director.

Sheila Nix will continue as Harris’ senior adviser and chief of staff on the campaign. Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge, who was recently brought on as a campaign co-chair, is expanding her portfolio to include outreach and strategy.

Brian Fallon, who had been Harris’ campaign communications director when Biden was still on the ticket, will now serve as senior adviser of communications.

Elizabeth Allen, most recently an undersecretary at the State Department, will be chief of staff for Harris’ running mate, who has not yet been chosen. Harris is expected to interview candidates over the weekend.

Democratic officials have said the accelerated roll call process was necessary because of an Aug. 7 deadline to ensure candidates appear on the Ohio ballot.

Ohio state lawmakers have since changed the deadline, but the modification doesn’t take effect until Sept. 1. Democratic attorneys said that waiting until after the initial deadline to determine a presidential nominee could prompt a legal challenge.

Intel tacks two years onto Raptor Lake CPU warranty after voltage crash fiasco

It’s starting to sink in for Chipzilla that it’s losing some credibility

Owners of Intel’s 13th and 14th Gen Core desktop processors are set to get an extra two years of warranty coverage.…

Friday Links: August 2, 2024

Stories about roasting agave; Casa Apocalyptica; the Central Valley; gardening in a changing climate; and more.

Public Health Reports COVID Cases Have Doubled in Last Month

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health is urging residents to take common-sense precautions to avoid becoming ill with COVID-19. As families return from summer travel and children in Los Angeles County prepare to go back to school in the coming weeks, protection from COVID-19 infection remains important, especially for those at high risk for severe illness

Olympians Finally Got to Swim in the Seine River

After months of uncertainty, the women’s and men’s triathlon events kicked off with a dip in the long-polluted waterway that runs through the heart of Paris

‘Taking it off the speculative market’: These nonprofits help tenants afford to stay put

California community land trusts, which buy land and sell or rent the buildings on it to low-income residents, have tripled.

Say ‘ahhhh’ – AI robots are now gunning for your gums

Perceptive turns its automated dental dynamo on humans, and Zuck’s dad thinks it’s great

Those with a fear of the dentist’s chair should probably look away now because one day a robot might be doing the job – at least if Perceptive has its way.…

Foul Bombs

After the Hezbollah attack on the soccer field in Israel’s Golan Heights, Israel released a statement saying, “We will not tolerate harm to civilians.”

The Rich Data Wonk

There‘s something weirdly comforting about Steve Ballmer’s unusual second act as a nonpartisan truth-teller, through his USAFacts nonprofit.

NASA Johnson Dedicates Dorothy Vaughan Center to Women of Apollo

On the eve of the 55th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston commemorated the unsung heroes who helped make humanity’s first steps on the Moon possible. To celebrate their enduring legacy, Johnson named one of its central buildings the “Dorothy Vaughan Center in Honor of the Women of […]

ON the Beat | Where the Wild and Spiritualized Things Are

Academy Update Alas, the end is in sightfor the sublime summertime bounty offered Santa Barbara by the Music Academy of the

Attention, Artists! Creek Week Art Contest Now Open

Goleta Valley Library is excited to announce the Third Annual Creek Week Art Contest! In celebration of Creek Week (September 21 –

‘Follow the Artist: 20 Years of CalArts Center for New Performance’

The CalArts Center for New Performance has published a new book titled “Follow the Artist: 20 Years of CalArts Center for New Performance,” now available in stores and libraries.

Uncle Sam sues TikTok for ‘extensive’ data harvesting from millions of kids

Remember that promise to be nice? You broke it, say prosecutors

The US government is suing TikTok, claiming the mega-popular app broke the law by playing fast and loose with millions of kids’ data and privacy.…

The Christmas Revels: A Winter Solstice Celebration

ADULT AUDITIONS for the Solstice Singers WHO: Singers and actors age 16 and up. All vocal ranges. WHAT: Prepare a folk song, art song, or

Shifting the U.S.-Japan Alliance from Coordination to Integration

Agreements announced last spring represent a significant evolution of the U.S.-Japan alliance. Washington and Tokyo are likely to confront several challenges. But successfully addressing these challenges could fundamentally change the nature of the alliance.

Summer’s Almost Over, and All I Got Was This Stupid Sunburn

Chief Investigator Kristina Perkins to Take Over Hosting Duties for “Scam Squad” Podcast

Santa Barbara County District Attorney John Savrnoch today announced that Chief Investigator Kristina Perkins will take over as host of

LittleBITS: Should We Continue Covering Apple Financials?

Apple’s Q3 2024 Record Revenues Surprise Tim Cook

Enjoy the Final Four Weeks of Concerts in the Park with Convenient Transportation Options

Santa Clarita Offers Multiple Ways to Get to Central Park for Free Summer Concerts The City of Santa Clarita’s Concerts in the Park series, presented by Logix Federal Credit Union, continues at Central Park (27150 Bouquet Canyon Road) every Saturday through August 24. As we enter the final four weeks, residents are encouraged to explore […]

Artemis II Core Stage Arrives at Kennedy

Teams transport NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) core stage into the Vehicle Assembly Building at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 24, 2024. Tugboats and towing vessels moved the Pegasus barge and 212-foot-long core stage 900-miles to the Florida spaceport from NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, where it was manufactured and assembled. […]

There Are No Imaginary Boundaries for Dr. Ariadna Farrés-Basiana

Dr. Ariadna Farrés-Basiana would look up at the sky and marvel at the immensity of space when she was younger. Now, the bounds are limitless as she helps NASA explore the expansive universe by computing the trajectories and maneuvers to get a spacecraft into space. Name: Dr. Ariadna Farrés-BasianaTitle: Astrodynamics and solar radiation pressure specialist, […]

Microsoft’s results are in, but the E7 subscription remains mythical. For now

Does the Windows giant’s love of 365 add-ons spell doom for a super premium tier?

Comment The guessing game over when and if Microsoft might add an E7 tier to its Microsoft 365 lineup continues following the company’s latest results.…

Circle of Trust: Six Steps to Foster the Effective Development of Tools for Trustworthy AI in the UK and the U.S.

Alongside its great potential, Artificial Intelligence (AI) also introduces considerable risks. Tools for trustworthy AI help bridge the gap between AI principles and their practical implementation, providing resources to ensure AI is developed and used responsibly and ethically.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-02, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

I like the Twitter ads that say “here ever? Upgrade your premium”, because they are a reminder to close the app.

Aug. 7: Crosspoint Church SCV Hosts Back-to-School Bash

Crosspoint Church SCV will host a Back to School Bash on Wednesday, Aug. 7, 6-8 p.m

ME Main Productions to Present “Agatha’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party” at The MAIN

Step into Agatha’s world and solve the mystery alongside Houdini, Edgar Allan Poe and more! Agatha’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party is a laugh-packed whodunit, solved by the biggest who’s who in crime fiction of 1925! Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley and Harry Houdini try to help Agatha Christie find […]

Celebrating NASA’s Coast Guard Astronauts on Coast Guard Day

Each Aug. 4, Coast Guard Day commemorates the founding on Aug. 4, 1790, of the U.S. Coast Guard as the Revenue-Marine by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. Although considered an internal event for active duty and reserve Coast Guard members, we take the opportunity of Coast Guard Day to honor the astronauts who began […]

AOOSTAR AG01 OCuLink eGPU dock is now available for $149

The AOOSTAR AG01 is an external graphics dock that lets you connect a desktop-class graphics card to any laptop, mini PC or handheld computer that has an OCuLink connector. First unveiled earlier this year, the AG01 eGPU Dock is now available for $149, making it one of the more affordable devices in this category. But […]

NASA Ames to Host Supercomputing Resources for UC Berkeley Researchers

Under a new agreement, NASA will host supercomputing resources for the University of California, Berkeley, at the agency’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. The agreement is part of an expanding partnership between Ames and UC Berkeley and will support the development of novel computing algorithms and software for a wide variety of scientific […]

Was This Renaissance Alchemist Ahead of His Time?

New research suggests that Tycho Brahe isolated tungsten nearly 200 years before the metal was identified as an element

Static Electricity May Help Butterflies and Moths Pick Up Pollen

A new study measured the insects’ electrostatic charges and used computer simulations to show that the charges were strong enough to lift pollen

Join in the Kayak Clean-up

Love Catalina Island, WetSpot Rentals, and Bleu World are hosting the next Kayak Clean-up event on Thursday, Aug. 8. Under their mutual support of Caring For Catalina and the ocean environment, volunteers are invited to join in the efforts and have fun kayaking and spotting sea life along the way. The day will begin at […]

Featured Friday: Spies & Secret Agents

Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week. This week, we enter the clandestine world of spies and secret agents to see how their writers use action, tension and character to keep us on the edge of our seats. Our collection includes: Argo by […] The post Featured Friday: Spies & Secret Agents first appeared on John August.

Dinner and a Movie with Elvis returns

The Catalina Museum for Art & History has announced the return of the beloved tradition, Dinner and a Movie with Elvis. This exceptional event guarantees an evening of entertainment, music and cinematic delight on Saturday, Aug. 17, from 6 – 10 p.m. The evening begins in the Schreiner Family Plaza, where guests will indulge in […]

CI Concert Series brings back Taimane

World-renowned performer Taimane will be the next star to take the stage in the Catalina Island Concert Series on Aug. 10, at 8 p.m. The free, family-friendly concert series takes place throughout the summer at Wrigley Stage overlooking Avalon Bay. Taimane last performed in the series in 2014. The evening performance will begin with a […]

Sheriff’s Log: July 25 to July 31, 2024

The following is the Avalon’s Sheriff’s Stations significant incidents report for the period of July 25 to July 31, 2024. All suspects are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Many people who are arrested do not get prosecuted in the first place and many who are prosecuted do not get convicted. […]

CalArts Alums Direct Netflix’s ‘Ultraman: Rising’

California Institute of the Arts alums writer and director Shannon Tindle (Film/Video BFA 1999) and co-director John Aoshima (Film/Video BFA 2000) have brought their creative prowess to Netflix’s animated feature, “Ultraman: Rising.”

Avalon seeks state grant

The city of Avalon was scheduled to submit a grant application to the California Division of Boating and Waterways on Thursday, Aug. 1. The city is seeking money to design and build a replacement for the Pier End Float System, according to a recent staff report by Assistant Harbormaster Kevin Schmidt and Administrative Analyst Aliana […]

Israeli hacktivist group brags it took down Iran’s internet

WeRedEvils alleges successful attack on infrastructure, including data theft

Israel-based hacktivists are taking credit for an ongoing internet outage in Iran.…

Behind the Blog: Olympic Posting and Reddit Gone Wild

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss Olympics posting, Reddit wildness, and “hacktivism.”

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-02, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

I was bothered by having to have two sets of popups in the toolbar, so I collapsed them into one:

Steam Deck is getting official support for 1200p displays

A Valve developer has added code to the official Steam Deck GitHub repository that will bring native 1200p resolution support to the popular handheld console. That’s good news for anyone who purchased a DeckHD display. They’ll be fully supported by SteamOS once Valve pushes the update — no more third-party patches required. DeckHD was introduced […]

MESSENGER – From Setbacks to Success

The excerpts below are taken from Discovery Program oral history interviews conducted in 2009 by Dr. Susan Niebur and tell the story of the hurdles the MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) mission team faced with the technical requirements of visiting Mercury, budget challenges, and schedule impacts —all while keeping their mission goals […]

The Fire Condition We Can’t Control For

Deep in the mountains, lightning strikes a tree on the hottest day in millennia. A dragging trailer chain, unnoticed by a driver, sends sparks into the bone-dry roadside brush. Hikers splash water over an illegal campfire, but it continues to smolder after they leave. And on the right day, in the right weather, unattended and unreported, these fires start to grow.

There is another kind of fire, too — one where the presence of a witness, some would argue, is the entire point. Arson officially accounts for only about 10% of fires handled by Cal Fire, the agency that manages wildfires and structure fires on California’s 31 million acres of wildlands and forests. But when there are thousands of fires across the state during a given season, that’s not an inconsequential number. “Getting 300 to 400 confirmed arson fires a year — that’s a lot of fires that don’t need to occur,” Gianni Muschetto, the staff chief of Cal Fire’s law enforcement division, told me.

The Park Fire, which has burned nearly 400,000 acres near Paradise, north of Sacramento, is now the fourth biggest wildfire in California’s recorded history. As of Friday afternoon, it is still only 24% contained. Investigators have charged 42-year-old Ronnie Dean Stout II with felony arson in connection with starting the blaze, alleging he pushed his burning car into a gully, where it ignited the surrounding vegetation. (Reports conflict over whether Stout set his car on fire intentionally or the engine accidentally caught fire while he was revving it.) Stout was then “seen calmly leaving the area by blending in with the other citizens who were in the area,” Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey said in a statement. Stout denies the charges.

In California, which has extremely strict arson laws, the felony is divided in the penal code into two different categories: “reckless” and “intentional” arson. Muschetto explained that someone shooting off illegal fireworks on a dry day might be charged with reckless arson: “They weren’t necessarily trying to start a wildland fire, but because of their reckless act, they did.” On the other hand, if the person shot the fireworks directly into dry grass to purposefully start a fire, “that would be a malicious arson act” and considered intentional. (Investigators had initially planned to charge Stout, the Park Fire suspect, with intentional arson but ultimately charged him on Monday with reckless arson, according to reports.)

Cal Fire lumps reckless and intentional arson together in their public statistics, which show an uptick in arson arrests from 61 in 2018 to over 110 every year since 2020, peaking at 162 in 2022. Muschetto attributes that rise to the fact that fire seasons have gotten longer due to climate change, meaning small acts of arson are more likely to result in fires big enough to warrant resources, investigations, and arrests. In 2023, for example, Cal Fire’s arson arrests dipped slightly, potentially because it wasn’t as long or severe of a fire season in the state.

The 2024 season has kicked off relatively normally, and Muschetto said he expects arson arrests to top 100 but not “break any record number, hopefully.”

The truth, though, is that arson happens “every single day,” Ed Nordskog, a retired Los Angeles arson investigator and the founder of the Serial and Wildland Arson Investigation Training program, told me. “But most of the year, it’s not conducive to a massive fire because of the weather and fuel conditions, so nobody gets excited.” Nordskog disputes reported arson numbers, pointing to the inconsistencies between fire agencies and the lack of resources available to investigate every fire with the thoroughness required to determine its origin. He estimates that closer to 50% of urban and wildland fires are caused by arson, though he agrees that number is likely lower when it comes to wildfires; many experts, however, admit that the commonly cited 10% statistic is probably an undercount.

Nordskog told me that arson investigators don’t care about the size of the fire; they care about the intent of the person who committed the act. Someone like the Park Fire suspect “didn’t have the ability to light a big fire; he didn’t have the ability to light a small fire,” Nordskog said. “He just lit a fire, and he did it on the wrong day, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and now you have a catastrophe.”

Nordskog is particularly rankled when people try to connect climate change to acts of arson, calling it a misconception that hot weather brings out the firebugs. Arsonists “are there all the time, 24 hours a day, doing their thing,” including in the winter, Nordskog explained. But a warmer world has made extreme fire conditions more common, as have decades of misbegotten fire suppression policies in the Western United States. As a result, arson fires in rural areas are more likely to burn out of control than they would have been half a century ago. That element of chance is why Nordskog likes to say that “a wildland arsonist has the power of a nuclear bomb at their fingertips: They’re the only criminal in the world that can do that kind of damage.”

Most arsonists are one-and-done offenders, and the crime cuts across race, gender, and education levels. Mental illness and drug use can certainly be exacerbating factors. Additionally, the housing crisis and anti-homelessness legislation have pushed marginalized populations into living in wildland-urban interfaces, on the fringes of towns and cities, where both intentional and unintentional fires can cause more extensive problems.

Nordskog specializes in serial arsonists — a much smaller subset of arsonists who set fires repeatedly and intentionally, sometimes hundreds of times. They can be sophisticated operators, picking “the perfect time of day” to start a fire when temperatures are high and the wind picks up; some even use delay ignition devices to avoid getting caught. “They’re usually very frustrated and angry about something,” Nordskog said of a motive, and “the one thing that anybody can do is light a fire.”

Nordskog, like Cal Fire’s Muschetto, told me he’s doubtful there is any significant rise in the number of people actually committing arson; discrepancies in investigations, annual fire conditions, and several other factors are the likelier reason for the fluctuations in numbers.

For Muschetto, though, it defies belief that someone would intentionally start a fire at all. “It blows my mind that [arson] occurs and how often it occurs,” Muschetto told me. An arson fire takes firefighters away from their families for potentially weeks on end; it puts first responders and the public in danger; and between the smoke pollution, immense environmental degradation, and potential loss of life and property, the damage can be incalculable.

“We’re always going to get accidental or natural ignitions” in California, Muschetto said. That’s why “reducing these intentional fires is very important.”

Recruiting roundup: Oregon’s loaded camp, Utah lands a lineman, USC grabs two from Georgia

The late-July quiet period proved beneficial for the West Coast schools entering the Big Ten.

18-year-old woman who died in Walnut Creek fatal crash identified

The crash kept a stretch of Ygnacio Valley Road closed until about 3:20 a.m. Friday.

Boeing’s Starliner proves better at torching cash than reaching orbit

Perhaps those thrusters actually burn dollars after all

Lurking in Boeing’s woeful Q2 financials is an admission that while its Starliner spacecraft might be struggling when it comes to burning fuel, it has no problem whatsoever setting fire to dollar bills.…

These Remote Volcanic Islands in the South Pacific Just Became a UNESCO World Heritage Site

The Marquesas, located some 3,000 miles from their nearest continental neighbor, are some of the most isolated islands on the planet

NASA Invites Media, Public to Attend Deep Space Food Challenge Finale

NASA invites the media and public to explore the nexus of space and food innovation at the agency’s Deep Space Food Challenge symposium and winners’ announcement at the Nationwide and Ohio Farm Bureau 4-H Center in Columbus, Ohio, on Friday, Aug. 16. In 2019, NASA and the CSA (Canadian Space Agency) started the Deep Space Food […]

Big paws to fill: Meet Contra Costa’s new director of Animal Services

What Is Analog Computing?

US student protests challenge balance of speech rights, university policies

Breaking the economy of trust: How busts affect malware gangs

It’s hard to track down individuals, so why not disrupt the underground market itself?

Feature Some of the world’s most notorious ransomware and malware-as-a-service (RaaS/MaaS) operators have shut up shop in the past 12 months thanks to international law enforcement efforts, but just because household names like Conti, LockBit, and ALPHV/BlackCat are on the ropes, it doesn’t mean we’re free from the threat of commodity malware.…

NASA Scientists on Why We Might Not Spot Solar Panel Technosignatures

One of NASA’s key priorities is understanding the potential for life elsewhere in the universe. NASA has not found any credible evidence of extraterrestrial life — but NASA is exploring the solar system and beyond to help us answer fundamental questions, including whether we are alone in the universe. For those who study the potential […]

The U.S. economy is still adding jobs, but there’s a slowdown

The economy added 114,000 jobs in July. Analysts were expecting a slowdown, but not that much of one. Unemployment rose more than expected too. Markets are tumbling on the news amid worries that the Federal Reserve may have waited too long to cut interest rates. We’ll discuss. Plus, a housing crunch means pain for furniture retailers, and a grassroots program in the U.K. is making the sport of fencing more accessible.

Increasing wind and heat plus risk of thunderstorms expected in fight against California wildfire

CHICO, California — Firefighters battling California’s largest wildfire of the year are preparing for treacherous conditions entering the weekend when expected thunderstorms may unleash fire-starting lightning and erratic winds that could erode progress made over the past week. Dry, hot conditions posed similar threats across the fire-stricken West.

Weather, fuels and terrain will pose challenges for the 6,000 firefighters battling the Park Fire, which has spread over 614 square miles (1,590 square kilometers) since allegedly being started by arson in a wilderness park in the Sierra Nevada foothills east of the Sacramento Valley city of Chico.

The fire’s push northward has brought it toward the rugged lava rock landscape surrounding Lassen Volcanic National Park, which has been closed due to the threat.

“Lava rocks make for hard and slow work for hand crews,” Cal Fire said in a situation report. “Crews are being flown into access areas that have been hard to reach because of long drive times and steep, rugged terrain.”

After days of benign weather, increasing winds and a surge of monsoonal moisture were expected to increase fire activity and bring a chance of thunderstorms Friday night into Saturday, said Ryan Walbrun, incident meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

“The concern with thunderstorms is any gusty outflow winds that would push the fire itself or create some new fire ignitions within the vicinity of the Park Fire,” Walbrun said.

Collapse of thunderstorm clouds can blow wind in any and all directions, said Jonathan Pangburn, a fire behavior analyst with Cal Fire.

“Even if there’s not lightning per se, it is very much a safety-watch-out environment for our firefighters out there,” Pangburn said.

Walbrun said there was little prospect of beneficial rains from the storms and the forecast for next week calls for continued warming and drying.

“As we look forward in time, we’re really just entering the peak of fire season in California,” he said.

The Park Fire, which has destroyed at least 480 structures and damaged 47, is one of almost 100 large fires burning across the western U.S.

A wildfire on the edge of metro Denver crept within a quarter-mile of evacuated homes, but authorities said Thursday they were hopeful that hundreds of threatened residences could be saved despite sweltering temperatures and firefighters suffering heat exhaustion.

The Quarry Fire southwest of the Denver suburb of Littleton encroached on several large subdivisions. Neighborhoods with nearly 600 homes were ordered to evacuate after the fire, of unknown origin, spread quickly Tuesday afternoon and overnight when relatively few firefighters were yet on the scene.

Jim and Meg Lutes watched from an overlook near their house northeast of the fire as smoke plumed up from the ridges. Their community west of Littleton was not yet under evacuation orders, but the couple had been ready to start packing a day earlier when flames could be seen blanketing the mountains.

“It can come over that hill pretty quick if the wind changes,” said Jim Lutes, 64, pointing to a nearby ridge.

Five firefighters were injured Wednesday, including four who had heat exhaustion, said Mark Techmeyer, a spokesperson with the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office.

The fire was in steep terrain that made it difficult to access but had been held to about a half-square mile (1.4 square kilometers) with no houses yet destroyed, authorities said.

Miles to the north near the city of Lyons, Colorado, officials lifted some evacuations and reported making progress on the Stone Canyon Fire. It has killed one person and destroyed five houses. The cause was under investigation.

The fire was among several threatening heavily populated areas of the Colorado foothills, including one in which a person was killed earlier this week.

Scientists say extreme wildfires are becoming more common and destructive in the U.S. West and other parts of the world as climate change warms the planet and droughts become more severe.

Podcast: Signal’s President Meredith Whittaker on Backdoors and AI

We speak to Meredith Whittaker about the threat posed by AI to end-to-end encryption, what backdoors actually look like, and much more in this special interview episode.

Park Fire near Chico grows to fourth-largest wildfire in California history

California bosses ranked third-best in US

Massachusetts and Washington were the only states with better grades on my scorecard.

Systems Engineer Douglas Wong

“When I was around 16 or 17, I came across this book by Arthur C. Clarke called Space Odyssey 2001. That was actually the first science fiction book that I’ve ever read. I was just so captured by what he had written because the things that he wrote about weren’t [happening] in the far-off future, […]

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-02, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

I am not a very knowledgeable C++ programmer, but this introduction to Swift for C++ programmers both covers a lot of ground I had not seen before, and explains things succinctly that I had not grasped before.

I am jealous of how well written it is, how effectively it communicates these concepts.

Thief steals 15-year-old cat from downtown Saratoga business

Fueled by New Attacks, the Houthi Information Campaign Is Thriving

Despite U.S.-led coalition efforts to curb their aggression, the Houthis’ adept use of propaganda and low-cost technology has allowed them to continue their attacks and gain regional support. Attacks will persist as long as they see benefits. A U.S. counterinformation campaign could substantially reduce those benefits.

Park Fire: Increasing wind and heat plus risk of thunderstorms expected in fight against wildfire

Firefighters battling California’s largest wildfire of the year are preparing for treacherous conditions entering the weekend.

ACEMAGIC X1 dual-screen laptop now available for pre-order for $899

The ACEMAGIC X1 is a dual-screen laptop with an unusual design. From the front you could easily mistake it for a typical notebook: there’s a screen, keyboard, and touchscreen. But there’s a second screen attached to a 360-hinge that flips out to give you a dual-screen setup without the need to carry a portable monitor. First […]

Azure Linux 3 hits general availability – but don’t expect any frills

Microsoft’s distribution gets a new LTS kernel

With impeccable timing considering recent Windows issues, Microsoft has made Azure Linux 3.0 generally available. It includes an update to the Linux kernel and new versions of various packages.…

US job growth slows, unemployment rate increases

oberon@gitlab.inf.ethz.ch pushed to project branch main at Felix Oliver Friedrich / Oberon A2

Technology history: where Unix came from

Today, every Unix-like system can trace their ancestry back to the original Unix. That includes Linux, which uses the GNU tools – and the GNU tools are based on the Unix tools. Linux in 2024 is removed from the original Unix design, and for good reason – Linux supports architectures and tools not dreamt of during the original Unix era. But the core command line experience in Linux is still very similar to the Unix command line of the 1970s. The next time you use ls to list the files in a directory, remember that you’re using a command line that’s been with us for more than fifty years. ↫ Jim Hall An excellent overview of some of the more ancient UNIX commands that are still with us today. One thing I always appreciate when I dive into an operating system closer to “real” UNIX, like OpenBSD, or a actual UNIX, like HP-UX, is just how much more logical sense they make under the hood than a Linux system does. This is not a dunk on modern Linux – it has to cater to endless more modern needs than something ancient and dead like HP-UX – but what I learn while using these systems closer to the UNIX has made me appreciate proper UNIX more than I used to in the past. In what surely sounds like utter lunacy to system administrators who actually had to seriously administer HP-UX systems back in the day, I genuinely love using HP-UX, setting it up, configuring it, messing around with it, because it just makes so much more logical sense than the systems we use today. The knowledge gained from using BSD, HP-UX, and others, while not always directly applicable to Linux, does aid me in understanding certain Linux things better than I did before. What I’m trying to say is – go and load up an old UNIX, or at least a modern BSD. Aside from being great operating systems in their own right, they’re much easier to grasp than a modern Linux system, and you’ll learn a lot form the experience.

Four Bay Area men plead guilty for $55 million in fraudulent real estate loans

A real estate agent, loan officer and two others falsified papers for 102 home loans.

Increasing wind and heat plus risk of thunderstorms expected in fight against California’s largest wildfire

Firefighters battling California’s largest wildfire of the year are preparing for treacherous conditions entering the weekend.

14-year-old charged with Denver murder was repeatedly released from custody in prior case, wanted for arrest at time of shooting

The teen is accused of killing bouncer William “Todd” Kidd outside the Federales Denver bar in RiNo.

Early Humans Migrated Out of Africa Several Times, DNA Study Suggests

Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals as early as 250,000 years ago and may have ultimately bred them out of existence, according to new research

Markets tumble, led by 5.8% drop in Tokyo following a tech-driven retreat on Wall Street

BANGKOK — Shares in Europe and Asia tumbled Friday, with Japan’s Nikkei 225 index slumping 5.8% as investors panicked over signs of weakness in the U.S. economy.

Bracing for a highly anticipated employment report coming on Friday, the future for the S&P 500 was down 1.3%, while that for the Dow Jones Industrial Average sank 0.9%.

The declines followed a retreat on Wall Street after weak manufacturing data raised worries the Federal Reserve may have waited too long to cut interest rates, raising risks of a recession. After the U.S. central bank held steady at a meeting this week, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said a cut could come in September.

“The short-lived satisfaction of Fed Chief Powell communicating decent odds of a September rate cut has turned sour as investors are now panicking that the central bank isn’t trimming soon enough,” José Torres, a senior economist at Interactive Brokers, said in a report.

A nearly 19% decline in Intel’s shares in aftermarket trading deepened the gloom. The chipmaker said it was cutting 15% of its massive workforce — about 15,000 jobs — to better compete with more successful rivals like Nvidia and AMD.

In early European trading, Germany’s DAX shed 1.5% to 17,806.65, while the CAC 40 slipped 1% to 7,298.81. In London, the FTSE 100 fell 0.6% to 8,233.49.

Japan’s market retreated to where it was trading in January before it surged to an all-time high last month of over 42,000. The Nikkei 225 lost 2,216.63 points Friday to 35,909.70, with banks’, technology-related and manufacturers’ shares hit by heavy selling.

Japanese shares were pummeled after the central bank raised its benchmark interest rate on Wednesday, to 0.25% from 0.1%. That pushed the value of the Japanese yen higher against the U.S. dollar, potentially hurting overseas earnings of major manufacturers and deflating a boom in tourism.

The dollar fell to 148.77 yen early Friday from 149.37 yen late Thursday. It had recently traded above 160 yen. The euro rose to $1.0820 from $1.0789.

Elsewhere in Asia on Friday, Hang Seng in Hong Kong dropped 2.1% to 16,945.51, while the Shanghai Composite index saw a more modest loss, of 0.9% to 2,905.34.

Chinese shares have extended losses this week as investors registered disappointment with the government’s latest efforts to spur growth through various piecemeal measures, instead of hoped-for infusions of broader stimulus.

The Kospi in Seoul dropped 3.7% to 2,676.19 and Taiwan’s Taiex sank 4.4%. Both markets tend to be hit hard by weakness in technology shares.

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics dropped 4.2% while another maker of computer chips and other components, SK Hynix, dropped 10.4%. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest chip maker, lost 5.9%.

Elsewhere in Asia, Australia’s S&P/ASX gave up 2.1% to 7,943.20 and the Sensex in India was down 1.1%. Bangkok’s SET fell 0.7%.

It has been a nerve wracking week for markets even as central banks in Japan, the United States and England acted much as had been expected. Japan raised its benchmark, the Fed stood pat, and the Bank of England lowered its key rate by 0.25%, to 5%, its first cut in more than four years.

Commodity prices have also had a rough ride, with oil prices surging after the killings of leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah that fueled fears conflict in the Middle East might escalate into a wider war. But prices fell back Thursday and were only marginally higher early Friday.

Benchmark U.S. crude oil gained 12 cents to $76.43 per barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, was up 12 cents at $79.64 per barrel.

The price of gold, a traditional refuge for investors in uncertain times, has surged to over $2,500 an ounce.

Meanwhile, other commodities sank on concerns that weakness in the U.S. and other major economies will hurt demand. The price of nickel dropped 2.4%, aluminum dropped 1% and copper traded in New York dropped 2.3%.

Worry is mounting that the Fed has kept its main interest rate at a two-decade high for too long in its zeal to stifle inflation by making it more costly to borrow. A rate cut could take months to a year to filter through the economy.

On Thursday, the S&P 500 sank 1.4% after a report from the Institute for Supply Management showed U.S. manufacturing activity is still shrinking. The Dow fell 1.2%, and the Nasdaq composite dropped 2.3%. The small stocks in the Russell 2000 index dropped 3%.

Other reports Thursday showed the number of U.S. workers applying for jobless benefits hit its highest level in about a year and that productivity for U.S. workers improved in the spring. The data are likely to relieve pressure on inflation and give the Fed more leeway to cut rates.

Employment growth does appear to be slowing more than expected, Philip Marey, senior U.S. strategist for Rabobank, said in a commentary.

“This suggests that the Fed’s strategy to bring better balance between labor demand and supply through restrictive interest rates is working, but of course the risk is that employment growth is brought to a halt and the economy slides into a recession.”

What a Mess

date: 2024-08-02, from: 500-ish blog, A collection of posts by M.G. Siegler of around 500 words in length.

A Power Crunch Looms for PJM

Current conditions: July was China’s hottest month since official record-keeping began in 1961 • Chile also experienced a month for the books as its capital, Santiago, had its first rainless July since records began in the 1950s • One death has been reported as multiple fires blaze in central and northern Colorado.

THE TOP FIVE

Sky-high PJM capacity prices highlight a halting energy transition

Recent retirements of coal- and gas-fired plants have left a gap in the generating fleet for PJM — the country’s largest regional transmission organization, spanning 13 states and Washington, D.C. — that wind and solar plants (many stuck in permitting and interconnection delays) have yet to fill. Add to that a projected 2% increase in peak demand, analysts say, and you’ve got a recipe for high prices.

To that end, PJM will offer record-high payments to power plant operators for the capacity they agree to maintain next delivery year. Producers across the region can expect to earn $269.92 per megawatt if they commit to being available during predetermined times, with prices in certain locations reaching as high as $466.35 per megawatt-day. Grid operators hope this will encourage the construction of new generating assets.

PJM’s quagmire is also a warning to other transmission organizations and independent system operators navigating a clean energy transition in the face of rising electricity demand. The bottom line? “PJM didn’t prepare for an energy transition we all saw coming,” said Jon Gordon, the director of clean energy trade group Advanced Energy United.

Home efficiency rebates roll out in Wisconsin

Starting today, Badger State residents can officially take advantage of federal rebates to make their homes less dependent on fossil fuels. Wisconsin is the second state after New York to launch a program to fund home energy improvements with money from the Inflation Reduction Act. To participate, residents will first have to get an energy audit by an approved contractor, who will then model potential energy savings from different courses of action, like new insulation, windows, doors, or even a new heating and cooling system. Depending on their income level and how much energy they save from the project, Wisconsinites will be eligible for up to $10,000 in rebates. But the program may see a slow start — there are currently only 13 approved contractors in the entire state.

The IRA’s home energy rebates programs are among those that are likely to be targeted first by a potential Trump administration. To date, the Department of Energy has provided funding to launch rebate programs in just approved applications from 10 of the 22 states that have applied.

Hydrogen has a long way to go, according to a new report

“Hydrogen-ready” has become a popular moniker for utilities and developers constructing new natural gas plants in an era of climate concern. A new report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis suggests that the term — meant to convey the infrastructure’s capability to transition to carbon-free hydrogen when the fuel becomes more available — may be little more than hot air. It identifies three major barriers: a lack of hydrogen supply, a lack of hydrogen-capable pipelines, and a lack of storage capacity. The authors highlight Duke Energy’s plan to build a “hydrogen-ready” gas turbine at an existing coal plant in Roxboro, North Carolina — a plan that wouldn’t introduce hydrogen into the pipeline until 2035, and even then would start with a mix of just 1% hydrogen to 99% methane.

Claims of hydrogen readiness, the report concludes, are “little more than marketing designed to obscure the myriad shortcomings and unanswered questions associated with using hydrogen in methane-fired turbines.”

A new financing tool aims to accelerate coal retirements

On the back of a record year for coal consumption driven by demand in Asia, climate advocates are searching for new ways to hasten the decline of the carbon-intensive fuel. One problem that has long bedeviled effort: Shutting down a coal plant prematurely means forfeiting years of profit. This amounts to a premium of $310 million for a five-year premature retirement, according to one estimate.

A group of financial institutions led by the Monetary Authority of Singapore is exploring a new financial tool to get around that barrier. The idea is to allow people and companies to purchase “transition credits” like they purchase carbon offsets. The money from these purchases would reimburse coal plant operators for the money they stand to lose by shutting down their plants. Some big banks see transition credits as a growth market. “We would also like to see how these can be traded, as creating a liquid secondary market should help support the primary markets too,” Patrick Lee, Standard Chartered’s chief executive officer for Singapore and ASEAN, told Bloomberg.

A booming business for undersea cables

Offshore wind is driving a surge in demand for undersea cables, with backlogs reaching up to 12 years. That’s bad news for utilities but good news for Europe’s three biggest manufacturers — Nexan, Prysmian, and NKT — which have all seen their stock more than triple in the past five years. A single kilometer of one of these cables can, according to Bloomberg, weigh as much as 50 Ford F-150 trucks, and cost more than $1.1 million. The specialized equipment required to produce such an item is a hurdle to any new companies trying to enter the market.

European regulators have long suspected the manufacturers of cartel behavior, and both the German and French governments are currently investigating them for price-fixing. Meanwhile, a Japanese manufacturer has begun construction on a new assembly plant in Scotland, which is slated to start production in 2026.

THE KICKER

Residents of Budapest were treated to an unusual sight on Thursday, as around 60 farmers paraded camels through the Hungarian capital to raise awareness about the impacts of climate change on agriculture. A drought cost the country’s agricultural sector $2.7 billion in 2022, according to Hungary’s farm ministry.“

2017: "The myth of the lone inventor dreaming up the future ensconced in a lab isn't how it works."

Climate change and a reverse mass migration?

We’re in the middle of another heat wave, which can make cooler parts of the country seem more attractive. And a new analysis shows that some Americans are reversing migration patterns. Typically, people are leaving colder states for warmer ones. Now, more Americans are staying put, while others are moving from warmer places to cooler ones. But first: Markets tumble as investors blink before The Fed does.

oberon@gitlab.inf.ethz.ch pushed to project branch main at Felix Oliver Friedrich / Oberon A2

Hubble Spies a Diminutive Galaxy

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the subtle glow of the galaxy named IC 3430, located 45 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. This dwarf elliptical galaxy is part of the Virgo cluster, a rich collection of galaxies both large and small, many of which are very similar in type to this […]

DoJ launches probes as AI antitrust storm clouds gather round Nvidia

US regulator reportedly not happy about Run:ai buy… nor industry dominance

The US Department of Justice has started an investigation into Nvidia’s acquisition of Run:ai, a startup offering orchestration tools for AI workloads.…

Fortune 50 biz coughed up record-breaking $75M ransom to halt leak of stolen data

They say crime doesn’t pay. They’re right – it’s the victims doing the paying

An unnamed Fortune 50 corporation paid a stonking $75 million to a ransomware gang to stop it leaking terabytes of stolen data.…

This LA barbershop could soon be made a historic landmark

The Black-owned shop has been at its current location since 1977. It was part of a string of Black businesses that sprang up when much of L.A. was still segregated.

Can fencing combat its elitist image?

From the BBC World Service: Fencing is currently having its moment on the Olympic stage in Paris and has been around since the very first modern, organized Olympics. And in the United Kingdom, one grassroots group is making fencing more accessible, investing in growing its popularity and helping Muslim women and girls access more organized sport. Also on today’s show Japan’s stocks tumble on concerns over the U.S. economy.

When Will The Climate Killers See Their Day In Court?

After an unprecedented wave of deaths caused by climate extremes, advocates are trying to convince courts that fossil fuel companies are criminally responsible for homicide.

P&B: Anne Sturdivant

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Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hello! My name is Anne Sturdivant, you will often find me online as “Apple Annie” or using the handle anniegreens. I give a little background on these names on my weblog: Origins of a nickname. I am originally from Washington state in the US but have lived in Portland, OR, for about 20 years.

I moved to Portland to attend college (for the second time) and studied web design and interactive media, for which I received a BS. I continued on that course for my career for the last 16 years, working mainly on the front-end with Drupal, design systems, and structured content. I recently have been on a hiatus from full-time work due to health (and other) factors. I am still active in the front-end and web design spaces, also more recently jumping back into “work” on a personal level.

Hobbies are hard to define since so many things I enjoy doing and could categorize as hobbies are just a core part of me. I am a gardener but calling that a hobby feels like an understatement. My entire yard is a garden and I put every single plant in the ground. I post many photos and write a bit about it more on my microblog than my weblog. I also travel to gardens in the Pacific Northwest and take photos and write about it in a newsletter that has been on hold for a while. I do plan on resuming this newsletter at some point, platform to be determined.

I also watch a fair amount of movies and television, mostly on streaming services, though I don’t write about that much. I love listening to podcasts and find myself gravitating towards the weird and unusual, tech-related and front-end, US political news (though not what you might think, I really only listen to serious lawyers that don’t get into hyperbolic punditry), and health-related and local subjects.

I read but am not a dedicated book reader, I find myself more drawn to blogs and the interlinking nature of the web. I do usually start this path in my RSS reader but very often a trail starts on Mastodon due to a post someone shares. I enjoy photography and hiking and visiting natural areas in the Pacific Northwest, also featured in my newsletter, but do less of that now (except photos of my garden) due to current health limitations.

I suppose you could call tinkering with front-end development a hobby as well, since nowadays I’m doing that for personal pleasure and growth, even if I am trained to do that as a career as well. I find this to be a creative outlet as much as other creative endeavors, including gardening, and I’ve written in the past about how I find both gardening and front-end development to share some of the same parts of my brain.

Finally, this “hobby” should lead us right into the next question: blogging!

What’s the story behind your blog?

I have several blogs, it might be an addiction. I’ve written pretty extensively about my weblog, which I consider my main blog, and how it came to be. Part of my hiatus and worsening health issues were due to work-induced burnout and I spent several years away from the web, unsure I’d ever return. In 2022 I started to have the desire to once again do something on the web, though I was unsure what that would look like. I had a blog in college but long abandoned it, though it still sits on the same domain my old portfolio site sits on, locked behind a login.

After coming to Mastodon, I discovered an instance that was part of a paid suite of tools, omg.lol, and signed up after finding the Local timeline to be quite enjoyable (it’s now my main instance). What I didn’t realize was that the rest of the tools would become just as important to me. I first created a “link page” that now acts as my global profile, then a /now page, and a weblog, and a statuslog, and soon had also signed up for Micro.blog. I now have nine blogs, seven of them active, spread across omg.lol and Micro.blog.

As I said, the weblog is my main blog and started as a way to get back into doing front-end development again and to write about it and the process of customizing the blog. I really started it for myself, to work my way out of burnout, as a means of therapy. I now post mostly longer form, often technical, posts about front-end development and web design, the indieweb, blogging, the internet, as well as some more personal pieces, and still the process of working on the blog.

I’d then consider my microblog a close second to the weblog. I post more short form content there, photo-blogging, bookmarks, gardening, chronic illness, as well as some politics and technology. I sometimes cross-post to one of my four Mastodon accounts.

My other blogs are more projects than traditional blogs. I have a trio of blogs that serve as one project for weblog.lol: Themes, Styles, and Custom, which I use exclusively for weblog.lol styles and customizations to create themes. This work is on hold right now as weblog.lol’s backend will be seeing some overhaul over the next few months and I’ll need to reflect that there.

3x5.pics is a fun project that I loved designing. I’m currently authoring all the messages on the notecards myself but I would like to open it up to submissions one day. Right now I’m working on the 100 Days to Offload challenge on a dedicated blog called 100 Days of Blog. Another microblog I haven’t started yet, other than to obtain a domain and have a direction for it, will be for testing and modernizing a trove of old recipes I inherited from my grandmother. It is called Table for One Cafe. Finally, I have a sixth weblog.lol blog that I’m working to make a place for front-end experiments that I can include with blog posts on my main weblog. This is code named Tiny Pages.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

For posts on my weblog, they are usually about something I worked on or a process/knowledge piece to share. For this type of post I put in a fair amount of research on a subject, create an outline, prepare assets or code samples, and citations and footnotes. These very often are about working on one of my blogs, adding a new feature, updating and improving something technical, or learning a modern and new piece of functionality within front-end development.

Personal pieces are far more spontaneous and may reflect how I am feeling or a struggle I am dealing with. Other posts are reactions to blog posts, articles, podcasts, and movies or television shows. I also try to post a near-daily featured photo on my microblog. Sometimes these are curated ahead of time, where I’ll plan out a week of photos, but often they are a picture that the Apple Photos.app is featuring that day. I thought about the kinds of blogs posts once and wrote something about it, I’m not sure I’ve hit all of them yet!

I had many requests from the omg.lol community about what my weblog workflow was so I published a piece aptly titled Weblog Publishing Workflow. In it I describe the tools I use, including Drafts, which I am writing these answers in right now. As far as how many drafts I write, I really can’t tell you. The way Drafts works I never see a “draft” version, I’m just constantly reading and rewriting or reorganizing sections. One of the nice part of Drafts is being able to set up preview templates that look exactly like the front-end of your blog, using all the same assets, which I have stored on a CDN. When I read a piece for editing, I read it in that preview as it gives me the best feeling of how something will be seen once published on my weblog.

As for proof reading or asking for help in reviewing what I blog about, I haven’t yet started to do that, but the idea has been in my mind for a while. I know I make mistakes and I will often find at least a couple after publishing, but I am not too worried about that. I’m fine airing my bumps and bruises. I would, however, appreciate a review on more technical pieces that I write in the future and may start looking for someone I trust to do that or that is willing to offer their time.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I usually write in the morning or later at night, often with a cup of coffee or tea, nestled into my large chair with ottoman in my living room. I have a proper (and rather nice) office and I worked from home for many years at my last job, but I’ve since moved away from that strict feeling space for blogging or creative endeavors, unless I need an external monitor for something large or complicated that I want to see in a code editor or graphics program.

One thing that definitely influences my ability to write is sound. I don’t necessarily mean I need to listen to music to be creative or to write, but if there is sound it cannot be dialogue or lyrics with music. For this reason I primarily listen to two highly curated Pandora stations I created many years ago. I also listen to them while working on design or technical projects, though often I prefer no sound at all.

If I’m already in the flow of something, either writing or working on a site or design, I will often listen to music, but also from one of those Pandora stations. I’ve been listening to them for so long, they are like a comfortable friend and may therefore help me feel at ease. I know creative spaces are important.

When I moved to Portland to attend an art college, I lived in a very inspiring neighborhood near my school and felt like a creative’s dream every time I stepped onto the sidewalk. Now when I am stuck on something I find that just stepping out my back door into my garden is enough of an escape that when I return I can get past that block. In 2019 when I was at the worst of my burnout I planted a pollinator garden in my raised vegetable beds and could spend hours out there gazing at the flowers and wildlife. It was therapeutic, got the creative juices flowing, and a means to make the day pass.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I assume most people answering these questions may run across the same thing as myself: I have written about this on my blog before. My weblog Colophon details much of this. The weblog is using weblog.lol, a small blogging platform that comes with an omg.lol address. There is a lightweight templating system that allows passing of variables with front-matter and config and authoring in Markdown and HTML, or a combination of the two.

All static assets are stored on my CDN at Bunny.net, the domain is registered at and DNS is currently managed by Porkbun but I may moved to Bunny.net for DNS as well, which would serve weblog as a static site. Email for my domain is handled by Fastmail. I have just recently added a contact form using Letterbird. Analytics are using Tinylytics for the time being, though I am investigating self-hosting Umami for analytics with PikaPods.

The theme is entirely custom CSS and HTML with limited Javascript for theme switching and some web components. I mention in my workflow post that I desired to use a platform and workflow that didn’t require a lot of maintenance overhead, such as updating modules, dependencies, and debugging build systems. I wanted the platform to get out of the way so I could work on the parts I want to work on and write about it. I love that there are so many diverse ways to blog right now, so many different options for complexity based on what people want to do or can do. And opportunities to do more when they want to and move to another platform as they need more features. There is no wrong way to blog and the best way is the way that makes it easiest for you.

My microblog is hosted on Micro.blog and uses a community contributed theme called Tiny Theme as a base with custom CSS, some Javascript for web components, and template overrides to complement the look and feel of my weblog’s theme. My other projects/blogs are also on one of these platforms: Themes, Styles, and Custom use weblog.lol; 3x5.pics and Tiny Pages use weblog.lol; and both 100 Days of Blog and Table for One Cafe are on Micro.blog.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

If I started over today, I’d be in a different head space and I like to think I would have “branched out” more and relied on my web development experience to build something more custom using 11ty or another static site generator. I have more experience with PHP so I might have gone in the direction of a PHP static site generator, but I appreciate and stay updated with what is happening with 11ty enough that I think I will end up using that some day.

Weblog.lol has some limitations and though I have gotten very far with truly making it my own, I started the blog in January 2023, I’ve only just started hitting walls that I am unable to get past due to the platform’s limitations. The next version of weblog will run on a new backend called Neato and I am willing to wait until that is ready to try out before making any moves to another platform.

I think it more likely I leave Micro.blog before I leave weblog.lol (or omg.lol). The original needs I had when I joined Micro.blog have either ended up being something I decided I didn’t need (Fediverse integration), or I’ve found alternatives to some of its functionality (cross-posting), and the remaining piece I’ve yet to get set up, a newsletter, I already have options, such as Buttondown or Ghost, that I could use.

I am still very pleased with the structure of my weblog. I believe starting with a Styleguide up front helped me to keep styling consistent by structuring the content and front-matter properly from fairly early on. The only structure that I find lacking is, again, due to the platform’s limitations. Having come from more than a decade of working on Drupal platforms, I can see gaps in functionality that other platforms might give me the flexibility to fill.

As for the name of my weblog, I’m glad this was brought up in the suggestions—I love when a blog has a name! I curate a blogroll by “spinning” it with nine new blogs at a time at no particular regularity. In the process of doing so I come across the “name” of each blog by peaking at the HTML <head> and I am always delighted to find when someone takes the time or creative effort to put a little gem in there that you may not otherwise know about. I wrote a blog post about this once and I still think the blog I name in that post is still my favorite name. As for my blog’s name(s), well, I have so many of them, I’m getting to scratch that naming itch!

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs?

Since I have so many blogs I’m going to break this into each platform’s costs along with additional costs for related services.

Weblog, 3x5.pics, Themes/Styles/Custom, Tiny Pages

All six of these blogs are omg.lol addresses. A one year subscription for all the tools and goodies omg.lol offers is $20USD. Sometimes there are deals (very often, multiple times a year) and you can also gain banks of time through referrals. So although, the cost of these would normally be $120USD per year combined, I don’t actually pay that much right now. I have also bought banks of time during promotional deals, so that helps as well. Each of these addresses comes with multiple tools and web presences that are infinitely configurable, so you gain quite a lot for a fairly low price. On top of that it is a lovely welcoming community run by a really nice guy, and I’m not just saying that.

Microblog, 100 Days of Blog, Table for One Cafe

A Micro.blog premium membership gets you up to five blogs plus a whole other host of goodies, such as podcasting, newsletter functionality, Fediverse integration, cross-posting, bookmarking, and more. The cost of the premium memership is $10USD per month. A non-premium membership with just one blog, plus cross-posting, and a few other goodies, is $5USD per month.

Related Services

On the subject of monetization, I don’t think I have any issue with it. I don’t enjoy ads, but I don’t mind unobtrusive methods of helping to support independent creators. I have a Buy me a coffee button on my blog at the bottom of every page. It rarely gets used, though I wouldn’t mind it got used more (obviously 😆) to help support the cost of my infrastructure.

I think if you find value in something someone creates there is no shame in giving them some money to show appreciation and encourage them to keep it up. Many people have stressful jobs and the creative output they get via writing or doing other art and coding on their blogs may be payment enough, but they still absolutely appreciate when someone shows support monetarily. I try to give when I can, especially if I find myself going back to a person over and over for things they create to give away or for writing that has helped me.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

This feels just as loaded as creating a blogroll! Which I took a different route in that I cannot and will not just choose a handful of people, especially since we all tend to get caught up in silos and add people that look and sound like us. My blogroll is an ever changing list that I “spin” with nine new blogs at a time when I’ve collected enough blogs to round out a diverse selection of bloggers and types of blogs.

These three suggestions come off my blogroll, any of them would be good candidates for your next interview that I would be very interested in reading.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

Okay, this is admittedly a smorgasbord of links, but I think they’re all great. How do you choose just a handful of what the web has to offer? For me, these are things I’ve thought about and looked at recently. Three of these items I submitted for a Tiny Award.

This was the 49th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Annie. Make sure to follow her blog (RSS) and get in touch with her if you have any questions.

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To preserve their work — and drafts of history — journalists take archiving into their own hands.

UK plans to revamp national cyber defense tools are already in motion

Work aims to build on the success of NCSC’s 2016 initiative – and private sector will play a part

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) says it’s in the planning stages of bringing a new suite of services to its existing Active Cyber Defence (ACD) program.…

How a Top Climate Scientist Learned to Speak Up

Mornings are my time for thinking about Rob Jackson — specifically, when I am making coffee. Every time I reach for the knob on my gas stove to heat my water kettle, I remember something he told me during our discussion of his new book, Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere: “We would never willingly stand over the tailpipe of a car breathing in the exhaust, yet we willingly stand over a stove, breathing the exact same pollutants.”

Jackson is the chair of the Global Carbon Project, a professor of Earth science and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment and Precourt Institute for Energy, as well as one of the most highly-cited climate and environmental scientists in the world — all a long way of saying, he spends a lot of time thinking about kitchens and neighborhoods just like mine. But emissions aren’t the only thing that occupies Jackson’s time these days; while he stresses that reducing emissions is still the “cheapest, safest, and only sure path to a safe climate,” his book also reluctantly examines technologies that remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere after they’ve been emitted. “In truth, I’m frustrated … because we shouldn’t need them,” he explains.

Ahead of the release of Into the Clear Blue Sky on July 30, I spoke with Jackson about why it’s so difficult to make people care about atmospheric restoration in the same way they care about habitat loss or extreme weather, and the stories, people, and emerging technologies that do make him hopeful. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

In the introduction to Into the Clear Blue Sky, you write that restoring the atmosphere “must invoke the same spirit and philosophy used to restore endangered species and habitats to health.” But unlike with polar bears or glaciers, we usually can’t see the damage to the atmosphere. Do you think that is part of why we’ve been so slow and halting in addressing greenhouse gas pollution?

A little bit, I do. I think the real reason we’ve been slow to address greenhouse gas pollution is because we are better at just continuing with the status quo. We aren’t making changes in our lifestyles and our industries. I’ve grown skeptical that people will respond to climate thresholds like 1.5 [degrees Celsius of warming] or 2 C. People don’t really understand why those numbers are important — they don’t understand what they mean in paleo-time, in terms of sea level rise and ice melt. I’m seeking a different motivator, a different narrative for change. And I think restoration is a more powerful narrative than some arbitrary temperature number.

There are several moments in the book where you suggest that decarbonization has benefits beyond just addressing climate change — like how feeding cows red seaweed accelerates their weight gain, or how electric motorcycles don’t have the fumes, vibrations, or noise of gas-powered motorcycles. Do you think we need to market green technologies in ways that go beyond just cleaning up the atmosphere?

Yes. Approximately half the population in the United States isn’t motivated by concerns about climate change, and we have to reach them a different way. I strongly believe that climate solutions won’t just help our grandchildren; they’ll help make us healthier today, and ultimately help us save money.

Air pollution is the best example: Our air is cleaner today than when I was a boy. So is our water. But there are 100,000 Americans who still die from coal and car pollution every year in the United States, and one in five people worldwide — that’s 10 billion people a year who die from fossil fuel pollution. Those deaths are unnecessary and senseless. We have cleaner technologies available now. So if we can help people see that clean energy and climate solutions will restore our water and air, they might be more likely to say, “Okay, let’s give it a try.”

CO2 and methane are the big villains of the book, but I noticed that you don’t tangle with nitrous oxide too much. Was there any thinking behind that decision?

The problem with nitrous oxide is there are fewer things that we can do to reduce emissions. The number one source of nitrous oxide pollution — which causes about 10% of global warming, it’s not a trivial amount — is nitrogen fertilization for our crops. It’s a very complicated discussion when you get into growing food for people around the world, especially in poor countries, and climate change caused by resource consumption in richer countries. The issues are more complicated, and the solution set is smaller.

In your chapter about hydrogen — which you express some doubts about — you say it’s not your job as a scientist to “pick winners and losers.” I’m curious about these moments of tension between your personal opinions and your position as a scientist. When do you speak up, and when do you choose to stand back?

I wish I had a perfect answer to that. I speak more often now than I did earlier in my career. I feel that we’ve run out of time. There’s more urgency today. I feel like I no longer have the luxury of just letting the data speak. I want to try to help people understand the available solutions and the things that we can do individually and systematically.

To succeed in the fight against climate change, we will, I think, need to accept solutions that are not our favorites. And that’s a difficult message. People tend to fight everything they’re not 100% happy with, but the climate is not going to be fixed by any single solution.

The part of your book that made me the most anxious was the chapter about methane leaks, where you’re driving around Boston taking air samples and having the methane sensors go off all over the place. It also reminds me of the chapter on indoor air pollution and how many of these forms of pollution are so passive — like methane quietly leaking into our homes or up from under our streets.

The city home work has been really interesting, and it’s consumed a lot of recent years of my life — much more than I expected it to. And yet the biggest surprise of our methane work in the homes was how slow but consistent leaks from appliances like stoves and the pipes in people’s walls produced more pollution than the methane that leaked when the appliances were on. And that’s because the appliance might be on for an hour a day, but for 23 hours a day, the slow bleed of methane continues to the atmosphere.

It isn’t passive, though. The pollutants we document include NOx gases that trigger asthma. Benzene, formed in flames, is a carcinogen. We would never willingly stand over the tailpipe of a car breathing in the exhaust, yet we willingly stand over a stove, breathing the exact same pollutants, day after day, meal after meal, year after year.

Your book takes readers to many places worldwide. Is there any one project or organization that stands out to you as particularly exciting or crucial?

I very much enjoyed learning about green steel manufacturing. The chapter that I enjoyed the most, though, was the trip to Finland [to see the work of the Snowchange Cooperative, a landscape restoration group]. What I liked about that project, first of all, was seeing people taking matters into their own hands and working for solutions. But what was so interesting for me was the idea of “rewilding,” in the European sense — they’re not interested in trying to recreate an exact replica of something that was present in 1900. They’re trying to restore a functioning ecosystem that will still be there in 100 years. It’s a beautiful sight and the message was very moving for me.

The book vacillates between optimism and a kind of wary realism. I think that’s kind of the conundrum of climate activists on the whole, but is it something you have thoughts about? Do you want readers to come away hopeful, or are you hoping this galvanizes action, too?

That duality, that tension, is deeply rooted in me, and perhaps many people who care about climate and environment. I study the Earth for a living; I see the changes happening not just year to year but decade to decade from now. And you can’t help but be discouraged about the lack of progress.

But on the other hand, I talk to students about how optimism and hope are muscles we can exercise. My first homework assignment in every class is for students to find things that are better today than they were 50 or 100 years ago. That list is long: life expectancy and childhood mortality; water and air quality; the decline of global poverty despite all the injustices that remain. Then there are many specific examples, like the phase-out of leaded gasoline, the Montreal Protocol, and my favorite example, the U.S. Clean Air Act, which saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year at a 30-fold return on investment, so workers are healthier and more productive. We all breathe easier and pay lower medical expenses from air pollution. So I talk to students about how it’s important to acknowledge past successes; by doing so, we make future successes, such as climate, more likely.

Are there any last thoughts about your book that you want to leave readers with?

In the book, I tend to emphasize technologies — maybe to a fault. We don’t talk enough about reducing consumption and demand. The world is deeply unequal in terms of resource use and pollution.

I’m obviously a nerdy guy, and I talk about how we’re in the “myocene” — the my-ocene — the era when the top 1% of the world’s population contributes more fossil carbon emissions than half the people on Earth. The world cannot support the global population at the levels of resource use that we have in the United States right now. Either we need to reduce our energy use and consumption somewhat, or those other people in those other countries will aspire to be like us and they’ll produce and use more.

One example is cars: if everyone in the world owned cars at the rate we do, there would be 7 billion cars instead of about 1.5 billion. And I don’t care whether those cars are EVs or hydrogen vehicles or whatever; the world would not be a more sustainable and richer place with 5 billion more cars on it. We need to talk about using less in this country, not just building new things.

50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution

In 1974, Gary Kildall got the first version working and changed the world of operating systems

Late in the summer of 1974, CP/M first started running on hardware. It became one of the first cross-platform microcomputer OSes, and revolutionized the hardware and software industries.…

John Boston | Making a Case for Healthy Intolerance

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Scenes of joy as American hostages return home

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Selina Thomas | Paris Piques Excitement for 2028

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Christine Flowers | Harris Campaign: Make Abortion Great Again

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Microsoft whiz dishes the dirt on the Blue Screen Of Death’s colorful past

CrowdStrike reminded the public that BSODs still exist. Their origins go back decades

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How Harris Left Medicare For All Behind

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Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

The minutes before a maintenance window closes are maybe not the best time to re-learn obscure router syntax

On Call The instructions on what to do at 5:00PM Friday are clear: down tools and prepare to have fun for two days. But as many Register readers are required to remain available to fix things all weekend, our team is commanded to use Fridays for a new instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that describes dodging danger and disasters while performing tech support tasks.…

FLTK 1.4.x Weekly Snapshot (master)

Today in SCV History (Aug. 2)

1935 – Newhall deputy Archie Carter sentenced to one year in jail for contributing to the delinquency of a minor after his wife fatally shot his 20-year-old mistress (the age of majority was 21) [story

Book Review | ‘Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show’ by Tommy Tomlinson

Americans released in historic prisoner swap arrive in US

UK crimebusters shut down global call-spoofing outfit that claimed 170K-plus victims

Suspected devs behind Russian Coms cuffed – now to find the users of the nastyware

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Webcurios 02/08/24

Japan mandates app to ensure national ID cards aren’t forged

First delays, then data leaks – now fraud detection needed at point of use

The Japanese government has released details of of an app that verifies the legitimacy of its troubled My Number Card – a national identity document.…

Amazon: Our cloud growth just sped up. Did you know we are also quite a big retailer?

Reveals Kuiper broadband sats to fly later this year and solid Q2 sales

Amazon.com has taken the unusual step of leading its quarterly results webcast with discussion of performance at Amazon Web Services.…

First-time buyers, especially in China, help Apple to quarterly revenue record

iPhone cash is a little off, but AI might just turn that around

Apple has posted its best-ever revenue for the June quarter, with help from first-time buyers of Macs and iPads.…

‘Historic act of resolve and compassion’: Family, supporters on prison swap

India contemplates compulsory dynamic 2FA for digital payments

SMS OTPs are overused, so bring on the tokens and biometrics

India’s central bank on Wednesday proposed a requirement for dynamically generated second authentication factors for most digital payments.…

Appeals court kicks fate of net neutrality in America further down the road

Judges wonder out loud: If Congress wanted this, it would have passed a law, no?

The fate of net neutrality in the US still hangs in the balance, with a decision now unlikely before the November presidential election.…

Here’s the Video for Our Fourth FOIA Forum: PACER with Seamus Hughes

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Public Health urging ‘common-sense precautions’ amid rising COVID-19 rates

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Historic prisoner swap frees Americans imprisoned in Russia

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Rotary Club hosts barbecue for sheriff’s deputies

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Canyon Country teen charged in juvenile court for attempted murder

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US sends cybercriminals back to Russia in prisoner swap that freed WSJ journo, others

Techno-crooks greeted by grinning Putin after landing

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County expected to formally approve city’s takeover of Hart Park

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Church to host Back to School carnival for families in need

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Announcing WASI 0.2.1

Welcome to the Bytecode Alliance blog. The Bytecode Alliance is a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating secure new software foundations, building on standards such as WebAssembly and WebAssembly System Interface (WASI).

Get Ready for PGconf.EU 2024: Schedule Now Live!

The schedule for the conference has now been published, and as you can see, we’ll have a great, diverse speaker lineup this year:

The conference is the largest PostgreSQL event in Europe and year after year brings together both renowned and emerging names in the Postgres ecosystem. Database developers, administrators, users, and open-source enthusiasts from all around the globe will come together to discuss the challenges, solutions, future of the database, and the upcoming release.

The first day of the conference is packed with half- and full-day Postgres training sessions, taught by PostgreSQL experts from around the world. These sessions have a limited number of places, so please register for those as soon as possible.

The conference always ends up with a long waiting list, so if you want to guarantee a seat, book your tickets today!

pgmoneta 0.13

PgBouncer 1.23.1 released

PgBouncer 1.23.1 has been released. This release fixes two crashes that could occur since 1.23.0. If you are on 1.23.0, upgrading to 1.23.1 is strongly recommended.

News gathered 2024-08-03

Trump, Vance head to Georgia after Harris event in same arena

Call for startups

Impressive

Aerosmith ends touring, citing permanent damage to singer’s voice

As recruiting rebounds, US Army expands basic training for modern warfare

Paris Olympics: Simone Biles wins women’s vault final for a second time

Berkeley cellphone store owner sentenced to 6 years for killing friend in DUI crash

Bay FC beats Club América in its final Summer Cup match

Forecasters expect depression nearing Florida to become tropical storm

Paris Olympics: U.S. women’s soccer team edges Japan in extra time to reach semifinals

Why the collapse of the Generative AI bubble may be imminent

Existential thoughts about Apple’s reliance on Services revenue

Harris foreign policy would bring continuity with some distinct emphases

Vallejo teen fatally shot in Oakland

Hunger at Home helping more restaurants with food recovery efforts

Pin-demonium hits Paris: Inside the pin-trading market at the Olympics

East Palo Alto tenants demand property owners improve living conditions

Meet the artist whose job is to paint beach volleyball at the 2024 Olympics

Tahiti’s youth surf culture gets a boost as island hosts the Paris Olympics

YOU LOVE TO SEE IT: Game On For Workers

Using Illustration To Help Investigations Stay Grounded and Approachable

The Time Ranger | When President Ford Ditched the SCV

DARPA suggests turning old C code automatically into Rust – using AI, of course

Now that’s a TRACTOR pull request

Suzette Martinez Valladares | Wanted: School Supply Tax Holiday

Rick Barker | Put an End to This

Ron Perry | Medical Insurance for All

Larry Moore | Harris a Frightening Thought

Byron York | Harris and the DEI Question

Servo enables parallel table layout

Robert Lamoureux | Can I replace the garburator myself?

Today in SCV History (Aug. 3)

Minority farmers set for $2 billion from USDA after years of discrimination

Simone Biles raises gymnastics bar so high that 5 skills bear her name

Scholarships help graduates attend college outside Hawaii a year after wildfire

Heat deaths of people without air conditioning underscore inequity

The “blowing smoke up your ass” theory of AI

Music to Lift the Spirit

Maui fire lawsuit parties reach $4B global settlement, court filings say

US colleges reembracing SAT as admissions requirement

Pentagon chief revokes plea deals with 3 Sept. 11 suspects

High heat expected in SCV starting Sunday

US military sending reinforcement to the Middle East

Faces of the SCV: Young cancer survivor working hard to become a doctor himself

About State Street

Aug. 9: College of the Canyons Welcome Day

Old Santa Barbara Days?

Saugus school district bond measure headed to ballot

US Justice Department sues TikTok, claiming it violated kids’ privacy

Concert In the Park Convenient Transportation Options

Heads Up for a Safe Start to the School Year| Ken Striplin

US pledges Israel will not stand alone if Iran attacks

Who did the West release in Thursday’s prisoner exchange?

Aug. 20: World Mosquito Day Vector Control Live Stream

San Francisco set to ban rent-hiking software algorithms

Automated price-fixing screwing over tenants? Fog off!

This Week in the IndieWeb

July 26 through August 2, 2024

Recent Events

Upcoming Events

What We’re Reading

Top New Wiki Pages

TUAW

indieweb-movie-club

Bear Blog

New Event Notes

Top Edited Wiki Pages

US, Canada near agreement on commercial space ventures

US lawmaker calls Chinese sanctions ‘badge of honor’

Will Suburbanites Buy an EV If It’s a Chevy Equinox?

The Gig Is Up

Securing Virtual Machines on Apple Silicon

Unread RSS Reader for Mac

The Switch From File Paths to URLs

Snapshots Aren’t Backups

Override xdg-open behavior with xdg-override

US pauses humanitarian program for citizens of four countries

Aug. 14: Webinar Explores Effects of Cerebral Palsy

UP Squared i12 Edge with Intel Core i7-1260P is now shipping