News gathered 2024-08-05
(date: 2024-08-05 17:01:48)
CSUN Prof Leads Study on How Climate Change Affects Joshua Trees
date: 2024-08-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
A team of researchers led by California State University, Northridge evolutionary biologist Jeremy Yoder partnered with hundreds of volunteer naturalists to reconstruct how 120 years of climate change has affected Joshua trees
https://scvnews.com/csun-prof-leads-study-on-how-climate-change-affects-joshua-trees/
Dow drops 1,000 points; Japanese stocks plunge as markets quake worldwide
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
new york — A scary Monday that started with a plunge abroad reminiscent of 1987 ’s crash swept around the world and pummeled Wall Street with more steep losses, as fears worsened about a slowing U.S. economy.
The S&P 500 dropped 3% for its worst day in nearly two years. The Dow Jones Industrial Average reeled by 1,033 points, or 2.6%, while the Nasdaq composite slid 3.4% as Apple, Nvidia and other Big Tech companies that used to be the stars of the stock market continued to wilt.
The drops were the latest in a global sell-off that began last week. Japan’s Nikkei 225 helped begin Monday by plunging 12.4% for its worst day since the Black Monday crash of 1987.
It was the first chance for traders in Tokyo to react to Friday’s report showing U.S. employers slowed their hiring last month by much more than economists expected. That was the latest piece of data on the U.S. economy to come in weaker than expected, and it’s all raised fear the Federal Reserve has pressed the brakes on the U.S. economy by too much for too long through high interest rates in hopes of stifling inflation.
Professional investors cautioned that some technical factors could be amplifying the action in markets, and that the drops may be overdone, but the losses were still neck-snapping. South Korea’s Kospi index careened 8.8% lower, and bitcoin dropped below $54,000 from more than $61,000 on Friday.
Even gold, which has a reputation for offering safety during tumultuous times, slipped about 1%.
That’s in part because traders began wondering if the damage has been so severe that the Federal Reserve will have to cut interest rates in an emergency meeting, before its next scheduled decision on Sept. 18. The yield on the two-year Treasury, which closely tracks expectations for the Fed, briefly sank below 3.70% during the morning from 3.88% late Friday and from 5% in April. It later recovered and pulled back to 3.89%.
“The Fed could ride in on a white horse to save the day with a big rate cut, but the case for an inter-meeting cut seems flimsy,” said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management. “Those are usually reserved for emergencies, like COVID, and an unemployment rate of 4.3% doesn’t really seem like an emergency.”
Of course, the U.S. economy is still growing, the U.S. stock market is still up a healthy amount for the year and a recession is far from a certainty. The Fed has been clear about the tightrope it began walking when it started hiking rates sharply in March 2022: Being too aggressive would choke the economy, but going too soft would give inflation more oxygen and hurt everyone.
Goldman Sachs economist David Mericle sees a higher chance of a recession within the next 12 months following Friday’s jobs report. But he still sees only a 25% probability of that, up from 15%, in part “because the data look fine overall” and he does not “see major financial imbalances.”
Some of Wall Street’s recent declines may simply be air coming out of a stock market that romped to dozens of all-time highs this year, in part on a frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology.
“Markets tend to move higher like they’re climbing stairs, and they go down like they’re falling out a window,” according to JJ Kinahan, CEO of IG North America. He chalks much of the recent worries to euphoria around AI subsiding, with pressure rising on companies to show how AI is turning into profits, and “a market that was ahead of itself.”
Treasury yields also pared their losses Monday after a report said growth for U.S. services businesses was a touch stronger than expected. Growth was led by arts, entertainment and recreation businesses, along with accommodations and food services, according to the Institute for Supply Management.
Still, stocks of companies whose profits are most closely tied to the economy’s strength took sharp losses on the fears about a slowdown. The small companies in the Russell 2000 index dropped 3.3%, washing out what had been a revival for it and other beaten-down areas of the market.
Making things worse for Wall Street, Big Tech stocks tumbled as the market’s most popular trade for much of this year continued to unravel. Apple, Nvidia and a handful of other Big Tech stocks known as the “Magnificent Seven” had propelled the S&P 500 to record after record this year, even as high interest rates weighed down much of the rest of the stock market.
But Big Tech’s momentum turned last month on worries investors had taken their prices too high and expectations for future growth are becoming too difficult to meet. A set of underwhelming profit reports that began with updates from Tesla and Alphabet added to the pessimism and accelerated the declines.
All told, the S&P 500 fell 160.23 points to 5,186.33. The Dow sank 1,033.99 to 38,703.27, and the Nasdaq composite tumbled 576.08 to 16,200.08.
Elon Musk is suing OpenAI again, claims CEO Sam Altman ‘betrayed’ him
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
These two are going through a really, really bad breakup
Elon Musk has decided he wants to bring Sam Altman and OpenAI to court after all in a brand-new lawsuit over whether OpenAI is actually open and not-for-profit.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/musk_new_lawsuit_openai/
Federal prison leaders excoriated for ‘unconscionable’ conditions at shuttered FCI Dublin women’s prison
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
The report found FCI Dublin’s leaders failed at nearly ever turn to keep inmates safe and ensure their claims of sexual abuse were investigated properly.
Bloomberg apologizes for premature story on prisoner swap, disciplines journalists involved
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
H-1B visa: Spouses on H-4 visa can keep working, but fight goes on
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
Two months after the right to work was granted in 2015 to holders of the H-4 visa – a residence permit for spouses of people on the H-1B skilled-worker visa – a group of tech workers sued the federal government, claiming the employment authorization illegally and unfairly forced them to compete for jobs against noncitizens.
Sale closed in San Jose: $1.9 million for a multi family
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
The property located in the 600 block of Bolton Court in San Jose was sold on July 12, 2024.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/05/sale-closed-in-san-jose-1-9-million-for-a-multi-family/
Kurtenbach: The 49ers finally have a viable option to resolve the Brandon Aiyuk contract drama
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
There’s a real chance Brandon Aiyuk has played his final game in red and gold.
Stock market finally discovers economy is cooling. Indexes take big dives
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
Nasdaq stock index, a Wall Street benchmark for the California-centric technology industry, fell 3.4% to its lowest level since May.
Parents of Secretly Filmed Child Take Santa Barbara Charter School, School District to Court for Negligence
date: 2024-08-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Teacher Steven Schapansky, who was arrested last month on a misdemeanor charge of invasion of privacy with a recording device, was filming students with hidden cameras for almost six years, the parents’ attorneys say.
The post Parents of Secretly Filmed Child Take Santa Barbara Charter School, School District to Court for Negligence appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Lawsuit: VTA mass shooting made bus driver’s PTSD worse, agency fired him over unexcused absences
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
VTA bus driver says transit agency failed to properly record his absences and later fired him. He’s suing them, but VTA won’t comment on the lawsuit.
San Francisco homicide: Man shot in Mission District
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
A man was fatally shot Monday morning in San Francisco’s Mission District, the police said. Officers called at 5 a.m. to 20th and Shotwell streets found the man on the ground, with a gunshot wound. After lifesaving efforts by police and paramedics, he was pronounced dead at the scene. No suspect details have been released.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/05/san-francisco-homicide-man-shot-in-mission-district-9/
TMU Students Can Now Major in Cinema & Digital Arts
date: 2024-08-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Master’s University Department of Communication has now expanded the Cinema and Digital Arts (CDA) program from an emphasis into a major due to the increasing number of students at The Master’s University interested in the “seventh art.”
https://scvnews.com/tmu-students-can-now-major-in-cinema-digital-arts/
Sell-off on Wall Street: Why it is happening and what it says about the economy
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
The sudden pullback has jolted investors and raised questions that go beyond financial markets to questions about the underlying health of the economy.
Stock meltdown puts S&P 500 on brink of correction: Markets wrap
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
Just as markets started celebrating signals from the Federal Reserve about a first rate cut, they were hit by a perfect storm — weak economic data, underwhelming corporate earnings, stretched positioning and poor seasonal trends.
US personnel wounded in attack against base in Iraq, officials say
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
Washington — At least five U.S. personnel were injured in an attack against a military base in Iraq on Monday, U.S. officials told Reuters, as the Middle East braced for a possible new wave of attacks by Iran and its allies following last week’s killing of senior members of militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah.
Two Katyusha rockets were fired at al Asad airbase in western Iraq, two Iraqi security sources said. One Iraqi security source said the rockets fell inside the base. It was unclear whether the attack was linked to threats by Iran to retaliate over the killings.
On Wednesday, Iran said the U.S. bears responsibility in the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran because of its support for Israel.
The U.S. officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said one of the wounded Americans was seriously injured. The casualty count was based on initial reports which could still change, they said.
“Base personnel are conducting a post-attack damage assessment,” one of the officials added.
Last week the U.S. carried out a strike in Iraq against individuals U.S. officials said were militants getting ready to launch drones and posed a threat to U.S. and coalition forces.
The U.S. has been watching to see if Iran would make good on its vow to respond to the killing of Haniyeh two days ago in Tehran, one in a series of killings of senior figures in the Palestinian militant group as the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza rages.
The Pentagon has said it will deploy additional fighter jets and Navy warships to the Middle East, as Washington seeks to bolster defenses following threats from Iran and its allies Hamas and Hezbollah.
A rare ally of both the U.S. and Iran, Iraq hosts 2,500 U.S. troops and has Iran-backed militias linked to its security forces. It has witnessed escalating tit-for-tat attacks since the Israel-Hamas war erupted in October.
Iraq wants troops from the U.S.-led military coalition to begin withdrawing in September and to formally end the coalition’s work by September 2025, Iraqi sources have said, with some U.S. forces likely to remain in a newly negotiated advisory capacity.
Baghdad has struggled to reign in Iran-backed armed groups that have attacked U.S. forces there and in neighboring Syria dozens of times since Oct. 7.
Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani spoke with U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on Sunday.
An Iraqi official said Blinken asked Sudani to help decrease regional tensions by helping to convince Iran to temper its response to an Israeli strike in Tehran that killed the leader of Hamas last week.
U.S. Army General Michael “Erik” Kurilla, head of U.S. Central Command, is currently in the Middle East. One of the U.S. officials said Kurilla was speaking with allies to ensure there was coordination in case of an Iranian attack against Israel.
US judge rules Google is a monopoly, search deals with Apple and Mozilla in peril
date: 2024-08-05, from: OS News
That sure is a big news drop for a random Tuesday. A federal judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets. “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” according to the court’s ruling, which you can read in full at the bottom of this story. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.” ↫ Lauren Feiner at The Verge Among many other things, the judge mentions Google’s own admissions that the company can do pretty much whatever it wants with Google Search and its advertisement business, without having to worry about users opting to go elsewhere or ad buyers leaving the Google platform. Studies from inside Google itself made it very clear that Google could systematically make Search worse without it affecting user and/or usage numbers in any way, shape, or form – because users have nowhere else to realistically go. While the ability to raise prices at will without fear of losing customers is a sure sign of being a monopoly, so is being able to make a product worse without fear of losing customers, the judge argues. Google plans to appeal, obviously, and this ruling has nothing yet to say about potential remedies, so what, exactly, is going to change is as of yet unknown. Potential remedies will be handled during the next phase of the proceedings, with the wildest and most aggressive remedy being a potential break-up of Google, Alphabet, or whatever it’s called today. My sights are definitely set on a break-up – hopefully followed by Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft – to create some much-needed breathing room into the technology market, and pave the way for a massive number of newcomers to compete on much fairer terms. Of note is that the judge also put yet another nail in the coffin of Google’s various exclusivity deals, most notable with Apple and, for our interests, with Mozilla. Google pays Apple well over 20 billion dollars a year to be the default search engine on iOS, and it pays about 80% of Mozilla’s revenue to be the default search engine in Firefox. According to the judge, such deals are anticompetitive. Mehta rejected Google’s arguments that its contracts with phone and browser makers like Apple were not exclusionary and therefore shouldn’t qualify it for liability under the Sherman Act. “The prospect of losing tens of billions in guaranteed revenue from Google — which presently come at little to no cost to Apple — disincentivizes Apple from launching its own search engine when it otherwise has built the capacity to do so,” he wrote. ↫ Lauren Feiner at The Verge If the end of these deals become part of the package of remedies, it will be a massive financial blow to Apple – 20 billion dollars a year is about 15% of Apple’s total annual operating profits, and I’m also pretty sure those Google billions are counted as part of Tim Cook’s much-vaunted services revenue, so losing it would definitely impact Apple directly where it hurts. Sure, it’s not like it’ll make Apple any less of a dangerous behemoth, but it will definitely have some explaining to do to investors. Much more worrisome, however, is the similar deal Google has with Mozilla. About 80% of Mozilla’s total revenue comes from a search deal with Google, and if that deal were to be dissolved, the consequences for Mozilla, and thus for Firefox, would be absolutely immense. This is something I’ve been warning about for years now, and the end of this deal would be yet another worry that I’ve voiced repeatedly becoming reality, right after Mozilla becoming an advertising company and making Firefox worse in the name of quick profits. One by one, every single concern I’ve voiced about the future of Firefox is becoming reality. Canonical, Fedora, KDE, GNOME, and many other stakeholders – ignore these developments at your own peril.
‘Follow the money’: Trial begins for ex-Antioch cop charged with college degree scam
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
At the start of the trial, jurors heard from the woman whose allegations against her ex-husband started the entire investigation into alleged corruption at the Antioch and Pittsburg police departments.
August 5, 2024, a big day in tech?
date: 2024-08-05, from: Gary Marcus blog
Big day.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/august-5-2024-a-big-day-in-tech
Farewell, Lynn Richardson
date: 2024-08-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Lynn Richardson’s talent was what made the Inkling Stamp Company a success, but she was also the business partner from heaven.
The post Farewell, Lynn Richardson appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/05/farewell-lynn-richardson/
US Supreme Court declines to halt Trump’s sentencing in hush money case
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
washington — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected a bid by the state of Missouri to halt Donald Trump’s upcoming sentencing for his conviction in New York on felony charges involving hush money paid to an adult film star and left a related gag order until after the November 5 presidential election.
The decision by the justices came in response to Missouri’s lawsuit claiming that the case against Trump infringed on the right of voters under the U.S. Constitution to hear from the Republican presidential nominee as he seeks to regain the White House.
The Supreme Court’s order was unsigned. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito indicated they would have taken up Missouri’s case but added that they “would not grant other relief.”
Trump was found guilty in May of falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence before the 2016 U.S. election about a sexual encounter she has said she had with Trump years earlier. Prosecutors have said the payment was designed help Trump’s chances in the 2016 election, when he defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Trump, the Republican candidate in this year’s election, denies having had sex with Daniels and has vowed to appeal his conviction after his sentencing, scheduled for September.
Missouri’s Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey filed a July 3 lawsuit against New York state asking the Supreme Court to pause Trump’s impending sentencing and the gag order placed on him by New York state judge Juan Merchan.
Legal disputes between states are filed directly to the Supreme Court.
Bailey argued that the criminal case against Trump violated the right of Missouri residents under the Constitution’s First Amendment to “hear from and vote for their preferred presidential candidate.”
“Instead of letting presidential candidates campaign on their own merits, radical progressives in New York are trying to rig the 2024 election by waging a direct attack on our democratic process,” Bailey said in bringing the case.
Republican attorneys general from Florida, Iowa, Montana and Alaska filed a Supreme Court brief in support of Missouri’s lawsuit.
Trump also faces federal and state criminal charges involving his efforts to undo his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
The Supreme Court in a July 1 ruling powered by its 6-3 conservative majority granted Trump substantial criminal immunity for actions taken in office. It all but ensured Trump would not face trial in the federal election subversion case before the election.
Trump’s lawyers promptly invoked the immunity ruling in a bid to toss the hush money verdict. They said prosecutors improperly relied on social media posts made in 2018 by Trump when he was serving as president that qualified as official communications.
The judge in the case said he would rule on Trump’s arguments by September 6. Merchan said that if he upholds the conviction, he would sentence Trump on September 18.
A New York state appeals court last week rejected Trump’s challenge to his gag order. The decision by the Appellate Division in Manhattan means Trump, who has called all the criminal cases against him politically motivated, cannot comment publicly about individual prosecutors and others in the case until his sentencing.
Secretaries of state urge Elon Musk to fix AI chatbot spreading election misinformation on X
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
Chicago — Five secretaries of state are urging Elon Musk to fix an AI chatbot on the social media platform X, saying in a letter sent Monday that it has spread election misinformation.
The top election officials from Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Washington told Musk that X’s AI chatbot, Grok, produced false information about state ballot deadlines shortly after President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race.
While Grok is available only to subscribers to the premium versions of X, the misinformation was shared across multiple social media platforms and reached millions of people, according to the letter. The bogus ballot deadline information from the chatbot also referenced Alabama, Indiana, Ohio and Texas, although their secretaries of state did not sign the letter. Grok continued to repeat the false information for 10 days before it was corrected, the secretaries said.
The letter urged X to immediately fix the chatbot “to ensure voters have accurate information in this critical election year.” That would include directing Grok to send users to CanIVote.org, a voting information website run by the National Association of Secretaries of State, when asked about U.S. elections.
“In this presidential election year, it is critically important that voters get accurate information on how to exercise their right to vote,” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said in a statement. “Voters should reach out to their state or local election officials to find out how, when, and where they can vote.”
X did not respond to a request for comment.
Grok debuted last year for X premium and premium plus subscribers and was touted by Musk as a “rebellious” AI chatbot that will answer “spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”
Social media platforms have faced mounting scrutiny for their role in spreading misinformation, including about elections. The letter also warned that inaccuracies are to be expected for AI products, especially chatbots such as Grok that are based on large language models.
“As tens of millions of voters in the U.S. seek basic information about voting in this major election year, X has the responsibility to ensure all voters using your platform have access to guidance that reflects true and accurate information about their constitutional right to vote,” the secretaries wrote in the letter.
Since Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it to X, watchdog groups have raised concerns over a surge in hate speech and misinformation being amplified on the platform, as well as the reduction of content moderation teams, elimination of misinformation features and censoring of journalists critical of Musk.
Experts say the moves represent a regression from progress made by social media platforms attempting to better combat political disinformation after the 2016 U.S. presidential contest and could precipitate a worsening misinformation landscape ahead of this year’s November elections.
Hometown Boy Scotty Pieper Returns to Play for TMU
date: 2024-08-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Scotty Pieper is returning to his hometown as he will be playing baseball at The Master’s University
https://scvnews.com/hometown-boy-scotty-pieper-returns-to-play-for-tmu/
NASA Seeks Student Missions to Send to Space in 2026, Beyond
date: 2024-08-05, from: NASA breaking news
NASA announced a new round of opportunities for CubeSat, developers to build spacecrafts on that will fly on upcoming launches through the agency’s CSLI (CubeSat Launch Initiative). CubeSats are a class of small spacecraft called nanosatellites. The initiative provides space access to U.S. educational institutions, certain non-profit organizations, and informal educational institutions such as museums and science centers, as well as […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-seeks-student-missions-to-send-to-space-in-2026-beyond/
US urged countries to ‘pass messages’ to Iran against escalation, State Department says
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — The United States has been urging countries through its diplomatic engagements to tell Iran that escalation in the Middle East is not in their interest, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Monday.
Speaking at a daily briefing, Miller said this was a “critical moment” for the region and that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was working the phones to help calm the tensions, but also said Washington was preparing for all possibilities.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in the Iranian capital Tehran last week, an attack that drew threats of revenge on Israel and fueled further concern that the conflict in Gaza was turning into a wider Middle East war.
Iran has blamed Israel and has said it will “punish” it; Israeli officials have not claimed responsibility for the killing. Iran backs Hamas, which is at war with Israel in Gaza, and also supports the Lebanese group Hezbollah, whose senior military commander Fuad Shukr was killed in an Israeli strike on Beirut last week.
The top U.S. diplomat spoke Monday with Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani and Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty on the tensions in the Middle East.
“One of the points of the engagements that we have had is to urge countries to pass messages to Iran and urge countries to make clear to Iran that it is very much not in their interests to escalate this conflict, that it is very much not in their interest to launch another attack on Israel,” he said.
Miller did not say definitively whether Washington’s messages have been disseminated to Iran or through which channel.
“I would expect that some of them would pass that message along and impress that point upon the government of Iran,” he added.
Google paying to be default search on phones is totally against antitrust law, judge rules
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Web giant to seek second opinion after bench labels biz ‘a monopolist’ in DoJ win
Google’s payments to make its search engine the default for smartphone browsers and elsewhere violate US antitrust law, a federal judge ruled Monday.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/google_default_search_deals_violate/
Google loses massive antitrust case over its search dominance
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
Washington — A judge on Monday ruled that Google’s ubiquitous search engine has been illegally exploiting its dominance to squash competition and stifle innovation in a seismic decision that could shake up the internet and hobble one of the world’s best-known companies.
The highly anticipated decision issued by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta comes nearly a year after the start of a trial pitting the U.S. Justice Department against Google in the country’s biggest antitrust showdown in a quarter century.
After reviewing reams of evidence that included testimony from top executives at Google, Microsoft and Apple during last year’s 10-week trial, Mehta issued his potentially market-shifting decision three months after the two sides presented their closing arguments in early May.
“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote in his 277-page ruling.
It represents a major setback for Google and its parent, Alphabet Inc., which had steadfastly argued that its popularity stemmed from consumers’ overwhelming desire to use a search engine so good at what it does that it has become synonymous with looking things up online.
Google’s search engine currently processes an estimated 8.5 billion queries per day worldwide, nearly doubling its daily volume from 12 years ago, according to a recent study released by the investment firm BOND.
Google almost certainly will appeal the decision in a process that ultimately may land in the U.S. Supreme Court.
For now, the decision vindicates antitrust regulators at the Justice Department, which filed its lawsuit nearly four years ago while Donald Trump was still president and has been escalating it efforts to rein in Big Tech’s power during President Joe Biden’s administration.
The case depicted Google as a technological bully that methodically has thwarted competition to protect a search engine that has become the centerpiece of a digital advertising machine that generated nearly $240 billion in revenue last year. Justice Department lawyers argued that Google’s monopoly enabled it to charge advertisers artificially high prices while also enjoying the luxury of having to invest more time and money into improving the quality of its search engine — a lax approach that hurt consumers.
As expected, Mehta’s ruling focused on the billions of dollars Google spends every year to install its search engine as the default option on new cellphones and tech gadgets. In 2021 alone, Google spent more than $26 billion to lock in those default agreements, Mehta said in his ruling.
Google ridiculed those allegations, noting that consumers have historically changed search engines when they become disillusioned with the results they were getting. For instance, Yahoo — now a minor player on the internet — was the most popular search engine during the 1990s before Google came along.
Mehta said the evidence at trial showed the importance of the default settings. He noted that Microsoft’s Bing search engine has 80% share of the search market on the Microsoft Edge browser. The judge said that shows other search engines can be successful if Google is not locked in as the predetermined default option.
Still, Mehta credited the quality of Google’s product as an important part of its dominance, as well, saying flatly that “Google is widely recognized as the best [general search engine] available in the United States.”
Mehta’s conclusion that Google has been running an illegal monopoly sets up another legal phase to determine what sorts of changes or penalties should be imposed to reverse the damage done and restore a more competitive landscape.
Besides boosting Microsoft’s Bing search engine, the outcome could hurt Google at a critical pivot point that is tilting technology in the age of artificial intelligence. Both Microsoft and Google are among the early leaders in AI in a battle that now could be affected by Mehta’s market-rattling decision.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was one of the Justice Department’s star witnesses during the testimony that covered his frustration with Google deals with the likes of Apple that made it nearly impossible for the Bing search engine to make any headway, even as Microsoft poured more than $100 billion in improvements since 2009.
“You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth, and you search on Google,” Nadella said at one point in his testimony. “Everybody talks about the open web, but there is really the Google web.”
Nadella also expressed fear that it might take an antitrust crackdown to ensure the situation didn’t get worse as AI becomes a bigger force in search.
Google still faces other legal threats besides this one, both in the U.S. and abroad. any antitrust lawsuits brought against Google domestically and abroad. In September, a federal trial is scheduled to begin in Virginia over the Justice Department’s allegations that Google’s advertising technology constitutes an illegal monopoly.
https://www.voanews.com/a/google-loses-massive-antitrust-case-over-its-search-dominance/7730990.html
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Surprise Poll Reveals a Key Trump Weakness Against Kamala Harris.
https://newrepublic.com/article/184533/surprise-poll-reveals-key-trump-weakness-kamala-harris
Every Microsoft employee is now being judged on their security work
date: 2024-08-05, from: OS News
After a number of very bug security incidents involving Microsoft’s software, the company promised it would take steps to put security at the top of its list of priorities. Today we got another glimpse of the step it’s taking, since the company is going to take security into account during performance reviews. Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft’s chief people officer, has outlined what the company expects of employees in an internal memo obtained by The Verge. “Everyone at Microsoft will have security as a Core Priority,” says Hogan. “When faced with a tradeoff, the answer is clear and simple: security above all else.” A lack of security focus for Microsoft employees could impact promotions, merit-based salary increases, and bonuses. “Delivering impact for the Security Core Priority will be a key input for managers in determining impact and recommending rewards,” Microsoft is telling employees in an internal Microsoft FAQ on its new policy. ↫ Tom Warren at The Verge Now, I’ve never worked in a corporate environment or something even remotely close to it, but something about this feels off to me. Often, it seems that individual, lower-level employees know all too well they’re cutting corners, but they’re effectively forced to because management expects almost inhuman results from its workers. So, in the case of a technology company like Microsoft, this means workers are pushed to write as much code as possible, or to implement as many features as possible, and the only way to achieve the goals set by management is to take shortcuts – like not caring as much about code quality or security. In other words, I don’t see how Microsoft employees are supposed to make security their top priority, while also still having to achieve any unrealistic goals set by management and other higher-ups. What I’m missing from this memo and associated reporting is Microsoft telling its employees that if unrealistic targets, crunch, low pay, and other factors that contribute to cutting corners get in the way of putting security first, they have the freedom to choose security. If employees are not given such freedom, demanding even more from them without anything in return seems like a recipe for disaster to me, making this whole memo quite moot. We’ll have to see what this will amount to in practice, but with how horrible employees are treated in most industries these days, especially in countries with terrible union coverage and laughable labour protection laws like the US, I don’t have high hopes for this.
Disaster Response Coordination System (DRCS) Formally Launches
date: 2024-08-05, from: NASA breaking news
The NASA Disasters Response Coordination System (DRCS) formally launched on 6/13/24 during a ceremony at NASA Headquarters with Administrator Nelson as the keynote speaker. The DRCS is a revamped one NASA approach in how the agency responds to natural hazards and disasters domestically and internationally to support partners and stakeholders The DRCS will be organized […]
Coming in Hot – NASA’s Chandra Checks Habitability of Exoplanets
date: 2024-08-05, from: NASA breaking news
This graphic shows a three-dimensional map of stars near the Sun. The blue haloes represent stars observed with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton. Astronomers are using these X-ray data to determine how habitable exoplanets may be based on whether they receive lethal radiation from the stars they orbit. This research will help guide […]
Ken Striplin | Santa Clarita Making Strides in Addressing Homelessness
date: 2024-08-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
It has been a landmark year for putting the crucial infrastructure in place to address homelessness in our community
https://scvnews.com/ken-striplin-santa-clarita-making-strides-in-addressing-homelessness/
Marshall Disasters Team Support National Weather Service Offices During May Severe Weather
date: 2024-08-05, from: NASA breaking news
May 2024 was a very active month for severe weather across the United States, with several hundred tornadoes occurring throughout the United States. The MSFC Disasters team has been working with several National Weather Service (NWS) Offices across the Southeast this spring to help support their damage surveys with high-resolution commercial imagery and derived products. […]
Snowstorm Field Campaign Wins Prestigious Presidential Rank Group Achievement Award
date: 2024-08-05, from: NASA breaking news
Personnel from the MSFC Earth Science Branch and local partners participated in the Investigation of Microphysics and Precipitation for Atlantic Coast-Threatening Snowstorms (IMPACTS), and they are members of the IMPACTS team that recently won the prestigious Presidential Rank Group Achievement Award from NASA. IMPACTS was a highly successful NASA Earth Venture Suborbital airborne field campaign […]
KNaCK LIDAR Technology Demonstration at 5th Joint EVA Test Team (JETT5) Field Compaign, Flagstaff, Arizona
date: 2024-08-05, from: NASA breaking news
Michael Zanetti (ST13), Kyle Miller (EV42), and Chris Whetsel (ES52) conducted a technology demonstration and field work with the NASA JSC 5th Joint EVA Test Team (JETT-3) from 5/17-23/24, near SP Crater, Flagstaff, AZ. JETT5 tested full-up mission operations with communication to JSC-Houston, and included astronauts Kate Rubins and Andre Douglas testing ATLAS suits and […]
Swimming in Schools May Help Fish Save Energy in Turbulent Waters
date: 2024-08-05, from: Smithsonian Magazine
A new study suggests schooling fish use up to 79 percent less energy in rough conditions than fish that swim alone
Climate Change Causing You Decision Fatigue? Try a Map
date: 2024-08-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Maps can help us understand and visualize the complexity of the impacts of our decisions, which is especially critical as people navigate climate change.
The post Climate Change Causing You Decision Fatigue? Try a Map appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/05/climate-change-causing-you-decision-fatigue-try-a-map/
IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society – Earth Science Informatics Workshop and Hackathon on Remote Sensing Data Systems Held at SRM University, Chennai
date: 2024-08-05, from: NASA breaking news
Muthukumaran Ramasubramanian, Slesa Adhikari, and Nish Pantha from IMPACT/ST11 organized hands-on workshops and a hackathon in collaboration with the Department of Computational Intelligence at SRMIST’s School of Computing in Chennai, India. These sessions were held as part of the IEEE GRSS-ESI TC (Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society – Earth Science Informatics Technical Committee) Remote Sensing […]
Ribbon Cutting Scheduled to Celebrate Reopening of Plaza del Mar Band Shell
date: 2024-08-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SANTA BARBARA, CA – August 5, 2024 The City of Santa Barbara Parks and Recreation Department will host a ribbon-cutting
The post Ribbon Cutting Scheduled to Celebrate Reopening of Plaza del Mar Band Shell appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
SERVIR Science Coordination Office (SCO) and Bhutan’s Implementing Partners Launch Farm Action Toolkit Service
date: 2024-08-05, from: NASA breaking news
On 5/13/24, in alignment with the NASA Interagency Agreement with the US Department of State Advancing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math in Bhutan through Increased Earth Observation Capacity, Aparna R. Phalke, Sarah Cox and Tony Kim (ST11) traveled to Thimphu, Bhutan, to represent the SERVIR SCO at the official launch on 5/17/24 of the “Farm […]
Free Will Astrology
date: 2024-08-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Week of August 8.
The post Free Will Astrology appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/05/free-will-astrology-222/
100 years young: SCV resident looks back on a century of life
date: 2024-08-05, from: The Signal
“I don’t feel any older,” Barbara Blakey Stephens said after celebrating her 100th birthday on Saturday. The birthday girl made sure she looked her best during her birthday brunch at […]
The post 100 years young: SCV resident looks back on a century of life appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/100-years-young-scv-resident-looks-back-on-a-century-of-life/
Participation at the National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Resource Event on Capitol Hill
date: 2024-08-05, from: NASA breaking news
Manil Maskey (ST11/IMPACT) represented NASA at a discussion on the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot program held on Capitol Hill. The event brought together key members of the House AI Caucus, including Representatives Anna Eshoo, Bill Foster, Haley Stevens, Jim Baird, and Sean Casten. In attendance were several congressional staffers and the director […]
SERVIR/ResilienceLinks Webinar on “Floods, Drought, and Water Security: How is Water Data Critical to Climate Resilience?”
date: 2024-08-05, from: NASA breaking news
On 5/22/24, Chinmay Deval, the Water Security Lead at the SERVIR Science Coordination Office, moderated a virtual panel for the ResilienceLinks monthly webinar series. ResilienceLinks is the knowledge platform for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) Center for Resilience. The theme for May focused on Water Data and Climate Resilience. The panel featured distinguished […]
Excessive Heat Warning Continues for SCV
date: 2024-08-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Los Angeles County Health Officer has issued an excessive heat warning for the Santa Clarita Valley as high temperatures have been forecast through Tuesday
https://scvnews.com/excessive-heat-warning-continues-for-scv/
50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution
date: 2024-08-05, from: OS News
CP/M is turning 50 this year. The ancient Control Program for Microcomputers, or CP/M for short, has been enjoying a modest renaissance in recent years. By 21st century standards, it’s unimaginably tiny and simple. The whole OS fits into under 200 kB, and the resident bit of the kernel is only about 3 kB. Today, in the era of end-user OSes in the tens-of-gigabytes size range, this exerts a fascination to a certain kind of hobbyist. Back when it was new, though, this wasn’t minimalist – it was all that early hardware could support. ↫ Liam Proven I’m a little too young to have experienced CP/M as anything other than a retro platform – I’m from 1984, and we got our first computer in 1990 or so – but its importance and influence cannot be overstated. Many of the conventions set by CP/M made their way to the various DOS variants, and in turn, we still see some of those conventions in Windows today. Had Digital Research, the company CP/M creator Gary Kildall set up to sell CP/M, accepted the deal with IBM to make CP/M the default operating system for the then newly-created IBM PC, we’d be living in a very different world today. Digital Research would also create several other popular and/or influential software products beyond CP/M, such as DR DOS and GEM, as well as various other DOS variants and CP/M versions with DOS compatibility. It would eventually be acquired by Novell, where it faded into obscurity.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140419/50-years-ago-cp-m-started-the-microcomputer-revolution/
Swing Meets Salsa to Shut Down the Streets for Santa Barbara Lobero’s Free Block Party with Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and Ozomatli
date: 2024-08-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The Big Bad Voodoo Daddy beat goes on: a conversation with drummer Kurt Sodergren.
The post Swing Meets Salsa to Shut Down the Streets for Santa Barbara Lobero’s Free Block Party with Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and Ozomatli appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
What AI bubble? Groq rakes in $640M to grow inference cloud
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
In the gold rush, be the one handing out the shovels
Even as at least some investors begin to question the return on investment of AI infrastructure and services, venture capitalists appear to be doubling down. On Monday, AI chip startup Groq — not to be confused with xAI’s Grok chatbot — announced it had scored $640 million in series-D funding to bolster its inference cloud.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/groq_ai_funding/
The Home Page | Fiesta Flavors and Road Trip Romance
date: 2024-08-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Pastel paletas, catnip dreams, and more.
The post The Home Page | Fiesta Flavors and Road Trip Romance appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/05/the-home-page-fiesta-flavors-and-road-trip-romance/
Vance Backed Attempts To Gut Dozens of Biden Rules
date: 2024-08-05, from: The Lever News
The vice presidential pick attempted to kill a slate of government protections under an obscure federal law — hinting at the GOP’s corporate vision for the next presidency.
https://www.levernews.com/vance-backed-attempts-to-gut-dozens-of-biden-rules/
17th-Century Home Unearthed in Colonial Williamsburg
date: 2024-08-05, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Crews were constructing a new archaeology center when they stumbled upon the historic structure’s foundations and accompanying artifacts
Marcia Mayeda | Urgent Need for Pet Shelter Adopters
date: 2024-08-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
I write to you today with deep concern as we face a critical crisis in our animal care centers
https://scvnews.com/marcia-mayeda-urgent-need-for-pet-shelter-adopters/
Michigan probes Musk-backed PAC website that weirdly tried and failed to help register people to vote
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
It claimed to have one job and couldn’t do it
The Michigan Secretary of State’s office has opened an investigation into America PAC, a political action committee backed by billionaire Elon Musk.…
When Vultures Nearly Disappeared in India, Half a Million People Died, Too, Study Finds
date: 2024-08-05, from: Smithsonian Magazine
By being nature’s clean-up crew, the often maligned birds help prevent the spread of diseases, according to a new study
Circle of Hope’s 20th Annual Tea set for Oct. 19
date: 2024-08-05, from: The Signal
News release The nonprofit Circle of Hope announced that its annual tea event, designed to raise awareness of breast cancer and raise funds to help those in the community fighting […]
The post Circle of Hope’s 20th Annual Tea set for Oct. 19 appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/circle-of-hopes-20th-annual-tea-set-for-oct-19/
Safari 17.6
date: 2024-08-05, from: TidBITS blog
https://tidbits.com/watchlist/safari-17-6/
Site-Specific Play Comes to Santa Barbara’s Stearns Wharf
date: 2024-08-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
See ‘Whalers’ Triptych, Part I’ at Moby Dick Restaurant August 19-28.
The post Site-Specific Play Comes to Santa Barbara’s Stearns Wharf appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/05/site-specific-play-comes-to-santa-barbaras-stearns-wharf/
Kiwanis Club Donates Adult Tricycles to VHS Special Needs Department
date: 2024-08-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Santa Clarita Kiwanis Club recently completed the first segment of it’s Special Needs Tricycle Program
https://scvnews.com/kiwanis-club-donates-adult-tricycles-to-vhs-special-needs-department/
BusyCal 2024.3.3
date: 2024-08-05, from: TidBITS blog
https://tidbits.com/watchlist/busycal-2024-3-3/
Little Snitch 6.0.4
date: 2024-08-05, from: TidBITS blog
https://tidbits.com/watchlist/little-snitch-6-0-4/
TextExpander 7.8
date: 2024-08-05, from: TidBITS blog
https://tidbits.com/watchlist/textexpander-7-8/
Judge rules that Google ‘is a monopolist’ in US antitrust case
date: 2024-08-05, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
<div class="known-bookmark">
<div class="e-content">“A federal judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets.
“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” the court’s ruling, which you can read in full at the bottom of this story, reads. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”“
This is seismic, both for Google and for the web. As The Verge points out, this is so far about liabilities, not about any prescriptive remedy. But as one of the major factors in the decision was the payments that Google makes to browser manufacturers, it seems likely that any remedy will change how this works. In turn, the impact across tech could be significant.
Apple received $20 billion from Google in 2022 to be the default search engine (it shares 36% of ad revenue from Safari users with the company). That’s a big number, but nothing compared to its $394bn in total revenue. But for Mozilla, the impact might be more profound: in 2021, these payments represented 83% of its revenue. What happens to it without this underwriting?
It’s too early to say exactly what will change, but this is also potentially a gift for the new batch of AI startups that are trying to seize search engine ground. The era of the internet flux that we’ve found ourselves in - wherein everything is once again up for grabs and seemingly-entrenched incumbents change dramatically at a moment’s notice - shows no sign of slowing.
<p>[<a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/24155520/judge-rules-on-us-doj-v-google-antitrust-search-suit">Link</a>]</p>
</div>
</div>https://werd.io/2024/judge-rules-that-google-is-a-monopolist-in-us-antitrust
How Moscow spins hostage-prisoner swap as domestic victory
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/how-moscow-spins-hostage-prisoner-swap-as-domestic-victory/7730805.html
Another law firm piles on Intel for Raptor Lake CPU failures as complaints grow louder
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Meanwhile, a boutique PC builder says Intel didn’t even need to chase high clock speeds
Yet another law firm says it’s investigating a potential class action lawsuit against Intel as Raptor Lake CPU owners increasingly complain about chip instability and failure.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/another_law_firm_piles_on/
Moxy Santa Barbara Hotel Is Bold Rebrand of Funk Zone Hotel
date: 2024-08-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Formerly The Wayfarer, Moxy is a fun and unique addition to the neighborhood.
The post Moxy Santa Barbara Hotel Is Bold Rebrand of Funk Zone Hotel appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/05/moxy-santa-barbara-hotel-is-bold-rebrand-of-funk-zone-hotel/
City confirms new diner location set for east side
date: 2024-08-05, from: The Signal
The city of Santa Clarita’s Planning Division officials confirmed a Northern California restaurant chain recently received the greenlight for a second location on the east side of the city. Black […]
The post City confirms new diner location set for east side appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/city-confirms-new-diner-location-set-for-east-side/
ARPA-E Is Cleantech’s Favorite Shadow VC
date: 2024-08-05, from: Heatmap News
When the George W. Bush administration established the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy, better known as ARPA-E, the number one goal for the new agency sounded an ambitious and patriotic note: “To enhance the economic and energy security of the United States through the development of energy technologies.” And from that uncontroversial foundation, a bipartisan bastion of cleantech innovation was born.
I knew I wanted to dig into the critical role that ARPA-E plays in the climate tech funding landscape after Rajesh Swaminathan, a partner at Khosla Ventures, told me that he views the agency as the “least talked about VC in town.” So I reached out to ARPA-E’s director, Evelyn Wang, to learn more.
Of course, ARPA-E isn’t actually a venture capital firm — it provides no-strings-attached funding to promising energy projects rather than aiming for a return on investment. “So a little bit different,” Wang told me. “Our mission is very much focused on energy independence, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and enhancing energy efficiency.”
The Bush administration established ARPA-E in 2007 with the passage of the America COMPETES Act, which aimed to improve the technological competitiveness of the United States via investments in research and development. But the agency was funded for the first time in 2009, under Obama, as a part of an $800 billion stimulus package in response to the Great Recession. A substantial chunk of that funding — $90 billion — was allocated for clean energy, which the administration would go on to boast amounted to the “largest single investment in clean energy in history.”
Yet whether it’s been Bush or Obama — or Trump or Biden — in the White House, the messaging around ARPA-E has always trended less towards renewables and climate mitigation and more towards energy security and economic competitiveness. As the name suggests, ARPA-E is modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which was established in 1958 in response to the Soviet’s launch of the Sputnik satellite. DARPA has since helped birth such little-known tech as the entire internet, GPS, automated voice recognition, and self-driving cars.
But while the de facto customer for DARPA-developed tech is always the Department of Defense, the pathway to commercialization for ARPA-E projects mainly relies on private sector interest. In that sense, the goal of ARPA-E is neatly aligned with that of venture capitalists: Get tech to market. Because while scientific learnings are all well and good, Wang said that “ultimately, we need to see these technologies commercialized — to actually be out there — to actually affect the ecosystem and change the energy landscape.”
Since ARPA-E can eschew the profit motive, it’s able to fund high-risk, high-reward projects at the earliest stages, when most investors would be reluctant to take on that level of uncertainty. Yet the inherent risk means the success rate for ARPA-E projects as measured by metrics such as the number of companies it’s spawned (157), exits via mergers, acquisitions or IPOs (30), and additional partnerships with other government agencies (360), can seem low compared to the 1,590 projects that the agency has funded over the past 15 years. A climate tech investor I spoke with on background told me that while they love ARPA-E and are glad it exists, they were expecting more success stories by now.
That’s at least partially because even after a project is funded and proof-of-concept has been demonstrated, there’s often still a ways to go before investors are ready to jump in. “I think when we first stood up ARPA-E, the idea was that at that point, it would be sufficiently de-risked for the private sector to then pick it up and invest,” Wang told me. But frequently, that hasn’t been the case. ARPA-E usually funds projects for one to three years, but often climate tech innovation relies on deeply complex and thus inherently slow advancements in science and engineering — think fusion energy, novel battery development, or direct air capture. Many venture funds have 10 year time horizons, so if investors don’t see a payoff happening in that timeframe, they’ll probably hold back.
The investor I spoke with on background told me that ARPA-E has become more effective in partnership with the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, established in 2021 under the Department of Energy, which uses its $25 billion budget to create model buildouts of new technology with private sector partners. Earlier this year, OCED selected six ARPA-E awardees focused on industrial decarbonization to receive a combined total of up to $775 million.
Even so, the investor told me, ARPA-E funding alone still might not be enough to get companies to a place where OCED would be interested. To help close that gap, ARPA-E started a program called SCALEUP, a mouthful of an acronym for The Seeding Critical Advances for Leading Energy (Technologies) with Untapped Potential, in 2019. It provides a small number of ARPA-E projects with follow-on funding to further prove out their concepts — provided they can identify at least one commercialization partner such as a potential customer, end-user, or supplier willing to take a stake in the development of the tech and help it get to market.
So far, Wang says the program has yielded some successes. The list includes LongPath Technologies, which monitors methane emissions and leaks in the oil and gas industry and received a conditional loan last year from the DOE’s Loan Programs Office; Natron Energy, which just opened the first commercial-scale sodium-ion battery production facility in the U.S.; and Sila, a battery materials manufacturer that has raised over $1.3 billion in total, and secured contracts with Mercedes-Benz and Panasonic.
When you look at ARPA-E’s success rate in terms of dollars in and dollars out, though, it starts to look pretty darn efficacious as is. Since 2009, ARPA-E has provided more than $3.8 billion for research and development, leading to over $12.6 billion in private-sector follow-on funding, while the 30 exits to date have yielded a combined market valuation of $22.2 billion. And since it often takes climate tech companies around a decade to mature to the point where they’re ready for an exit event, many of ARPA-E’s companies have yet to reach the acquisition or IPO threshold.
These days, ARPA-E projects are facing a completely different funding landscape than in the 2000s — one ripe with both excitement and cash as well as increasing competition. So while Wang told me that the agency’s goal is always to look for “technological whitespace” in the energy landscape, “it’s getting more crowded,” she said. “And I think in that context, we’ve strategically decided that we should also think about broader vision type efforts.” To that end, ARPA-E has identified three comprehensive focus areas: developing clean primary energy sources such as geothermal, small modular nuclear reactors, fusion and geologic hydrogen; power delivery for non-electrical sources, such as energy transported via hydrogen or heat; and figuring out how to source carbon sustainably, such as via engineered plants and algae.
Now that ARPA-E has been supporting projects for a decade and a half, it’s getting more experimental when it comes to developing novel testbeds for its tech. Exhibit A is the San Antonio International Airport, which recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the agency to deploy a series of ARPA-E backed technologies.
Many major airports are actually higher tech than passengers may realize, and given the mounting pressure on the aviation industry to decarbonize, they’re also open to novel sustainability solutions. In San Antonio, the airport is deploying EV chargers from Imagen Energy and sodium-ion battery tech from Natron Energy, both of which could help electrify their ground vehicles, as well as a distributed energy management system from Autogrid, which allows airports to control their virtual power plants, microgrids, EV fleet, and demand response measures. Other tech, such as hybrid-electric planes from Ampaire, could be integrated into the airport in the future.
That’s a lot of technology development for not many headlines. And when a company raises a major round or goes public, sometimes you have to dig deep to discover their ARPA-E origins. Hence, the “least talked about VC in town” comment. In some sense, Wang says, this is intentional.
“When we think about success, if our teams, our companies are successful, and they shine, then we shine,” she told me, and maybe that’s the way it should continue to be. Because while advertising government investment in anything seen as “clean” or “green” can immediately draw both partisan praise and ire, funding for ARPA-E has been steadily creeping up nearly every year since 2015. And yes, that includes the Trump era, even though the former president seemingly wanted to axe the agency altogether. Congress, it turned out, was not on board with that plan.
“Our mission is about energy independence and bolstering our economy and I think everyone agrees with this mission,” Wang told me. “Everyone,” of course, will always be an overstatement. But perhaps Wang is right that the agency does function better as a behind-the-scenes player. As she put it, speaking of the companies the agency funds, “It’s more about them, right? And how that affects the ecosystem, and helps our nation in terms of what we need to do as a country, and how that sets an example for the world.”
Editor’s note: This story initially misstated the size of
the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the amount of funding
allocated to clean energy.
https://heatmap.news/technology/arpa-e-climate-tech
Shredding Tunes
date: 2024-08-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Iconic musician-skateboarder Tommy Guerrero set to perform in Santa Barbara at SOhO.
The post Shredding Tunes appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/05/shredding-tunes/
Stock-trading apps fall under the feet of stampeding panicking investors
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
They’re doing you a favor, probably best not to look today
As stock markets suffered a bit of a wobble today, share-trading apps and sites fell over as investors barreled in to see how badly their portfolios had been hit.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/stock_market_outages/
Caltrans Announces SR-126 Lane Closures, Debris Removal
date: 2024-08-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The California Department of Transportation announces repairs on State Route 126, quarter mile east of Pena Ranch Road, to clear the shoulder and roadway of mudslide/debris, clear and clean drainage systems, repair damaged slopes and place erosion control
https://scvnews.com/caltrans-announces-sr-126-lane-closures-debris-removal/
Beta for Apple Intelligence in Apple Mail
date: 2024-08-05, from: Michael Tsai
Cabel Sasser (Hacker News): Apple Intelligence in 15.1 just flagged a phishing email as “Priority” and moved it to the top of my Inbox. This seems… bad I’ve been trying to test the new features in Mail to make sure that they work properly with my apps, but Mail is not showing any categories or […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/05/beta-for-apple-intelligence-in-apple-mail/
Apple Intelligence Privacy Dark Patterns
date: 2024-08-05, from: Michael Tsai
After I got off the beta waitlist, I went to enable Apple Intelligence, and it wouldn’t let me do so without also enabling Siri. I don’t find Siri to be useful on my Macs and tend to restrict it to my iPhone to prevent accidentally triggering the wrong device. It also doesn’t seem to work […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/05/apple-intelligence-privacy-dark-patterns/
Apple’s Q3 2024 Results
date: 2024-08-05, from: Michael Tsai
Apple (transcript, MacRumors, MacStories, ArsTechnica): The Company posted quarterly revenue of $85.8 billion, up 5 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.40, up 11 percent year over year. […] “During the quarter, our record business performance generated EPS growth of 11 percent and nearly $29 billion in operating cash flow, […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/05/apples-q3-2024-results/
“Find My” Privacy
date: 2024-08-05, from: Michael Tsai
Tim Sweeney (MacRumors): This feature is super creepy surveillance tech and shouldn’t exist. Years ago, a kid stole a Mac laptop out of my car. Years later, I was checking out Find My and it showed a map with the house where the kid who stole my Mac lived. WTF Apple? How is that okay?! […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/05/find-my-privacy/
Enterprise spend on cloud up sharply as world biz splashes $80B in Q2
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Plus: Oracle nudges to top of second tier providers
Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services continues to grow, now nearing $80 billion per quarter, with the big three continuing to dominate and Oracle emerging as leader of the second tier providers.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/cloud_market_grows_22_percent/
DEVONthink 3.9.7
date: 2024-08-05, from: TidBITS blog
https://tidbits.com/watchlist/devonthink-3-9-7/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Secretaries of state call on Musk to fix chatbot over election misinformation.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/05/elon-musk-harris-grok-misinformation
Americans have more depth than anyone at pool, but gold harder to come by
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
NANTERRE, France — No one can match America’s depth at the pool.
That said, claiming the top step on the Olympic medal podium is no longer a given for U.S. swimmers.
Nine days of thrilling competition at La Defense Arena wrapped up Sunday night with the Americans barely pulling out the lead in the gold medal standings thanks to a victory in the last race.
The U.S. finished with eight golds, its fewest since the 1988 Seoul Games and one ahead of its biggest rival, Australia.
“It’s one of the worst performances in history as a U.S. team,” Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian ever and part of the NBC broadcast team in Paris, said Monday. “Something’s got to happen before 2028 because if you have a repeat like this, it’s gonna be even more embarrassing.”
Notably, the rest of the world totaled more victories (20) than the United States and Australia combined, the first time that’s happened since the 1996 Atlanta Games.
The Americans will certainly be intent on improving their performance heading into the home games at Los Angeles in 2028, when swimming will have in its largest, most spectacular setting yet — a temporary pool inside SoFi Stadium with a capacity for some 38,000 fans.
Still, with more and more international swimmers getting their training in the U.S. — and prominent American coaches such as Bob Bowman spreading their knowledge to other countries — a more diverse list of gold medalists is likely to be the norm going forward.
“This sport is growing and I can’t help but feel like we’ve been a part of that,” American gold medalist Bobby Finke said. “It’s something we should take home and be proud of.”
Two of the biggest swimming stars in Paris, France’s Léon Marchand and Canada’s Summer McIntosh, train in the U.S. but won a bevy of medals for their home countries.
Marchand, who captured four individual golds as well as a relay bronze, is coached by Bowman, best known as the guy who guided Michael Phelps throughout his record-setting career. It was a bit strange to see Bowman in a France shirt, working on the coaching staff of Marchand’s nation.
After a break to savor his Olympic triumph, Marchand will return to the U.S. to continue his work with Bowman, who now heads the swimming program at the University of Texas.
“Look at Bob Bowman. He doesn’t care if you’re from the USA or whatever,” said Shane Ryan, an American-born swimmer who competes for Ireland. “He just wants to coach the fastest swimmers at all times.”
McIntosh trains with a team in Sarasota, Florida, where she honed the form that produced three individual gold medals — the most ever by a Canadian athlete — and a silver.
“I think competition is great,” said longtime American stalwart Ryan Murphy, who trains with several international athletes at Cal-Berkeley including Spain’s Hugo González. “He’s pushed me a lot. There’s plenty of days where he’s right next to me and helping me get better.”
Murphy said it’s only natural in today’s information-driven world that more nations are rising up to challenge the U.S.
“People will take a video of what they’re doing in practice and put it up on social media right away,” he said. “The learning curve is so quick around the world. That’s a big reason why there’s so many talented athletes across the world now.”
The U.S. certainly has its shining moments in Paris.
Katie Ledecky won two more golds, moving her into a tie for second place among all athletes on the career list with nine. She also joined Phelps as the only swimmers to win the same event at four straight Summer Games with her victory in the 800-meter freestyle.
The women’s team produced several more stars, including Torri Huske (three golds, two silvers), Gretchen Walsh (two golds, two silvers) and Regan Smith (two golds, three silvers).
But there were plenty of disappointments, particular on the men’s side.
Caeleb Dressel, a big star at the Tokyo Games with five gold medals, finished sixth in the 50 freestyle and didn’t even qualify for the final of the 100 butterfly.
Murphy settled for a bronze in the 100 backstroke and, like Dressel, failed to qualify for the final of his other individual event, the 200 back.
In all, the American men produced only two gold medals, and they didn’t pick up an individual victory until Finke’s world record in the 1,500 freestyle on the final night.
“You always want to be better,” said Anthony Nesty, head coach of the men’s team. “Yes, we want our athletes to win gold medals, but the other teams have great athletes as well. We have to go back, all the coaches in the U.S., get back on it and hopefully four years from now we have a better result. From the men, for sure.”
The depth of the American team remains its biggest strength. Even with four of its most prominent stars — Dressel, Murphy, Lilly King and Simone Manuel — managing only one individual medal (Murphy’s bronze in the 100 back), the U.S. easily led the overall medals table with 28.
Three of the four world records set at the meet came from the Americans, two of them in relays.
“Whether our athletes won a gold medal or failed to make a semifinal or whatever it might be,” said U.S. women’s coach Todd DeSorbo, “you’ve got to learn from it, go back home and be better.”
Will AI ‘Photographs’ Make Selfies a Thing of the Past?
date: 2024-08-05, from: The Signal
We’ve all been there, whether it’s taking a professional photo for your resume, posing for a company headshot, or simply getting the perfect selfie, everyone has agonized in front of […]
The post Will AI ‘Photographs’ Make Selfies a Thing of the Past? appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/will-ai-photographs-make-selfies-a-thing-of-the-past/
Hidden Underground Magma Pools Fueled Iceland’s Volcanic Eruptions, Study Suggests
date: 2024-08-05, from: Smithsonian Magazine
A subterranean plumbing system of magma beneath the island’s Reykjanes Peninsula may have helped set off the recent series of eruptions that could last for centuries
That cyber-heist of 2.9B personal records? There’s a class-action lawsuit looming for that
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Background check biz accused of negligence
A lawsuit has accused a Florida data broker of carelessly failing to secure billions of records of people’s private information, which was subsequently stolen from the biz and sold on an online criminal marketplace.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/national_public_data_lawsuit/
Senior economic aide Sperling leaving White House to work on Harris campaign
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
washington — White House senior adviser Gene Sperling is leaving his administration position to work with Vice President Kamala Harris’ election campaign as the Democrats step up efforts to challenge Donald Trump on policy issues in November’s election.
Sperling will be a senior economic adviser to Harris’ policy team. The shift was revealed by White House officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.
Sperling served both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as director of the White House National Economic Council. President Joe Biden tasked Sperling with managing his $1.9 trillion pandemic aid package, a role in which Sperling implemented the temporary expansion of the child tax credit. He was also the White House liaison to the union and car companies during the auto strikes.
“Under Gene’s leadership, the American Rescue Plan has delivered economic relief to cities and counties across the country, protected millions of union pensions, made the largest-ever federal investment in public safety, and kept thousands of small businesses afloat,” Biden said in a statement obtained by The Associated Press.
Sperling first worked with Harris when she was California attorney general during his time in the Obama administration. He frequently consulted with her as an outside adviser when she was in the Senate. The two partnered during the Biden presidency on promoting the monthly payments for the child tax credit, among other policies.
The pandemic programs halved child poverty with tax credits that went to 40 million families and provided rental assistance to 8 million.
But Republican critics blame the pandemic aid for sparking higher inflation, an issue that has hounded the Biden administration as many voters say that groceries, housing and gasoline have become less affordable. Financial markets opened Monday with a selloff as a weaker than expected jobs report last week has raised concerns about the U.S. economy’s resilience.
The White House has maintained that the inflation was global in nature, with chief of staff Jeff Zients saying that the efforts coordinated by Sperling “produced the strongest economy in the world.”
North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, described the work that Sperling spearheaded as “generational investments” and credited him working with states to get the programs right.
Anaconda’s Python-for-Excel escapes Azure Cloud, heads for your PC
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Badger, badger, badger your CIO to let you use this, perhaps
Anaconda, the maker and distributor of data science tools, has unleashed a public beta of Anaconda Code that enables Python code to be run locally within Microsoft Excel.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/anaconda_excel_python/
One hurt in single-car crash
date: 2024-08-05, from: The Signal
A single-car crash Monday morning slowed west-side commuters and left one person injured. The cause of the crash, which happened around 8:18 a.m. on McBean Parkway, just west of Newhall […]
The post One hurt in single-car crash appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/one-hurt-in-single-car-crash/
MiSTer, PlayStation 1, Nintendo 64 and the MIPS CPU
date: 2024-08-05, from: Stephen Smith’s blog
Introduction In the late mid-90s, the Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation introduced a new generation of game consoles. Both utilized MIPS CPUs and licensed advanced 3D graphics capabilities from SGI. In fact SGI was the main developer for the N64 hardware as SGI was looking to expand into consumer markets from their lofty usual expensive […]
https://smist08.wordpress.com/2024/08/05/mister-playstation-1-nintendo-64-and-the-mips-cpu/
‘S.W.A.T.,’ ‘NCIS’ Among Seven Productions Filming in SCV
date: 2024-08-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The city of Santa Clarita’s Film Office has released the list of seven productions currently filming in the Santa Clarita Valley for the week of Monday, Aug. 5 to Sunday, Aug.
https://scvnews.com/s-w-a-t-ncis-among-seven-productions-filming-in-scv/
X-Ample Technology comes to WROCC
date: 2024-08-05, from: RiscOS Story
The next Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club (WROCC) meeting is almost upon us – it takes place on Wednesday, 7th August – and the guest speaker this month will be Paul Reuvers from X-Ample Technology (XAT). Based in the Netherlands, XAT was at one time the Dutch representative for Computer Concepts, and later became the official Acorn distributor. The company also has a range of products of their own, having developed presentation software, medical applications, databases, both software and hardware for television subtitling, and much more. Paul’s talk will provide…
https://www.riscository.com/2024/xat-wrocc/
A Statue of Johnny Cash Is Coming to the U.S. Capitol
date: 2024-08-05, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Standing alongside civil rights leader Daisy Bates, the singer-songwriter will represent the state of Arkansas in Statuary Hall
@Tomosino’s Mastodon feed (date: 2024-08-05, from: Tomosino’s Mastodon feed)
I got a fabulous new-to-me sewing machine. It’s so much fancier than anything I’ve ever used. I love it!
Today I’m practicing basics: straight stitches, zig-zag, overlock, blind hems, joins, embroidery, curves, spacing, etc. Little break now, then button holes.
I’ll start on some basic patterns soon. Maybe dice bags for the players in my TTRPG game.
https://tilde.zone/@tomasino/112910464563481714
US completes withdrawal from last base in Niger
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-completes-withdrawal-from-last-base-in-niger/7730618.html
Freighter bound for the ISS suffers engine abort
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Are the woes of the Calamity Capsule catching?
NASA’s latest cargo mission to the International Space Station (ISS) has encountered problems on its way to the orbiting outpost.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/freighter_bound_for_iss_engine_abort/
Students Gain Career Skills Through VIA Connecting to Success Program
date: 2024-08-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Valley Industry Association, a leading advocate for workforce development, proudly shares the success and impact of its Connecting to Success Program, which continues to transform the career readiness landscape for students and employers alike
https://scvnews.com/students-gain-career-skills-through-via-connecting-to-success-program/
Americans abroad help countries grow women’s basketball for Olympic opportunity
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
VILLENEUVE-D’ASCQ, France — Germany has lots of players who can score. The Germans knew they needed a point guard for the Paris Games with the country making its Olympic debut in women’s basketball.
Alexis Peterson, a native of Columbus, Ohio, has proven to be a perfect fit.
The guard who played at Syracuse in college has helped Germany qualify for Wednesday’s quarterfinals in Paris, and German coach Lisa Thomaidis said Peterson has been everything they wanted.
“Ball control, that’s always been the issue for us,” Thomaidis said. “We’ve had to kind of do it by committee. We’ve never really had a true point guard. We’ve been able to, you know, do it OK. But to get to that next level? We knew that she was someone that would be a huge help.”
Peterson’s not the only American abroad in these Olympics playing for other countries. The reason? The stacked pipeline of U.S. talent is essentially impossible to crack, and a FIBA rule allows countries to tap players with dual citizenships or a player who becomes a naturalized citizen.
For Peterson, it’s been a long road.
Now 29, she was drafted 15th overall in 2017 by the WNBA’s Seattle Storm. She spent six seasons bouncing around the WNBA from Indiana, Phoenix and the Las Vegas Aces. She’s played in Israel, Poland and France.
Then Germany and Thomaidis reached out to Peterson last summer to gauge her interest. She had represented the U.S. in 3x3 basketball, so USA Basketball and the German Basketball Association agreed to a change of Peterson’s nationality so she could play for Germany.
“If you recall, like Las Vegas head coach Becky Hammon played for Russia,” Peterson said of the Aces coach. “So it’s been happening for a while. Players find opportunities elsewhere and make the most of those opportunities. So I’m grateful that I was given this opportunity.”
Peterson has lots of company at these Games playing for other countries.
Yvonne Anderson was born in Springdale, Arkansas, and is the daughter of college coach Mike Anderson. The point guard will be playing in her second straight Olympic quarterfinals for Serbia against Australia on Wednesday. She helped Serbia finish fourth three years ago in the Tokyo Games.
Then, Anderson was fitting into a new team, figuring out her role. Time has made a big difference.
“At this point, I have a bond with the team,” said Anderson, who has been wearing a mask protecting the nose she broke earlier this year. “This is my family. Like, these are my girls. This is my team.”
Megan Gustafson from Port Wing, Wisconsin, played at Iowa and was the 2019 AP women’s player of the year. The 6-foot-4 Gustafson currently is a backup on the WNBA’s Aces and said yes when Spain asked if she’d be interested in playing for their team.
With her scoring and rebounding, Spain was among the first to qualify for the quarterfinals and will play Belgium on Wednesday.
Gabby Williams has dual citizenship. She played at UConn and was a late addition to the 2021 French Olympic team that won bronze in Tokyo, beating Serbia and Anderson.
Even more special because Williams’ French mother finally got to watch her daughter play for France in person.
“I think that was really, really hard on my mum to miss the Olympics (in Tokyo),” Williams said. “And then, of course, when you have games when it doesn’t go well and to not have your family there, that’s always really hard, and then to celebrate without them too is also really difficult.”
There are many others.
Houston native Mya Hollingshed played at Colorado and was the eighth pick overall by Las Vegas in the 2022 WNBA draft. Her grandfather, Terry Sykes, was a 1978 NBA draft pick by Washington. She has been playing for Puerto Rico since the 2022 World Cup.
Nigeria became the first African team, male or female, to reach the Olympic quarterfinals in basketball. The roster features five players born in the U.S. with four others who played at American colleges. Nigeria plays the U.S. on Wednesday.
Peterson spends up to 11 months a year in Europe with Fairfax, Virginia, home when in the U.S. Her European experience and being a pass-first point guard is why Thomaidis saw Peterson as a perfect fit for Germany’s roster.
“We knew we had a lot of weapons that we can distribute the ball to, and she’s been just that,” Thomaidis said.
Germany wants to make a splash in these Games as a big step toward hosting the 2026 World Cup. Olympic success will only give women’s basketball a huge boost in Germany, and these Olympians are getting messages of support and know people are paying attention.
“This is huge for German women’s basketball, for little girls in Germany right now watching us here compete here as the underdogs of our group and come out is just so inspiring to them,” Peterson said. “And I know it’ll give them something to look forward to as well.”
Writearound
date: 2024-08-05, from: Tedium feed
How I gradually fell out of love with the idea of using a code editor for all of my writing—in part because of a subtle MacOS feature that Linux doesn’t have.
https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/16762389/linux-markdown-writing-vs-code
Leaked Documents Show Nvidia Scraping ‘A Human Lifetime’ of Videos Per Day to Train AI
date: 2024-08-05, from: 404 Media Group
Internal emails, Slack conversations and documents obtained by 404 Media show how Nvidia created a yet-to-be-released video foundational model.
https://www.404media.co/nvidia-ai-scraping-foundational-model-cosmos-project/
Hotel to Search Rooms During DEF CON Hacking Conference
date: 2024-08-05, from: 404 Media Group
“As you may or may not know, a well-known hacking convention will be held in Las Vegas during your stay,” Resorts World Las Vegas writes. “We will be conducting scheduled, brief visual and non-intrusive room inspections daily,” it adds.
https://www.404media.co/hotel-to-search-rooms-during-def-con-hacking-conference/
How to Watch the Perseids, the ‘Best Meteor Shower of the Year’
date: 2024-08-05, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The annual celestial event is one of the year’s most anticipated, and it will peak from August 11 to 12
Infineon announces layoffs as Q3 results disappoint
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Follows 15% job cuts from chip giant Intel, with CEO blaming weak economy
Infineon has become another chipmaker to shed a chunk of the workforce to cut costs after reporting shrinking sales.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/infineon_announces_layoffs_as_q3/
‘We Have a Rattlesnake Problem’: Wildland Firefighters in the West Must Also Face a Slithering, Venomous Foe
date: 2024-08-05, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Nearly 100 large fires are burning in the United States right now, including some in rattlesnake territory
We’ll Always Have Heat Records
date: 2024-08-05, from: Heatmap News
Temperatures may still be scorching, but hey, at least you probably don’t have to swim in the Seine.
Don’t get used to cooler temperatures
The Midwest cooled off a bit over the weekend — but doesn’t mean extreme temperatures are behind us. More heat is in store this week for the Central Plains and the deep South. A heat dome developing in the Western side of the country will push hot air over to those regions, Bryan Jackson, a National Weather Service meteorologist, told me.
“Cities like Denver, Oklahoma City and Kansas City will have temperatures ranging from 95 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit the rest of the work week. That’s 6 to 12 degrees above historical averages,” Paul Pastelok, a senior meteorologist at Accuweather, told me.
The conditions in the Southern Plains across the Gulf States into the interior Southeast will be even more extreme, as high humidity levels will make already high temperatures in cities like Houston, Memphis, Tennessee, Jackson, Mississippi feel 8 to 10 degrees hotter, Pastelok explained. To be clear, that means heat indexes as high as 110.
Over in the West, the heat will focus over eastern Oregon, southern Idaho, Nevada, and central and southern California. According to Pastelok, Boise, Idaho, will see temperatures above 100 degrees for most of this week — 8 to 14 degrees above historical averages.
Olympians are having more trouble staying cool than winning medals
Beyond sleeping in cardboard beds and swimming in the Seine (which is potentially still full of E.coli), athletes are having to deal with the intense heat in the city.
In 2021, Tokyo became the hottest Olympic Games ever, with daily highs averaging nearly 90 degrees and the heat index soaring well past 113 degrees. While Paris won’t come close to challenging that, it’s still been plenty hot. Temperatures in the French capital reached 97 degrees last Tuesday before settling back into the high 70s over the weekend.
To counter the heat, athletes were taking extra breaks to hydrate, but sometimes not even that was enough. “We were drinking hot water out there,” British tennis player Jack Draper told ABC News. USA gymnast-slash-golden girl Simone Biles also complained about the heat and having to go around in a bus without AC. Spectators also struggled, and volunteers had to use a water hose to spray those in the bleachers at a beach volleyball game.
- Looking Ahead: After a cooler weekend, temperatures in Paris will trend warmer again early this week. The city will likely see temperatures above 86 degrees today and tomorrow, Jason Nicholls, lead international forecaster at Accuweather, told me. That same cycle will repeat again from mid-week through Friday. One spot of good news, though, for those toughing it out in the City of Lights: You’re likely already through the worst of it.
Park Fire rages
The Park Fire is now the fourth largest wildfire in California’s history — and there might still be weeks before it’s quenched. As of this morning, only 31% of the fire had been contained, with one more county being added to the evacuation list. Hundreds of structures have been destroyed, and over 400,000 acres have been burned.
Looking at California’s fire season to date, the numbers are even more shocking. During the summer of 2023, the state responded to 119 wildfire incidents. So far this summer — and remember we still have all of August to go — the state has already responded to 321 wildfires, according to Cal Fire data.
- Looking Ahead: The chances of putting out the Park Fire this week are low, as “precipitation is not in the forecast to help firefighters,” Pastelok told me. Dry thunderstorms and gusty winds coming from the south to southwest predicted for this week will also make the fire harder to contain. New wildfires in the region can also be expected.
“Extended summer” will last into fall
The first couple of weeks of August will continue to see much of the same extreme heat the country has experienced so far this summer, according to Pastelok. In fact, the Southeast looks to be getting even hotter and more humid late this week and into next. In northern California and parts of Oregon, some cooling may happen around the middle of the month, but not enough to end the wildfire season. More significant opportunities for cooler weather in the region won’t start until September — or even October.
Seattle and Portland may get lucky with a more substantial drop in temperatures later in August, but the Northeast will continue hot and humid throughout all of this month. The location of the cooler weather will mostly be determined by storms, Pastelok explained. “If more storms hit the East coast, the cooling will drive into the Midwest,” he said. “If the storms drive into the Gulf, then warmth will remain back to the Midwest and cooling will be more confined to the northern Rockies and Northwest.”
- Looking Ahead: From September through November, meteorologists at AccuWeather expect temperatures to be 1 to 3 degrees above historical averages. The only region that will be spared is the Pacific Northwest, where cooler, wetter weather will pop up earlier. This also means that the risk of extreme weather events, such as tornadoes and wildfires, will continue high through the end of the year.
The coldest place on the planet is not even that cold anymore
Not even Antarctica is safe from bizarre temperatures this summer. Last month, an intense heat wave caused temperatures across the continent to average up to 50 degrees above normal. Temperatures were up 82 degrees from historical readings on some days.
The numbers confirm what climate scientists have been telling us for years: Climate change will be most intensely perceived in the polar regions, making temperatures soar even higher in the rest of the globe. Zeke Hausfather, a researcher at Berkeley Earth, told The Guardian that the heat wave in Antarctica was one of the main factors behind the scorching temperatures in the last few weeks.
Extreme weather sends China from drought to drowning
Now major cities in China are also struggling under boiling heat. Shanghai issued its first red warning alert — the most severe temperature alert in the country — for the year last Thursday; the next day, temperatures along the country’s eastern coast hit 104 degrees. On August 3, the city of Hangzhou faced a high of almost 107 degrees, breaking its previous record set in 2022. Warnings have also been issued for the provinces of Fujian, Anhui, Jiangsu, among others, and intense heat is expected to continue through this week.
In Henan province, which had been battling a severe drought after months of no rain, the situation has taken a turn. In late July, the province was hit by a brutal typhoon, leading to the evacuation of tens of thousands.
This year, China recorded its hottest July in history.
https://heatmap.news/climate/paris-olympics-heat
Jill On Money: Consumers confound economists
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
When the government released its most recent update on U.S. economic growth (Gross Domestic Product or GDP), it was a classic “upside surprise.”
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/05/jill-on-money-consumers-confound-economists/
The stock market losses continue this morning
date: 2024-08-05, from: Marketplace Morning Report
In early trading this Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq Composite Index both fell more than 1,000 points, but recovered some. A weaker jobs report on Friday suggests to some that the Federal Reserve was too slow to lower interest rates raising the possibility of a recession in the U.S. We’ll hear the latest. And later, what happens when K-Pop meets AI?
California police releases photos of suspects in killing of former ‘General Hospital’ actor Johnny Wactor
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
LAPD said the three men were trying to steal a catalytic converter when the Wactor interrupted them.
Vatican: Boston archbishop, ally of sex abuse victims, retires
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
Rome — U.S. Cardinal Sean O’Malley, known for championing survivors of sexual abuse and pushing the Catholic Church to reform, is stepping down as the Archbishop of Boston, the Vatican announced Monday.
The 80-year-old will be replaced by Richard Henning, the 59-year-old bishop of Providence, to helm the fourth-largest diocese in the United States, the Vatican said in a statement.
It did not give a reason, saying only that Pope Francis had accepted O’Malley’s resignation.
In the Catholic Church, bishops who lead a diocese have a traditional retirement age of 75, but the pope has the discretion to ask them to stay on longer.
For now, O’Malley remains head of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, a body created by Pope Francis to fight pedophilia by priests that the bishop has led since 2014.
O’Malley’s resignation ends a two-decade chapter leading Catholics in the largely Irish and Italian city of Boston, where the global scandal over child sex abuse by clergy erupted in 2002, the year before he arrived.
An ally of Francis, O’Malley is part of the Franciscan mendicant order, Friars Minor Capuchin, and spent his early years as a priest building bridges with the immigrant Hispanic community in the diocese of Washington DC.
Before arriving in Boston, O’Malley served as bishop of Saint Thomas, a diocese covering all the US Virgin Islands, and later of Fall River, Massachusetts, south of Boston.
In Fall River and the diocese of Palm Beach, Florida, he managed the fall-out of scandals involving the sexual abuse of minors by priests.
But it was in Boston where O’Malley came to prominence, managing what was then the highest-profile US clerical sex abuse scandal, later depicted in the Academy Award-winning film, “Spotlight.”
Recognized for his rapport with victims and his speed in settling cases, under O’Malley’s watch the archdiocese agreed to pay $85 million to settle nearly 550 victim lawsuits.
https://www.voanews.com/a/vatican-boston-archbishop-ally-of-sex-abuse-victims-retires/7730409.html
The significance of Bluesky and decentralized social media
date: 2024-08-05, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
<div class="known-bookmark">
<div class="e-content">“The larger social networks provide a level of distribution that’s worth tapping into, but I strongly encourage investing a portion of your energy into networks where you will be able to maintain ownership long-term.”
Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne talks about how the rise of the new, decentralized / federated social networks allow publishers to retain control.
“They have data portability baked in from the beginning. When you use these networks, you are much more likely to be able to maintain control over your content and audience than if you use social networks owned by large corporations with complex ownership structures of their own, and often with public markets to answer to.”
I’m a Buffer customer. I love that it works with both Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as every other major social network. More than that, I’ve long admired Joel’s approach while running Buffer: it’s a transparent company that works in the open and genuinely values independence. Alongside excellent ventures like micro.blog, I wish there were more like it.
<p>[<a href="https://joel.is/bluesky/">Link</a>]</p>
</div>
</div>https://werd.io/2024/the-significance-of-bluesky-and-decentralized-social-media
Elon Musk files new lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
While the first lawsuit was filed in California state court, the new one was filed in federal court in Northern California and is nearly double in length. In contrast to the original suit, it includes claims that OpenAI is engaging in racketeering activity.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/05/elon-musk-files-new-lawsuit-against-openai-and-sam-altman/
Sneaky SnakeKeylogger slithers into Windows inboxes to steal sensitive secrets
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Malware logs users’ keystrokes, pilfers credentials, exfiltrates data
Criminals are preying on Windows users yet again, this time in an effort to hit them with a keylogger that can also steal credentials and take screenshots.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/snakekeylogger_malware_windows/
Grad Students Find Inevitable Patterns in Big Sets of Numbers
date: 2024-08-05, from: Quanta Magazine
A new proof marks the first progress in decades on a problem about how order emerges from disorder.The post Grad Students Find Inevitable Patterns in Big Sets of Numbers first appeared on Quanta Magazine
‘Charger hogs’ are ruining the electric vehicle experience. One company is clamping down on bad manners
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
At 10 of the busiest EV fast charging stations in California, Electrify America has enacted a strict limit. Once a car’s batteries are 85% charged, charging will automatically stop and the driver will be told to unplug.
Tulip Creative Computer is a small, cheap, open source PC for making music and more (available for $59, but you can also build your own)
date: 2024-08-05, from: Liliputing
The Tulip Creative Computer is an open source computer designed for making music or coding simple games or other applications. It’s not exactly the most powerful little computer money can buy, but it doesn’t take a lot of money to buy one: you can pick up a pre-built Tulip system for $59 or build your own […]
The post Tulip Creative Computer is a small, cheap, open source PC for making music and more (available for $59, but you can also build your own) appeared first on Liliputing.
NASA Sends More Science to Space, More Strides for Future Exploration
date: 2024-08-05, from: NASA breaking news
Biological and physical investigations aboard the Northrop Grumman Commercial Resupply mission NG-21 included experiments studying the impacts of zero gravity on grass, how packed bed reactors could improve water purification both in space and on Earth, and observations on new rounds of samples that will allow scientists to learn more about the characteristics of different materials as they change phases on the tiniest of scales.
Lagniappe for August 2024
date: 2024-08-05, from: NASA breaking news
Explore Lagniappe for August 2024 featuring: Gator Speaks The roll out of NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) Artemis II core stage from NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans on July 16 brought warm feelings to this Gator heart of mine. It shows the continued progress toward the Artemis II test flight for NASA’s first […]
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/stennis/lagniappe-for-august-2024/
Simone Biles finishes off her return to the Olympics with a silver on floor exercise
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
Paris — American gymnast Simone Biles didn’t get the golden sendoff she hoped.
Biles earned silver in the floor exercise finals on Monday — her 11th Olympic medal — after a routine that included a couple of costly steps out of bounds.
Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade became the first gymnast to beat Biles in a floor final in a major international competition, posting a score of 14.166 that finished just ahead of Biles at 14.133.
Jordan Chiles, a longtime friend of Biles, earned the bronze.
The 27-year-old Biles, considered the greatest in the history of the sport, wasn’t at her usual best during a routine set to music from pop icons Taylor Swift and Beyonce.
Still, she boosted her medal haul in Paris to four, gold in the team, all-around and vault finals and a silver that came as a surprise in her signature event.
Biles’ medal total (including seven gold, two silver, two bronze) ties Czechoslovakia’s Vera Caslavska for the second-most by a female gymnast in Olympic history. She missed a chance to add a fifth Paris medal earlier Monday when she fell during the beam final, finishing fifth.
Though she can make it look easy at times, it is not. She thudded to the floor during her floor warm-up and had the balky left calf she tweaked in qualifying re-wrapped before she competed.
Her tumbling passes weren’t perfect — she stepped out of bounds twice — but her difficulty is usually so far above everyone else that it hardly matters.
Not this time. She received a 7.833 execution score that included 0.6 in deductions for stepping out of bounds, allowing Andrade to win her second Olympic gold.
Still, wearing a red-white-and-blue leotard featuring thousands of crystals, Biles ended nine days of competition in Paris by silencing the critics once and for all who have long derided her for pulling out of multiple events at the Tokyo Games three years ago.
She won four medals in all, just one less than she did eight years ago in Rio de Janeiro.
Chiles — the last competitor of the day — initially received a 13.666 from judges. After some delay, her total was boosted by 0.1 when she filed an inquiry about her difficulty score, pushing Chiles past Romanians Ana Barbosu and Sabrina Maneca-Voinea and into third.
World stocks plunge on fears of US economic slowdown
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
New York — Stock markets across the globe plunged Monday as investors sold stocks on worries that the U.S. economy, the world’s largest, might be slowing and possibly headed to a recession.
In afternoon trading, all three major U.S. indexes — the Dow Jones Industrial Average of 30 blue chip stocks, the broader S&P 500 index and the tech-heavy NASDAQ — were still down more than 2% after sustaining even steeper declines earlier in the day.
In Europe, the Pan-European Stoxx 600 index fell 1.5%, rallying from a larger dip earlier in the day, as every major market in Europe declined. The FTSE 100, Britain’s benchmark index, dipped just over 2%, its worst day since July 2023.
The sell-off started in Japan, with the Nikkei 225 index suffering its largest single-day point drop in history, ending the day down a staggering 12.4% — drawing comparisons to the “Black Monday” stock market crash of 1987. Other Asian markets also fell.
Monday’s sell-off began last week after a monthly U.S. jobs report showed significantly slower hiring, with 114,000 new jobs in July, far fewer than had been forecasted and sharply down from recent months. Unemployment rose to 4.3%, its highest level in nearly three years.
The two pieces of data spooked investors, deepening fears that the U.S. economy could be sliding into a recession and that the Federal Reserve may have waited too long to cut its benchmark rate. It has delayed any rate cut until September, when the central bank’s policy makers are expected to trim the key rate that sets the standard for interest charges on many business and consumer loans.
The Fed last week held its benchmark rate at a two-decade high, where it has remained for a year.
In a new assessment, the Goldman Sachs investment company said it now expects the Federal Reserve to cut rates at its next three meetings — in September, November and December. Goldman raised its forecast for the probability of a U.S. recession in the next 12 months from 15% to 25%.
Because it encompasses 500 stocks, Standard & Poor’s index is often considered a key barometer of the U.S. economy. It has fallen sharply in recent days, but it is still up about 9% percent for the year. At its peak in mid-July, it was up 19%.
Trading in Japan was suspended to prevent panic selling after the decline triggered circuit breakers designed to contain severe market drops. The frenzy also activated circuit breakers in South Korea, where the main market finished nearly 9% lower.
In Taiwan, stocks plunged more than 8% — the worst single-day percentage drop in the island’s history. Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company — the world’s largest chipmaker — fell nearly 10%.
Aside from fears about the U.S. economy, geopolitical tensions frequently draw concerns for investors, too, including last week’s assassination in Iran of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ top political leader. Iran has blamed Israel for the attack, and vowed retaliation, raising fears of a regional war.
The market plunge has been most severe in Japan, which analysts said was experiencing a market correction after many investors relied on a historically cheap yen and rock-bottom interest rates to fund risky investments. That strategy was exposed after Japan last week raised benchmark interest rates for only the second time in 17 years and hinted that such rate hikes may continue.
“I don’t think it’s a civilization-altering crash,” said Khoon Goh, head of Asia research at ANZ. “It’s just to me a simple case of market participants getting way ahead and, I guess you can argue, greedy, in over-leveraging, thinking that cheap and free money in Japan was going to be here to stay. And that has gone badly wrong, and they are having to very quickly unwind it and it’s having knock-on effects into asset markets.”
In an interview with VOA, Goh downplayed concerns about a U.S. recession.
“I think it’s a little bit unfair to blame the (U.S.) Fed for being late or behind the curve, because until recently a lot of people were thinking that the U.S. economy was still in reasonably good shape. And no one was really ringing the recession alarm bells,” he said.
Two years ago, the Fed started increasing borrowing costs to curb inflation, which had caused prices to soar for essentials like rent and food. Since then, it has aimed for a “soft landing,” seeking to control inflation without causing an economic recession.
In a commentary published Monday, BMI – A Fitch Solutions Company, said, “The Fed has significant fire power and can cut rates quite aggressively to support growth if needed.”
BMI said that while global markets have been more volatile than expected, they had recently rallied sharply and were vulnerable to a sell-off.
“Corrections of 5-10% are fairly common during bull markets and typically, there is a seasonal pick up in equity volatility during the July-October period,” it added.
NASA Stennis Flashback: Shuttle Team Achieves Unprecedented Milestone
date: 2024-08-05, from: NASA breaking news
As chief of test operations at NASA’s Stennis Space Center, Maury Vander has been involved in some long-duration propulsion hot fires – but he still struggles to describe a pair of 34-minute space shuttle main engine tests conducted onsite in August 1988. “When you stop and think about it, …” Vander begins, then pauses. “In […]
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/stennis/stennis-flashback-shuttle-milestone/
NASA’s Stennis Space Center Announces New Deputy Director
date: 2024-08-05, from: NASA breaking news
NASA’s Stennis Space Center Director John Bailey announced Aug. 2 that longtime propulsion engineer/manager Christine Powell has been selected as deputy director of the south Mississippi propulsion site, effective Aug. 12. “I am excited for Christine to join the NASA Stennis executive team,” Bailey said. “She has deep and proven experience and expertise in propulsion […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/stennis-announces-new-deputy-director/
NASA Inspires Employee to Reach Full Potential
date: 2024-08-05, from: NASA breaking news
NASA employee Kim Johnson’s desire for growth has taken her many places and continues unabated at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. The D’Iberville, Mississippi, resident is a contracting officer in the NASA Stennis Office of Procurement, where she supports NASA’s mission at the largest rocket propulsion test site. Johnson oversees natural […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/kim-johnson-inspired-to-reach-potential/
The Energy Mascot that Electrified America
date: 2024-08-05, from: Heatmap News
With all the attention paid to electric vehicles and heat pumps, the 2020s might seem like the decade of home electrification — but nothing might ever rival the boom of the original Roaring Twenties. By 1929, 70% of all American homes had access to electricity, double the figure from the beginning of the decade – bringing home electrification from minority to majority.
Home electrification was so big back then, it even had a mascot: Reddy Kilowatt. Invented by a marketer at the Alabama Power Company in 1926, this cheery spokescharacter with a lightning-bolt body and a lightbulb nose was licensed to hundreds of utility companies throughout the greater part of the 20th century to promote electricity – and more specifically investor–owned utilities. Reddy was even used as a tool to link government-owned utilities to socialism or communism in years following World War II.
National
Museum of American History Archives Center
I first came across Reddy Kilowatt last year when a climate tech peer emailed me an image of him, probably from the 1950s, powering everything from a hot water heater to a record player with the headline “Your all Electric Home.”
National
Museum of American History Archives Center
For weeks I couldn’t stop thinking about that headline because I kept hearing people in the decarbonization movement say similar things (does Electrify Everything ring a bell?). Itching to learn more of the history of Reddy, I reached out to an expert.
Dr. Kirsten Moana Thompson is a professor at Seattle University who teaches and writes about animation. Her paper, Live Electrically with Reddy Kilowatt, Your Electrical Servant, explores the history of this “phenomenally successful and ubiquitous spokescharacter.”
I chatted with Dr. Moana Thompson over a video call from her office where a framed illustration of Reddy Kilowatt hung behind her. I went into the call thinking about positioning this article, “Is America ready for another Reddy?,” but by the end I learned he may be best left in the 1900s. The following interview was edited for length and clarity.
Mike Munsell
Can you introduce yourself and tell me how you ended up researching Reddy Kilowatt?
Dr. Kirsten Moana Thompson:
I’m a professor and chair of the film and media department at Seattle University, and Reddy Kilowatt was part of my research into animation that has been used in sponsored media — that is media used for non-traditional, non-entertainment purposes to do something else, like sell something, instruct you, persuade you. It forms a chapter in what will be a new book coming out in the next couple of years on animation and advertising. I think Reddy Kilowatt is a great example of how popular it was in the post-war period to use animated spokescharacters to sell products or ideas.
Munsell:
I’m curious: Are animated mascots less prevalent today than back in the post-war period?
Thompson:
My research doesn’t focus on the contemporary era, so I couldn’t give you a precise example. But certainly, as late as the ’70s, animation characters still were extensively used to promote products, not just cereal, and toys, but things like bubble bath and candy and, well into the ’70s, alcohol as well.
There are lots of reasons for that, because certain types of animation were fairly cheap to produce, were appealing, often comedic, and attention grabbing. They were a great means to sell a product — also great to use for abstract or more complex processes, like, how do you make oil or petrol or gas? How do you convey a concept like capitalism? Animation, as opposed to live action, was often a more successful way to convey or target topics of that nature.
We have to anthropomorphize the things that are too abstract, too conceptual, or too inhuman to make them translatable into something that we can comprehend and relate to. Hence the Geico lizard or the Aflac duck.
Munsell
And that makes sense then for Reddy Kilowatt to advertise electricity back when it was new, right?
Thompson
Yes, it really emerged around the time electrification was in two thirds of American households — by 1930. And electrical utility companies needed to find an appealing way to sell their product and to encourage consumer consumption of things like appliances, which themselves were emerging — things like dishwashers and washing machines and hair dryers and so on. But also rural electrification, and electrification for business purposes and factories, and on farms.
[Reddy Kilowatt] emerged targeting a fairly affluent consumer, by, for example, turning electricity into a servant – an abstract servant that was personalized and anthropomorphized.
But it was also a way of rather cleverly justifying rate increases as well, which occurred a little later, by making Reddy Kilowatt literally a figure that earns wages and was regarded as an employee by many electrical utility companies. So it’s a clever way to say to people, hey, everybody deserves a wage and Reddy Kilowatt deserves a wage and prices are going up, so we’re going to put his wages up. And that’s a fair thing.
National
Museum of American History Archives Center
Munsell:
The Smithsonian has a huge collection of Reddy Kilowatt material. Did you get to go check that out?
Thompson:
Yes, I did. The archives are extensive. And so you can read all about how [Reddy Kilowatt creator] Ashton Collins promoted the product, and what the kinds of speeches that he gave to many other business companies and electrical utility companies in the 30s and 40s.
But he’s part of a wider movement. There are other leading figures like Walt Disney and Walter Lantz, who were animation studio heads. Walter Lantz, of course, ran what he would pick the Walter Lantz studios that produced Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda, and a number of other popular cartoons of the 40s. And Walt Disney, of course, we’re all familiar with. But they all believed that the kinds of skills that animation studios were doing in the 1940s — by making cartoons to train troops to operate machinery or rifles, and by making propaganda to translate the values of the fight for democracy against fascism — they believed that those skills could be applied to the commercial market in the post-war period. And that animation was a key element of visual culture that could translate to a sometimes illiterate population or partially illiterate population.
So Ashton Collins is not alone there. He’s part of a broader movement in the film industry and in the animation industry, to understand the unique power of animation to communicate and to sell and persuade.
Munsell
Did you find anything in your research particularly surprising?
Thompson
In addition to extensive print materials in the Smithsonian, you see dozens and dozens of objects that featured Reddy Kilowatt. His image is on everything from stickers to comic books to toys, and other giveaways for kids to little marionettes, and robots, which were used in trade shows and trade fairs. [Author’s note: eBay has an extensive Reddy Kilowatt collection]
It was used in the 1939 World’s Fair, for example, to communicate and to encourage the public to interact with Reddy Kilowatt as if it was a real figure. I was quite taken with this – it’s really an early form of animatronics. They were using an avatar, a spokescharacter, who was fairly ubiquitous in the American home, on people’s electricity bills, and combining it with a large three dimensional object with a record player attached and somebody who operated the speaking, to interact with kids at fairs and to communicate basic ideas. So that was really exciting in a way because it shows how ahead of its time Ashton Collins was at understanding interactivity.
Mike Munsell
I was thinking about copyright and trademark law and the public domain. Reddy Kilowatt was, in his original form, created in 1926. We’re coming up on that 100 year mark. Is there a chance he enters the public domain?
Dr. Moana Thompson
I’m not sure about that. Because you can renew copyright. Which of course Disney did repeatedly before it finally had to succumb to the end of copyright. And Reddy is also a trademark as opposed to a copyrighted image. So he has not just appeared in what is public access now, some of his films and TV commercials, but he’s also a trademark figure that has a continuing commercial currency. And Ashton Collins was absolutely rigorous at paying attention to trademark law. He sued other companies that had similar characters, like Willie Wired Head.
National
Museum of American History Archives Center
I suspect that Xcel Energy [who now owns the rights to Reddy Kilowatt] is going to be very strict in policing its trademarks. Because if this product has value as a commodity of nostalgia for a certain generation, or multiple generations, or even if it has a new function in Xcel’s future corporate identity, he’s going to have value.
Munsell
I guess your research sort of doesn’t get quite into the present day, but for my understanding Reddy Kilowatt is not really used much today. It was used by a utility in Barbados and an Ecuadorian soccer club more recently, but from your understanding do you know why he stopped being used?
Thompson
Well, I’m not sure that he stopped being used. I have seen the return of Reddy Kilowatt as a consumer figure and as a licensed product that appears on T-shirts and stickers. Amazon has been selling quite a lot of Reddy Kilowatt products. So it’s possible that Xcel Energy that owns the trademark sees the value of the product for a new market, which is the nostalgic market, where you can sell a cartoon character itself.
Munsell: I do think that with the emergence of heat pumps, and induction stoves, there is a push toward home electrification and moving away from fossil fuels in your home. I wonder if that’s an opportunity for a reemergence of Reddy?
Thompson
Yeah, it could be an opportunity for them to repurpose the trademark.
Munsell
Is there anything else you wanted to add about your research into Reddy?
Thompson
I thought it was interesting, the blend that Reddy Kilowatt had of both the impersonal and the personal. On the one hand, we’ve mostly been talking about it as this cute cartoony character of appeal and personality. But on the other hand, he represents an abstract concept, which is almost robotic. He was literally a robot as part of his marketing. This concept of the kilowatt as one and a half horsepower was part of this wider discursive emergence in the ’20s that electricity was both a servant, as an anthropomorphized figure, and an abstraction that is there at the flick of a switch.
And in their marketing, they used imagery that of course would never be used today. The association of kilowatt as both a “coolie” – which was the specific language used – and a slave.
So this kind of racist imagery is interesting because it gets to the roots of this idea of the dehumanized, depersonalized aspects of Reddy Kilowatt – that electricity represented by using this imagery, and they had little pictures of kilowatt, which were described as a slave or a “coolie” to explain that, basically, this was free labor and unlimited labor. So obviously addressed to an implicitly white consumer. [The idea that] racial imagery of course affected all kinds of aspects of American advertising is well known to scholars in this field and often played on imagery of blackness or whiteness, in the case of soap advertising, for example, but Reddy Kilowatt in particular is this machinic identity.
And who knows, maybe that’ll come back again in the future, because machines are so much more part of our lives now, as compared to 1926 or the mid century with computers and artificial intelligence.
https://heatmap.news/culture/reddy-kilowatt
NASA Trains Machine Learning Algorithm for Mars Sample Analysis
date: 2024-08-05, from: NASA breaking news
When a robotic rover lands on another world, scientists have a limited amount of time to collect data from the troves of explorable material, because of short mission durations and the length of time to complete complex experiments. That’s why researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, are investigating the use of […]
https://www.nasa.gov/technology/nasa-trains-machine-learning-algorithm-for-mars-sample-analysis/
Lenovo launches ThinkBook Plus Hybrid in China (14 inch Android tablet with a Windows keyboard dock)
date: 2024-08-05, from: Liliputing
The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid is basically two different mobile devices meant to work together. The first is a 14 inch Android tablet with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor that you can use as a standalone device. And the second is a keyboard dock that basically has the guts of a modern […]
The post Lenovo launches ThinkBook Plus Hybrid in China (14 inch Android tablet with a Windows keyboard dock) appeared first on Liliputing.
AI puppetry | #MagPiMonday
date: 2024-08-05, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
This #MagPiMonday, Rob Zwetsloot explores interesting uses for the new Raspberry Pi AI Kit.
The post AI puppetry | #MagPiMonday appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/ai-puppetry-magpimonday/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-05, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
The NYTimes main goal is to manufacture consent, not inform. That sometimes happens by chance.
And we are all playing into their game of manufactured consent when we refer to it as “the paper of record”.
(Yes other media is in the same business, but nobody else is benefiting from everyone parroting their propaganda)
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112909673462737103
Travel Troubleshooter: Refund still missing six months after seats were downgraded
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
When ITA Airways changes Rocco De Mella’s plane from Miami to Rome, he loses the seat upgrade he bought. An airline representative promises him a prompt refund. But six months later, the airline still has his money.
Wish You Were Here: Exploring New Zealand’s North and South Islands
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
A Santa Cruz couple’s New Zealand bucket list surpassed all expectations, offering kayak jaunts, hikes, biking and incredible scenery. Here are their travel tips.
Three white squirrels spotted in Los Altos; what does the future hold for them?
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
And a reader wonders where all the snails have gone.
TasteFood: A cheese worth grilling
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
This hearty, flavorful – and easy – dish combines Halloumi cheese, quinoa, red peppers and plenty of fresh herbs.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/05/tastefood-a-cheese-worth-grilling/
Top 7 places around the world for water adventures
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
From Alaska’s Inside Passage to the Faroe Islands, here are Travel+Leisure’s top destinations for water experiences.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/05/top-7-places-around-the-world-for-water-adventures/
Nvidia reportedly delays Blackwell GPUs until 2025 over packaging issues
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Backdrop of multi-billion dollar orders to support AI services, but unlikely to hurt NVDA long term
Updated Nvidia is understood to be delaying shipments of its Blackwell GPUs until the first quarter of 2025, and it appears the problems may be due to the complexity of the chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging tech that TSMC is using to manufacture the next-gen hardware.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/nvidia_delays_blackwell_gpus_until/
DOU: The Engineering Leader: A Must-Read for Success-Oriented Professionals
date: 2024-08-05, from: Accidentally in Code
I had a great conversation with Oleks about my book, about DRI-ing your career and why leadership starts with self management.
Did a father tell his teenage son to kill rapper PnB Rock? California jury to hear closing arguments at trial
date: 2024-08-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
The two sides at the murder trial in the killing of Philadelphia hip-hop star PnB Rock agree that a 17-year-old boy walked into Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles restaurant in South Los Angeles, shot the rapper twice in the back and once in the chest.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Silicon Valley’s Trump supporters are making a big mistake.
https://www.ft.com/content/14f0a270-5143-4c75-b1d0-fa302467d73f
Against the Grain: Indian Telemedicine and Its Discontents
date: 2024-08-05, from: Care
<p>“Telemedicine in India reflects larger gaps within the healthcare system.”</p>Hurricane Debby makes landfall in Florida
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/hurricane-debby-makes-landfall-in-florida/7730229.html
CrowdStrike unhappy about Delta’s ‘litigation threat,’ claims airline refused ‘free on-site help’
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Vendor plans to aggressively defend its case before listing catalog of shortcomings at the airline
CrowdStrike says it is “highly disappointed” and rejects the claims made by Delta and its lawyers that the vendor exhibited gross negligence in the events that led to the global IT outage a little over two weeks ago.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/crowdstrike_is_not_at_all/
The Climate Stakes of the Veepstakes
date: 2024-08-05, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Cooler weekend weather helped fire crews working to contain the Park Fire, which has now burned an area larger than the city of Los Angeles • Two people were killed and 12 were missing after mudslides in China’s Sichuan province linked to record rainfall • Assuming you have clear skies, you should be able to catch the annual Perseid meteor shower, which peaks this week.
THE TOP FIVE
- Hurricane Debby threatens southeast with catastrophic flooding
Hurricane Debby made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region this morning as a category 1 storm. It is expected to be extremely dangerous, not necessarily because of its wind speeds but because of the water it will dump over southeastern states in the coming days. Forecasters are warning of life-threatening storm surge, severe flash flooding, as well as strong winds. Up to 18 inches of rain could fall along the coast throughout the week, from Georgia through the Carolinas. If the storm stalls after it hits land, it is likely to strengthen and drop even more rain. Debby is the fourth named storm of the season and is making landfall in the same region Hurricane Idalia hit a year ago. Scientists agree climate change is heating the oceans, which is making tropical storms wetter and stronger.
Image:
NOAA
Sometime today or tomorrow, Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to announce who she has tapped as her running mate in the 2024 presidential race. She spent the last few days speaking with some of the top contenders, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly. Here’s a look at their climate track records:
- Shapiro – He has proposed a “cap-and-invest” program to cut state emissions and lower electricity bills. He secured a $369 million federal grant to cut industrial emissions and create 6,000 jobs. Environmentalists aren’t jazzed about his murky history on fracking. As state attorney general, he investigated the gas drilling industry on fracking dangers, but as governor, “he’s become more friendly to drilling,” wrote Mike Soraghan at Politico. Harris might see that as a good thing, though, as Donald Trump tries to target her for being anti-fracking.
- Walz – With a keen understanding of what it will take to get Americans on board with climate policies, Walz is “one of the country’s most skillful climate communicators,” wrote Time’s Justin Worland. During Walz’s time in office, Minnesota has passed a law requiring utilities to be 100% carbon free by 2040, created a $2 billion climate spending program to incentivize electrification and emissions reductions, and secured a $200 million federal grant to cut food system emissions.
- Beshear – The Kentucky governor has remained pretty quiet about the climate crisis, probably because he has a fine line to walk as a democratic politician in a red state that depends heavily on coal. That said, he has helped quietly push for investment in renewable energy and EV battery production. Kentucky’s clean energy job growth is the second fastest in the country.
- Kelly – Representing one of the hottest states in the country, the former astronaut has been vocal about the effects of climate change. He pushed to get the final Inflation Reduction Act to include $4 billion from drought mitigation and cosponsored legislation to allow incentives for farmers that deploy carbon-storing agricultural practices. He has “frequently crossed the aisle to work on environment and mining legislation and is well-versed in ongoing disputes over the Western United States’ historic drought,” wrote Timothy Cama at E&E News. Kelly’s science background and knowledge of water and drought policy in the West could boost Harris’ campaign.
- China setting new emissions limits
China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, plans to set a hard emissions cap. The move is seen as positive because it decouples emissions targets from economic growth. As Bloomberg explained, the country has so far measured its emissions against gross domestic product. “That approach has allowed China to tout environmental successes even as its total emissions soared, so long as they didn’t grow faster than the overall economy.” Under a new five-year plan that begins in 2026, the country will start to target overall emissions volumes and these will become the main measure after the country’s emissions peak, which could happen in 2030 or sooner.
- Japanese automakers join forces to counter China
In case you missed it: Japanese auto manufacturers Nissan, Honda, and Mitsubishi are teaming up to produce a new EV by 2030, in a bid to take on Tesla and Chinese carmakers. The companies will work together to develop new software and e-axles, and share battery supplies. “It’s another example of big, global automakers pooling their resources in the interest of defraying costs and finding more efficient ways to introduce new EVs to the marketplace,” wrote Andrew J. Hawkins at The Verge.
- Geoengineering scientist in the spotlight
The New York Times over the weekend published a long feature on David Keith, a professor in the University of Chicago’s department of geophysical sciences and a longtime proponent of solar geoengineering. Keith makes his case for the contentious and still experimental idea of spraying sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to lower global temperatures. He admits the process comes with risks, but says these are “quantitatively small compared to the benefits.” Yes, the practice could make twilight look different (more orange), but daylight would otherwise probably look the same.
The article quotes Frank Keutsch, one of Keith’s collaborators on a previous project, who compared solar geoengineering to opiates: “They only treat the symptom and not the actual cause,” Keutsch said. “You can get addicted to it if you don’t actually address the cause. In addition, like any painkiller, you’re going to have side effects. And then there are withdrawal symptoms, and that’s termination shock.”
THE KICKER
In an office park in Florida, far from the ocean, Disney-funded scientists are working to preserve and restore the state’s brain corals. The process involves carefully calibrating water chemistry and lighting to mimic the environment off the Florida Keys, Inside Climate News reports.
https://heatmap.news/politics/harris-vp-hurricane-debby-china
Another sharply down day?
date: 2024-08-05, from: Marketplace Morning Report
U.S. stock index futures are pointing to one amid worries that elevated interest rates from the U.S. Federal Reserve might lead to a recession rather than a soft landing. We’ll check in on global markets. And later in the program, grocery prices are elevated. Now, the Federal Trade Commission is launching an investigation to assess if companies are juicing profits by raising prices.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/another-sharply-down-day
Second patient receives the Neuralink implant
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Almost half the electrodes are working… for now
According to company boss Elon Musk, its Neuralink implant is now at work in a second patient, and this time, almost half of the device’s electrodes are working.…
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Beware Trump's secret weapon: Elon Musk's X-Twitter.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Has pop music got less melodic? I’ve immersed myself in 70 years of hits?
Low Leakage Cryogenic Disconnects for Fuel Transfer and Long-Term Storage
date: 2024-08-05, from: NASA breaking news
To enable deep space missions, the capability to transfer and store cryogenic fuels (typically liquid hydrogen, methane, and oxygen) without significant leakage over long duration missions is critical. NASA has been actively developing zero boil-off cryocooler technology to reduce storage losses. Another source of fuel loss is from leakage at the fuel disconnect used for in-space refueling. […]
Punkt MC02: As private, and pricey, as a Swiss bank account
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
A de-Googled Android phone with extra security – and a subscription
Punkt adds a fondleslab to its lineup of minimalist tech kit, with a very unusual build of Android – and a hefty pricetag.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/mc02_swiss_private_phone/
Biden holds security talks as tensions heighten in Middle East
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
Global stocks are down on fears of a U.S. recession
date: 2024-08-05, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: The fall was most dramatic in Japan where, the Nikkei suffered its biggest one-day points drop ever. Then, the prime minister of Bangladesh has resigned and left the country following a protest that started over job shortages. And in in South Korea, AI is causing a split in the K-pop world, with some fans annoyed that K-pop stars are using AI to make music videos and experiment with song writing.
UK axes plans for Edinburgh-based exascale computer
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Shortsighted or a chance to refocus? Tech sector is not happy
The UK’s £1.3 billion ($1.66 billion) plan for AI and tech investment that included an £800 million ($1 billion) exascale supercomputer at Edinburgh University has gone up in smoke.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/axe_exascale_uk_edinburgh/
NASA Furthers Aeronautical Innovation Using Model-Based Systems
date: 2024-08-05, from: NASA breaking news
As NASA continues cutting-edge aeronautics research, the agency also is taking steps to make sure the benefits from these diverse technologies are greater than the sum of their parts. To tackle that challenge, NASA is using Model-Based Systems Analysis and Engineering (MBSAE). This type of engineering digitally simulates how multiple technologies could best work together […]
https://www.nasa.gov/aeronautics/nasa-model-based-systems/
Keir Starmer says facial recognition tech is the answer to far-right riots
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The technology remains highly controversial despite widespread rollout
Responding to the riots across England over the past week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer says he’s backing a wider rollout of facial recognition technology to track and prevent “thugs” from traveling to areas where they plan to cause unrest.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/keir_starmer_facial_recognition/
The cybersecurity QA trifecta of fail that may burn down the world
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Malware is often described as biology. It should be the other way around
Opinion In Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, he invents malware that can leap species from silicon to the human brain. That’s a great metaphor for so much of our online lives, but it raises one question of particular interest. If humans can be damaged by our own technology, should we protect not just our data but ourselves through cybersecurity?…
Hello? Emergency services? I’d like to report a wrong number
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
911 is no joke
Who, Me? Greetings, gentle readerfolk, and welcome to Who Me? the section of The Reg in which we soften the crushing blow of the working week’s return with tales of technical transgression.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/who_me/
Today in SCV History (Aug. 5)
date: 2024-08-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1891 – Surrey post office established inside Saugus train station; Alexander Fraser, postmaster [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-aug-5/
FreeBSD as a daily driver
date: 2024-08-05, from: OS News
Not too long ago I linked to a blog post by long-time OSNews reader (and silver Patreon) and friend of mine Morgan, about how to set up OpenBSD as a workstation operating system – and in fact, I personally used that guide in my own OpenBSD journey. Well, Morgan’s back with another, similar article, this time covering FreeBSD. After going through the basic steps needed to make FreeBSD a bit more amenable to desktop use, Morgan notes about performance: Now let’s compare FreeBSD. Well, quite frankly, there is no comparison! FreeBSD just feels snappier and more responsive on the desktop; at the same 170Hz refresh it actually feels like 170Hz. Void Linux always felt fast enough and I thought it had no lag at all at that refresh rate, but comparing them side by side (FreeBSD installed on the NVMe drive, Void running from a USB 4 SSD with similar performance), FreeBSD is smooth as glass and I started noticing just the slightest lag/stutter on Void. The same holds true for Firefox; I use smooth scrolling and on FreeBSD it really is perfectly smooth. Similarly, Youtube performance is unreal, with no dropped frames at any resolution all the way up to 4Kp60, and the videos look so much smoother! ↫ Morgan/kaidenshi This is especially relevant for me personally, since the prime reason I switched my workstation back to Fedora KDE was OpenBSD’s performance issues. While those performance issues were entirely expected and the result of the operating system’s focus on security and hardening, it did mean it’s just not suitable for me as a workstation operating system, even if I like the internals and find it a joy to use, even under the hood. If FreeBSD delivers more solid desktop and workstation performance, it might be time I set up a FreeBSD KDE installation and see if it can handle my workstation’s 270Hz 4K display. As I keep reiterating – the BSD world has a lot to offer those wishing to run a UNIX-like workstation operating system, and it’s articles like these that help people get started. A lot of the steps taken may seem elementary to many of us, but for people coming from Linux or even Windows, they may be unfamiliar and daunting, so having it all laid out in a straightforward manner is quite helpful.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140416/freebsd-as-a-daily-driver/
Hurricane Debby to bring heavy rain, catastrophic flooding to Florida, Georgia, S. Carolina
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
TAMPA, FLORIDA — The center of Hurricane Debby is expected to reach the Big Bend coast of Florida early Monday bringing potential record-setting rains, catastrophic flooding and life-threatening storm surge as it moves slowly across the northern part of the state before stalling over the coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina.
Debby was located about 40 miles (70 kilometers) west of Cedar Key, Florida, with maximum sustained winds of 80 mph (130 kph). The storm was moving north at 12 mph (19 kph), the National Hurricane Center in Miami said early Monday.
Debby is the fourth named storm of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season after Tropical Storm Alberto, Hurricane Beryl and Tropical Storm Chris, all of which formed in June.
Forecasters warned heavy amounts of rain from Debby could spawn catastrophic flooding in Florida, South Carolina and Georgia.
The storm was expected to make landfall around midday Monday in the Big Bend area of Florida, north of Tampa, the hurricane center said. A tornado watch also was in effect for parts of Florida and Georgia until 6 a.m. Monday.
“Right now, we are trying secure everything from floating away,” said Sheryl Horne, whose family owns the Shell Island Fish Camp along the Wakulla River in St. Marks, Florida, where some customers moved their boats inland. The sparsely populated Big Bend region in the Florida Panhandle was hit last year by Hurricane Idalia, which made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane.
“I am used to storms and I’m used to cleaning up after storms,” Horne said.
Debby was expected to move eastward over northern Florida and then stall over the coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina, thrashing the region with potential record-setting rains totaling up to 76 centimeter) beginning Tuesday. Officials also warned of life-threatening storm surge along Florida’s Gulf Coast, with 1.8 to 3 meters of inundation expected Monday between the Ochlockonee and Suwannee rivers.
“There’s some really amazing rainfall totals being forecast and amazing in a bad way,” Michael Brennan, director of the hurricane center, said at a briefing. “That would be record-breaking rainfall associated with a tropical cyclone for both the states of Georgia and South Carolina if we got up to the 30-inch level.”
Flooding impacts could last through Friday and are expected to be especially severe in low-lying areas near the coast, including Savannah, Georgia; Hilton Head, South Carolina; and Charleston, South Carolina. North Carolina officials were monitoring the storm’s progress.
Officials in Savannah said the area could see a month’s worth of rain in four days if the system stalls over the region.
“This is going to a significant storm. The word historic cannot be underscored here,” Savannah Mayor Van. R. Johnson said during a press conference.
The hurricane center said at 11 p.m. that Debby was located about 161 kilometers west of Tampa, Florida, with maximum sustained winds of 120 kph. The storm was moving north at 19 kph.
Debby’s outer bands grazed the west coast of Florida, flooding streets and bringing power outages. Sarasota County officials said most roadways on Siesta Key, a barrier island off the coast of Sarasota, were under water. The hurricane center had predicted the system would strengthen as it curved off the southwest Florida coast, where the water has been extremely warm.
At a briefing Sunday afternoon, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis warned the storm could lead to “really, really significant flooding that will happen in North Central Florida.”
The storm would follow a similar track to Hurricane Idalia but would “be much wetter. We are going to see much more inundation,” he said.
A hurricane warning was issued for parts of the Big Bend and Florida Panhandle areas, while tropical storm warnings were posted for Florida’s West Coast, the southern Florida Keys and Dry Tortugas. A tropical storm watch extended farther west into the Panhandle.
Tropical storms and hurricanes can trigger river flooding and overwhelm drainage systems and canals. Forecasters warned of 15 centimeters to 30 centimeters of rain and up to 46 centimeters in isolated areas of Florida.
Storm surge expected to hit Gulf Coast, including Tampa Bay
Flat Florida is prone to flooding even on sunny days and the storm was predicted to bring a surge of 0.6 to 1.2 meters along most of the Gulf Coast, including Tampa Bay, with a storm tide of up to 2.1 meters north of there in the Big Bend region.
Forecasters warned of “a danger of life-threatening storm surge inundation” in a region that includes Hernando Beach, Crystal River, Steinhatchee and Cedar Key. Officials in Citrus and Levy counties ordered a mandatory evacuation of coastal areas, while those in Hernando, Manatee, Pasco and Taylor counties called for voluntary evacuations. Shelters opened in those and some other counties.
Citrus County Sheriff Mike Prendergast estimated 21,000 people live in his county’s evacuation zone.
Residents, businesses prepare for flooding
Residents in Steinhatchee, Florida, which flooded during Hurricane Idalia, spent Sunday moving items to higher ground.
“I’ve been here 29 years. This isn’t the first time I’ve done it. Do you get used to it? No,” Mark Reblin said as he moved items out of the liquor store he owns.
Employees of Savannah Canoe and Kayak in Georgia said they were busy tying down their watercraft, laying sandbags, and raising equipment off the ground. Mayme Bouy, the store manager, said she wasn’t too concerned about the forecast calling for a potential historic rain event.
“But we do have some high tides this week so if the rain is happening around then, that could be bad,” Bouy added. “I’d rather play it safe than sorry.”
Governors declare emergencies ahead of landfall
DeSantis declared a state of emergency for 61 of Florida’s 67 counties, with the National Guard activating 3,000 guard members. Utility crews from in and out of state were ready to restore power after the storm, he said in a post on X. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster made their own emergency declarations.
In Tampa alone, officials gave out more than 30,000 sandbags to barricade against flooding.
“We’ve got our stormwater drains cleared out. We’ve got our generators all checked and full. We’re doing everything that we need to be prepared to face a tropical storm,” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said.
Northeast coast also preparing for storm conditions
Emergency managers in New England and New York were already monitoring the path of the storm for the possibility of remnants striking their states. States including New York and Vermont have been hit by heavy rain and thunderstorms in recent weeks and were still coping with flooding and saturated ground.
Tencent Cloud’s home-grown traffic-tamer halves WAN latency
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
MegaTE can arrange things so each endpoint gets just the network it needs
Sigcomm 2024 Chinese web giant Tencent has revealed “MegaTE”, a traffic engineering (TE) system it uses on its own cloud and which it claims outperforms rivals by tailoring network configurations to the needs of individual flows generated by VMs or containers.…
Are plug-in hybrids booming or fading, and are they better for the climate?
date: 2024-08-05, from: Hannah Richie at Substack
Plug-in hybrids are still going strong in some markets. Their climate benefits strongly depend on who is buying them.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/are-plug-in-hybrids-booming-or-fading
China starts testing national cyber-ID before consultation on the idea closes
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Eighty-one apps signed up to pilot facial recognition and real name ID system
Chinese app developers have signed up to beta test a national cyberspace ID system that will use facial recognition technology and the real names of users, according to Chinese media.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/china_cyber_id_pilot/
Atlassian softens its cloud-first approach for remaining on-prem customers
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Happy to have ’em go hybrid as it wises up to the enterprise
Fresh from moving its smaller customers off its server-based products onto and into its cloud, Atlassian has softened its cloud-first approach after recognizing that its larger customers can’t or won’t go there in a hurry – if ever.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/atlassian_q4_2024/
Cooler weather helps firefighters corral a third of big California blaze
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
CHICO, California — Fire crews battling California’s largest wildfire this year have corralled a third of the blaze aided in part by cooler weather, but a return of triple-digit temperatures could allow it to grow, fire officials said Sunday.
Cooler temperatures and increased humidity gave firefighters “a great opportunity to make some good advances” on the fire in the Sierra Nevada foothills, said Chris Vestal, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The Park Fire has scorched 1,623 square kilometers since igniting July 24 when authorities said a man pushed a burning car into a gully in Chico and then fled. The blaze was 30% contained as of Sunday.
The massive fire has scorched an area bigger than the city of Los Angeles, which covers about 1,302 square kilometers. It continues to burn through rugged, inaccessible, and steep terrain with dense vegetation.
The fire’s push northward has brought it toward the rugged lava rock landscape surrounding Lassen Volcanic National Park, which has been closed because of the threat. The inhospitable terrain remains one of the biggest challenges for firefighters.
“The challenge with that is we can’t use our heavy machinery like bulldozers to go through and cut a line right through it,” Vestal said.
“On top of that, we have to put human beings, our hand crews, in to remove those fuels and some of that terrain is not really the greatest for people that are hiking so it takes a long time and extremely hard work,” he added.
The fire has destroyed at least 572 structures and damaged 52 others. At least 2,700 people in Butte and Tehama Counties remain under evacuation orders, Veal said.
After days of smoky skies, clear skies Sunday allowed firefighters to deploy helicopters and other aircraft to aid in the fight against the blaze as temperatures reached above 38 degrees Celsius.
“The fire is in a good place from the weather conditions we had the last couple of days but we still have to worry about the weather that we have and the conditions that are going to be present now for about the next five or six days,” Veal said.
The fire in Northern California is one of 85 large blazes burning across the West.
In Colorado, firefighters were making progress Sunday against three major fires burning near heavily populated areas north and south of Denver. Many residents evacuated by the fires have been allowed to go back home.
The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office is investigating a blaze threatening hundreds of homes near the Colorado city of Littleton as arson.
About 50 structures were damaged or destroyed, about half of them homes, by a fire near Loveland. And one person was found dead in a home burned by a fire west of the town of Lyons.
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.
In Canada, a 24-year-old firefighter battling a blaze in Jasper National Park was killed Saturday by a falling tree, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said.
The firefighter from Calgary, whose name was not released, was battling a fire north of Jasper, a town in Alberta Province that was half destroyed last month by a fast-moving fire.
Google gamed into advertising a malicious version of Authenticator
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Plus: CISA’s AI hire; and claimed Canuck SIM swappers busted
Infosec in brief Scammers have been using Google’s own ad system to fool people into downloading a borked copy of the Chocolate Factory’s Authenticator software.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/security_in_brief/
High School Students Get a Jump Start Through UC Santa Barbara Summer Research Programs
date: 2024-08-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Participants engage in interdisciplinary learning and research, presenting their findings at UCSB Research Conferences.
The post High School Students Get a Jump Start Through UC Santa Barbara Summer Research Programs appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
US expected to propose barring Chinese software in autonomous vehicles
date: 2024-08-05, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Commerce Department is expected to propose barring Chinese software in autonomous and connected vehicles in the coming weeks, according to sources briefed on the matter.
The Biden administration plans to issue a proposed rule that would bar Chinese software in vehicles in the United States with Level 3 automation and above, which would have the effect of also banning testing on U.S. roads of autonomous vehicles produced by Chinese companies.
The administration, in a previously unreported decision, also plans to propose barring vehicles with Chinese-developed advanced wireless communications abilities modules from U.S. roads, the sources added.
Under the proposal, automakers and suppliers would need to verify that none of their connected vehicle or advanced autonomous vehicle software was developed in a “foreign entity of concern” like China, the sources said.
The Commerce Department said last month it planned to issue proposed rules on connected vehicles in August and expected to impose limits on some software made in China and other countries deemed adversaries.
Asked for comment, a Commerce Department spokesperson said on Sunday that the department “is concerned about the national security risks associated with connected technologies in connected vehicles.”
The department’s Bureau of Industry and Security will issue a proposed rule that “will focus on specific systems of concern within the vehicle. Industry will also have a chance to review that proposed rule and submit comments.”
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately comment but the Chinese foreign ministry has previously urged the United States “to respect the laws of the market economy and principles of fair competition.” It argues Chinese cars are popular globally because they had emerged out of fierce market competition and are technologically innovative.
On Wednesday, the White House and State Department hosted a meeting with allies and industry leaders to “jointly address the national security risks associated with connected vehicles,” the department said. Sources said officials disclosed details of the administration’s planned rule.
The meeting included officials from the United States, Australia, Canada, the European Union, Germany, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Spain, and the United Kingdom who “exchanged views on the data and cybersecurity risks associated with connected vehicles and certain components.”
Also known as conditional driving automation, Level 3 involves technology that allows drivers to engage in activities behind the wheel, such as watching movies or using smartphones, but only under some limited conditions.
In November, a group of U.S. lawmakers raised alarm about Chinese companies collecting and handling sensitive data while testing autonomous vehicles in the United States and asked questions of 10 major companies including Baidu, Nio, WeRide, Didi Chuxing, Xpeng, Inceptio, Pony.ai, AutoX, Deeproute.ai and Qcraft.
The letters said in the 12 months ended November 2022 that Chinese AV companies test drove more than 450,000 miles in California. In July 2023, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said his department had national security concerns about Chinese autonomous vehicle companies in the United States.
The administration is worried about connected vehicles using the driver monitoring system to listen or record occupants or take control of the vehicle itself.
“The national security risks are quite significant,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in May. “We decided to take action because this is really serious stuff.”
India migrates 25,000 small lenders to ERP in just five months
date: 2024-08-05, updated: 2024-08-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Plus: Food poisoning hits ByteDance Singapore; Indonesia bans DuckDuckGo; and more
ASIA IN BRIEF India’s government has successfully migrated 25,904 Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS) to a unified ERP system in just five months, as part of its broader initiative to modernize and streamline rural lending operations.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/asia_tech_news_in_brief_/
New farmers market comes to Valencia
date: 2024-08-05, from: The Signal
Shoppers of the local Old Town Newhall and Canyon Country Farmers Markets Lee and LeeAnn Morrell, Saugus residents, arrived at the new weekly farmers market excited to see what new […]
The post New farmers market comes to Valencia appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/new-farmers-market-comes-to-valencia/
pgspot 0.8.0 released
date: 2024-08-05, from: PostgreSQL News
The pgspot development team is happy to announce the release of version 0.8.0.
This version of adds the following new features:
- Add flag to ignore specific procedural languages
- Support @extschema:name@ placeholders introduced with PG16
- Warn about C security definer functions without search_path
See full release notes for more information.
pgspot is a tool to find security vulnerabilities in postgres sql scripts.
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/pgspot-080-released-2907/
Episode 136.5 - Data Center Disaster
date: 2024-08-04, from: Advent of Computing
I’ve gotten busy preparing for VCF West, so this time you get a short one!
In this byte-sized episode we are looking at a short and strange story: that time a plane struck a software company, and the company turned around and used the crash in their own ads.
https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-1365-data-center-disaster
Americans ‘whacked’ by too many laws, regulations, says Justice Gorsuch’s book
date: 2024-08-04, from: VOA News USA
Washington — Ordinary Americans are “getting whacked” by too many laws and regulations, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch says in a new book that underscores his skepticism of federal agencies and the power they wield.
“Too little law and we’re not safe, and our liberties aren’t protected,” Gorsuch told The Associated Press in an interview in his Supreme Court office. “But too much law and you actually impair those same things.”
“Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law” is being published Tuesday by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Gorsuch has received a $500,000 advance for the book, according to his annual financial disclosure reports.
In the interview, Gorsuch refused to be drawn into discussions about term limits or an enforceable code of ethics for the justices, both recently proposed by President Joe Biden at a time of diminished public trust in the court. Justice Elena Kagan, speaking a couple of days before Biden, separately said the court’s ethics code, adopted by the justices last November, should have a means of enforcement.
But Gorsuch did talk about the importance of judicial independence. “I’m not saying that there aren’t ways to improve what we have. I’m simply saying that we’ve been given something very special. It’s the envy of the world, the United States judiciary,” he said.
The 56-year-old justice was the first of three Supreme Court nominees of then-President Donald Trump, and they have combined to entrench a conservative majority that has overturned Roe v. Wade, ended affirmative action in college admissions, expanded gun rights and clipped environmental regulations aimed at climate change, as well as air and water pollution more generally.
A month ago, the Supreme Court completed a term in which Gorsuch and the court’s five other conservative justices delivered sharp rebukes to the administrative state in three major cases, including the decision that overturned the 40-year-old Chevron decision that had made it more likely that courts would sustain regulations. The court’s three liberal justices dissented each time.
Gorsuch also was in the majority in ruling that former presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution in a decision that indefinitely delayed the election interference case against Trump. What’s more, the justices made it harder to use a federal obstruction charge against people who were part of the mob that violently attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn Trump’s defeat by Biden in the 2020 election.
Gorsuch defended the immunity ruling as necessary to prevent presidents from being hampered while in office by threats of prosecution once they leave.
The court had to wrestle with an unprecedented situation, he said. “Here we have, for the first time in our history, one presidential administration bringing criminal charges against a prior president. It’s a grave question, right? Grave implications,” Gorsuch said.
But in the book, co-authored by a former law clerk, Janie Nitze, Gorsuch largely sets those big issues aside and turns his focus to a fisherman, a magician, Amish farmers, immigrants, a hair braider and others who risked jail time, large fines, deportation and other hardships over unyielding rules.
In 18 years as a judge, including the past seven on the Supreme Court, Gorsuch said, “There were just so many cases that came to me in which I saw ordinary Americans, just everyday, regular people trying to go about their lives, not trying to hurt anybody or do anything wrong and just getting whacked, unexpectedly, by some legal rule they didn’t know about.”
The problem, he said, is that there has been an explosion of laws and regulations, at both the federal and state levels. The sheer volume of Congress’ output for the past decade is overwhelming, he said, averaging 344 pieces of legislation totaling 2 million to 3 million words a year.
One vignette involves John Yates, a Florida fisherman who was convicted of getting rid of some undersized grouper under a federal law originally aimed at the accounting industry and the destruction of evidence in the Enron scandal. Yates’ case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where he won by a single vote.
“I wanted to tell the story of people whose lives were affected,” Gorsuch said.
The book expands on a theme that has run through Gorsuch’s opinions over the years, from his criticism of the Chevron decision back when he served on a federal appeals court in Denver to his statement in May 2023 in which he called emergency measures taken during the COVID-19 crisis that killed more than 1 million Americans perhaps “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”
While Gorsuch has voted with the other conservative justices in most of the court’s momentous cases, he also has joined with the liberals in notable cases, including those in which he wrote the opinion in 2020 that expanded protections against workplace discrimination to LGBTQ people. Gorsuch also has sided with the liberal justices in all the court’s cases involving Native Americans since he joined the court.
Immigration, especially when people fighting deportation have complained they were given inadequate notice about hearings, is another area where he has typically broken with his conservative colleagues.
Gorsuch recently returned from a summer teaching gig in Porto, Portugal, for the George Mason University law school. Last year, he spent two weeks in Lisbon, Portugal, with the same program for which he was paid nearly $30,000, plus meals, lodging and travel.
He will travel to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, later this week to talk about the new book.
The day he met with AP, he said, was the first time in weeks that he put on a tie. He wore a dark blue suit, cowboy boots and a Western-style belt.
He seemed at ease, offering chocolate chip cookies and coffee to visitors and joking with a reporter who talked about an upcoming trip to the New Jersey shore. “Go fly some flags up there,” Gorsuch said, a reference to the controversy over flags, similar to those carried by Jan. 6 rioters, that were flown at homes owned by Justice Samuel Alito and his wife.
Gorsuch is not the only justice rolling out a book this summer. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s memoir, “Lovely One,” will be published next month.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-04, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
This week's Trippi show is fantastic. It left me feeling far more hopeful than any episode so far this year.
NASA Science, Cargo Launch on 21st Northrop Grumman Mission to Station
date: 2024-08-04, from: NASA breaking news
Following a successful launch of NASA’s Northrop Grumman 21st commercial resupply mission, new scientific experiments and cargo for the agency are bound for the International Space Station. Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft, carrying more than 8,200 pounds of supplies to the orbiting laboratory, lifted off at 11:02 a.m. EDT Sunday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket […]
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-04, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
This week's Radio Open Source is a fantastic perspective on America, the politics of the people and how we've lost our way.
https://radioopensource.org/american-believer/
Field Notes. 08.04.2024
date: 2024-08-04, from: Om Malik blog
On My Mind A week away from the usual vagaries of modern life and a social media (and news) fast has been a welcome break. It looks like I didn’t miss much on social media. I am glad I took some time to reacquaint myself with my camera and exercise my compositional skills. I went …
https://om.co/2024/08/04/field-notes-08-04-2024/
Harris interviewing possible vice presidential running mates, with decision soon
date: 2024-08-04, from: VOA News USA
Oakland: Four people shot at Dimond District sideshow
date: 2024-08-04, from: San Jose Mercury News
four victims, believed to be spectators, found their own transportation to a hospital, where they were treated and listed in stable condition
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/04/oakland-four-people-shot-at-dimond-district-sideshow/
Trio of home runs power SF Giants to rare road series win over Reds
date: 2024-08-04, from: San Jose Mercury News
The Giants got homers from Matt Chapman, LaMonte Wade Jr. and Tyler Fitzgerald to earn their first road series win since July 2-4.
Everyday Ways to Nurture Your Skin This Summer: 4 simple habits to support healthy skin
date: 2024-08-04, from: The Signal
Good skin care doesn’t have to mean intensive routines or expensive moisturizers – it can be as easy as adopting everyday habits that nurture your skin from the inside out. […]
The post Everyday Ways to Nurture Your Skin This Summer: 4 simple habits to support healthy skin appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
Shape-Shifting Companies
date: 2024-08-04, from: Tedium feed
How the aggressive machinations of investor interests and corporate culture can significantly reshape a company’s focus. Just ask the company behind Frogger.
https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/16761534/corporations-holding-companies-identity-drift
Summer Wine Tasting
date: 2024-08-04, from: The Signal
So much wine, and so little time. When summer is in full swing and the temperatures reach double digits, wine might not be your first choice for a summer adult […]
The post Summer Wine Tasting appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/summer-wine-tasting/
Lights, camera, AI! Real-time deepfakes coming to DEF CON
date: 2024-08-04, updated: 2024-08-04, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Red teamer finds they’re easy to make, which is welcome to produce fodder for detection bots
DEF CON Visitors to the AI Village at this year’s DEF CON hacker conference will have the chance to star in their own deepfake video simply by standing in front of Brandon Kovacs’ camera, and watching as he turns them into a digital likeness of a fellow attendee – for a good cause.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/04/realtime_deepfakes_defcon/
Unraveling Credit Reports and Credit Scores
date: 2024-08-04, from: The Signal
Your credit score plays a significant role in your ability to reach your financial goals. When you apply for a loan, a cellphone, a rental unit or any number of […]
The post Unraveling Credit Reports and Credit Scores appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/unraveling-credit-reports-and-credit-scores/
Visit Beautiful California Lakes and Rivers
date: 2024-08-04, from: The Signal
What says summer more than diving into a cool mountain lake or rafting along a scenic river? A day by the water in California usually means a day by the […]
The post Visit Beautiful California Lakes and Rivers appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/visit-beautiful-california-lakes-and-rivers/
Finke, women’s relay team set world records as U.S. wins medal race over Australia
date: 2024-08-04, from: San Jose Mercury News
Bobby Finke set a new standard in the 1,500 freestyle and the American women closed a thrilling nine days at La Defense Arena with another record in their 4×100 medley relay.
Dueling Harris and Trump rallies in the same Atlanta arena showcase America’s deep divides
date: 2024-08-04, from: San Jose Mercury News
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump stood in the same arena four days apart, each looking over capacity crowds like concert stars or prizefighters.
U.S. bench comes up big against Germany to extend streak to 58 games with quarterfinals next
date: 2024-08-04, from: San Jose Mercury News
Jackie Young scored 19 of the reserves’ 52 points in the win.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-04, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The President Can Now Assassinate You, Officially.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/trump-immunity-supreme-court/
Antioch man charged with burglaries of Walnut Creek homes
date: 2024-08-04, from: San Jose Mercury News
The Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office has filed charges against the suspect in court with two counts of burglary, and he remains in custody at the Martinez Detention Facility
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/04/antioch-man-charged-with-burglaries-of-walnut-creek-homes/
Kamala Harris Can Be the Pro-Innovation President Silicon Valley Needs
date: 2024-08-04, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
<div class="known-bookmark">
<div class="e-content">[Reid Hoffman in the New York Times]
“As Vice President Harris defines her vision for how best to lead the United States in this moment in time, she has an opportunity to take the torch passed to her by President Biden in an explicitly pro-innovation direction. Instead of governing by tweet, Mr. Biden passed bipartisan legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that authorized hundreds of billions of dollars for new manufacturing construction and investment.”
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman explains why Silicon Valley should get behind Harris, counter to the example set by Musk, Andreessen, and a few others. Hoffman is a co-signatory of VCs for Kamala, which makes clear that most Silicon Valley funders are in favor of the Democratic candidate and current Vice President.
Hoffman make the case clearly:
“Under the Biden-Harris administration, U.S. stock market indexes hit all-time highs, with the S&P 500 increasing by 48 percent. Unemployment dropped below 4 percent. The number of U.S. manufacturing jobs hit its highest level since 2008. While Mr. Trump’s great ambition was to build a big beautiful border wall, Mr. Biden actually secured the necessary funding to build large-scale factories for manufacturing semiconductors, electric vehicles, batteries, solar cells and more. And we’re now constructing them at stunning rates.”
I’m more pro-regulation than Hoffman is. Harris should maintain a strong antitrust stance, too, I believe, as well as providing new protections against the worst excesses of AI and other technologies that might harm vulnerable groups. But it’s certainly true that her administration will be better for innovation than her opponent, even if the latter might be better for lining the pockets of a few select billionaires.
This is also true:
“In a speech Ms. Harris gave on the future of A.I. in 2023, she noted that we must “reject the false choice that suggests we can either protect the public or advance innovation.”“
It is a false choice. Regulation, principles, and a duty of care to the public are not anti-innovation: in fact, they promote it. And that’s the direction we should all be heading in.
<p>[<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/03/opinion/kamala-harris-innovation-technology.html">Link</a>]</p>
</div>
</div>https://werd.io/2024/kamala-harris-can-be-the-pro-innovation-president-silicon-valley-needs
Review: Three music legends walk into Shoreline Amphitheatre and this is what happens
date: 2024-08-04, from: San Jose Mercury News
Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, John Mellencamp performed at the Outlaw Music Festival Tour concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre at Mountain View.
IBM Canada can’t duck channel exec’s systematic age discrimination claim
date: 2024-08-04, updated: 2024-08-04, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
‘They actually replaced me with a younger employee’
Three years ago, Bruce Maule, worldwide president of channel marketing at IBM, was informed by bosses that his position was being eliminated.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/04/ibm_canada_cant_duck_systematic/
A’s shut down by Flaherty in Dodgers debut as Ohtani joins 30-30 club
date: 2024-08-04, from: San Jose Mercury News
A’s manager Mark Kotsay pointed to a borderline call in the sixth inning that went the Dodgers’ way, saying it changed the game.
The 2024 Lexus RX 450h AWD Luxury PHEV Plug in Hybrid SUV
date: 2024-08-04, from: San Jose Mercury News
What is a RX 450h? The RX is a midsize luxury SUV built in the Miyawaka, Japan, assembly plant and sold worldwide by Lexus. The 450h designation means that the SUV has a combined total system of 304 hp horsepower from a 2.5 liter 4 cylinder gas engine with a plug-in hybrid electric (PHEV) drive.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/04/the-2024-lexus-rx-450h-awd-luxury-phev-plug-in-hybrid-suv/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-04, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
A tutorial in why the social web is so useless.
https://www.threads.net/@sandipsrawat/post/C-QP8QGyJlK
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-04, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
The cryptocurrency lobby:
https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarettes/doctors-smoking/more-doctors-smoke-camels/
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112904723368536324
Monterey Auto Week: auctions fast, furious
date: 2024-08-04, from: San Jose Mercury News
The front page of the Monterey section of the Mecum Auctions website features a bright yellow 1966 Ferrari 275 GTB/6C Alloy Berlinetta. It sold at last year’s annual three-day gathering at the Hyatt Regency Monterey for $3.41 million.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/04/monterey-auto-week-auctions-fast-furious/
Logitech ponders a ‘forever mouse’ that requires a subscription
date: 2024-08-04, from: Liliputing
In a recent interview with The Verge’s Nilay Patel, Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber talked about the desire to create a ‘forever mouse.’ Buy one, and you wouldn’t just have the mouse forever. You may also have pay for yet another subscription forever, too. Faber likened the idea to owning a higher-end watch. ” I’m not […]
The post Logitech ponders a ‘forever mouse’ that requires a subscription appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/logitech-ponders-a-forever-mouse-that-requires-a-subscription/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-04, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
I use this idiom extensively in Swift with Godot.
I used to do one guard for each condition, until I discovered I could compound those all in one go with the comma operator.
In this particular case, I am dealing with converting weakly typed data into strongly typed data:
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112900465963859780
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112904560165031862
The Curious About Everything Newsletter #41
date: 2024-08-04, from: Curious about everything blog
The many interesting things I read in July 2024
https://jodiettenberg.substack.com/p/forty-one
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-04, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
OpenAI has a 99.9% accurate ChatGPT AI text detector, but won't release it.
https://the-decoder.com/openai-has-a-99-9-accurate-chatgpt-ai-text-detector-but-wont-release-it/
Chrome warns uBlock Origin may soon be disabled
date: 2024-08-04, from: OS News
As uBlock Origin lead developer and maintainer Raymond Hill explained on Friday, this is the result of Google deprecating support for the Manifest v2 (MV2) extensions platform in favor of Manifest v3 (MV3). “uBO is a Manifest v2 extension, hence the warning in your Google Chrome browser. There is no Manifest v3 version of uBO, hence the browser will suggest alternative extensions as a replacement for uBO,” Hill explained. ↫ Sergiu Gatlan at Bleeping Computer If you’re still using Chrome, or any possible Chrome skins who have not committed to keeping Manifest v2 extensions enabled, it’s really high time to start thinking about jumping ship if ad blocking matters to you. Of course, we don’t know for how long Firefox will remain able to properly block ads either, but for now, it’s obviously the better choice for those of us who care about a better browsing experience. And just to reiterate: I fully support anyone’s right to block ads, even on OSNews. Your computer, your rules. There are a variety of other, better means to support OSNews – our Patreon, individual donations through Ko-Fi, or buying our merch – that are far better for us than ads will ever be.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140411/chrome-warns-ublock-origin-may-soon-be-disabled/
Rebasing to reality
date: 2024-08-04, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
Somehow, I need to deal with my sadness.
Do we all?
It’s like it sits just under the surface, ready to spring up. Is every adult like this? I think it must be more common than anyone talks about. It’s not even that the world is getting harder, between climate change and nationalism and war; it’s the narrowing vice of what it takes to just be alive. There’s no time, there’s no money, we’re all expected to be a part of a template that someone else has established for their own benefit. It’s maybe easier if you’re rich, because more money roughly translates to more time and more freedom, at least in America, but even the rich get trapped into their own cycles of spending and acquiescence in order to maintain their lifestyles. Even rich kids compare their lives to people who have it better. They’ve got to keep earning, somehow.
I had a conversation with a good friend recently. I told her that I felt like I was living in a branch in the timestream, and I was waiting for the world to snap back to the main timeline.
“Ben,” she patiently told me, “this is the main timeline.”
I mean, fuck.
I’m older than I think I am. That’s a common problem too, I think: finding yourself stuck in that late twenties / early thirties mindset where you’re still exploring and nothing is really set in stone yet. I’m forty-five. My next major milestone birthday is fifty. I’m fifteen years away from being sixty years old. Is it always going to feel like this? When, exactly, will I have my shit together?
I’m still dealing with the loss of my mother and everything that led up to it. It’s been thirteen years since I moved to America to be closer to her, because she needed supplementary oxygen and it wasn’t clear how long she would live for. For so much of that time, I was worried about her. The two fridge-sized oxygen concentrators running in parallel so she would have enough to breathe, the clear tubes snaking around the house as she moved; the day she had her double lung transplant, when the ICU nurses eventually had to kick me out of her room; her first steps, set perfectly to Beyoncé’s Super Bowl half-time show; the joy of being free; the slow sadness of the drugs taking it all away from her. The nightmare trauma of palliative care and my guilt for not having done more. Wishing I’d said more to her in those final hours. Wishing I’d talked more with her overall. Feeling, despite everything I know, that I must have disappointed her, she must be mad at me, because she’s never shown up in a dream for me since.
My life hasn’t been real. It’s all a hyper-surreal collection of scenes that I’ve been disassociated from to varying degrees. After her loss, I fell into a trough of feeling like nothing at all mattered, like I was disconnected from the cause and effect of reality. It was all a dream.
It was not a dream. This is the main timeline.
One of the things about being a third culture kid — or maybe this isn’t about being a third culture kid at all, maybe it’s just about me, or maybe everyone feels this — is that however you may superficially appear to be a part of an archetype, you’re not a part of it. For all those years with a British accent, going to an English school, I was missing the cultural touchpoints and feeling of belonging. Some people are anchored in place, nationhood, nationality, their hometowns. The only feeling of belonging that really made sense to me was family: the only people who had that same background, that mix of cultural touchpoints and recognition. Losing family is about the profound hole that’s left when someone you love is suddenly gone, a real hurt, but it’s also about losing a tether: losing belonging itself.
I have always felt like I don’t really matter to anyone, except to my family. I could disappear tomorrow and, shrug. When I was younger, I convinced myself that there was some kind of magic incantation that other people knew and I didn’t; if I could just learn the password, I’d be a part of what everyone else was a part of. Until then, I wasn’t good enough. I needed to prove myself.
When I didn’t date in high school, it was because I wasn’t good enough. (All those beautiful people who did — I admired them so much. To my teenage eyes, to hook up with someone meant that they acceptedyou. What an unattainable thing for someone who didn’t feel like he belonged.) (And: Christ, why was my body so big. I hated my physicality. I wanted so badly for someone to tell me I was okay. This is still true.) Every job I didn’t get, I wasn’t good enough. When my startups didn’t hit the highs I was hoping for, I wasn’t good enough. Every mistake, I wasn’t good enough. I didn’t measure up.
I don’t measure up. I’m not good enough. Even in my chosen profession, I’ve never been in the cool developer circle, I’ve never quite made it into the in crowd. I am still scared of my body, of catching myself in the mirror. I’m still looking for the password.
This backchannel in my head is exhausting. It’s another reason to think: eh, I don’t matter, nothing I do is really that important.
The thing about being convinced that you’re in some kind of dream-world fork of reality is that you don’t face these things. The temptation is to slide and slide — nothing really matters, remember? — and pretend that one day you’ll go back to how it was before any of it started. But you have to; there is no going back; if this is a fork, it’s been worked on so long that there’s no way you could possibly rebase to the main branch. This is life.
Which brings me to: I have a son.
He’s beautiful and smart; his smile cuts through everything else. He sings the alphabet song in the back seat of the car and randomly walks up to me and says “hug” before wrapping me in an embrace. I wish my mother could have met him, is the toxic thought, but he is infused with everything that was good about her. To him, I want to be the belonging she represented to me. The belonging that my dad still represents for me. (Largely unacknowledged: I am terrified of losing him, too.)
That means I have to deal with this sadness, this untethered unreality. This has to be the main branch, because no other branch has him in it. What I do matters to him, a lot, and it will for the rest of his life.
Therapy? Yes, of course. Parts Work and reflection and perspective. I have a trauma therapist and Erin and I have a couples therapist and these things work.
But they don’t cut to the sadness. The sadness is there, always. And I have to deal with it, don’t I, because eventually it will infuse itself into my son. I don’t want him to carry it. I want him to be free of its tendrils. I want him to not feel how I feel.
I’ve been focused on the loss of belonging, and the idea of returning to a less complicated timeline. I think, though, the way to deal with the sadness is simpler, although also harder.
Ultimately, finally, I’ve got to make peace with myself.
That’s the job.
I’ll be honest: I don’t have the first clue how to do it.
And I don’t know how universal this is. Is this something that’s unique to me? Something that a lot of people quietly deal with? Is this sadness sitting just underneath everybody’s skin, or is it just an infection under mine? If it is lurking everywhere, shallowly digging its way into everyone, what can we do about it? How can we tell each other that we belong, that we’re okay, that it’s alright?
And if it’s not: please, finally, what’s the password? Not for my sake. For his.
https://werd.io/2024/rebasing-to-reality
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-04, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
This might be the sole reason to switch from using the verb “tweet”:
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112904100171267151
Wall Street week ahead: Flaring economic worries threaten US stocks rally
date: 2024-08-04, from: VOA News USA
New York — Economic fears are roiling Wall Street, as worries grow that the Federal Reserve may have left interest rates elevated for too long, allowing them to hurt U.S. growth.
Alarming economic data in recent days have deepened those concerns. U.S. job growth slowed more than expected in July, a Friday report showed, while the unemployment rate increased to 4.3%, heightening fears that a deteriorating labor market could make the economy vulnerable to a recession.
The jobs report exacerbated a selloff in stocks that began on Thursday, when data showing weakness in the labor market and manufacturing sector pushed investors to dump everything from chip stocks to industrials while piling into defensive plays.
Richly valued tech stocks tumbled further on Friday, extending losses in the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC to more than 10% from a record closing high reached in July. The benchmark S&P 500 index .SPX has slid 5.7% from its July peak.
“This is what a growth scare looks like,” said Wasif Latif, president and chief investment officer at Sarmaya Partners. “The market is now realizing that the economy is indeed slowing.”
For months, investors had been heartened by cooling inflation and gradually slowing employment, believing they bolstered the case for the Fed to begin cutting interest rates. That optimism drove big gains in stocks: the S&P 500 remains up 12% this year, despite recent losses; the Nasdaq has gained nearly 12%.
Now that a September rate cut has come into view following a Fed meeting this week, investors are fretting that elevated borrowing costs may already be hurting economic growth. Corporate earnings results, which saw disappointments from companies such as Amazon, Alphabet and Intel, are adding to their concerns.
“We’re witnessing the fallout from the curse of high expectations,” said James St. Aubin, chief investment officer at Ocean Park Asset Management. “So much had been invested around the scenario of a soft landing, that anything that even suggests something different is difficult.”
Next week brings earnings from industrial bellwether Caterpillar CAT.N and media and entertainment giant Walt Disney DIS.N, which will give more insight into the health of the consumer and manufacturing, as well as reports from healthcare heavyweights such as weight-loss drugmaker Eli Lilly LLY.N.
Bets in the futures markets on Friday suggested growing unease about the economy. Fed fund futures reflected traders pricing an over-70% chance of a 50-basis point cut at the central bank’s September meeting, compared to 22% the day before, according to CME FedWatch. Futures priced a total of 116 basis points in rate cuts in 2024, compared to just over 60 basis points priced in on Wednesday.
Broader markets also showed signs of unease. The Cboe Volatility index .VIX - known as Wall Street’s fear gauge - hit its highest since March 2023 on Friday as demand for options protection against a stock market selloff rose.
Meanwhile, investors have rushed into safe haven bonds and other defensive areas of the market. U.S. 10-year yields - which move inversely to bond prices - on Friday dropped as low as 3.79%, the lowest since December.
Sectors that are often popular during times of economic uncertainty are also drawing investors.
Options data for the Health Care Select Sector SPDR Fund XLV.P showed the average daily balance between put and call contracts over the last month at its most bullish in about three years, according to a Reuters analysis of Trade Alert data. Trading in the options on Utilities Select Sector SPDR Fund XLU.P also shows a pullback in defensive positioning, highlighting traders’ expectations for strength for the sector.
The healthcare sector .SPXHC is up 4% in the past month, while utilities .SPLRCU are up over 9%. By contrast, the Philadelphia SE Semiconductor index .SOX is down nearly 17% in that period amid sharp losses in investor favorites such as Nvidia NVDA.O and Broadcom AVGO.O.
To be sure, some investors said the data could just be a reason to lock in profits after the market’s overall strong run in 2024.
“This is a good excuse for investors to sell after a huge year to date rally,” said Michael Purves, CEO of Tallbacken Capital Advisors. “Investors should be prepared for some major volatility, particularly in the big tech stocks. But it will probably be short-lived.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/7729306.html
StarBook 7 Linux laptop comes with a choice of Intel N200 or Core Ultra 7 165H chips
date: 2024-08-04, from: Liliputing
It’s not unusual for PC makers to offer the same laptop with several different processor options. But usually we’re talking about chips in the same family, like Intel Core i3, i5, or i7 or AMD Ryzen 3, 5, or 7. But the new StarBook 7 laptop from Linux PC vendor Star Labs is something different. […]
The post StarBook 7 Linux laptop comes with a choice of Intel N200 or Core Ultra 7 165H chips appeared first on Liliputing.
Support Wildlife Corridors Bill
date: 2024-08-04, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Studies show that wildlife corridors can reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions by up to 90 percent.
The post Support Wildlife Corridors Bill appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/04/support-wildlife-corridors-bill/
LEVER WEEKLY: When Big Oil Kills Your Family
date: 2024-08-04, from: The Lever News
Advocates are charging Big Oil for climate-related deaths, and more from The Lever this week.
https://www.levernews.com/lever-weekly-when-big-oil-kills-your-family/
Limine: a modern, advanced, portable, multiprotocol bootloader and boot manager
date: 2024-08-04, from: OS News
Limine is an advanced, portable, multiprotocol bootloader that supports Linux, multiboot1 and 2, the native Limine boot protocol, and more. Limine is lightweight, elegant, fast, and the reference implementation of the Limine boot protocol. The Limine boot protocol’s main target audience is operating system and kernel developers that want to use a boot protocol which supports modern features in an elegant manner, that GRUB’s aging multiboot protocols do not (or do not properly). ↫ Limine website I wish trying out different bootloaders was an easier thing to do. Personally, since my systems only run Fedora Linux, I’d love to just move them all over to systemd-boot and not deal with GRUB at all anymore, but since it’s not supported by Fedora I’m worried updates might break the boot process at some point. On systems where only one operating system is installed, as a user I should really be given the choice to opt for the simplest, most basic boot sequence, even if it can’t boot any other operating systems or if it’s more limited than GRUB.
Exploring O3 optimization for Ubuntu
date: 2024-08-04, from: OS News
Following our recent work 5 with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS where we enabled frame pointers by default to improve debugging and profiling, we’re continuing our performance engineering efforts by evaluating the impact of O3 optimization in Ubuntu. O3 is a GCC optimization 14 level that applies more aggressive code transformations compared to the default O2 level. These include advanced function and the use of sophisticated algorithms aimed at enhancing execution speed. While O3 can increase binary size and compilation time, it has the potential to improve runtime performance. ↫ Ubuntu Discourse If these optimisations deliver performance improvements, and the only downside is larger binaries and longer compilation times, it seems like a bit of a no-brainer to enable these, assuming those mentioned downsides are within reason. Are there any downsides they’re not mentioning? Browsing around and doing some minor research it seems that -O3 optimisations may break some packages, and can even lead to performance degradation, defeating the purpose altogether. Looking at a set of benchmarks from Phoronix from a few years ago, in which the Linux kernel was compiled with either O2 and O3 and their performance compared, the results were effectively tied, making it seem not worth it at all. However, during these benchmarks, only the kernel was tested; everything else was compiled normally in both cases. Perhaps compiling the entire system with O3 will yield improvements in other parts of the system that do add up. For now, you can download unsupported Ubuntu ISOs compiled with O3 optimisations enabled to test them out.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140403/exploring-o3-optimization-for-ubuntu/
A course correction
date: 2024-08-04, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
Over time — and really, over the last few years — this personal space really has evolved to become more about tech and society and less about me. I’m going to add more “me” back. This is my space.
https://werd.io/2024/a-course-correction
Children of freed sleeper agents learned they were Russians on the flight, Kremlin says
date: 2024-08-04, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
<div class="known-bookmark">
<div class="e-content">[Dmitry Antonov and Andrew Osborn at Reuters]
“A family of Russian sleeper agents flown to Moscow in the biggest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War were so deep under cover that their children found out they were Russians only after the flight took off, the Kremlin said on Friday.”
What a bonkers story. It’s crazy to me that these kinds of sleeper agents are still real - or that they ever were at all. Imagine what it takes to fit in with a culture completely, from language to mannerisms to cultural understanding.
Also, many of these voices appear to adhere to their pulp fiction archetypes:
“Andrei Lugovoi, a former spy wanted by Britain for murdering dissident Alexander Litvinenko with atomic poison and now serving as head of an ultranationalist party’s faction in the Russian Duma, said on Telegram:”Our people are at home with their families. And for each of them it is no pity to hand over a bunch of foreign agent scum.”“
I wonder how many sleeper agents are still out there, acting on behalf of Russia and every other nation.
<p>[<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/kremlin-says-an-fsb-agent-deep-cover-russian-sleeper-agents-among-those-returned-2024-08-02/">Link</a>]</p>
</div>
</div>https://werd.io/2024/children-of-freed-sleeper-agents-learned-they-were-russians-on
In win for Mexico, US will expand areas for migrants to apply online for entry at southern border
date: 2024-08-04, from: VOA News USA
Mexico City — The Biden administration will expand areas where migrants can apply online for appointments to enter the United States to a large swath of southern Mexico, officials said Saturday, potentially easing strains on the Mexican government and lessening dangers for people trying to reach the U.S. border to claim asylum.
Migrants will be able to schedule appointments on the CBP One app from the states of Chiapas and Tabasco, extending the zone from northern and central Mexico, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said. The move satisfies a request of Mexico, an increasingly close partner of the U.S. in efforts to control extraordinary migration flows.
The change will spare migrants from traveling north through Mexico to get one of 1,450 appointments made available daily, CBP said. The agency said it will happen soon but did not give a date.
“We consistently engage with our partners in the Government of Mexico and work together to adjust policies and practices in response to the latest migration trends and security needs,” CBP said in a statement.
The statement confirmed remarks a day earlier by Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Secretary Alicia Bárcena, who said closer relations with the United States cut migration sharply from late last year.
U.S. officials have said increased Mexican enforcement is largely responsible for a sharp drop in U.S. arrests for illegal border crossings during the first half of this year. Mexican officials have stepped up their presence at highway checkpoints and on railroads leading to the U.S. border, returning most to southern Mexico.
In June, the U.S. temporarily suspended asylum processing for those who enter the country illegally, making CBP One of the only avenues for migrants to enter the U.S. to seek asylum and further driving down illegal entries. U.S. officials said arrests for illegal crossings plunged 30% in July from the previous month to the lowest level of Joe Biden’s presidency and the lowest since September 2020.
“We have managed to decompress our [northern] border in a very meaningful way and that has helped … our relationship with the United States be very, very dynamic and very positive,” Bárcena said Friday.
More than 680,000 people scheduled CBP One appointments at eight Mexican land crossings with the U.S. from its introduction in January 2023 through June. The top nationalities are Venezuelan, Cuban and Haitian. U.S. authorities recently limited slots for Mexicans due to the high number of applicants from the country.
The perils of traveling through Mexico to be kidnapped or robbed has prompted many migrants to fly to northern border cities like Tijuana for their CBP One appointments once they reach the southernmost point from which they can apply — until now, Mexico City.
Migrants generally enter Mexico in Chiapas or Tabasco from Guatemala. Mexico City may offer more job opportunities and relative safety but the cost of living is higher, prompting some to live in informal camps in the nation’s capital.
AI boom is reshaping the face of cloud infrastructure
date: 2024-08-04, updated: 2024-08-04, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Capex skyrockets as providers prioritize new shiny over traditional server upgrades
Analysis Cloud infrastructure is undergoing an upheaval with service providers rushing to deploy servers configured for AI model training, often at the cost of postponing the usual refresh cycle for their standard server hardware.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/04/ai_cloud_infrastructure/
‘We’re going to survive and it’s going to come back’: A year after Maui wildfire, survivors press on
date: 2024-08-04, from: VOA News USA
LAHAINA, Hawaii — They have combed the ashes for mementos, worried about where they would sleep, questioned their faith and tried to find a way to grieve amid the great, unsettling devastation. Residents have faced a year of challenges, practical and emotional, since the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century decimated the historic town of Lahaina, on Maui, on Aug. 8, 2023.
To mark the anniversary, The Associated Press interviewed seven survivors its journalists first encountered in the days, weeks or months after the fire, as well as a first responder who helped fight the flames. Among their difficulties, they also have found hope, resilience and determination: the Vietnam veteran who has helped others deal with post-traumatic stress; the Buddhist minister with a new appreciation for the sunsets from Lahaina; the college-bound teen aspiring to become a Maui firefighter himself.
Here is a series of vignettes examining some of their experiences over the past year.
Coping and staying
Even as he hid behind a seawall from the flames, Thomas Leonard knew Lahaina’s wildfire was going to give him flashbacks to his service as a U.S. Marine in Vietnam 55 years ago. The exploding cars and propane tanks sounded just like mortars.
“Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom — one car after another,” he said.
The nightmares started a few months later. His Veterans Administration doctor prescribed new sleeping medication.
“Thank God for the VA,” he said.
The 75-year-old retired mailman learned to identify signs of post-traumatic stress disorder at a VA clinic in 2001, helping him spot and cope with new triggers. He’s also helped fellow fire survivors.
“I’ve learned to be a really good listener on that with other people, what they’re going through,” he said.
His condo building is still a pile of ash and rubble. Leonard suspects it might take years to rebuild, but he’s determined to see it through. He’s been living in hotels and a rented condo.
“We all got to stay together here on Maui,” Leonard said. “We’re going to survive and it’s going to come back.”
Memories of gold
After Elsie Rosales arrived on Maui from the Philippines in 1999, she scrimped on a hotel housekeeper’s salary. As she saved up enough to buy a five-bedroom house in Lahaina in 2014, she did allow herself a few luxuries: gold bracelets, delicate hoop earrings, things she could never have afforded if she remained in the Philippines.
Like the home — her pride, her American dream — the jewelry was a reminder of what’s possible in the U.S.
It all was wiped out in the wildfire that destroyed Lahaina. When she finally was allowed back on the property, she dug through the debris for anything that survived. All she found was a broken bangle.
She used insurance money to pay off the mortgage on the house. She’s now renting a two-bedroom apartment with her husband, their son and their son’s girlfriend in Kahului, an hourlong bus ride from Lahaina.
On those long commutes, she reflects on how she amassed her jewelry collection, only for it to vanish.
“When I’m not working, I keep thinking about everything that burned,” she said. “Especially my jewelry. Everything that I worked hard for.”
Missing the mana
Surfing off his Lahaina home always gave Ekolu Lindsey “mana,” spiritual energy. The house was in his family for five generations.
He’s so familiar with the area he notices when more crabs are around or fish are undersized. He has brought school groups there to teach them about the coral, seaweed and the ocean.
“My reset button is to jump in the water at home,” he said.
That has been impossible since the wildfire turned his house to rubble. His property is now clear of debris but has no electricity or other utilities. Reconstruction is well off.
He’s living at a friend’s place on Oahu, another island, a plane ride away. He couldn’t find anything in Lahaina for less than $4,000 a month.
He returns regularly to Maui to help restore native forests, a focus of the nonprofit his father founded, Maui Cultural Lands. Sadness weighs on him as he drives the winding coastal highway to Lahaina.
State conservation officials won’t allow people to enter the ocean from the burn zone. He surfs on Oahu, but it’s not the same.
“You get the physical exercise,” he said, but not the “rejuvenation of that mana.”
The right track
As he was dying of colon cancer, Mike Vierra spent sleepless nights fretting about where his wife, Leola, and their daughter would live when he was gone. The wildfire had reduced their home of more than half a century to hardened pools of melted metal, burned wood and broken glass.
By the time he passed away in April, the answer still wasn’t clear.
Leola Vierra and her daughter moved multiple times after the fire, switching hotel rooms and vacation rentals whenever the unit’s owners would return.
“Everything was so unsettled,” she said.
The Vierras, married 57 years, also couldn’t find their beloved cat, Kitty Kai. But in February, they learned Kitty Kai had found her way to Kahului, 30 miles (48 kilometers) across the West Maui Mountains.
The reunion, while joyful, complicated their housing search. Landlords are less likely to rent to families with pets.
Not until last month did Vierra find some stability, securing a six-month lease while they wait to someday rebuild on their own property. Their new place has a yard, a sundeck and an ocean view.
“I have been so depressed ever since my husband passed, and I can feel my mind and my memory all going downhill,” she said. “With this new home, I think I will be able to accept more things now, because it seems like I’m on the right track.”
Cherishing sunsets
As the flames approached, Ai Hironaka and his family — wife, four children, French bulldog — crammed into his Honda Civic and drove off, leaving behind their home and the Japanese Buddhist temple where he was resident minister and caretaker.
Losing those buildings and being uprooted amid the greater devastation has tested him as a Buddhist. How should he behave as a disaster victim? What is the appropriate response when someone gives him donated clothing he doesn’t want? If he feels ungrateful, he turns to the teachings of his religion.
“We all have an evil nature, self-centeredness,” he said.
After moving three times in the months after the fire, he now lives across the island, nearly an hour away, at another temple, Kahului Hongwanji Mission, where he also serves as resident minister. He performs much of the same work he did at the Hongwanji Mission in Lahaina: leading ceremonies and counseling members, including fire survivors.
He returns to the site of the Lahaina temple occasionally to check the columbarium, an area for storing funeral urns, which survived. He misses the town, the beach parks, the parents on his son’s high school football team.
And he misses the sunsets from Lahainaluna High School, overlooking the ocean. When he goes back now, he does not take that view for granted.
“I have to capture that,” he said, “because I cannot see this tomorrow.”
From football to firefighting
Before the fire, Morgan “Bula” Montgomery was a kid who loved playing football and paddling in the ocean. College wasn’t on his radar.
But the University of Hawaii offered full-ride scholarships for Lahainaluna High School graduates at any school in its system following the disaster. Montgomery thought, “Why not?”
He plans to leave Maui this fall to study fire science at Hawaii Community College on the Big Island, inspired by the devastation and the firefighters who tried to save the community.
“I want to come back to Lahaina and come back to Maui and try to be a firefighter,” he said.
Montgomery’s family lost their two-bedroom apartment to the fire, but also found opportunity. Montgomery and fellow Lahainaluna football captains were invited to the Super Bowl in Las Vegas this year. It was one of just a handful of times he has left Maui.
After spending time in a hotel, the family secured a rental house about an hour drive across the island. It’s not convenient for his canoe paddling practices in Lahaina. But it’s the biggest house they’ve lived in, with five bedrooms, enough for his mom and her five children.
He’s a little nervous about leaving Maui but grateful for the scholarship.
“An opportunity for school or free tuition is something you’ve got to take advantage of,” Montgomery said.
‘That’s what we do’
Ikaika Blackburn, an 18-year veteran of the Maui Fire Department, talks often with his crewmates about the blaze that consumed Lahaina: at the fire house kitchen table, over cups of coffee while waiting for calls or during family gatherings on days off.
His five-person crew was one of the first on the scene. There was no time to think, “no time to have these sentimental feelings,” as he fought through the night. He spent a lot of time growing up with his grandparents in Lahaina. His wife is from the town. His mother-in-law lost her home.
At daybreak, it set in: “We lost Lahaina.”
Blackburn and his crew spent days talking about it, “just releasing it and not holding it all in,” he said. Recalling how they rushed from one part of town to the next, trying to find a way to stop it.
“For the most part, we’re able to always win,” he said. “We’re always able to get ahead of it.”
But this fire was different, uncontrollable. Firefighters and investigators from outside Maui helped him understand that his crew did all they could.
Blackburn followed his father’s footsteps as a Maui fire captain. Firefighting feels like something he was born to do.
And he has kept doing it. This year’s busy brushfire season hasn’t triggered memories of last August, he said, because nothing compares to that fire.
“We respond to fires all the time,” he said. “That’s what we do.”
Lahaina Strong
When wildfire struck, Jordan Ruidas couldn’t sleep. Eager to help families in the 21 homes that burned, she started a Facebook fundraiser titled, “Lahaina Strong,” which raised more than $150,000.
That was in 2018.
Five years later, Ruidas and Lahaina Strong again emerged as leaders, pushing officials to control tourism and try to find enough housing for local residents after the 2023 fire destroyed thousands of buildings.
Ruidas was seven months pregnant when last year’s fire destroyed Lahaina. She sometimes missed prenatal checkups. Traveling nurses at community hubs for fire survivors would check her blood pressure.
The fire spared her neighborhood and two months later she gave birth at home to a daughter, Aulia.
“I don’t think I’ve dealt with all the emotions that came with losing Lahaina and being postpartum,” she said. “I feel like I cope by staying busy with work, with Lahaina Strong.”
Ruidas brought the baby along, strapped to her chest, when she helped organize a “fish-in” protest at a popular beach resort demanding more short-term rental housing be made available for survivors.
She still hasn’t been able to bring herself to visit the burn zone.
“My kids will never grow up seeing or knowing the Lahaina that I grew up seeing and knowing,” she said. “The Lahaina that we lost was a very special and beautiful place.”
Tropical Storm Debby moving through Gulf toward Florida with hurricane warnings
date: 2024-08-04, from: VOA News USA
MIAMI, FLORIDA — A tropical depression strengthened into Tropical Storm Debby north of Cuba on Saturday and was predicted to become a hurricane as it moves through the Gulf of Mexico on a collision course with the Florida coast.
The National Hurricane Center said in an update posted at 5 a.m. Sunday that Debby was located about 195 miles (315 kilometers) south-southwest of Tampa, Florida, and about 255 miles (410 kilometers) south-southwest of Cedar Key, Florida. The storm was moving north-northwest at 13 mph (20 kph) with maximum sustained winds of 50 mph (85 kph).
The storm was strengthening over the southeastern Gulf and expected to be a hurricane before making landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida, the hurricane center said.
Wind and thunderstorms have spread over a broad area including southern Florida, the Florida Keys and the Bahamas. A hurricane warning and tropical storm warnings were in effect for sections of Florida’s coast and a tropical storm watch was added for coastal Georgia in the latest advisory.
Debby is likely to bring drenching rain and coastal flooding to much of Florida’s Gulf Coast by Sunday night and predictions show the system could come ashore as a hurricane Monday and cross over northern Florida into the Atlantic Ocean.
Forecasters warn it also could drop heavy rains over north Florida and the Atlantic coasts of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina early next week.
Debby is the fourth named storm of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season after Tropical Storm Alberto, Hurricane Beryl and Tropical Storm Chris, all of which formed in June.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami predicted the system will strengthen as it curves off the southwest Florida coast, where the water has been extremely warm. Intensification was expected to proceed more quickly later on Sunday.
A hurricane warning was issued for parts of the Big Bend and the Florida Panhandle, while tropical storm warnings were posted for Florida’s West Coast, the southern Florida Keys and Dry Tortugas. A tropical storm watch extended farther west into the Panhandle. A warning means storm conditions are expected within 36 hours, while a watch means they are possible within 48 hours.
Tropical storms and hurricanes can trigger river flooding and overwhelm drainage systems and canals. Forecasters warned of 6 to 12 inches (150mm to 300 mm) of rain and up to 18 inches (450 mm) in isolated areas, which could create “locally considerable” flash and urban flooding. Forecasters also warned of moderate flooding for some rivers along Florida’s West Coast.
Heaviest rain could be in Georgia, South Carolina
Some of the heaviest rains could actually come next week along the Atlantic Coast from Jacksonville, Florida, through coastal regions of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. The storm is expected to slow down after making landfall.
“We could see a stall or a meandering motion around coastal portions of the southeastern United States,” National Hurricane Center Director Michael Brennan said in a Saturday briefing. “So that’s going to exacerbate not just the rainfall risk, but also the potential for storm surge and some strong winds.”
Flat Florida is prone to flooding even on sunny days, and the storm was predicted to bring a surge of 2 to 4 feet (0.6 to 1.2 meters) along most of the Gulf Coast, including Tampa Bay, with a storm tide of up to 7 feet (2.1 meters) north of there in the sparsely populated Big Bend region.
Forecasters warned of “a danger of life-threatening storm surge inundation” in a region that includes Hernando Beach, Crystal River, Steinhatchee and Cedar Key. Officials in Citrus and Levy counties ordered a mandatory evacuation of coastal areas, while those in Hernando, Manatee, Pasco and Taylor counties called for voluntary evacuations. Shelters opened in those and some other counties.
Citrus County Sheriff Mike Prendergast estimated 21,000 people live in his county’s evacuation zone. Officials rescued 73 people from storm surge flooding during last year’s Hurricane Idalia. Prendergast said by phone that he hopes not to have a repeat with Debbie.
“After the storm surge does come in, we simply don’t have enough first responders in our agency and among the other first responders in the county to go in and rescue everybody that might need to be rescued,” he said.
Flood preparations underway
Gov. Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency for 61 of Florida’s 67 counties, with the National Guard activating 3,000 guard members. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp made his own emergency proclamation on Saturday.
The White House said federal and Florida officials were in touch and FEMA “pre-positioned” resources including water and food.
In Tampa alone, officials gave out more than 30,000 sandbags to barricade against flooding.
“We’ve got our stormwater drains cleared out. We’ve got our generators all checked and full. We’re doing everything that we need to be prepared to face a tropical storm,” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said.
Christina Lothrop is the general manager at Blue Pelican Marina in Hernando Beach, a barrier island about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of St. Petersburg. She said the public ramp was jammed Saturday with people launching boats.
“Today it’s kind of normal, which is kind of weird,” Lothrop told The Associated Press by telephone.
Workers at her marina have been preparing since Tuesday, however, securing boats stored on racks, stowing tool boxes and tying everything down.
“Right now what we’re doing is mostly tying up boats,” Lothrop said.
Before closing Saturday, Lothrop planned to raise computers off the floor and sandbag and tape doors. Idalia pushed about a foot of water (30 centimeters) into the store.
Betti Silverman, whose home in Crystal River was under an evacuation order, said on Saturday afternoon that she doubted her family would leave. Silverman’s waterfront home flooded during Idalia just as her family was moving in, ruining boxes and furniture in the garage. But she said the forecast for Debby didn’t seem as severe.
“We’ve been in Florida our whole lives, in South Florida, so hurricanes are not really a big, big thing,” Silverman said.
On Friday, crews pulled floating cranes away from a bridge construction project across Tampa Bay, lashing together 74 barges and 24 floating cranes and anchoring them, project engineer Marianne Brinson told the Tampa Bay Times. Crews also laid down cranes on land on their sides.
Pinellas County paused a $5 million beach renourishment project necessitated in part by erosion from past storms.
For some, the name Debby summons bad memories of a 2012 tropical storm of the same name that caused $250 million in losses and eight deaths, including seven in the Sunshine State. That storm dumped torrential rains, including an astronomical 29 inches (730 mm) south of Tallahassee.
More storms in the Pacific, but no threat to land
More than 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) off Mexico in the Pacific Ocean, Hurricane Carlotta continued moving westward with top sustained winds of 85 mph (140 kph). Carlotta began losing strength Saturday and is likely to dissipate into a remnant of thunderstorms.
Farther west, Tropical Storm Daniel formed in the Pacific. It was more than 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) from the southern tip of Baja California and was also expected to dissipate without striking land.
ArchiveBox
date: 2024-08-04, from: Tilde.news
David Hegg | Caution: Keyboard Communication
date: 2024-08-04, from: The Signal
By David Hegg Have you ever written what you thought was a relatively innocuous email or text only to find out much later that the recipient found it offensive and […]
The post David Hegg | Caution: Keyboard Communication appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/david-hegg-caution-keyboard-communication/
Rob Kerchner | A Fair Trade?
date: 2024-08-04, from: The Signal
What? A celebrity once paid off a porn star? Well in that case give me $5 gas, two wars and three decades of bribery! Rob Kerchner Valencia
The post Rob Kerchner | A Fair Trade? appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/rob-kerchner-a-fair-trade/
Arthur Saginian | Marxism in the White House
date: 2024-08-04, from: The Signal
I’ve often wondered as to what is the underlying driving factor behind many of the more bizarre socioeconomic policies that were being pursued by former President Barack Obama and his […]
The post Arthur Saginian | Marxism in the White House appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/arthur-saginian-marxism-in-the-white-house/
Today in SCV History (Aug. 4)
date: 2024-08-04, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1992 – Pardee House (ex-Good Templars Lodge) moved to Hart Park [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-aug-4/
Tribes wait to get items back, 6 months after museums shut Native exhibits
date: 2024-08-04, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — Tucked within the expansive Native American halls of the American Museum of Natural History is a diminutive wooden doll that holds a sacred place among the tribes whose territories once included Manhattan.
For more than six months now, the ceremonial Ohtas, or Doll Being, has been hidden from view after the museum and others nationally took dramatic steps to board up or paper over exhibits in response to new federal rules requiring institutions to return sacred or culturally significant items to tribes — or at least to obtain consent to display or study them.
Museum officials are reviewing more than 1,800 items as they work to comply with the requirements while also eyeing a broader overhaul of the more than half-century-old exhibits.
But some tribal leaders remain skeptical, saying museums have not acted swiftly enough. The new rules, after all, were prompted by years of complaints from tribes that hundreds of thousands of items that should have been returned under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 still remain in museum custody.
“If things move slowly, then address that,” said Joe Baker, a Manhattan resident and member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, descendants of the Lenape peoples European traders encountered more than 400 years ago. “The collections, they’re part of our story, part of our family. We need them home. We need them close.”
Sean Decatur, the New York museum’s president, promised tribes will hear from officials soon. He said staff these past few months have been reexamining the displayed objects in order to begin contacting tribal communities.
Museum officials envision a total overhaul of the closed Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains halls — akin to the five-year, $19 million renovation of its Northwest Coast Hall, completed in 2022 in close collaboration with tribes, Decatur added.
“The ultimate aim is to make sure we’re getting the stories right,” he said.
Discussions with tribal representatives over the Ohtas began in 2021 and will continue, museum officials said, even though the doll does actually not fall under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act because it is associated with a tribe outside the U.S., the Munsee-Delaware Nation in Ontario, Canada.
The museum also plans to open a small exhibit in the fall incorporating Native American voices and explaining the history of the closed halls, why changes are being made and what the future holds, he said.
Lance Gumbs, vice chairman of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, a federally recognized tribe in New York’s Hamptons, said he worries about the loss of representation of local tribes in public institutions, with exhibit closures likely stretching into years.
The American Museum of Natural History, he noted, is one of New York’s major tourism draws and also a mainstay for generations of area students learning about the region’s tribes.
He suggests museums use replicas made by Native peoples so that sensitive cultural items aren’t physically on display.
“I don’t think tribes want to have our history written out of museums,” Gumbs said. “There’s got to be a better way than using artifacts that literally were stolen out of gravesites.”
Gordon Yellowman, who heads the department of language and culture for the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, said museums should look to create more digital and virtual exhibits.
He said the tribes, in Oklahoma, will be seeking from the New York museum a sketchbook by the Cheyenne warrior Little Finger Nail that contains his drawings and illustrations from battle.
The book, which is in storage and not on display, was plucked from his body after he and other tribe members were killed by U.S. soldiers in Nebraska in 1879.
“These drawings weren’t just made because they were beautiful,” Yellowman said. “They were made to show the actual history of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people.”
Institutions elsewhere are taking other approaches.
In Chicago, the Field Museum has established a Center for Repatriation after covering up several cases in its halls dedicated to ancient America and the peoples of the coastal Northwest and Arctic.
The museum has completed four repatriations to tribes involving around 40 items over the past six months, with at least three more repatriations pending involving additional items. Those repatriations were through efforts that were underway before the new regulations, according to Field Museum spokesperson Bridgette Russell.
At the Cleveland Museum in Ohio, a case displaying artifacts from the Tlingit people in Alaska has been reopened after their leadership gave consent, according to Todd Mesek, the museum’s spokesperson. But two other displays remain covered up, with one containing funerary objects from the ancient Southwest to be redone with a different topic and materials.
And at Harvard, the Peabody Museum’s North American Indian hall reopened in February after about 15% of its roughly 350 items were removed from displays, university spokesperson Nicole Rura said.
Chuck Hoskin, chief of the Cherokee Nation, said he believes many institutions now understand they can no longer treat Indigenous items as “museum curiosities” from “peoples that no longer exist.”
The leader of the tribe in Oklahoma said he visited the Peabody this year after the university reached out about returning hair clippings collected in the early 1930s from hundreds of Indigenous children, including Cherokees, forced to assimilate in the notorious Indian boarding schools.
“The fact that we’re in a position to sit down with Harvard and have a really meaningful conversation, that’s progress for the country,” he said.
As for Baker, he wants the Ohtas returned to its tribe. He said the ceremonial doll should never have been on display, especially arranged as it was among wooden bowls, spoons and other everyday items.
“It has a spirit. It’s a living being,” Baker said. “So if you think about it being hung on a wall all these years in a static case, suffocating for lack of air, it’s just horrific, really.”
Summary of changes for July 2024
date: 2024-08-04, from: Hundred Rabbits blog
Hey everyone!
This is the list of all the changes we’ve done to our projects during the month of July.
Summary Of Changes
- 100r.co, added Sitka, and completed route in {us se alaska}.
- Left, can now paste binary directly from programs like Nasu.
- Hakum, added two drawings to the Characters section, and a new very short comic called Shoes.
- Wiktopher, fixed some typos.
- Markl, we don’t have much of anything to show for it yet, but who knows, maybe this time it will work out!
- Solrela, expanded Solresol dictionary.
- Malleable Systems, wrote a little thing about extending compiled software with devtools.
Pino and crew have moved a lot in the past month. On the first of July, we were in Sitka, Southeast Alaska, and then on the last day of the month we were back in Millbrook Cove, very near to the top of Vancouver Island. We sailed 590 NM and stopped in 15 different anchorages.
Leaving Sitka, we sailed along the west coast of Southeast Alaska for a few days to try and take advantage of a good weather window, we had some engine issues which too motivated the need for such a long passage(see our track)—we spent two days troubleshooting the issue while anchored in Port Bazan, a bay far from everything, with no internet connection or way to talk to anybody, we were glad to have the physical engine manual on board. Sailing on open waters is always nice, we saw black-footed albatrosses, horned puffins, a whale per hour, and many more sea otters(Port Bazan was full of them).
After checking back into Prince Rupert, the way back south through Northern Canada was plagued with unfavorable winds, we had to beat into it, or travel on quiet waters to make progress. We resorted to doing short hops between anchorages, conditions did not permit for long distances. Doing short hops though did allow us to discover beautiful places we might have otherwise missed. We spent many grey days waiting for weather, reading, drawing, and beginning work on markl, we’re giving it another go).
Book Club: This month we read Erewhon by Samuel Butler, Technophilia and Its Discontents by Ellen Ullman, The Democracy Of Species by Robin Wall Kimmerer, I Will Fight No More Forever by Merrill D. Beal, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, and Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
https://100r.co/site/log.html#jul2024
Inspired by older Olympians, adults get back into gymnastics
date: 2024-08-04, from: VOA News USA
As wildfires rage in US, volunteers save animals with warm hearts and cool heads
date: 2024-08-04, from: VOA News USA
COHASSET, California — While firefighters continued to battle California’s biggest wildfire of the year, Norm Rosene was spending 18-hour days behind fire lines with a different task –- saving the animals.
Tucked in an old wooden barn in the decimated forest town of Cohasset in northern California, his team stumbled upon a calf that appeared to be just a few days old. Its mother protectively hovered over her baby while it nursed.
“It’s critical for us to get feed and water … especially because the temperature is supposed to go up to the hundreds (above 37 degrees Celsius) over the next few days,” said the 66-year-old volunteer. “They drink a lot of water, especially the mom’s going to need water and food to be able to nurse the calf.”
He made sure any smoldering hay or small fires still burning near the barn were extinguished, alerted nearby firefighters and moved on to the next home.
With more than 26,000 residents evacuated due to the Park Fire and over 1,554 square kilometers scorched as of Wednesday, there were cats, dogs, chickens, horses, and goats left behind.
Worried owners depend on volunteers like Rosene to rescue their beloved pets and keep their livestock alive until they can return to their homes.
“If people can’t take their animals, they sometimes want to stay,” Rosene said. “So if we can come and help them take their animals, then they will come out of that disaster area and they are safer and they feel better because they didn’t leave their animals behind.”
When the Park Fire started last Wednesday, Rosene at first thought it wouldn’t come his direction. But by evening, the winds had changed. He and his wife Janice evacuated his home in Chico around 1 a.m.
“It’s almost terrifying because the wind was blowing and the fire was roaring and it’s coming right at you and the embers are like fireflies just darting all over the sky,” Rosene said, showing images of a blood red sky blanketed with billowing columns of black smoke.
But the fire burned through his area quickly and thankfully left his house intact. Within hours, he and his wife were already at work evacuating animals.
The couple began volunteering 12 years ago with the North Valley Animal Disaster Group, a team of now about 300 volunteers. They’re trained for all types of disasters, from floods to fires, and nearly every type of rescue you could think of – helicopter rescue, high angle rope rescue, search and rescue – as well as animal behavior and handling.
“That’s why our team is allowed to go behind fire lines and work within the fire disaster system because we integrate with them and we don’t get in the way of the firefighters,” Rosene said. “They like having us back there because when they find an animal they don’t know what to do with it.”
They’ve dealt with all types of animals, and Rosene is team’s designated snake-and-lizard handler. He’s even evacuated two giant emus and their chicks. Every pet is worth saving.
For large animals, the goal is to keep them where they are, as long as they’re safe.
“When they get stressed by fire and smoke … now you try to load them into a trailer or truck it can be a real challenge,” he said.
If they have to be evacuated, Rosene and others will coax them into the back of their trailer and take them to the Camelot Equestrian Park. Smaller animals like cats and dogs are taken to an emergency shelter in Oroville.
Sometimes owners will bring in their animals if they are unable to care for them, Rosene said. There are about 100 in the small animal shelter and 70 in the large animal shelter from the Park Fire, and they are taking care of 850 more within the evacuation area.
Even if the fire is out in an area, it can take days for an evacuation order to lift. Crews have to clear the numerous hazards that appear in the aftermath of a fire, such as falling trees and power lines, exposed nails and broken glass, and tree holes filled with embers.
During the devastating Camp Fire in 2018, which destroyed several towns including nearly the entire community of Paradise, Rosene and others helped more than 4,000 displaced animals. He and group founder John Maretti have traveled to more than a dozen countries to teach and respond to disasters.
“If there’s one lesson here, it’s for people to be prepared to take their pets with them during a fire,” Rosene said. “So if they have a go bag for themselves, they should have a go bag for their pets.”
Review | Mid-Summer Symphonic High on John Adams Turf
date: 2024-08-04, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Orchestra delivers Music Academy season pinnacle with help from Leila Josefowicz and John Adams.
The post Review | Mid-Summer Symphonic High on John Adams Turf appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/03/review-mid-summer-symphonic-high-on-john-adams-turf/
Summer rain
date: 2024-08-04, from: Ed Summers blog, Inkdroid
https://inkdroid.org/2024/08/04/summer-rain/
Power Lines and Clouds
date: 2024-08-04, from: Ed Summers blog, Inkdroid
https://inkdroid.org/2024/08/04/power-lines-and-clouds/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-04, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Rumors of Threads dot net federation have been greatly exaggerated. (Indeed, threads users have to opt in.)
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/08/rumors-of-threads-dot-net-federation-have-been-greatly-exaggerated/
Harris campaign staffs up in battleground states, ‘Sun Belt’
date: 2024-08-04, from: VOA News USA
WILMINGTON, Delaware — Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign is staffing up in battleground states over the next two weeks including in the ‘Sun Belt’ that increasingly looked out of reach for President Joe Biden, citing momentum for her White House bid as grassroots engagement and fundraising soar.
“Our grassroots engagement is proving that Kamala Harris is strong in both the Sun Belt and the Blue Wall — with multiple pathways to 270 (electoral votes),” wrote Dan Kanninen, the campaign’s battleground states director in a memo on Saturday.
The Sun Belt refers to states including Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, and the Blue Wall includes Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. U.S. President Joe Biden won all six of those states in 2020 by thin margins, but just weeks ago, his campaign said the Sun Belt and North Carolina looked increasingly out of reach.
Harris energizes race
Harris’ takeover of the Democratic presidential campaign has injected new energy, money and enthusiasm into the race, which is translating into a shift in polls that show her pulling even with Republican former President Donald Trump or ahead in some battleground states.
Since Biden endorsed Harris on July 21, 200,000 volunteers have joined the Harris campaign, while over 350,000 supporters attended their first phone bank, rally or other campaign event - an over 350% increase in event attendees, Kanninen said.
Harris’ campaign announced on Friday it raised $310 million in July, fueled by small-dollar donations.
In the next two weeks, the campaign will add 150 more staff in the “Blue Wall,” and will more than double its staff in Arizona and North Carolina, Kanninen said.
Harris campaign operations on the ground are more extensive than Trump’s, he said.
“In Nevada, Team Harris has 13 offices, while Trump has just one,” Kanninen wrote. “In Pennsylvania, we have 36 coordinated offices while Trump has just three. In Georgia, we have 24 offices while the Trump team didn’t open their first until June.”
The Trump campaign did not immediately confirm the accuracy of those numbers, and it did not respond to a request for comment.
This week Trump’s campaign was set to launch a $10 million advertising blitz in six battleground states. A super PAC supporting Trump, MAGA Inc., kicked off a parallel ad blitz after it said it will spend $32 million in three states with new ads criticizing Harris.
Some political experts have questioned Trump’s lack of campaign infrastructure in recent days.
“Those of us who are interested in voting are like, ‘Why don’t you need a ground game?’” political historian Heather Cox Richardson said in a Facebook livestream. “It really takes feet on the ground, knuckles on doors, meetings with people, everything to get money circulating. He is not trying to get enough votes.”
Search for running mate. continues
Harris was expected to meet in person this weekend with the top contenders vying to join the ticket as the candidate for vice president, Reuters reported on Friday, citing sources.
She will meet with leading contenders Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro for interviews on Sunday, according to sources familiar with her plans.
Other top names include U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Senator Mark Kelly, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.
Harris held a marginal one-percentage-point lead over Trump in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, closing the gap that opened in the final weeks of Biden’s reelection bid.
The three-day poll showed Harris supported by 43% of registered voters, with Trump supported by 42%, within the poll’s 3.5 percentage point margin of error.
https://www.voanews.com/a/harris-campaign-staffs-up-in-battleground-states-sun-belt-/7729156.html
Katie Ledecky swims into Olympics history, winning 800 freestyle in Paris
date: 2024-08-04, from: VOA News USA
NANTERRE, France — Every year on August 3, Katie Ledecky is reminded of her first Olympic gold medal.
She was just 15 years old, a reserved high schooler who had surprisingly made the U.S. swim team for the London Games. Then she went out and shocked the world, beating everyone in the 800-meter freestyle.
Twelve years to the day, Ledecky did it again.
Not a stunner, but one for the ages.
Gold medal No. 9.
Ledecky capped another stellar Olympics by becoming only the second swimmer to win an event at four straight Summer Games, holding off Ariarne Titmus, the “Terminator,” to win the 800 free Saturday night.
It was Ledecky’s second gold medal in Paris and the ninth of her remarkable career, which marked another milestone.
She became only the sixth Olympian to reach that figure, joining swimmer Mark Spitz, track star Carl Lewis, Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina, and Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi in a tie for second place.
The only athlete to win more golds: swimmer Michael Phelps with 23.
Ledecky was very aware of the significance of the date.
“Every August 3rd, the video [of her first Olympic gold] gets posted somewhere and you kind of reminisce,” she said. “So, when I saw it was August 3rd, I was like, ‘Oh boy, I’ve got to get the job done.’”
That she did, going faster than her winning time in Tokyo to finish in 8 minutes, 11.04 seconds. Titmus was right on her shoulder nearly the entire race, but Ledecky pulled away in the final 100.
Titmus, who beat Ledecky in the 400 freestyle, settled for silver at 8:12.29. The bronze went to another American, Paige Madden at 8:13.00.
Phelps had been the only swimmer to win the same event at four straight Olympics, taking gold in the 200 individual medley at Athens, Beijing, London and Rio de Janeiro.
Now he’s got company.
Titmus added some perspective to Ledecky’s consistency over the last dozen years, noting where she was when the American won that first gold in London.
“I was in grade six in primary school,” Titmus said. “That’s how remarkable she is.”
Their friendly rivalry has driven both to greater heights. They each won two golds and four medals at these games, which pushed Ledecky to 14 overall and left the 23-year-old Aussie with four golds and eight medals in her career.
“To think that eight years later, I challenged her into her fourth consecutive in the 800 is pretty cool,” Titmus said. “So I’m really proud of myself and I feel very honored and privileged to be her rival, and I hope I’ve made her a better athlete. She has certainly made me become the athlete I am. I felt so privileged to race alongside her.”
Dominant for a dozen years
Ledecky has dominated the distance freestyle events over the last dozen years — and isn’t done yet. She’s made it clear she plans to keep swimming at least through the 2028 Los Angeles Games.
“It’s not easy,” Ledecky said. “I’ll take it year by year, and we’ll see if I can keep giving everything I’ve got for as long as I have left in me.”
Another gold for Canadian teenager
Summer McIntosh stamped herself as one of the swimming stars of the Paris Olympics with her third individual gold medal, winning the 200 individual medley.
The 17-year-old Canadian chased down American Alex Walsh and held off another U.S. swimmer, Kate Douglass, to finish in an Olympic record of 2:06.56.
Douglass grabbed the silver in the star-studded final at 2:06.92, but the Americans lost the bronze when Walsh, the silver medalist in this event at Tokyo who recorded a time of 2:07.06, was disqualified because she did not finish the backstroke segment on her back.
Kaylee McKeown, who touched fourth, was bumped up to the bronze at 2:08.08.
It was a bitter blow for Walsh, whose younger sister, Gretchen, has won a gold medal and two silvers in Paris.
McIntosh set several world records ahead of the Paris Olympics, and she backed up the enormous expectations by claiming a starring role at La Defense Arena along with Léon Marchand and Ledecky.
McIntosh also won gold medals in the 200 butterfly and 400 IM, plus a silver in the 400 freestyle. She fell just 0.88 seconds — the margin of her loss to Titmus — shy of matching Marchand’s four individual golds.
“It’s pretty surreal,” said McIntosh, who became the first Canadian athlete to win three golds in a single Olympics. “I’m just so proud of myself and how I’ve been able to recover and manage events.
US sets world record
The United States made up for a disappointing showing in Tokyo by setting a world record in the 4x100 mixed medley relay.
Ryan Murphy, Nic Fink, Gretchen Walsh and Torri Huske held off China for a winning time of 3:37.43, breaking the mark of 3:37.58 set by Britain when it won gold in the wild and woolly event’s Olympic debut three years ago.
With each team picking two men and two women, the U.S. and China both went with their male swimmers in the first two legs.
Murphy put the U.S. in front on the backstroke, China’s Qin Haiyang slipped past Nic Fink on the breaststroke, but Walsh put the Americans back in front on the butterfly before Huske held off Yang Junxuan to secure the gold.
The Chinese team, which also included Xu Jiayu and Zhang Yufei, took silver in 3:37.55. The bronze went to Australia in 3:38.76.
Marchand swam the breaststroke leg for France but couldn’t add to his already impressive haul of four individual golds. The French finished fourth, more than two seconds behind the Aussies.
When the British won gold in 2021, the Americans finished fifth. Britain was seventh this time.
Hungarian claims butterfly gold
Kristóf Milák of Hungary won the men’s 100 butterfly, chasing down three swimmers on the return lap.
Milák was only fourth at the turn, but he rallied to touch in 49.90. Canada grabbed the silver and bronze, with Josh Liendo finishing in 49.99 and Ilya Kharun next at 50.45.
Milák had failed to defend his Olympic title in the 200 butterfly, settling for a silver behind French star Marchand.
Milák claimed silver in the 100 fly three years ago, but he didn’t have to worry about the guy who beat him in that race. American Caeleb Dressel stunningly failed to qualify for the final, posting only the 13th-fastest time in the semifinals Friday.
Kharun added another bronze to the one he garnered in the 200 butterfly.
Harris rejects Trump’s idea to debate her on FOX with live audience
date: 2024-08-04, from: VOA News USA
reuters — Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump proposed to debate Democratic U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on Fox News on September 4, and the Harris campaign said Trump is trying to back out of a debate that had been set to run on ABC.
The rules would be similar to the first debate with President Joe Biden, who has since dropped his reelection bid, Trump said in a post on Truth Social late Friday. But this time it would have a “full arena audience” and take place in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, Trump said.
Trump and Biden had agreed to a second debate on September 10 on ABC News which the former president had suggested should be moved to Fox, the most popular network with his followers.
Harris, who on Friday secured the delegate votes needed to clinch the Democratic nomination for the November 5 election, said Saturday that she plans to participate in the originally planned debate.
“It’s interesting how ‘any time, any place’ becomes ‘one specific time, one specific safe space,’” she wrote on social media platform X. “I’ll be there on Sept. 10, like he agreed to. I hope to see him there.”
Trump ‘running scared,’ says Harris camp
Harris spokesperson Michael Tyler said Trump is “running scared” and that her campaign is happy to discuss further debates after the September 10 one that “both campaigns have already agreed to.”
On Saturday, Trump said on Truth Social that Harris is “afraid to do it” and that he will see her on September 4, “or I won’t see her at all.”
On Friday he said that the ABC debate had been “terminated” in that Biden would no longer be in it and because he himself was in litigation with ABC.
ABC on July 26 outlined qualification requirements for the debate but did not mention any candidates by name.
Requirements include proving polling support and state ballot access by September 3.
Recent polls show a tight contest between Harris and Trump, who had enjoyed a bigger lead over Biden after the first debate.
ABC News had no comment about whether Trump had dropped out of the debate, a spokesperson said.
Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s proposal for the debate on Fox came right after the Democratic National Committee launched an advertising campaign Friday taunting him by saying “the convicted felon is afraid to debate” and questioning whether that is due to his stance on abortion.
David Plouffe, an adviser to former President Barack Obama who recently joined the Harris campaign, posted on social media: “Now, he seems only comfortable in a cocoon, asking his happy place Fox to host a Trump rally and call it a debate. Maybe he can only handle debating someone his own age.”
Trump is 78 and Harris is 59.
Former Democratic President Jimmy Carter, who turns 100 on Oct. 1, said, “I’m only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Saturday.
Full Circle Weekly News 377
date: 2024-08-04, from: Full Circle Magazine
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