News gathered 2024-08-20
(date: 2024-08-20 14:52:48)
AMD reverses course: Ryzen 3000 CPUs will get SinkClose patch after all
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Still no love for 1000- or 2000-series
In an apparent reversal, AMD has decided that its Ryzen 3000-series processors released in 2019 are actually worth patching against the recently disclosed SinkClose vulnerability.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/amd_sinkclose_ryzen_3000/
Sept. 6: Deadline to Submit Application for Vacant COC Board Trustee Seat
date: 2024-08-20, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Santa Clarita Community College District Board of Trustees will appoint a new member to fill the seat representing Trustee Area No.
https://scvnews.com/sept-6-deadline-to-submit-application-for-coc-board-seat/
El Aeropuerto de Santa Bárbara Anuncia las Reuniones Públicas Finales para la Actualización del Plan Maestro del Aeropuerto
date: 2024-08-20, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SANTA BÁRBARA, CA– 19 de agosto de 2024 El Aeropuerto de Santa Bárbara (SBA) invita a la comunidad a participar
The post El Aeropuerto de Santa Bárbara Anuncia las Reuniones Públicas Finales para la Actualización del Plan Maestro del Aeropuerto appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Santa Barbara Airport Announces Final Public Meetings for Airport Master Plan Update
date: 2024-08-20, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SANTA BARBARA, CA – August 19, 2024 The Santa Barbara Airport (SBA) invites the community to participate in the final
The post Santa Barbara Airport Announces Final Public Meetings for Airport Master Plan Update appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
It’s Getting Harder to Close a Coal Plant
date: 2024-08-20, from: Heatmap News
To fully decarbonize the electricity system will require more than just
the rapid deployment of non-carbon-emitting generation capacity, plus
the transmission necessary to get that electricity to where it needs to
go. It will also require that our existing stock of electricity
generation — which is largely natural gas- and coal-powered — get mostly
mothballed. So far, this process has been proceeding briskly. Renewable
deployment is on the way up and is projected to accelerate, and older
electricity generation was sliding quickly but gracefully into
retirement — until recently.
Retirements of existing generation have slowed down dramatically in the first half of this year, which is on pace to be the slowest for existing generation retirements since 2011, according to new data from the Energy Information Administration.
In the first half of the year, some 5.1 gigawatts of generating capacity have been retired, and another 2.4 gigawatts are scheduled to be retired by year’s end, for a projected total of 7.5 retired gigawatts. From 2004 to 2023, by contrast, just over 12 gigawatts of capacity were retired each year on average, with almost 15 gigawatts retired per year this decade. Since 2022, according to EIA data, over 90% of retired capacity has been coal or natural gas.
What’s behind the slowdown? “Reliability is threatened because the grid conditions are tightening,” Douglas Giuffre, executive director of gas, power and renewables analysis at S&P Global Commodity Insights, explained in an email. “This is partly due to the recent pace of coal and natural gas retirements in the U.S., which worked off some of the excess capacity in power markets. Now we are seeing tighter reserve margins, and a relatively thin pipeline of new gas-fired projects that can come online quickly.” That’s especially concerning for utilities at a time when projected electricity demand is way, way up.
The wave of retirements was a national phenomenon, often having nothing
to do with state-level plans to decarbonize. Coal and gas were being
retired so steadily over the past 20 years not just because plants were
aging, but also because power use was essentially flat from the early
2000s through, essentially, yesterday. This meant that older plants —
especially dirty coal plants — became uneconomic to run, especially as
natural gas prices began to fall.
Now, we are in a completely different world. Electricity use is forecast to start growing again, thanks to a buildout of new data centers and manufacturing, plus the ongoing electrification of automobiles and home heating and cooling.
The Southeast offers an example of how these trends have played out on the ground. In December 2020, the Mississippi Public Service Commission determined that the state had “excess reserves … largely due to decreases in projected load” and ordered a 950 megawatt reduction in generating capacity by Mississippi Power by 2027. A consulting firm hired by the commission determined that Plant Daniel, a coal plant, was “relatively inefficient compared to other available resources;” a few months later, the utility said it would decommission Plant Daniel by 2027.
Then Georgia Power, the utility that covers most of the state (and, like Mississippi Power, a subsidiary of Southern Company), rushed out a new three-year plan for its future power usage less than a year after finalizing its old one. Its demand forecast through the end of the decade had jumped from 400 megawatts to 6,600 megawatts, the result of a projected boom in data center construction.
“They came in with a preselected list of ways it wanted to meet that power need,” including buying power from Plant Daniel and new gas, Bob Sherrier, a staff attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told me. Georgia Power told the state’s utility commission that to respond to growing demand it would need to extend contracts with its sister utility in Mississippi — which meant not only that Daniel would remain open for at least another year — and build new new plants that could run on gas or diesel, plans for which regulators approved on Tuesday. The utility also hinted that its existing plans to euthanize, for the most part, its coal-fired generation fleet by the end of 2028 were likely to be revised.
“To meet that projected need, the utilities are reverting to what they know, which is fossil fuels,” Sherrier said.
In vertically integrated markets, where utilities own generating assets and sell power to customers, environmentalists have seen delayed retirements and the building of new fossil plants as examples of utilities slipping into their comfort zone, building and operating expensive projects instead of developing or procuring renewables to handle rising demand.
But it’s not just in vertically integrated markets where fossil retirements are being delayed. In Maryland, for instance, Brandon Shores, a coal-fired power plant that was scheduled to close in 2025, is staying open because PJM Interconnection, the regional electricity market, determined that a plan to replace it with battery storage was not a “realistic option at present” nor “technically viable to resolve the reliability violations or avoid the need for an RMR agreement at this time,” PJM president Manu Asthana said in a letter to Paul Pinsky, the director of the Maryland Energy Administration. The transmission investments required to make up the difference, meanwhile, would take several years.
Along with the neighboring Wagner plant, which burns a mix of coal, oil, and natural gas, Brandon Shores will likely stay open more than three years past its planned retirement date thanks to what’s known as a “reliability must run” contract, which “would put Maryland ratepayers on the hook for over $600 million dollars in out-of-market payments,” according to a letter written by several Maryland congressional representatives to PJM.
Environmental advocates have blamed PJM for not doing enough proactive transmission planning to account for predictable and scheduled plant retirements.
The slowing retirements mean that emissions from the electricity sector, which have been falling since the mid-2000s (with occasional bumps up as the economy has recovered from downturns), are expected to plateau over the next year or so. EIA forecasts show carbon dioxide emissions from electricity as essentially flat from 2023 to 2025, with increased natural gas emissions essentially offsetting falling coal emissions.
There is a bright side to the data, however. So far this year, the U.S. has installed just over 20 gigawatts of new generation, 80% of which has been solar and battery storage, including a 600-plus megawatt projects in Nevada and Texas. If added generation comes on in the second half of this year as planned, the EIA projects we’ll have 15 gigawatts of battery storage by year’s end. Along with the large and growing solar generation in states like California, Nevada, and Texas, the U.S. is getting closer to a grid that can, at least, run without carbon emissions day or night.
https://heatmap.news/economy/coal-gas-plant-retirements
Consolo is a modular cyberdeck with a Raspberry Pi 5 for brains, a 7 inch display and 7 hours of battery life
date: 2024-08-20, from: Liliputing
The Consolo is a tablet computer with a 7 inch touchscreen display and a modular design that lets you attach a physical keyboard or other add-ons via a slot on the bottom. Powered by a Raspberry Pi 5, the system should support a wide range of GNU/Linux distributions and software designed for that credit card-sized […]
The post Consolo is a modular cyberdeck with a Raspberry Pi 5 for brains, a 7 inch display and 7 hours of battery life appeared first on Liliputing.
University of California bans encampments, face masks
date: 2024-08-20, from: The Signal
By Aldgra Fredly Contributing Writer The president of the University of California said on Monday that the 10-campus university system would enforce policies banning encampments and the wearing of masks to […]
The post University of California bans encampments, face masks appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/university-of-california-bans-encampments-face-masks/
5 takeaways from Democratic National Convention’s opening night
date: 2024-08-20, from: The Signal
By Jacob Burg, Nathan Worcester Contributing Writers CHICAGO — Day one of the Democratic National Convention kicked off with excitement as delegates and attendees listened to speeches from major lawmakers and […]
The post 5 takeaways from Democratic National Convention’s opening night appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/5-takeaways-from-democratic-national-conventions-opening-night/
NASA Marshall Names Roger Baird Associate Director
date: 2024-08-20, from: NASA breaking news
Roger Baird has been selected as associate director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. In this role, Baird will lead execution and integration of the center’s business operations, mission support enterprise functions, and budget management. In addition, he will be a senior adviser in advancing the direction of the center’s future. Baird […]
2025 Gateways to Blue Skies Competition
date: 2024-08-20, from: NASA breaking news
The agriculture industry faces several challenges, including limited resources and growing demands to reduce agriculture’s environmental impact while increasing its climate resilience. NASA Aeronautics is dedicated to expanding its efforts to assist commercial, industry, and government partners in advancing aviation systems that could modernize capabilities in agriculture. In NASA’s 2025 Gateways to Blue Skies Competition: […]
https://www.nasa.gov/general/2025-gateways-to-blue-skies-competition/
Archaeologists May Have Identified the Bones of a Celebrated Ninth-Century Bishop in Spain
date: 2024-08-20, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Bishop Teodomiro was a central figure in the creation of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage
In Memoriam Lawrence Lesser 1941–2024
date: 2024-08-20, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
At the recent memorial for my brother-in-law Lawrence Lesser, my husband, Bobby, and his brothers spoke about Larry’s fundamental goodness.
The post In Memoriam Lawrence Lesser <br> 1941–2024 appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/20/in-memoriam-lawrence-lesser-1941-2024/
Writers sue Anthropic for feeding ‘stolen’ copyrighted work into Claude
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Another day, another lawsuit over how AI lands training sets
Anthropic was sued on Monday by three authors who claim the machine-learning lab unlawfully used their copyrighted work to train its Claude AI model.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/anthropic_claude_copyright/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-20, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Will the Harris Justice Department prosecute Trump to the full extent of the law?
https://feedland.org/?item=14712402
Free Will Astrology
date: 2024-08-20, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Week of August 22.
The post Free Will Astrology appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/20/free-will-astrology-224/
UP Squared 7100 is a 3.5 PC board with Alder Lake-N, 2 M.2 slots, and 40-pin GPIO headers
date: 2024-08-20, from: Liliputing
The UP Squared 7100 is a palm-sized computer board from AAEON Technology, with an Intel Alder Lake-N low-power processor, up to 16GB of LPDDR5 memory and up to 128GB of eMMC storage. It also has plenty of expansion options including two M.2 slots: one for storage and another for a wireless card, support for dual displays, […]
The post UP Squared 7100 is a 3.5 PC board with Alder Lake-N, 2 M.2 slots, and 40-pin GPIO headers appeared first on Liliputing.
Good news! The new Covid-19 vacines are scheduled to be approved soon…
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045179-good-news-the-new-covid-1
Jason Gibbs Retains City Council Seat for New Term
date: 2024-08-20, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Santa Clarita City Council help a special meeting on Monday, Aug. 19 to determine how to proceed in the Nov. 5 general election for the city council District 3 seat. The options were to appoint Jason Gibbs, the lone candidate who had filed for the seat, or to pay the cost for an election offering only one candidate.
https://scvnews.com/jason-gibbs-retains-city-council-seat-for-new-term/
Why California’s AI safety bill should (still) be signed into law - and why that won’t be nearly enough
date: 2024-08-20, from: Gary Marcus blog
Thursday broke my heart.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/why-californias-ai-safety-bill-should
Tortoise Takes a Leisurely Stroll
date: 2024-08-20, from: NASA breaking news
A NASA photographer captured this gopher tortoise walking on the Launch Pad 39B beach road at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on June 4, 2014. The undeveloped property on Kennedy Space Center is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service through the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge provides a habitat for […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/tortoise-takes-a-leisurely-stroll/
The Reason Social Security Currently Has a Funding Shortfall
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/the-reason-social-security-currently-has-a-funding-shortfall
Push to build more homes on California coast stifled after lawmakers derail housing bills
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The LAist
Several efforts to minimize the power and influence of the California Coastal Commission have stalled.
Rare ‘Doomsday’ Oarfish Surfaces in California, Just the 20th Discovered in the State Since 1901
date: 2024-08-20, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Kayakers spotted and hauled ashore the 12-foot-long oarfish, a deep-sea species known for its connection to earthquakes in Japanese folklore
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-20, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Yesterday I met a human version of the Hacker News comment section.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112995925544728469
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-20, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
The mansplainer exploits a loophole in relationships, the desire to not pour fuel in a burning fire.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112995924105119370
Photos: Carl Sonny Layland
date: 2024-08-20, from: The Signal
Residents came out to the final installment of the year of Valencia Marketplace’s Summer Concerts series on Friday, where Carl Sonny Layland’s Boogie Woogie Boys performed vintage pop, jazz, swing, […]
The post Photos: Carl Sonny Layland appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/photos-carl-sonny-layland/
EagleFiler 1.9.15
date: 2024-08-20, from: Michael Tsai
EagleFiler 1.9.15 is a maintenance release for my Mac information organizer app. This version greatly improves the quality of imports from X/Twitter and expands the import-tweet-via-hotkey support to more browsers. Preserving the selected text when capturing whole Web pages also works in non-Safari browsers now. Some interesting bugs were: macOS Sequoia has changed the way […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/20/eaglefiler-1-9-15/
tvOS 17.6.1
date: 2024-08-20, from: Michael Tsai
Juli Clover (no release notes, no security, no developer): We do not yet know what’s included in the update. Previously: tvOS 17.6
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/20/tvos-17-6-1/
watchOS 10.6.1
date: 2024-08-20, from: Michael Tsai
Juli Clover (no release notes, no security, no developer): According to Apple’s release notes, the watchOS 10.6.1 update fixes an issue that could prevent access to the Apple Fitness+ service. Previously: watchOS 10.6
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/20/watchos-10-6-1/
Apple Maps on the Web
date: 2024-08-20, from: Michael Tsai
Apple (Hacker News): Today, Apple Maps on the web is available in public beta, allowing users around the world to access Maps directly from their browser.[…]All developers, including those using MapKit JS, can also link out to Maps on the web, so their users can get driving directions, see detailed place information, and more. Juli […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/20/apple-maps-on-the-web/
Open source biz promises to slash bills with observability-as-a-service in the cloud
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
AWS first, others to follow
VictoriaMetrics has become the latest open source company to offer a hosted product, claiming around five times the savings for customers.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/victoriametrics_cloud/
Apple Maps in Sequoia and iOS 18
date: 2024-08-20, from: Michael Tsai
Ryan Christoffel: Building on the existing Guides feature, Maps in iOS 18 lets you save places with a quick tap of the + button on their Maps listing. Saved places are accessible from the new Library menu, where you’ll also find your Guides, Pinned locations, and more. […] A great component of saving a place […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/20/apple-maps-in-sequoia-and-ios-18/
Dazzling Jewels Stolen in Green Vault Heist Go Back on Display in Dresden
date: 2024-08-20, from: Smithsonian Magazine
In the early morning hours of November 25, 2019, thieves made away with 4,300 valuable diamonds and other stones
Influencers, Media and Relevance
date: 2024-08-20, from: Om Malik blog
In its story about the Democratic National Convention 2024 (behind a paywall), Wired pointed out that the DNC is all-in on influencers. It has created an influencer paradise at its Chicago convention, with exclusive yacht parties and creators’ lounges, while journalists struggle to find power outlets and CNN anchors wait in security lines. “Bringing creators …
https://om.co/2024/08/20/influencers-media-and-relevance/
On the value of context
date: 2024-08-20, from: Manu - I write blog
<p>I was reading a discussion about a new text editor and, as is often the case online, a bunch of people started discussing the adjacent topic of coding more broadly. The discussion started because someone was pointing out—correctly—that “typing speed” is irrelevant when it comes to programming because the art of programming is mostly about the thinking behind the code and so the majority of the time is not spent typing code.</p>People started going back and forth and it was fascinating to observe because everyone was talking about “programming” and sharing their own experience to either prove or disprove this theory that 90% of the job is not typing code but no one was providing context to help other understand what “programming” meant in their specific case. Everyone was using the word but it was clear that it meant very different things for the people involved because they’re likely to work in very different situations, doing a very different job. So yes, they were all technically “programming” but the word was meaningless without the appropriate context.
Reading that made me wonder how often this must happen, both online and in meatspace, people talking about something and assuming the words they use must have the same meaning for everyone while in fact that’s far from the truth.
Context matters. Providing details is important. Especially if you care about helping people understand what you mean when you say something.
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Disney has cancelled The Acolyte after one season. Such a high ratings…
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045178-disney-has-cancelled-the-
Building a Steampipe Plugin — and Powerpipe Dashboards — for WordPress
date: 2024-08-20, from: John Udell blog
“Users of the WordPress API may enjoy the abstraction — and standardization — that a SQL interface provides. If you need to query multiple WordPress sites, Steampipe’s connection aggregator will be really handy. And if you want to integrate data from WordPress with data from other APIs wrapped by other plugins in the Steampipe hub, … Continue reading Building a Steampipe Plugin — and Powerpipe Dashboards — for WordPress
The World’s Largest Animal Genome Belongs to an Odd, Air-Breathing Fish
date: 2024-08-20, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Scientists sequenced the 91 billion base pairs in the South American lungfish’s genome, setting a record and revealing insights into vertebrate evolution
Cilantro used to be a key ingredient in Italian cooking. “Roman chefs…
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045153-cilantro-used-to-be-a
xMEMS “fan-on-a-chip” could bring solid-state cooling to smartphones and tablets
date: 2024-08-20, from: Liliputing
A company that makes tiny, solid state speakers is adapting its technology to make a solid-state cooling chip for smartphones, tablets, and other small electronic devices. The xMEMS XMC-2400 µCooling chip is an “active micro-cooling fan for ultramobile devices. According to xMems, it’s a silent, vibration-free solution that measures just 9.26 x 7.6 x 1.08 […]
The post xMEMS “fan-on-a-chip” could bring solid-state cooling to smartphones and tablets appeared first on Liliputing.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-20, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Mask bans violate disabled Americans’ rights.
https://www.statnews.com/2024/08/20/mask-bans-nassau-county-north-carolina-new-york-disabled-rights/
400 Warriors Arrive at Westmont
date: 2024-08-20, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
About 400 new incoming students, including the Grotenhuis Nursing cohort of 24, arrive at Westmont to begin their first week
The post 400 Warriors Arrive at Westmont appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/20/400-warriors-arrive-at-westmont/
SpaceX set to surpass Gemini 11’s altitude record with Polaris Dawn mission
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Let’s hope the spacesuits hold up for extravehicular activity
The Polaris Dawn mission to send humans to a 1,400 km orbit – higher than 1966’s Gemini 11 – is set for launch in less than a week.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/spacex_polaris_dawn/
Review | Khruangbin Returns: An Otherworldly Journey at the Hollywood Bowl
date: 2024-08-20, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
A magical blend of influences resonates beautifully with the audience.
The post Review | Khruangbin Returns: An Otherworldly Journey at the Hollywood Bowl appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-20, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Procreate defies AI trend, pledges “no generative AI” in its illustration app.
Tyler Parsotan Takes a Long Look at the Transient Universe with NASA’s Swift
date: 2024-08-20, from: NASA breaking news
Through a nonlinear path to success, research astrophysicist Tyler Parsotan discovers transformational science using Swift’s observations. Name: Tyler ParsotanFormal Job Classification: Research astrophysicistOrganization: Astroparticle Physics Laboratory (Code 661), Astrophysics Science Division, Sciences and Exploration Directorate What do you do and what is most interesting about your role here at Goddard? I help operate the Burst Alert […]
Music Under the Stars with Mads Tolling and “The Danish-American Songbook”
date: 2024-08-20, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Solvang’s Elverhøj Museum of History and Art hosts Mads Tolling and Colin Hogan on August 24.
The post Music Under the Stars with Mads Tolling and “The Danish-American Songbook” appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Vivian Maier: Unseen Work
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/vivian-maier-unseen-work
Danish Instrument Helps NASA’s Juno Spacecraft See Radiation
date: 2024-08-20, from: NASA breaking news
Using cameras designed for navigation, scientists count ‘fireflies’ to determine the amount of radiation the spacecraft receives during each orbit of Jupiter. Scientists with NASA’s Juno mission have developed the first complete 3D radiation map of the Jupiter system. Along with characterizing the intensity of the high-energy particles near the orbit of the icy moon […]
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/juno/danish-instrument-helps-nasas-juno-spacecraft-see-radiation/
FAQ: NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test Return Status
date: 2024-08-20, from: NASA breaking news
Editor’s note: This article was updated Aug. 20, 2024, to reflect the latest information from NASA’s Office of Communications. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams arrived at the orbiting laboratory on June 6 aboard the Boeing Starliner after lifting off on June 5 from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in […]
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/commercial-crew/starliner-faq/
Cuenta Regresiva para el Festival del Orgullo LGBTQ+ 2024
date: 2024-08-20, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Santa Bárbara, CA — El muy anticipado Festival del Orgullo LGBTQ+ 2024 está por llegar y, este sábado 24 de agosto,
The post Cuenta Regresiva para el Festival del Orgullo LGBTQ+ 2024 appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/20/cuenta-regresiva-para-el-festival-del-orgullo-lgbtq-2024/
Countdown to the 2024 Pacific Pride Festival
date: 2024-08-20, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Santa Barbara, CA — The highly anticipated 2024 Pacific Pride Festival is almost here, and this Saturday, August 24th, Chase Palm
The post Countdown to the 2024 Pacific Pride Festival appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/20/countdown-to-the-2024-pacific-pride-festival/
Want to Learn How to Podcast? Sign Up for This Free Workshop Series at Workzones
date: 2024-08-20, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SANTA BARBARA, California – Did you know in the next 6 years Podcast Listeners are predicted to grow from approximately 100 million
The post Want to Learn How to Podcast? Sign Up for This Free Workshop Series at Workzones appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Beelink EQi12 is a mini PC with 12th-gen Intel Core, 24GB RAM, and integrated power supply
date: 2024-08-20, from: Liliputing
The Beelink EQi12 is a compact desktop computer that measures 126 x 126 x 44.2mm (4.96″ x 4.96″ x 1.74″), dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, two HDMI ports, and support for up to two PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSDs. While it’s not the smallest mini PC around, the EQi12 has another space-saving feature up its sleeve: an integrated […]
The post Beelink EQi12 is a mini PC with 12th-gen Intel Core, 24GB RAM, and integrated power supply appeared first on Liliputing.
The Good Milk List. “These locations, around the world, are where happy…
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045172-the-good-milk-list-these
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-20, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
DNC speakers tonight: Who is on stage Tuesday in Chicago.
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/20/g-s1-18014/speakers-dnc-day-2-tuesday-obama
55 Years Ago: Apollo 11 Astronauts End Quarantine, Feted from Coast to Coast
date: 2024-08-20, from: NASA breaking news
On Aug. 10, 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin completed their 21-day quarantine after returning from the Moon. The historic nature of their mission resulted in a very busy postflight schedule for Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin, starting with celebrations in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston. […]
Your SoCal Weather Report For Tuesday August 20: Just a few days of heat before cool down
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The LAist
Beginning Thursday, the region will see comfy temperatures in the upper 70’s.
https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/la-weather-report-august-20-waning-heat
NanoPi M6 single-board RK3588S PC is available optional 3.5 inch touchscreen display integrated in a metal case
date: 2024-08-20, from: Liliputing
The NanoPi M6 is a single-board computer that’s a little larger than a Raspberry Pi 5, but it’s also a much more versatile little board that features a Rockchip RK3588S processor, support for up to 32GB of RAM, and multiple storage options including a microSD card reader, eMMC socket, and M.2 slot with support for PCIe […]
The post NanoPi M6 single-board RK3588S PC is available optional 3.5 inch touchscreen display integrated in a metal case appeared first on Liliputing.
Smart Anand Giridharadas piece about the Democrats’ shift in political style, one…
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045174-smart-anand-giridharadas-
PostgreSQL in line for DuckDB-shaped boost in analytics arena
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Microsoft-backed extension aims to address open source database’s perceived weaknesses
A Microsoft-backed open source project aims to help address PostgreSQL’s weaknesses as an analytics database.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/postgresql_duckdb_extension/
Honoring C.L. Daniel, World War I Veteran and Tulsa Race Massacre Victim
date: 2024-08-20, from: National Archives, Text Message blog
Today’s post is by Rachael Salyer, Archivist in the Textual Reference Branch at the National Archives in College Park, MD. “I have travled this country over […] and want to get home” – C.L. Daniel, World War I Veteran and Victim of the Tulsa Race Massacre Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum recently announced that World War … Continue reading Honoring C.L. Daniel, World War I Veteran and Tulsa Race Massacre Victim
Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Is Now the Worst Buyout for Banks Since the Financial Crisis
date: 2024-08-20, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
<div class="known-bookmark">
<div class="e-content">[Alexander Saeedy and Dana Mattioli at The Wall Street Journal]
“The $13 billion that Elon Musk borrowed to buy Twitter has turned into the worst merger-finance deal for banks since the 2008-09 financial crisis.”
“[…] The banks haven’t been able to offload the debt without incurring major losses—largely because of X’s weak financial performance—leaving the loans stuck on their balance sheets, or “hung” in industry jargon. The resulting write-downs have hobbled the banks’ loan books and, in one case, was a factor that crimped compensation for a bank’s merger department, according to people involved with the deal.”
Let that sink in.
It’s not like this was unpredictable: it was obvious that Elon Musk was not going to turn Twitter into a roaring success. While Twitter was, at its heart, a media company, Musk’s direction has been a muddle of three sometimes-competing priorities: his long-held desire to create X, an “everything” app; his desire to build his own brand in an effort to boost his own equity and therefore wealth, sometimes in ways that got him in trouble with the SEC; and his desire to influence global politics.
There’s no three-dimensional chess being played here; this likely isn’t an intentional plan by Musk to write off the debt. It’s simply narcissistic mismanagement, and one has to wonder how this will affect his businesses at Tesla and SpaceX in the longer term. There will come a time when shareholders declare that enough is enough - although given that they approved his ludicrous pay deal, perhaps that time isn’t coming soon.
<p>[<a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/elon-musks-twitter-takeover-is-now-the-worst-buyout-for-banks-since-the-financial-crisis-3f4272cb">Link</a>]</p>
</div>
</div>https://werd.io/2024/elon-musks-twitter-takeover-is-now-the-worst-buyout-for
Toltec - a community-maintained repository of free software for the reMarkable tablet
date: 2024-08-20, from: Tilde.news
Conflict and Stakes Compendium
date: 2024-08-20, from: John August blog
In this compendium episode, John and Craig look at two of the most fundamental building blocks of compelling stories – conflict and stakes. We define six forms of conflict common in movies, and explore ways to sustain conflict within a scene and throughout a story. We also look for ways to find the root of […] The post Conflict and Stakes Compendium first appeared on John August.
https://johnaugust.com/2024/conflict-and-stakes-compendium
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-20, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
My linkblog, which posts to the Links tab on Scripting News, as well as Bluesky, Mastodon and RSS, now also posts to Twitter and Threads.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/20.html#a152945
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-20, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Osnos wrote a biography of Joe Biden.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-lede/proud-and-impassioned-biden-passes-the-torch
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-20, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
"The new Democratic Party must not make the mistake Biden made, it must not subjugate itself to the press. When they attack, you must respond."
http://scripting.com/2024/08/20/135836.html
Shein Is Suing Temu For Copyright Infringement
date: 2024-08-20, from: 404 Media Group
Shein, notorious for being accused of copyright infringement by small artists and big brands alike, is suing its competitor Temu for… copyright infringement.
https://www.404media.co/shein-temu-copyright-lawsuit/
Ephemeral tic-tac-toe. Each player’s moves disappear after 4 turns….
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045170-ephemeral-tic-tac-toe-eac
US sanctions former Haitian president over drug trafficking
date: 2024-08-20, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — The United States on Tuesday imposed sanctions on Haiti’s former president, Michel Joseph Martelly, over drug trafficking, accusing him of playing a significant role in perpetuating the ongoing crisis in the country.
The U.S. Treasury Department in a statement said Martelly “abused his influence to facilitate the trafficking of dangerous drugs, including cocaine, destined for the United States.”
The department said he also worked with Haitian drug traffickers, sponsored multiple gangs and engaged in the laundering of illicit drug proceeds.
“Today’s action against Martelly emphasizes the significant and destabilizing role he and other corrupt political elites have played in perpetuating the ongoing crisis in Haiti,” Treasury’s Acting Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Bradley Smith said in the statement.
“The United States, along with our international partners, is committed to disrupting those who facilitate the drug trafficking, corruption and other illicit activities fueling the horrific gang violence and political instability.”
Tuesday’s action freezes any of Martelly’s U.S. assets and generally bars Americans from dealing with him.
Gang wars have displaced more than 578,000 Haitians, while nearly 5 million — almost half the population of 11.7 million — face acute hunger, with 1.6 million of those people at risk of starvation, the United Nations says.
Armed gangs have formed a broad alliance while carrying out widespread killings, ransom kidnappings and sexual violence.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-sanctions-former-haitian-president-over-drug-trafficking/7749717.html
Plane tracker FlightAware admits user passwords, SSNs exposed for years
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Notification omits a number of key details
Popular flight-tracking app FlightAware has admitted that it was exposing a bunch of users’ data for more than three years.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/flightaware_data_exposure/
The Daily Kitten
date: 2024-08-20, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
I do a daily episode of the adventures of Wordle Kitty as art I do with ChatGPT, on Facebook. There often is a NY Times headline in the image, saying something silly like how prisons are dealing with an influx of convicted house pets (like the kitten).
In this drawing the NYT is reporting on how the kitten loves lasagna, and of course how cute she is (it’s important to emphasize that in the AI prompt because otherwise you get less cute kittens in the drawing).
This is therapeutic. Finally I can see the NYT doing something useful! Keeping me entertained while we try to get through this election. If I’m forced to accept lies from the NYT, without any voice given to opposition, they might as well be lies that entertain me! 😄
PS: I wonder if the NYT minds that we think of them as no more straight than Fox News. They’ve fallen really far, and have so far shown they totally don’t care if we know.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/20/142602.html?title=theDailyKitten
Sols 4280-4281: Last Call at Kings Canyon
date: 2024-08-20, from: NASA breaking news
Earth planning date: Monday, Aug. 19, 2024 Curiosity successfully completed the drill sequence at the Kings Canyon site within the Gediz Vallis channel. Today was a smooth planning day as we decided to stay put for sols 4280 and 4281 to obtain APXS data of the drill tailings (the crushed rock removed from the drill hole) before […]
https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/sols-4280-4281-last-call-at-kings-canyon/
Are You a Local?
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/are-you-a-local
Dueling economics on the campaign trail
date: 2024-08-20, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Former President Barack Obama is set to speak tonight at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The theme today: “A Bold Vision for America’s Future.” Part of that vision? The U.S. economy. President Joe Biden spoke at the convention last night, highlighting his administration’s economic policies. Former President Donald Trump was also talking about the economy on the campaign trail. We’ll discuss. Then, the Department of Transportation wants the nation’s infrastructure to get a tech upgrade.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/dueling-economics-on-the-campaign-trail
The National Archives Building’s Landmark Plaque
date: 2024-08-20, from: National Archives, Pieces of History blog
On August 22, 2024, the National Archives Building’s National Historic Landmark Plaque is being unveiled. Visit National Archives News and the National Archives History websites to learn more about this historic building. In December 2023, 90 years after its cornerstone was dedicated, the National Archives Building became a National Historic Landmark. This week the plaque … Continue reading The National Archives Building’s Landmark Plaque
https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2024/08/20/the-national-archives-buildings-landmark-plaque/
Ignore the NY Times
date: 2024-08-20, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
When President Biden took the stage last night at the DNC, I had a moment of buyer’s remorse. He looked so good in his black suit, and the pictures of the new candidates, and their spouses, looked comical in comparison to the president who was about to speak.
Why did Walz have a permanent frown on his face. I find his presence next to Harris is almost always awkward. He’s taller, and moves a lot. I noticed this with Sanders when he was debating Clinton in 2016. She stood still and Sanders waved his hands a lot. She spoke quietly, he shouted.
Biden shouted last night, and he was mostly unplugged. On the team, but you have to wonder, how did the journos get so much power that they could force this change. He gave a fine speech. I’m not sure that pushing him aside, net-net, was a win for us. Maybe Harris will be a sugar high.
One thing I know for sure, the new Democratic Party must not make the mistake that Biden did, must not subjugate itself to the press. When they go on the attack, you must respond. Break their wall of objectivity, these people are political players, and so far not subject to rebuttal. That must end. If they want to be in the middle, then don’t pretend they aren’t.
They will yell about the First Amendment, which also applies to elected leaders and candidates for office, and there is no special right for publications like the NYT, they have no immunity to First Amendment speech about them.
To the extent we can, it’s time to push them aside.
When someone quotes the NYT in frustration, I have a mantra I repeat over and over, “Ignore the NY Times.” I’m going to paste it in 25 times now so you get the idea. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/20/135836.html?title=ignoreTheNyTimes
Yayoi Kusama’s Largest Permanent Public Sculpture Arrives in London
date: 2024-08-20, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Stainless steel archways and reflective spheres stretch for more than 300 feet at Liverpool Street station
The search for Celebrity Number Six. The internet has been unable to…
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045171-the-search-for-celebrity-
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-20, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Today would have been my mother’s 92nd birthday. She died in 2018, and I still haven’t, deep inside, fully gotten the message that she’s gone. Probably the most significant person in my life. I find most of my adult relationships can be traced back to my relationship with her.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/20.html#a134439
Entrepreneurs Challenge Prize Winner Uses Artificial Intelligence to Identify Methane Emissions
date: 2024-08-20, from: NASA breaking news
The NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) instituted the Entrepreneurs Challenge to identify innovative ideas and technologies from small business start-ups with the potential to advance the agency’s science goals. Geolabe—a prize winner in the latest Entrepreneurs Challenge—has developed a way to use artificial intelligence to identify global methane emissions. Methane is a greenhouse gas that […]
Pixar’s Inside Out movies have changed how therapists talk about feelings with…
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045162-pixars-inside-out-movies-
Google to websites: let us train our AI on your content, or we’ll remove you from Google Search
date: 2024-08-20, from: OS News
Google now displays convenient artificial intelligence-based answers at the top of its search pages — meaning users may never click through to the websites whose data is being used to power those results. But many site owners say they can’t afford to block Google’s AI from summarizing their content. That’s because the Google tool that sifts through web content to come up with its AI answers is the same one that keeps track of web pages for search results, according to publishers. Blocking Alphabet Inc.’s Google the way sites have blocked some of its AI competitors would also hamper a site’s ability to be discovered online. ↫ Julia Love and Davey Alba OSNews still relies partially on advertising right now, and thus Google continues to play a role in our survival. You can help by reducing our dependency on Google by supporting us through Patreon, making donations using Ko-Fi, or buying our merch. The more of you support us, the closer to reality the dream of an ad-free OSNews not dependent on Google becomes. OSNews is my sole source of income, and if that does not work out, OSNews will cease to exist if I’m forced to find another job. Due to Google’s utter dominance on the internet, websites and publishers have no choice but to accept whatever Google decides to do. Not being indexed by the most popular search engine on the web with like 90% market share is a death sentence, but feeding Google’s machine learning algorithms will be a slow death by a thousands cuts, too, for many publishers. The more content is fed to Google’s AI tools, the better they’ll get at simply copying your style to a T, and the better they’ll get at showing just the little paragraph or line that matters as a Google result, meaning you won’t have to visit the site in question. It’s also not great for Google in the long-term, either. Google Search relies on humans making content for people to find; if there’s no more quality content for people to find, people aren’t going to be using Google as much anymore. In what is typical of the search giant, it seems they’re not really looking ahead very far into the future, chasing short-term profits riding the AI hype train, while long-term profits take a back seat. Maybe I’m just too stupid to understand the Silicon Valley galaxy brain business boys, but to a simple man like me it seems rather stupid to starve the very websites, publishers, authors, and so on that your main product relies on to be useful in the first place. I honestly don’t even know how much of OSNews’ traffic comes from Google, so I don’t know how much it would even affect us were we to tell Google’s crawlers to get bent. My guess is that search traffic is still a sizable portion of our traffic, so I’m definitely not going to gamble the future of OSNews. Luckily we’re quite small and I doubt many people are interested in AI generating my writing style and the topics I cover anyway, so I don’t think I have to worry as much as some of the larger tech websites do.
Hubble Examines a Possible Relic
date: 2024-08-20, from: NASA breaking news
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image captures the dwarf irregular galaxy UGC 4879 or VV124. As this image illustrates, Hubble’s high resolution can detect individual stars, even in the densest parts of the galaxy. This allows astronomers to better determine the galaxy’s distance, and the composition and age of its stars. UGC 4879 is an […]
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-examines-a-possible-relic/
2024-08-20 An offline Bulletin Board System (BBS) using NNCP
date: 2024-08-20, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
2024-08-20 An offline Bulletin Board System (BBS) using NNCP
OK, plugd has done it! The Offline Bulletin Board System system works by sending out QWK files and accepting back REP files.
One tool that does this is MultiMail. And it’s in Debian!
Before you can participate, plugd has to know about your node.
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-08-20-offline-bbs
Elon Musk’s X Corp faces $61M lawsuit over unpaid tech tabs
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Taiwanese IT infrastructure provider claims platform ghosted it
X is facing yet another legal case in the shape of a breach of contract claim from IT infrastructure provider Wiwynn over non-payment for $120 million in components it procured for the Elon Musk-owned biz.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/x_corp_wiwynn_lawsuit_unpaid_bills/
Console yourself – research finds gaming may actually boost mental health
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Digital athletes enjoy positive effects in Japan study, but too much screentime sees diminishing returns
A study of nearly 100,000 people in Japan has found that gaming may be good for the player’s mental health, contrary to the prevailing narrative around the popular pastime.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/research_gaming_mental_health/
Can Harris Rebrand Climate Policy as an Economic Strategy?
date: 2024-08-20, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Typhoon Jongdari is expected to bring flooding to South Korea when it makes landfall tomorrow • Wildfire smoke from North America turned the moon red for stargazers in the U.K. • California’s Park Fire, which started on July 24, is still burning.
THE TOP FIVE
- Trump attacks Harris on energy and environment
While the Democratic National Convention got underway in Chicago yesterday, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance went on the offensive in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. In separate speeches, Trump and Vance slammed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ energy and environmental policies. Trump accused her of waging “war on American energy” and promised to “unlock American energy” if he is elected to the White House again in November. He reiterated his pledge to scrap the Biden administration’s rules limiting power plant pollution, saying Harris is on “a regulatory jihad to shut down power plants all across America.” He also hinted at giving Tesla CEO a cabinet position. Vance told a crowd: “We are going to drill, baby, drill.” In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Vance claimed Harris “cares more about climate change than about inflation.” A New York Times/Sienna poll last week showed Harris inching ahead of Trump in Pennsylvania, as well as in Michigan and Wisconsin.
Allies have encouraged Harris to lean into the environmental wins of the past four years, including the Inflation Reduction Act, but it’s anyone’s guess how much of her big speech on Thursday will be about climate. For his part, President Biden used his moment in the spotlight yesterday to tout emission reductions and his initiatives to expand EV charging stations across the country.
- Climate groups launch $55 million ad push for Harris
A group of climate organizations are putting out a $55 million ad campaign for Kamala Harris in swing states this week, The New York Times reported. The ads frame the current administration’s climate and energy policies as economic wins. “The goal of her presidency: strengthen America’s middle class,” one ad says. “We get there by investing in growing fields like advanced manufacturing and clean energy – good-paying jobs that don’t need a four-year degree.” The ad campaign is backed by L.C.V. Victory Fund, E.D.F. Action Votes, Climate Power Action, and the Future Forward super PAC.
- Maine to build first U.S. floating offshore wind research site
The first floating offshore wind research site in the U.S. will be located in the Gulf of Maine. The Biden administration this week issued a lease for the research site, which “will inform how floating offshore wind operates and can co-exist with ocean users and ecosystems,” the Maine governor’s office said in a statement. The area is about 28 nautical miles from the shore and covers 9,700 acres, enough to accommodate 12 floating offshore wind turbines designed by the University of Maine. Floating offshore wind platforms enable wind power generation in deeper waters, and the Interior Department has a goal of deploying 15 gigawatts of floating capacity by 2035. Construction on the Maine site won’t start for another few years.
- Sinking of luxury yacht off Sicily could have climate link
Climate change may have contributed to the freak storm that sank a luxury yacht Monday off the coast of Sicily, leaving one person dead and six missing, including British tech tycoon Mike Lynch. As rescue efforts continue, one Italian climatologist told Reuters the accident could have been caused by a water spout that produced high winds. Data suggests these weather events are becoming more frequent in Italy. “The sea surface temperature around Sicily was around 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit), which is almost 3 degrees more than normal,” said Luca Mercalli, president of the Italian meteorological society. “This creates an enormous source of energy that contributes to these storms. So we can’t say that this is all due to climate change, but we can say that it has an amplifying effect.” The Mediterranean is bracing for more intense storms today.
- U.S. grid’s utility-scale electric capacity continues to grow
The U.S. power grid added 20.2 gigawatts of utility-scale electric generating capacity in the first half of 2024, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That’s a 21% jump compared to the same period last year. In the second half 2024, the grid could expand capacity by another 42.6 GW “if utilities add all the solar capacity they are currently planning.” Solar accounted for 59% of additions through June this year. Battery storage made up 21% of additions, and wind power made up 12%. Meanwhile, coal and gas plant retirement has slowed.
EIA
THE KICKER
Starting this fall, both Arizona State University and the University of California San Diego are requiring students to take a course on climate change and sustainability.
https://heatmap.news/economy/harris-trump-climate-energy-economy
Unknowingly Hiring North Koreans
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2024/08/20/unknowingly-hiring-north-koreans/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-20, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The NYT is now publishing fiction presented as “news.” They must think we’re idiots.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/us/politics/biden-convention.html
Oreon Lime is AlmaLinux with a desktop twist
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: Liam Proven’s articles at the Register
Enterprise-level long-term stability, but a little friendlier
<p>Oreon Lime R2 blends AlmaLinux with a bunch of extra tools and repositories, plus some helpful tweaks for the GNOME desktop. It's sort of akin to an LTS version of Fedora 34.</p> Oreon Lime is AlmaLinux with a desktop twist
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Enterprise-level long-term stability, but a little friendlier
Oreon Lime R2 blends AlmaLinux with a bunch of extra tools and repositories, plus some helpful tweaks for the GNOME desktop. It’s sort of akin to an LTS version of Fedora 34.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/oreon_lime_desktop_almalinux/
The economic issues bubbling up on the floor of the DNC
date: 2024-08-20, from: Marketplace Morning Report
President Joe Biden’s victory lap at the Democratic National Convention last night included a lot of mentions of how far the economy has come from the depths of pandemic lockdowns. While there’s a lot to celebrate, the nation’s mayors have a message for convention-goers: Do more to address housing affordability. Plus, consumers are waiting for a rate cut to make big financial decisions, and AI is changing how we predict the weather.
MASTER PLAN, Ep 2: Watergate’s Magic Window Of Corporate Cash
date: 2024-08-20, from: The Lever News
As brand-name companies fund the break-in, a White House memo envisions dark money and Nixon leaves a ticking time bomb in D.C.
https://www.levernews.com/master-plan-ep-2-watergates-magic-window-of-corporate-cash/
U.K. tech tycoon and Morgan Stanley boss among those missing in yacht disaster
date: 2024-08-20, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Morgan Stanley International bank chairman Jonathan Bloomer and British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch are among the six still missing after a yacht sunk in bad weather in Sicily on Monday. One body has been recovered. We’re hear the latest on the incident and learn more about those missing. And later, a Scottish horror film has finally been released — 17 years after filming first got under way.
Rocket Factory Augsburg engine test ends in explosion at SaxaVord spaceport
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
First stage destroyed during hot fire in Scotland
A hot-fire test of Rocket Factory Augsburg’s RFA One ended in explosion at Scotland’s SaxaVord spaceport.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/german_rocket_explodes_scotland/
Powell may use Jackson Hole speech to hint at how fast and how far the Fed could cut rates
date: 2024-08-20, from: VOA News USA
Washington — Federal Reserve officials have said they’re increasingly confident that they’ve nearly tamed inflation. Now, it’s the health of the job market that’s starting to draw their concern.
With inflation cooling toward its 2% target, the pace of hiring slowing and the unemployment rate edging up, the Fed is poised to cut its benchmark interest rate next month from its 23-year high. How fast it may cut rates after that, though, will be determined mainly by whether employers keep hiring. A lower Fed benchmark rate would eventually lead to lower rates for auto loans, mortgages and other forms of consumer borrowing.
Chair Jerome Powell will likely provide some hints about how the Fed sees the economy and what its next steps may be in a high-profile speech Friday in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, at the Fed’s annual conference of central bankers. It’s a platform that Powell and his predecessors have often used to signal changes in their thinking or approach.
Powell will likely indicate that the Fed has grown more confident that inflation is headed back to the 2% target, which it has long said would be necessary before rate cuts would begin.
Economists generally agree that the Fed is getting closer to conquering high inflation, which brought financial pain to millions of households beginning three years ago as the economy rebounded from the pandemic recession. Few economists, though, think Powell or any other Fed official is prepared to declare “mission accomplished.”
“I don’t think that the Fed has to fear inflation,” said Tom Porcelli, U.S. chief economist at PGIM Fixed Income. “At this point, it’s right that the Fed is now more focused on labor versus inflation. Their policy is calibrated for inflation that is much higher than this.”
Still, how fast the Fed cuts rates in the coming months will depend on what the economic data shows. After the government reported this month that hiring in July was much less than expected and that the jobless rate reached 4.3%, the highest in three years, stock prices plunged for two days on fears that the U.S. might fall into a recession. Some economists began speculating about a half-point Fed rate cut in September and perhaps another identical cut in November.
But healthier economic reports last week, including another decline in inflation and a robust gain in retail sales, have largely dispelled those concerns. Wall Street traders now expect three quarter-point Fed cuts in September, November and December, though in December it’s nearly a coin-toss between a quarter- and a half-point cut. Mortgage rates have already started to decline in anticipation of a rate reduction.
A half-point Fed rate cut in September would become more likely if there were signs of a further slowdown in hiring, some officials have said. The next jobs report will be issued on Sept. 6, after the Jackson Hole conference but before the Fed’s next meeting in mid-September.
Raphael Bostic, president of the Fed’s Atlanta branch, said in an interview Monday with The Associated Press that “evidence of accelerating weakness in labor markets may warrant a more rapid move, either in terms of the increments of movement or the speed at which we try to get back” to a level of rates that no longer restricts the economy.
Even if hiring stays solid, the Fed is set to cut rates this year given the steady progress that’s been made on inflation, economists say. Last week, the government said consumer prices rose just 2.9% in July from a year ago, the smallest such increase in more than three years.
Bostic noted that the economy has changed from just a couple of months ago, when he was suggesting that a rate cut might not be necessary until the final three months of the year.
“I’ve got more confidence that we are likely to get to our target for inflation,” he said. “And we’ve seen labor markets weaken considerably relative to where they were” last year. “We might need to shift our policy stance sooner than I would have thought before.”
Both Bostic and Austan Goolsbee, president of the Fed’s Chicago branch, say that with inflation falling, inflation-adjusted interest rates — which are what many businesses and investors pay most attention to — are rising even as inflation has slowed. When the Fed first set its key rate at its current 5.3%, inflation — excluding volatile energy and food costs — was 4.7%. Now, it’s just 3.2%.
“Our policies are getting tighter with every moment in that type of situation,” Bostic said. “We have to be concerned” that rates are so high they could cause an economic slowdown.
Still, Bostic said that for now, the job market and the economy appear mostly healthy, and he still expects a “soft landing,” whereby inflation falls back to the Fed’s 2% target without a recession occurring.
With the economy’s outlook unclear and the Fed focusing heavily on what future data shows, there may be only so much Powell will be able to say Friday about the central bank’s next steps.
Given the Fed’s focus on how the economic data comes in, “it will be difficult for Powell to pre-commit to a particular trajectory at Jackson Hole,” Matthew Luzzetti, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank, said in a research note.
‘Right to switch off’ initiative aims to boost economy by beating burnout
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Your country needs you… to quit it with all those sick days
UK government believes its proposed “right to switch off” will bring crucial economic and productivity benefits to the country, while also improving the well-being of workers.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/uks_right_to_switch_off/
Platform Engineering: The Next Step in Operations
date: 2024-08-20, from: O’Reilly Radar
Platform engineering is the latest buzzword in IT operations. And like all other buzzwords, it’s in danger of becoming meaningless—in danger of meaning whatever some company with a “platform engineering” product wants to sell. We’ve seen that happen to too many useful concepts: Edge computing meant everything from caches at a cloud provider’s data center […]
https://www.oreilly.com/radar/platform-engineering-the-next-step-in-operations/
Cloudflare calls for regulatory harmonization amid rising internet challenges
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Removing security services not always the best way to tackle problematic content
Interview Cloudflare wants harmonization of all the regulation and compliance frameworks springing up around the world, according to the networking service provider’s deputy chief legal officer and global head of public policy, Alissa Starzak.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/cloudflare_harmonization/
City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Europe’s largest local authority canceled expected savings baked into financial plans
The total cost of Birmingham City Council’s Oracle implementation disaster is set to reach £216.5 million ($280.4 million) by April 2026, according to a new audit report.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/birmingham_oracle_cost/
Euro antitrust cop Margrethe Vestager to depart after decade of reining in Big Tech
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Her legacy hinges on her successor – will they double down?
Europe’s top competition cop, Margrethe Vestager, will reportedly be stepping down later this year, a development certain to please the US tech firms she called to the carpet.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/eu_competition_cop_depart/
Today in SCV History (Aug. 20)
date: 2024-08-20, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1967 – New Town of Valencia dedicated; homes sell for $25,000 [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-aug-20/
2024-08-19 Something new: intrigue
date: 2024-08-20, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
2024-08-19 Something new: intrigue
A while ago, @enfors said he wanted his sandbox generator supplement to have something special. I wasn’t exactly sure what he was thinking of, but I started thinking about the things that I feel are under-explored.
A while ago, for example, I wondered: What would be the simplest game that emphasises how many friends you make, that rewards the size of the community you build? Back in 2016 I wrote a game called Best Friends that I never used. It was still an adventure game. Basically, replace your “level” with the number of friends you have. Something like that.
But that still doesn’t get into really new territory. Something I would like to see is a system for how to run an intrigue as a party – including everybody at the table, for all the classes and skill profiles. I feel that A Song of Ice and Fire attempted to do this but the result wasn’t great, at least at my table.
Quoting my past self:
I’m also not too happy with A Song of Ice and Fire. We’ve only played three times, so I’m willing to give it more time. When I ran one of the sessions I basically split the party to the max since since all characters are so diverse. There is no D&D like party and that also requires me to rethink my adventure design. – 2010-04-08 Spring
I can always switch into a movie director stance, go around the table, point at players, “now you!” and after a bit when the exchange happened and a die was maybe cast, “as we wait for that, we cut to…” and soon enough “in the mean time…” – and I do this aggressively, in small time slots. This results in a somewhat military style of pointing at people to let them know that now is their turn, while simultaneously waving at others to hold their thoughts, or maybe cutting talkative players off when they’re running too long. It’s weird, but when there’s a lot of players, or when there’s no party play to return to, it works well enough. We’ve made these kinds of mistakes in games where there are characters that are well suited for fighting and others that are not, with their players trying to solve problems by fighting, and players do not. This happened to me when I ran a one-shot of A Song of Ice and Fire. It worked for a session, but it was exhausting and I don’t want to claim that it’s a good solution. It was simply a short term solution that worked, for me. Next time, however, make sure players create characters that will adventure together. – 2021-02-27 Cohesion
Perhaps the split into combat and intrigue that the game introduced wasn’t good game design because it made sense from the perspective of emulating the books but it didn’t make sense from the perspective of some people wanting to play a game together. Or maybe it just didn’t fit my expectations of what it means to play together. Or maybe we just missed the implied recommendation to focus on either combat or intrigue and everybody having two characters, one for each domain. Or maybe just run either a combat campaign or an intrigue campaign.
So what I’m looking for is a way to get intrigue results, using procedures like we do for combat or exploration, for dungeons or the wilderness. The goal is to bring about a change in leadership of a town, a gang, a castle, an army unit, or to succeed in an act of sabotage, to incite a rebellion – things that are either hand-waved or the party is hired for the dirty work while the non-player characters are the politicians and rabble-rousers. I know this can work. It’s OK for the party to do the dirty work, to assassinate a tyrant and the non-player characters then taking the throne and similar things, but I want to go further. I want to involve all the players at the table. I want the players to think about the logistics of war, the organising and preparations of revolutions, the intricacies of marriage politics.
What if B/X D&D went levels 1–3 is for dungeons, 4–6 is for the wilderness and 7–9 is for politics. Doesn’t that sound fantastic? What sort of rules would you find in that third book? You would not get to name level by being a colonizer and clearing the land but by taking over an existing position of power – through intrigue. Oust the abbot, kick out the bishop, marry into the baron’s family, take over the guild. With the help of your friends. Without resorting to combat, but with dice rolling.
The dice rolling and the procedures are important to me because otherwise it all goes in a direction I don’t like: the referee decides everything and that is exhausting.
Not something like Burning Wheel’s Duel of Wits but something like social combat for Fate games, like the social combat system in Diaspora, for example. Note @bradjmurray’s most recent take on those rules: social combat in diaspora.
This space deserves more attention.
2024-08-20. I find that urban adventures suffer from the same problem. If it’s just two or three buildings and those act like dungeons, my games work. If it’s just social encounters that can be resolved with reaction rolls, my games work. But everything else in an urban environment seems to be politics, to me. And I have no good procedures to resolve those. So if anybody reading this is thinking about writing a blog post on the topic, I’d love to read it.
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-08-19-rpg-intrigue
Iran named as source of Trump campaign phish, leaks
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Political stirrer Roger Stone may have been a weak link after personal emails cracked
US authorities have named Iran as the likely source of a recent attack on the campaign of the US Republican Party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/iran_trump_phishing_attribution/
Final report outlines missed opportunities to stop Maine’s deadliest shooting
date: 2024-08-20, from: VOA News USA
LEWISTON, Maine — Both the Army Reserve and police missed opportunities to intervene in a gunman’s psychiatric crisis and initiate steps to seize weapons from the spiraling reservist responsible for the deadliest shootings in Maine history, according to the final report released Tuesday by a special commission created to investigate the attacks, which killed 18 people.
The independent commission, which held 16 public meetings, heard from scores of witnesses and reviewed thousands of pages of evidence, reiterated its earlier conclusion that Maine law enforcement officers had authority under the state’s yellow flag law, but didn’t use it, to seize reservist Robert Card’s guns and put him in protective custody weeks before the shootings.
The 215-page report also faulted the Army Reserve for failing to do more to ensure Card’s health and deal with his weapons. And it pointed out that no one used New York’s red flag law to initiate steps to seize the gunman’s weapons when he was hospitalized last summer, even though the law had been used on non-New York residents before.
The commission, created by Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, announced its conclusions at Lewiston City Hall, less than 3 miles (5 kilometers) from the two sites where the shootings took place Oct. 25, 2023.
“Our ability to heal — as a people and as a state — is predicated on the ability to know and understand, to the greatest extent possible, the facts and circumstances surrounding the tragedy in Lewiston. The release of the independent commission’s final report marks another step forward on that long road to healing,” the governor said in a statement.
While the report contained no major surprises, the commission’s chair, Daniel Wathen, noted the facts laid out in the document can be used by others to make changes to prevent future tragedies.
Megan Vozzella, who lost her husband two weeks shy of their first anniversary, expressed through an American Sign Language interpreter that she wants accountability for those who failed to act to stop the shootings.
“We are dealing with grief, loss of our loved ones. And it’s a journey. All we can do is learn from this and make our lives better,” she said, likening the process to dealing with broken pieces. “It’s like we’re walking through the shards,” she said.
Ben Gideon, a lawyer for Vozzella and other relatives of those who died, described the shootings as the product of a dangerous intersection of gun ownership and mental illness with failures to intervene that were outlined in the report.
“At the end of the day, what happened here was a pairing of someone who was known to be paranoid, delusional and suffering from a diagnosed psychosis with someone who owned numerous weapons of warfare,” Gideon said.
The commission began its work a month after the mass shootings by Card, who killed his victims at a bowling alley and a bar in Lewiston and then took his own life. Over nine months, there has been emotional testimony from family members and survivors of the shooting, law enforcement officials and U.S. Army Reserve personnel, and others.
The commission praised the swift response by police to the shootings but also noted what Wathen, a former chief justice of Maine’s highest court, described Tuesday as “utter chaos” as hundreds of law enforcement officers arrived to search for the gunman.
Family members and fellow reservists said Card had exhibited delusional and paranoid behavior months before the shootings. He was hospitalized by the Army during training in July 2023 in New York, where his unit was training West Point cadets, but Army Reserve officials acknowledged that no one made sure Card was taking his medication or complying with his follow-up care at home in Bowdoin, Maine.
The starkest warning came in September text from a fellow reservist: “I believe he’s going to snap and do a mass shooting.”
The commission report contained new details of Card’s time at a private psychiatric hospital — Four Winds in Katonah, New York — where Card acknowledged having a “hit list” and officials planned to ask a judge to extend Card’s hospitalization. But the court hearing never happened, and his psychiatrist felt the hospital’s request would have been unsuccessful, given Card’s stabilization and progress and his agreement to continue medications and participate in therapy. The psychiatrist thought he was safe to discharge after 19 days.
The report also took up New York’s red flag law but didn’t reach a conclusion on whether it should have been used to initiate the removal of Card’s weapons while he was hospitalized at Four Winds. An Army health care worker testified he thought the law applied only to New York residents. But the report noted that petitions were successfully initiated in New York against at least 10 nonresidents, like Card, between 2021 and June 2024.
Army officials conducted their own investigation after the shootings that Lt. Gen. Jody Daniels, then the chief of the Army Reserve, said found “a series of failures by unit leadership.” Three Army Reserve leaders were disciplined for dereliction of duty, according to the report.
After the shootings, Maine’s Legislature passed new guns laws for the state, which has a tradition of hunting and firearms ownership, after the shootings. A three-day waiting period for gun purchases went into effect this month.
In addition to Wathen, the seven-member commission included two former federal prosecutors; two additional former judges, including a former member Maine’s highest court; the state’s former chief forensic psychologist; and a private psychiatrist who is an executive at a psychiatric hospital.
https://www.voanews.com/a/final-report-on-lewiston-mass-shooting-to-be-released-/7749335.html
Pakistan’s internet slows to uncomfortable levels, allegedly due to new China-style firewall
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Minister issues denial – it’s just an upgrade to the ‘web-management system’
Industry group Pakistan Software Houses Association for IT (P@SHA) last week accused the Pakistan government late last week of implementing a China-style internet firewall – a claim the nation’s IT minister denied over the weekend.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/pakistan_minister_denies_firewall/
Alibaba and Tencent clouds see demand for CPUs level off, GPUs accelerate
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Lenovo also cashes in on AI demand, without being able to turn it into profit
Demand for cloudy CPUs has levelled out at top Chinese clouds Alibaba and Tencent, whose customers increasingly want GPUs instead.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/tencent_alibaba_cloud_lenovo_results/
Firefighters significantly tame California’s fourth-largest wildfire on record
date: 2024-08-20, from: VOA News USA
CHICO, Calif. — California’s largest wildfire this year has been significantly tamed as the state’s initially fierce fire season has, at least temporarily, fallen into a relative calm.
The Park Fire was 53% contained Monday after scorching nearly 1,738 square kilometers in several northern counties, destroying 637 structures and damaging 49 as it became the state’s fourth-largest wildfire on record.
A large portion of the fire area has been in mop-up stages, which involves extinguishing smoldering material along containment lines, and residents of evacuated areas are returning home. Timber in its northeast corner continues to burn.
The fire is burning islands of vegetation within containment lines, the Cal Fire situation summary said.
The Park Fire was allegedly started by arson on July 24 in a wilderness park outside the Central Valley city of Chico. It spread northward with astonishing speed in withering conditions as it climbed the western slope of the Sierra Nevada.
July was marked by extraordinary heat in most of California, where back-to-back wet winters left the state flush with grasses and vegetation that dried and became ready to burn. Wildfires erupted up and down the state.
The first half of August has been warmer than average but not record-breaking, according to Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“We’re still seeing pretty regular ignitions and we’re still seeing significant fire activity, but the pace has slowed and the degree of that activity, the intensity, rates of initial spread, are not as high as they were,” he said in an online briefing Friday.
“Nonetheless, vegetation remains drier than average in most places in California and will likely remain so nearly everywhere in California for the foreseeable future,” he said.
There are signs of a return of high heat in parts of the West by late August and early September, Swain said.
“I would expect to see another resurgence in wildfire activity then across a broad swath of the West, including California,” he said.
Biden gets rousing ovation, gives Harris enthusiastic endorsement
date: 2024-08-20, from: VOA News USA
Chicago — President Joe Biden delivered his valedictory address to the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, as his decision to end his reelection bid released newfound energy within his party with Vice President Kamala Harris’ elevation to the top of the ticket.
After 52 years rising to the pinnacle of influence within his party, Biden, 81, received a hero’s welcome for the act of stepping aside for Harris, weeks after many in his party were pressuring him to drop his bid for reelection. One month after an unprecedented mid-campaign switch, the opening night of the convention in Chicago was designed to give a graceful exit to the incumbent president and slingshot Harris toward a faceoff with Republican Donald Trump, whose comeback bid for the White House is viewed by Democrats as an existential threat.
A visibly emotional Biden was greeted by a more than four-minute-long ovation and chants of “Thank you, Joe.”
“America, I love you,” he replied.
Speaking clearly and energetically, Biden appeared to relish the chance to defend his record, advocate for his vice president and go on the attack against Trump. His delivery was more reminiscent of the Biden who won in 2020 than the mumbling and sometimes incoherent one-time candidate whose debate performance against Trump in June sparked the downfall of his reelection campaign.
Biden, in his remarks, repeated his 2020 theme that “we’re in a battle for the very soul of America,” and pressed the case for why Harris and her running mate Tim Walz were best prepared to wage it.
“Because of you, we’ve had the most extraordinary four years of progress ever, period,” Biden declared. And then he interjected, “I say ‘we,’ I mean me and Kamala,’” sharing the credit for his most popular successes with the vice president to whom he handed over his political operation.
Harris made an unannounced appearance onstage as the convention’s prime-time program began Monday evening to thank Biden for his leadership and watched his remarks from the stands.
“Joe, thank you for your historic leadership, for your lifetime of service to our nation, and for all you’ll continue to do,” she said. “We are forever grateful to you.”
Biden’s speech, billed as the marquee event of the evening, was pushed into late night as the convention program lagged more than an hour behind schedule.
The president recalled the 2017 “unite the right” rally, when torch-carrying white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, an episode he cites as cementing his decision to run for president in 2020 despite his ongoing grief over the death of his son Beau Biden.
“I could not stay on the sidelines,” Biden said. “So I ran. I had no intention of running again. I’d just lost part of my soul. But I ran with a deep conviction.”
Biden celebrated the successes from his administration, including a massive boost in infrastructure spending and a cap on the price of insulin. The spending resulted in more money going to Republican-leaning states than Democratic states, he said, because “the job of the president is to deliver for all of America.”
During one of the crowd’s many chants of “thank you, Joe,” he added, “Thank you, Kamala, too.”
Not even a month ago, Democrats were riven over foreign policy, political strategy and Biden himself, who was holding on after a disastrous debate by claiming he had a better chance than any other Democrat — including Harris — of beating Trump.
On Monday, Biden insisted he did not harbor any ill will to the many voices in the arena before him who had pushed him to the exits and called on the party to unite around Harris. Accusing Trump of “bowing down” to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Biden said, “I never have and I promise you Kamala Harris will never do it.”
“She’ll be a president we can all be proud of,” he said.
First lady Jill Biden alluded to her husband’s wrenching decision to leave the race in her remarks minutes before Biden took the stage. She said she fell in love with him all over again “just weeks ago, when I saw him dig deep into his soul and decide to no longer seek reelection and endorse Kamala Harris.”
Still, there was little question that the Democratic Party would almost certainly have been in a far worse state if Biden had continued to cling to his campaign, despite growing concerns about his mental and physical acuity after struggling to complete sentences during his debate against Trump.
Democrats took turns praising Biden’s leadership and his choice in Harris to succeed him. “I’ve never known a more compassionate man than Joe Biden,” said his longtime confidant Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, who led the crowd in a “we love Joe” chant.
They tried to connect both Biden and Harris to what the party sees as the governing pair’s most popular accomplishments: leading the country out of the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, pushing for massive investments in the country’s infrastructure, working to lower health care costs and promoting clean energy.
“Thanks to Joe and Kamala, we reduced the price of prescription drugs, repaired roads and bridges and replaced lead pipes,” said South Carolina Representative Jim Clyburn, whose 2020 endorsement was critical to Biden winning that primary. He added that one of Biden’s best decisions was “selecting Kamala Harris as his vice president and endorsing her to succeed him.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was greeted with prolonged applause, saluted Harris while noting her potential to break the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” to become America’s first female president. Clinton was the Democratic nominee in 2016, but she lost that election to Trump.
“Together, we’ve put a lot of cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling,” Clinton said, invoking a metaphor she referenced in her concession speech eight years ago. “On the other side of that glass ceiling is Kamala Harris taking the oath of office as our 47th president of the United States. When a barrier falls for one of us, it clears the way for all of us.”
Clinton also saluted Biden for stepping aside, saying, “Now we are writing a new chapter in America’s story.”
Highlighting the party’s generational reach, Clinton, 76, followed New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 34, who endorsed Harris while delivering the first mention of the war in Gaza from the convention stage, addressing an issue that has split the party’s base ever since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and Israel’s resulting offensive.
Outside the arena, thousands of protesters descended on Chicago to decry the Biden-Harris administration’s support for the Israeli war effort.
Harris “is working tirelessly to secure a cease-fire in Gaza and bringing the hostages home,” Ocasio-Cortez said, drawing cheers from the crowd.
Biden acknowledged the protests outside the convention and inside the arena as he spoke, saying, “Those protesters out in the street have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.” He reiterated his push to get Israel and Hamas to agree to a cease-fire deal that would also see the release of hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7 in the attack that sparked the 10-month war.
Meanwhile, Democrats also looked to keep the focus on Trump, whose criminal convictions they mocked and who they asserted was only fighting for himself, rather than “for the people” — the night’s official theme.
Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow hoisted an oversized copy of “Project 2025” — a blueprint for a second Trump term that was put together by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank — onto the lectern and quoted from portions of it.
“So we read it,” McMorrow said. “Whatever you think it might be. It is so much worse.”
Trump, the former president, has publicly disavowed any interests in the policies outlined in Project 2025, but he has close ties to its authors and campaign aides had praised its work in the past.
Democrats kept abortion access front and center for voters, betting that the issue will propel them to success as it has in other key races since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago. Speakers Monday included three women whose health care suffered as a result of that decision. And the convention program included a video of Trump praising his own role in getting Roe struck down.
DNC’s Day 1: Biden’s exit, talk of the glass ceiling, nod to Gaza protesters
date: 2024-08-20, from: VOA News USA
CHICAGO — The Democratic National Convention ’s first night showcased speeches from the last Democrat to lose to Donald Trump and the last one to beat him.
Hillary Clinton spoke hopefully of finally breaking the “glass ceiling” to elect a female president. Joe Biden laced into Trump and directly acknowledged the concerns of protesters against the war in Gaza who demonstrated a few blocks from the convention hall.
Here are some takeaways from the first night of the convention.
Biden begins long political exit
President Joe Biden wrapped up the convention’s opening night by beginning his long political farewell with an address that both framed his own legacy and signaled he was ready to start ceding control of the party to Vice President Kamala Harris.
He took the stage to a long, raucous ovation from delegates hoisting “We love Joe” placards and told them in turn, “I love you!” After the affectionate opening, Biden spent long stretches of his 50-minute speech lacing into Trump, returning to a key theme of the reelection campaign he’s no longer running.
Biden ticked through many of his administration’s achievements, including a major public works package and climate program, and shared the credit with Harris. But the convention ran so late that Biden took the stage after prime time had ended in much of the country. That didn’t stop Biden from declaring, “America’s winning.”
Biden called Harris a “close friend” and said picking her as his running mate was the best decision he ever made. He also vowed to help get the new Democratic ticket elected, promising to be the “best volunteer” that Harris and Walz have ever seen.
He ended by telling those still listening, “I gave my best to you for 50 years.”
He had no plan to linger at the convention, though. Biden was set to fly to California’s wine country for a vacation immediately after his speech.
A surprise Harris appearance to pay tribute to Biden
The vice president made an unscheduled appearance onstage to pay tribute to Biden ahead of his own address to the convention. She told the president, “Thank you for your historic leadership, for your lifetime of service to our nation, and for all you’ll continue to do.”
On a night meant to honor the president who stepped aside to make way for Harris, the vice president added, “We are forever grateful to you.” Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and her husband, Doug Emhoff, were in the stands to cheer her message.
Gaza gets little attention inside DNC hall — except from Biden
Thousands of marchers churned through Chicago’s streets protesting U.S. support for Israel during the war in Gaza. But inside the convention hall, the combustible issue went largely unmentioned until Biden got to the microphone.
Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez got cheers when she praised Harris for working “tirelessly to get a cease-fire in Gaza and get the hostages home.” Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia made a brief allusion to the conflict.
A handful of delegates who ran on an “uncommitted” ticket protesting Biden’s position on the war unfurled a banner during his speech that read “Stop Arming Israel.” But it was blocked by supporters waving Biden signs before it was wrestled away and the lights over that section of the audience were shut off.
Biden himself addressed the issue head-on, saying he’d keep working to “end the war in Gaza and bring peace and security to the Middle East.”
“Those protesters out in the streets have a point,” Biden said. “A lot of innocent people are being killed, on both sides.”
The crowd cheered, and for a moment the war didn’t seem like it was dividing the party at all.
Clinton revives talk of breaking that ‘glass ceiling’
Clinton was greeted with wild and sustained applause that lasted for more than two minutes before she quieted the crowd. She delivered a fiery speech hoping that Harris could do what she could not –- become the first woman president by beating Trump.
Clinton evoked her 2016 concession speech by referencing all the “cracks in the glass ceiling” that she and her voters had achieved. And she painted a vision of Harris “on the other side of that glass ceiling” taking the oath of office as president.
She closed her speech with a striking desire for someone who’s stood at the pinnacle of American politics and power: “I want my grandchildren and their grandchildren to know I was here at this moment. That we were here and that we were with Kamala Harris every step of the way.”
Clinton dipped into traditional political attacks in her speech, including mocking Trump’s criminal record. That led to chants of “lock him up” — mirroring the ones that Trump’s supporters directed at Clinton in 2016.
Tracing a line from Jesse Jackson to Kamala Harris
An early theme of the evening was celebrating the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a longtime civil rights leader in Chicago and former presidential candidate in 1984 and 1988. Many Democrats credit him with blazing a trail that helped Barack Obama win the White House in 2008 and Kamala Harris become the first woman of color nominated for the presidency.
Jackson was saluted from the stage by several speakers, including Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and California Rep. Maxine Waters. There was a video montage of Jackson’s career and legacy that played before the 82-year-old Jackson himself came to the stage in a wheelchair, thrusting his arms skyward and grinning. Jackson has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
During the 1984 Democratic convention in San Francisco, Jackson gave a speech declaring that America is “like a quilt: Many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread.” The address became known as the “Rainbow Coalition” speech, and Jackson used momentum from it to seek the Democratic nomination again in 1988.
Harris has called Jackson “one of America’s greatest patriots.”
Remember COVID? Democrats don’t want voters — or Trump — to forget
Democrats opted to shine the convention spotlight on the harrowing subject of the coronavirus pandemic.
It was a reflection of Democratic frustration at how Trump has portrayed his tenure in office as a golden age for the country, even though hundreds of thousands of Americans died of COVID-19 during the last year of his term.
There are plenty of risks for Democrats in hammering the pandemic. Even more people died of the virus during Biden’s presidency than during Trump’s, voters have shown an eagerness to move on and some preventative measures championed by Democrats — like school closures and masking — are not popular in retrospect.
Still, the lineup of early speakers focused on Trump’s performance during the pandemic. Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan recalled how her brother was the second person in Tennessee to die of the disease and how she couldn’t visit him or hold a memorial service. Rep. Lauren Underwood of Illinois, a nurse, said of Trump: “He took the COVID crisis and turned it into a catastrophe. We can never ever let him be our president again.”
Rep. Robert Garcia, whose mother and stepfather died of the disease in 2020, recalled Trump’s missteps and concluded with one of the slogans of Harris’ young campaign: “We are not going back.”
Democrats one-up Republicans on labor
Trump’s convention last month featured a rare appearance from a union leader at such a GOP event: Teamsters President Sean O’Brien. That’s reflective of how Trump’s populism has cut into Democrats’ advantage with union households.
In that speech, O’Brien did not endorse Trump. But he criticized both major political parties for not doing enough to help working people.
Democrats didn’t invite O’Brien to their convention, but they countered with a half-dozen other union leaders onstage Monday. And then Shawn Fain, head of the United Auto Workers, led a blistering chant of “Trump’s a scab!” while wearing a red T-shirt emblazoned with those words.
Fain noted that Biden visited a UAW picket line last year and, when autoworkers struck in 2019, Harris, not Trump, walked the picket lines. “Donald Trump is all talk and Kamala Harris walks the walk,” Fain said.
https://www.voanews.com/a/7749309.html
Dem Convention Day 1: Speakers Sound Themes of Patriotism and Hope
date: 2024-08-20, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Kamala Harris biographer says she’s “winning the vibes.”
The post Dem Convention Day 1: Speakers Sound Themes of Patriotism and Hope appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Jury hears ex-politician on trial for murder amassed photos, ID records about slain Vegas reporter
date: 2024-08-20, from: VOA News USA
Las Vegas — Hundreds of photos of a slain investigative journalist’s home and neighborhood were found on the cellphone and computer of a local Democratic politician accused of “lying in wait” and killing the reporter, who had written several articles critical of the official, a Nevada jury was told Monday.
Other photos taken from Robert Telles’ devices included an image of a single gray athletic shoe with a distinctive black pattern and a shot of Telles’ work computer at the Clark County Public Administrator and Guardian office with results of internet searches through a password-protected site that retrieved slain reporter Jeff German’s name, home address, vehicle registration and date of birth.
Prosecutor Christopher Hamner noted for jurors that photo was taken Aug. 23, 2022 — less than two weeks before German was slashed and stabbed to death in a side yard of his home.
“This image came out of Mr. Telles’ phone?” Hamner asked Matthew Hovanec, a Las Vegas digital forensics supervisor who testified Monday about “extracting” the data from Telles’ devices.
“It did,” Hovanec responded.
Detective Justine Gatus, the primary Las Vegas police homicide investigator of German’s death, was the main — and final — witness called Monday as prosecutors rested their case after four days of testimony from more than two dozen witnesses.
Telles has pleaded not guilty to murder and faces the possibility of life in prison if the jury finds him guilty. Prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty.
Telles insists he didn’t kill German and was framed for the crime. He intends to testify, defense lawyer Robert Draskovich said Monday, and is expected to take the witness stand to cap his own defense case, possibly Tuesday afternoon.
Gatus cited Las Vegas Review-Journal articles about Telles and the county office that German wrote, published in May and June 2022, about a county office in turmoil.
“They weren’t flattering,” the detective observed.
Social media posts by Telles at the same time derided German and the articles as false depictions of his efforts to fight corruption amid a political and social “old guard” real estate network.
Gatus testified that the gray sneaker with a Nike logo and four black marks on the sole was “identical” to one jurors saw earlier in neighbors’ security camera images of a figure wearing orange who slipped into a side yard of German’s home where German was later found dead on Labor Day weekend 2022.
Neither an orange shirt nor a murder weapon was entered as evidence in the case. But one of those shoes, cut to pieces and bearing spots of blood from an unidentified source, was found in plastic shopping bag in Telles’ home following his arrest.
German’s killing in September 2022, at age 69, made him the only reporter killed in the U.S. among 69 news media workers killed worldwide that year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. German spent 44 years covering Las Vegas mobsters and public officials at the Las Vegas Sun and then at the rival Review-Journal.
About 10 of his family members and friends have attended each day of Telles’ trial but have not spoken publicly about the killing. They declined as a group on Monday to comment.
Jurors last week heard from forensic scientists who said Telles’ DNA was found beneath German’s fingernails and saw security video of the suspect driving through German’s neighborhood.
Oct. 19: Fourth Annual OCD Awareness Walk
date: 2024-08-20, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Fourth Annual OCD Awareness SCV Walk and community event will be held in Santa Clarita on Saturday, Oct.
https://scvnews.com/oct-19-fourth-annual-ocd-awareness-walk/
Hello, President Biden!
date: 2024-08-20, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Joe and Jill Biden to arrive in Santa Ynez Valley following the president’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Monday night.
The post Hello, President Biden! appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/19/hello-president-biden/
Orange County announces lawsuit against another nonprofit with connections to Supervisor Andrew Do
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The LAist
Supervisor Katrina Foley announced Monday that the county has filed a lawsuit against Hand to Hand Relief Organization and its CEO to recover millions of taxpayer dollars.
LASD Reminds Drivers, Keep Final Days of Summer Fun, Not Fatal
date: 2024-08-20, from: SCV New (TV Station)
As the end of summer approaches and families prepare for Labor Day celebrations, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department reminds everyone to prioritize safety on the roads
https://scvnews.com/lasd-reminds-drivers-to-keep-the-final-days-of-summer-fun-not-fatal/
Missing scissors cause 36 flight cancellations in Japan
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Plus a further 200 delays, rockstars knocked off stage … all on a holiday weekend
Thirty-six flights were cancelled at Japan’s New Chitose airport on Saturday after a pair of scissors went missing.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/missing_scissors_cut_flights_japan/
Pentagon: US State Department OKs $3.5B sale of helicopters to South Korea
date: 2024-08-20, from: VOA News USA
New Film Festival Partnership Offers Cash Grants up to $10K to Santa Barbara Filmmakers
date: 2024-08-20, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Santa Barbara International Film Festival teams with Veraison Fund for SBIFF Filmmaker Fund.
The post New Film Festival Partnership Offers Cash Grants up to $10K to Santa Barbara Filmmakers appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Texas jury finds school shooter’s parents not liable for violence
date: 2024-08-20, from: VOA News USA
Deputies: Shots fired at Residence Inn
date: 2024-08-20, from: The Signal
Deputies from the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station responded to a call about shots fired at the Residence Inn on Wayne Mills Place in Valencia at approximately 6 p.m. on Monday. […]
The post Deputies: Shots fired at Residence Inn appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/deputies-shots-fired-at-residence-inn/
Council names Gibbs to District 3 seat
date: 2024-08-20, from: The Signal
The Santa Clarita City Council appointed Councilman Jason Gibbs as the first-ever representative of the city’s 3rd District during a special meeting Monday evening. City Council members basically had two […]
The post Council names Gibbs to District 3 seat appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/council-names-gibbs-to-district-3-seat/
Digital wallets can allow purchases with stolen credit cards
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Researchers find it’s possible to downgrade authentication checks, and shabby token refresh policies
Digital wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal can be used to conduct transactions using stolen and cancelled payment cards, according to academic security researchers.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/digital_wallets_simplify_fraud/
Democrats approve platform that mentions Biden’s ‘second term’ despite his making way for Harris
date: 2024-08-20, from: VOA News USA
CHICAGO — Delegates at the Democratic National Convention voted Monday night to approve their 2024 party platform, which lays out familiar priorities for the party but wasn’t updated to reflect that President Joe Biden is no longer running for reelection.
The largely ceremonial vote at Chicago’s convention signaled the party coalescing around a singular vision for the next four years — though a somewhat outdated one, as Vice President Kamala Harris has only outlined a few of her own specific policy positions since she took over the Democratic presidential ticket last month. The platform makes repeated reference to Biden’s “second term” despite the president’s decision a month ago to no longer seek one.
The Democratic National Committee said the more than 90-page document “makes a strong statement about the historic work that President Biden and Vice President Harris have accomplished hand-in-hand and offers a vision for a progressive agenda that we can build on as a nation and as a Party as we head into the next four years.”
Regina Romero, the mayor of Tucson, Arizona, and co-chair of the convention platform committee, told delegates that the platform was passed “prior to the president passing the torch in an act of love and patriotism.” She said that the platform nonetheless included input from all corners of the party and has a “forward-looking vision for our party that echoes the voice of all.”
“Vice President Harris is now carrying the torch,” Romero said.
The platform was approved on the floor by a voice vote.
The convention’s platform committee voted to approve the platform on July 16, days before Biden bowed out of the race and endorsed Harris on July 21. As a result, the document repeatedly refers to Biden’s second term and his administration’s accomplishments. It mentions Harris’ work as vice president but does not describe her candidacy or go into detail on her views on key issues.
“President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Democrats are running to finish the job,” it states, a sentiment that is now out of date.
Republican former President Donald Trump’s campaign has sought to tie Harris to Biden, arguing that his policies on the economy and other key issues are deeply unpopular. In a statement released shortly before the convention vote, it said, “There is no daylight between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. The proof? The DNC just released Kamala’s party platform, and it includes at least (asterisk)nineteen(asterisk) mentions of ‘Biden’s second term.’”
Harris has indeed talked generally about supporting the Biden administration’s key goals, which are more or less endorsed in the platform as written. It calls for restoring abortion rights nationwide, continuing to advance green energy initiatives that can create jobs and help slow climate change, capping low-income families’ child care costs and urging Congress to approve a pathway to U.S. citizenship for “long-term” people in the country illegally.
The platform also says Israel’s right to defend itself is “ironclad” while endorsing the Biden administration’s efforts to broker a lasting cease-fire deal that could suspend the fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Harris laid out a string of new economic proposals last week but otherwise hasn’t released a detailed list of her policy positions since taking over the top of the Democratic ticket. Her campaign aides have suggested she no longer adheres to some of the more liberal positions she took during her first run for president in 2020, including endorsing a ban on hydraulic fracturing.
In any event, candidates are not bound to adhere to their party’s platform and often don’t. What the platforms spell out usually has little effect on the race and is unlikely to have much impact on Election Day this cycle.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-20, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Elon Musk bought the biggest airport on the social web.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/19/200828.html
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-20, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Keanu Reeves: “If you see someone falling behind, walk beside them. If you see someone being ignored, find a way to include them. Always remind people of their worth. One small act could mean the world to them.”
http://scripting.com/2024/08/19.html#a010710
Procreate’s anti-AI pledge attracts praise from digital creatives
date: 2024-08-20, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
<div class="known-bookmark">
<div class="e-content">[Jess Weatherbed at The Verge]
““Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things. Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future,” Procreate said on the new AI section of its website. “We think machine learning is a compelling technology with a lot of merit, but the path generative AI is on is wrong for us.”“
This is a company that knows its audience: the lack of concern for artist welfare demonstrated by AI vendors has understandably not made the technology popular with that community. Adobe got into trouble with its userbase for adding those generative AI features.
It’s a great way for Procreate to deepen its relationship with artists and take advantage of Adobe’s fall from grace. There’s also something a bit deeper here: if work created with generative AI does run into copyright trouble at the hands of current and future lawsuits, work created with Procreate will be clean of those issues.
<p>[<a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/19/24223473/procreate-anti-generative-ai-pledge-digital-illustration-creatives">Link</a>]</p>
</div>
</div>https://werd.io/2024/procreates-anti-ai-pledge-attracts-praise-from-digital-creatives
Ernesto retains strength as hurricane over open Atlantic
date: 2024-08-20, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/ernesto-retains-strength-as-hurricane-over-open-atlantic-/7749219.html
Decoding the Art of Franceschi House
date: 2024-08-20, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The Pearl Chase Society continues their Kellam de Forest speaker series with a presentation on Friday, August 30 at 5:30
The post Decoding the Art of Franceschi House appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/19/decoding-the-art-of-franceschi-house/
House Republicans issue report urging Biden’s impeachment
date: 2024-08-20, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/house-republicans-issue-report-urging-biden-s-impeachment/7748862.html
Lady Matadors Fall to No. 8 Texas Tech 0-4
date: 2024-08-20, from: SCV New (TV Station)
California State University, Northridge women’s soccer fell to No. 8 Texas Tech on Sunday at John Walker Soccer Complex
https://scvnews.com/lady-matadors-fall-to-no-8-texas-tech-0-4/
City awards four animal care nonprofits $10,000 grants
date: 2024-08-20, from: The Signal
The Santa Clarita City Council has awarded four nonprofit organizations with the city’s first animal care grants, totaling $40,000, to help local organizations that support animals residing in or rescued […]
The post City awards four animal care nonprofits $10,000 grants appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/city-awards-four-animal-care-nonprofits-10000-grants/
Range Over Function Types
date: 2024-08-20, updated: 2024-08-20, from: Go language blog
A description of range over function types, a new feature in Go 1.23.
https://go.dev/blog/range-functions
Cowboy Spirit: Vasquez Rocks’ Fireside Night draws large crowd
date: 2024-08-19, from: The Signal
Sarah Brewer grew up visiting the Vasquez Rocks Natural Area and Nature Center with her parents who were devoted volunteers. When she was around 6 to 7 years old, she […]
The post Cowboy Spirit: Vasquez Rocks’ Fireside Night draws large crowd appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/cowboy-spirit-vasquez-rocks-fireside-night-draws-large-crowd/
US intelligence officials blame Iran for hacks targeting Trump, Biden-Harris campaigns
date: 2024-08-19, from: VOA News USA
washington — U.S. intelligence officials said Monday that they were confident that Iran was responsible for the hack of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, casting the cyber intrusion as part of a brazen and broader effort by Tehran to interfere in American politics and undermine faith in democratic institutions.
Although the Trump campaign and private-sector cybersecurity investigators had previously said Iran was behind the hacking attempts, it was the first time the U.S. government had assigned blame for the attack.
The joint statement from the FBI and other federal agencies also indicated that Iran was responsible for attempts to hack Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, saying hackers had “sought access to individuals with direct access to the presidential campaign of both political parties.”
The goal of the hacking and other activities, federal officials said, was not only to sow discord but also to shape the outcome of elections that Iran perceives to be “particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests.”
“We have observed increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle, specifically involving influence operations targeting the American public and cyber operations targeting presidential campaigns,” said the statement, which in addition to the FBI was also released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The statement largely confirms the findings of private companies like Microsoft, which earlier this month issued a report detailing foreign agents’ attempts to interfere in this year’s election, and Google, which separately said that an Iranian group linked to the country’s Revolutionary Guard has tried to infiltrate the personal email accounts of roughly a dozen people linked to President Joe Biden and Trump since May.
‘Clear the Shelters’ puts pets in new homes: 29 pets adopted, more await
date: 2024-08-19, from: The Signal
There were a total of 79 animals ready to be adopted at the Castaic Animal Care Center for the “Clear the Shelters” kickstart adoption event on Aug. 10. Fifty-six dogs […]
The post ‘Clear the Shelters’ puts pets in new homes: 29 pets adopted, more await appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/clear-the-shelters-puts-pets-in-hew-homes-29-pets-adopted-more-await/
TMU Women’s Soccer Opens Season with 3-1 Win Over Bushnell
date: 2024-08-19, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Master’s University women’s soccer team opened the 2024 campaign with a solid 3-1 win over Bushnell University (OR) Thursday afternoon on Pete Reese Field
https://scvnews.com/tmu-womens-soccer-opens-season-with-3-1-win-over-bushnell/
Saugus school board to discuss preschool program, risk assessment protocols
date: 2024-08-19, from: The Signal
The Saugus Union School District began offering preschool at Bouquet Canyon Early Learning Academy in January after the program was shuttered in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. On Tuesday, […]
The post Saugus school board to discuss preschool program, risk assessment protocols appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
Matadors Offer Advice on Navigating Smooth Transition to Campus Life
date: 2024-08-19, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Parking, papers and (finding some) peace … these are just some of the subjects Matadors — returning students, professors and staff — covered when asked for advice for those just starting out at California State University, Northridge
https://scvnews.com/matadors-offer-advice-on-navigating-smooth-transition-to-campus-life/
palm-sync-daemon: Simple synchronization between Palm device and OrgMode files
date: 2024-08-19, from: Tilde.news
https://github.com/eugeneandrienko/palm-sync-daemon
2nd Annual Lompoc Teens’ Got Talent Returns Next Month
date: 2024-08-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Lompoc Teen Center and Lompoc Theatre Project are excited to host the second annual Lompoc Teens’ Got Talent showcase next
The post 2nd Annual Lompoc Teens’ Got Talent Returns Next Month appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/19/2nd-annual-lompoc-teens-got-talent-returns-next-month/
ShelterBox Calls on Greater Safety for Aid Workers
date: 2024-08-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Santa Barbara – ShelterBox USA President Kerri Murray points out aid workers across the world are risking their lives to
The post ShelterBox Calls on Greater Safety for Aid Workers appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/19/shelterbox-calls-on-greater-safety-for-aid-workers/
Cox Enterprises Announces 2024 Cox Conserves Heroes Nomination Period
date: 2024-08-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SANTA BARBARA, CA (August 16, 2024) – Calling all environmental enthusiasts in Santa Barbara!Cox Enterprises has opened the nomination process for
The post Cox Enterprises Announces 2024 Cox Conserves Heroes Nomination Period appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
International Overdose Awareness Day Free Events Hosted by Local Grassroots Organization
date: 2024-08-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
(SANTA BARBARA, Calif.) – Families ACT, a grassroots organization founded in Santa Barbara in 2007 by mothers who lost their
The post International Overdose Awareness Day Free Events Hosted by Local Grassroots Organization appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
County Behavioral Wellness Accepting Annual Applications for John Kovacs Scholarship Awards
date: 2024-08-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
(SANTA BARBARA, Calif.) – The County of Santa Barbara Department of Behavioral Wellness is announcing the opening of the application period
The post County Behavioral Wellness Accepting Annual Applications for John Kovacs Scholarship Awards appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
¡Viva el Arte de Santa Bárbara! presenta una temporada emocionante para 2024-2025 con músicos y bailarines destacados
date: 2024-08-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Santa Barbara, CA, 16 de agosto de 2024 – ¡Viva el Arte de Santa Bárbara! (Viva) se complace en anunciar su muy
The post ¡Viva el Arte de Santa Bárbara! presenta una temporada emocionante para 2024-2025 con músicos y bailarines destacados appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Russia court rejects US soldier’s appeal of jail term
date: 2024-08-19, from: VOA News USA
Moscow — A Russian court rejected an appeal Monday by a U.S. soldier who has been jailed for three years and nine months for alleged death threats and theft.
Gordon Black was sentenced in June by a court in Russia’s Far Eastern city of Vladivostok, where he was arrested in May while visiting a Russian woman he met and dated while serving in South Korea.
The 34-year-old was detained after the woman, named by Russian media as Alexandra Vashuk, reported him to the police after an argument, saying he physically attacked her and stole about $110 from her.
Black pleaded “partially guilty” to theft and not guilty to threatening to kill Vashuk, saying she had started an argument after drinking.
Black appealed his sentence and Monday, the Primorye regional court rejected the appeal, saying in a statement that it decided “to leave the verdict in place” after examining the case.
The pair met in October 2022 on the dating app Tinder in South Korea and had dated there, Black said, before Vashuk then invited him to come to Vladivostok.
Black is one of several American citizens imprisoned in Russia.
Washington has accused Moscow of arresting its citizens on baseless charges to use them as bargaining chips to secure the release of Russians convicted abroad.
On August 1, Russia freed U.S. reporter Evan Gershkovich, former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan and 14 others in its biggest prisoner swap with the West since the Cold War.
https://www.voanews.com/a/russia-court-rejects-us-soldier-s-appeal-of-jail-term-/7748791.html
MenuetOS gets basic X server
date: 2024-08-19, from: OS News
There’s been a few new releases since the last time we talked about MenuetOS, back in March of this year when version 1.50.00 was released, so I figured it was time to take a look at what the project’s been up to. And just in case you don’t remember – MenuetOS is 64 bit operating system written in assembly that fits on a single 1.44 MB floppy disk. There’s also a 32 bit version that’s no longer being developed – I think. Weirdly enough, the 1.50.00 released is no longer listed, but recent changes include Mplayer being part of the disk image, further updates to the included X-Window Server, the usual bugfixes, and a few more things. The X server is quite cool – with it, you can run, say, Firefox on your Linux installation, but have the MenuetOS X server render the UI. In addition, thanks to MenuetOS now including a basic POSIX layer, it’s possible to create basic applications that run unmodified on both MenuetOS and a Linux distribution like Ubuntu. Neat.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140534/menuetos-gets-basic-x-server/
Masq(p)arade! Seeks Performers for ‘Pianos on Street’ Grand Finale on October 18
date: 2024-08-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Whimsical performance applications remain open through September 8.
The post Masq(p)arade! Seeks Performers for ‘Pianos on Street’ Grand Finale on October 18 appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Floods from thunderstorms lead to dramatic rescues and 2 deaths in Connecticut
date: 2024-08-19, from: VOA News USA
oxford, connecticut — Torrential rains turned streets into raging rivers in parts of Connecticut and New York’s Long Island, trapping people in cars and a restaurant, covering vehicles in mud, and sweeping two women to their deaths, authorities said.
Dramatic rescues unfolded as a foot (30 centimeters) of rain fell on some parts of western Connecticut late Sunday and early Monday, coming down so fast that it caught drivers unaware. Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont said more than 100 people were evacuated by search and rescue teams Sunday evening.
The bodies of two women who had been in separate cars were recovered Monday in Oxford, a town of 13,000 about 35 miles southwest of Hartford, officials said. Both were Oxford residents.
Firefighters were trying to get the first woman to safety when the flooded Little River swept her away, Oxford Fire Chief Scott Pelletier said at a news conference with other Connecticut officials. The second woman got out of her car and tried to cling to a sign, but “the racing water was too much” and swept her away, too, he said.
“This is a tragic and devastating day for Oxford,” the town’s first selectman, George Temple, said.
U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal added, “Who would have thought the Little River would turn into a gushing torrent of destruction, which is what happened.”
In nearby Southbury, Lucas Barber used wilderness first responder techniques he learned as a backpacker and rock climber to wade through chest-high water to save Patrick Jennings, who has a prosthetic leg, and Jennings’ dog from a car outside the Southbury Plaza mall.
Barber, 30, said he drove to higher ground and grabbed rope he keeps in his car for emergencies. Jennings’ car, he said, looked like it was “turning in the tide and seemed to be sinking.”
Barber said he first tried to throw his rope to Jennings but changed his approach when he was told Jennings had a prosthetic leg. Barber waded and swam to the car, which was filling with water, he said.
He saw Jennings’ golden retriever, Stanley, in the back, scared, and Jennings worried about leaving him behind.
“‘Your dog is coming with us, but also I need to get you out right now,’” Barber said he told Jennings.
Jennings took off his prosthetic leg, and Barber wrapped his rope around the man’s waist and chest. Barber tried tying the rope around the dog’s collar, but it came undone. Once he got Jennings to safety and others could tend to him, he went back for Stanley. Halfway back, Barber said, the dog got excited to see Jennings and swam the rest of the way to his owner.
Barber said he went back a third time to fetch Jennings’ prosthetic leg, which was bobbing next to his car.
In Oxford, rushing waters surrounded the Brookside Inn, trapping 18 people. Firefighters had to stretch a ladder across the floodwaters to reach them as cars and other large debris carried by the torrent smashed into the building, said Jeremy Rodorigo, a firefighter from neighboring Beacon Falls.
The storm system that hit Connecticut and then moved on to Long Island was separate from Hurricane Ernesto, which on Monday was over the open Atlantic Ocean but still expected to cause powerful swells, dangerous surf and rip currents along the U.S. East Coast.
William Syrett, a professor of meteorology and atmospheric science at Penn State University, referred to the Connecticut-New York system as “training thunderstorms.”
“It’s like each thunderstorm is a car on a train track, and so they just keep going over the same place,” he said. He cited “perfect conditions” for the storms, thanks to the amount of moisture in the air and a slow weather system.
The unusual part was the amount of rain that fell over several hours, Syrett said, not the thunderstorms themselves.
Ed Romaine, the executive of Long Island’s Suffolk County, said that hundreds of homes were affected by flooding and that mudslides covered the roofs of cars in some areas.
The storms canceled more than 450 flights at Newark Liberty, LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy airports, officials said.
Parents rage against new fee to keep their smart bassinets smart
date: 2024-08-19, from: OS News
But last month, that hand-me-down network was dealt a blow when Happiest Baby, the company that makes Snoo, began charging for access to some of the bassinet’s premium features — features that used to be available to Snoo users indefinitely, at no extra cost. Now, access to the app needed to lock in the bassinet’s rocking level, to track the baby’s sleep and to use the so-called weaning mode, among other features, will cost parents $20 a month. The change has angered secondhand users and original buyers alike. On Reddit, the new subscription model has prompted review bombs, group brainstorms for collective action and detailed instructions for outraged parents seeking recourse. Some have taken to filing complaints with the Federal Trade Commission, Better Business Bureau and state-run consumer protection offices. ↫ Sandra E. Garcia and Rachel Sherman at The New York Times My wife had our first baby a little over three years ago, and our second one a little over a year ago, and let me tell you – the amount of “smart” and “connected” stuff they sell targeted at babies and young parents is insane. The only “smart” thing we got was a camera that pipes sound to my phone and detects movement, and sends a notification to our phone so we can take a peek and see if everything’s alright. Our oldest has outgrown it, and our youngest doesn’t really need it, so it’s just being useless at the moment, fitted to the wall. It definitely improved our nights, though, since it made sure we would never have to get up for no reason. Other than that, we are very analog. I had heard of “smart” bassinets, but we didn’t think we needed one. That’s just our decision, though, and you can rightfully argue that using a camera and open microphone is not that different. All of these new “smart” tools are just that, tools, and can be useful and make your life just a little bit easier, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Being a parent of a newborn is hard enough as it is without outsiders judging you and pressuring you into doing things you don’t think are right, especially since you know your own newborn – and yourself – better than some random outsiders do. The Snoo is one of the more popular smart bassinets, apparently, and at an entry price of 1700 dollars it’s bonkers expensive. The thing is, though, as a new parent you know a lot of the stuff you buy has a relatively limited shelf life – they grow so fast – so you kind of take into account that you’ll be selling some of the more expensive stuff down the line to recoup some of the costs. We have an insanely expensive stroller from a Norwegian brand, because it needed to be able to handle the Arctic climate and its endless snow, including specialised wheels and tires for trudging through the snow. The resale value of these is quite decent, so we know we’ll get a decent part of the initial cost back, especially since we take extremely good care of it. And this is where the company that makes the Snoo, Happiest Baby, decided to screw over its customers. The company clearly realised the theoretical loss of revenue from the used market, and came up with this subscription model to lock in some of that theoretical revenue. However, since Happiest Baby always promised all of its features would work perpetually, this came as a huge shock to both buyers of used Snoo bassinets, as well as to parents intending to sell their Snoo, who now see their resale value plummet. The reasoning behind the sudden subscription model given by the company is absolutely wild. Harvey Karp, the founder and chief executive of Happiest Baby, defended the move as a business necessity. “We don’t have any dollar from the government, we don’t have a dollar from a university,” said Dr. Karp, a former pediatrician who created the Snoo after becoming frustrated with the lack of progress in reducing rates of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. “We have to sell products and bring in revenue to be able to get to this goal.” That goal, according to Dr. Karp, is “that everyone will have access to this, and it will be paid for not by your friend, but it will be paid for by your corporation, the government or your insurance company,” the way breast pumps are often covered. He also pointed to Happiest Baby’s efforts to make the Snoo available “in the inner city and in rural areas.” For many parents, however, paying into that ideal is of little comfort to their bottom line. ↫ Sandra E. Garcia and Rachel Sherman at The New York Times He’s basically stating that because he doesn’t get free money from the government, universities, customers’ employers, or insurance companies, he can’t make any profit off the Snoo products. He’s arguing that a $1700 bassinet with some sensors and chips is not a profitable product, which sounds absolutely like a flat-out lie to me. If he really can’t make a profit with such a price for such a product, there’s clearly something else wrong with the way the company is spending its money. Anyone who has ever watched Last Week Tonight with Jon Oliver knows just how many healthcare-related markets and businesses in the United States rely almost exclusively on government money through programs like Medicare and Medicaid, leading to an insane amount of scams and wasted money because there aren’t even remotely enough inspectors and related personnel to ensure such money is effectively spent, made worse by the fact such tasks are delegated to the states. This whole Snoo thing almost make me think Karp intended to profit off these often nebulous government money streams, but somehow failed to do so. I feel for the parents, though. They bought a product that didn’t include a hint of a subscription or paywalled features, and now they have
Blinken warns Israel, Hamas of ‘last opportunity’ to end Gaza War
date: 2024-08-19, from: The Signal
By Jack Phillips Contributing Writer U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday warned that the current push for a Gaza cease-fire and hostage deal is likely the final chance to […]
The post Blinken warns Israel, Hamas of ‘last opportunity’ to end Gaza War appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/blinken-warns-israel-hamas-of-last-opportunity-to-end-gaza-war/
Lilbits: Apple’s first consumer robot, Qualcomm’s first smartphone chip with Oryon CPU cores, and MNT Pocket Reform (modular mini-laptop)
date: 2024-08-19, from: Liliputing
The MNT Pocket Reform is a modular, open source mini-laptop that went up for pre-order last year through a crowdfunding campaign and began shipping this summer. Thanks to its modular design, the system was always made with customization in mind: the brains of the system are on a removable system-on-a-module (SoM) with a processor, memory, […]
The post Lilbits: Apple’s first consumer robot, Qualcomm’s first smartphone chip with Oryon CPU cores, and MNT Pocket Reform (modular mini-laptop) appeared first on Liliputing.
One805!Live Returns With a Star Studded Lineup for a Night of Rock ‘N’ Roll
date: 2024-08-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Final performing roster announced for fundraiser for Santa Barbara County First Responders.
The post One805!Live Returns With a Star Studded Lineup for a Night of Rock ‘N’ Roll appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Television host Phil Donahue dies at 88
date: 2024-08-19, from: The Signal
By Zachary Stieber Contributing Writer Longtime television host Phil Donahue has died, according to his family. Donahue was 88 when he died on Sunday, relatives told news outlets in a statement. […]
The post Television host Phil Donahue dies at 88 appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/television-host-phil-donahue-dies-at-88/
Lady Mustangs Volleyball Win Season Opener Against La Sierra
date: 2024-08-19, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Master’s University women’s volleyball team traveled to Riverside, Calif. for their 2024 season opener, coming away with a 3-set win over the La Sierra Golden Eagles Friday. The Lady Mustangs (1-0) hit .435 in the 25-20, 25-8, 25-10 road win. The team had a combined 43 kills and just four attack errors. By contrast, the…
Investigation: Local officer shot Trump rally shooter first
date: 2024-08-19, from: The Signal
By Zachary Stieber Contributing Writer The first shot to strike the man who fired at former President Donald Trump was from a local law enforcement officer, according to a preliminary report […]
The post Investigation: Local officer shot Trump rally shooter first appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/investigation-local-officer-shot-trump-rally-shooter-first/
Nvidia’s latest AI climate model takes aim at severe weather
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
That tornado warning couldn’t possibly be a hallucination… could it?
While enterprises struggle to quantify the return on investment of AI, the technology continues to show promise in bolstering weather forecasting and climate models.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/nvidia_ai_weather/
Winners of the 2024 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/winners-of-the-2024-bulwer-lytton-fiction-contest
For parenting students at community college, it takes a village. It also takes a grant
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The LAist
The Pasadena City College’s family resource center was created two years ago, following a federal earmark to try out a more supportive form of child care.
https://laist.com/news/education/pasadena-city-college-family-resource-center
Roblox: the Biggest Game in the World
date: 2024-08-19, from: Michael Tsai
Matthew Ball (via Hacker News): During the average day, more than 80MM people log onto Roblox. As a historical point of contrast, this means that more people log onto Roblox every 10 or so minutes than used Second Life in a month at its peak. On a monthly basis, Roblox now counts more than 380MM […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/19/roblox-the-biggest-game-in-the-world/
VPN Apps in Brazilian App Store
date: 2024-08-19, from: Michael Tsai
Proton (via Hacker News): We have received multiple reports today from users in Brazil having difficulties installing the Proton VPN app on iOS devices via the Apple App Store. We can confirm that the issue is not on our side, but likely with the App Store itself, which is controlled by Apple. What makes this […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/19/vpn-apps-in-brazilian-app-store/
Brazil vs. Twitter
date: 2024-08-19, from: Michael Tsai
Luana Maria Benedito (via Hacker News): Media platform X said on Saturday it would close its operations in Brazil “effective immediately” due to what it called “censorship orders” by Brazilian judge Alexandre de Moraes. X Global Government Affairs: Last night, Alexandre de Moraes threatened our legal representative in Brazil with arrest if we do not […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/19/brazil-vs-twitter/
Digital Services Act and Thierry Breton vs. Twitter
date: 2024-08-19, from: Michael Tsai
European Commission: X designs and operates its interface for the “verified accounts” with the “Blue checkmark” in a way that does not correspond to industry practice and deceives users. […] Second, X does not comply with the required transparency on advertising, as it does not provide a searchable and reliable advertisement repository, but instead put […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/19/digital-services-act-and-thierry-breton-vs-twitter/
Super Blue Moons: Your Questions Answered
date: 2024-08-19, from: NASA breaking news
The Moon of August 30-31, 2023, is a full moon, a supermoon, and a blue moon. Here’s what it all means.
https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/moon/super-blue-moons-your-questions-answered/
California hits milestones toward 100% clean energy — but has a long way to go
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The LAist
Fossil fuels are still a large source of electricity, but California has made progress with renewables while keeping the lights on.
NextSTEP R: Lunar Logistics and Mobility Studies
date: 2024-08-19, from: NASA breaking news
Solicitation Number: NNH16ZCQ001K-Appendix-R August 16, 2024 – Draft Solicitation Released Solicitation Overview The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) intends to release a solicitation under the Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships-2 (Next STEP-2) Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) to seek industry-led concept definition and maturation studies that address lunar surface logistics and uncrewed surface mobility […]
https://www.nasa.gov/general/nextstep-r-lunar-logistics-and-mobility-studies/
What Climate World Wants From a Harris-Walz Administration
date: 2024-08-19, from: Heatmap News
If Vice President Kamala Harris is elected president in November — as is looking increasingly likely — her term will last until the beginning of 2029. At that point, we’ll have a much better idea whether the planet is on track to hit the 1.5 degrees Celsius climate threshold that some expect it to cross that year; we’ll also know whether the United States is likely to meet the first goal of the Inflation Reduction Act: to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions to half of 2005 levels by 2030.
There is a lot riding on the outcome of the 2024 election, then. But even more to the point, there is a lot riding on how, and how aggressively, Harris extends President Biden’s climate policies. Last week, I spoke to nine different climate policy experts about what’s on their wishlists for a potential Harris-Walz administration and encountered resounding excitement about the opportunities ahead. I also encountered nine different opinions on how, exactly, Harris should capitalize on those opportunities, should she wind up in the White House come January.
That said, the ideas I heard largely coalesced into three main avenues of approach: The first would see Harris use her position to shore up the country’s existing climate policies, doubling down on spending and addressing loopholes in the IRA. A second path would involve aggressively expanding on Biden’s legacy, mainly through major new investments. The final and most ambitious path would involve Harris approaching climate change and the energy transition with an original and bold vision for the years ahead (though your priorities may vary).
The policy proposals that fall under these loosely organized paths aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, and, as you’ll see, some of the advocate’s proposals fall into multiple categories. But it’s also true that by making everything a priority, nothing is. With that in mind, here are three approaches climate insiders say Harris could take if she wins the White House in November.
Harris should finish the job Biden started
- Continue building on what has already been accomplished
- Ensure permitting reform gets across the line
- Address existing regulatory uncertainties
- Make sure policies like the Justice 40 Initiative are working the way they’re supposed to
Before jumping headlong into expanding the country’s climate policies, the Harris administration could start by shoring up existing legislation — mainly, the loopholes and oversights in the Inflation Reduction Act. “The IRA was the biggest climate investment in history and fundamentally changed the emissions trajectory of the U.S — but the work is not done,” Adrian Deveny, founder of the decarbonization strategy group Climate Vision who previously worked on the IRA as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s director of energy and environmental policy, told me.
As things stand, the policies in the IRA alone won’t be enough to meet President Biden’s goal of halving the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2030; to do that, the U.S. would “need to pass another IRA-sized bill,” Deveny said. Until that happens, filling the IRA’s emissions gaps will take a lot of work “in every sector of the economy,” he added.
Lena Moffitt, the executive director of Evergreen Action — which has already released a comprehensive 2025 climate roadmap for a Harris administration — told me that the task of “doubling down on Biden’s climate legacy as a job creator” will run through rebuilding and expanding the grid and revitalizing industry and rural economies, two projects that started in the IRA but remain incomplete. “We’d love to see a day one executive order from the White House outlining a plan to create American jobs and seize the mantle of leadership by building clean energy and clean tech in the United States,” she told me.
Permitting reform is part of that — and could be another piece of yet-unfinished business Harris will need to wrap up. “If that doesn’t get done this year, that is what we have to look to as soon as possible during a future Harris administration,” Harry Godfrey, who leads Advanced Energy United’s Federal Investment and Manufacturing Working Group, told me.
That’s not the only regulatory matter still up in the air. Austin Whitman, the CEO of The Climate Change Project, a non-profit that offers climate certification labeling and helps businesses reduce their emissions, told me that the Federal Trade Commission, for example, still hasn’t updated its green guides — “a loose collection of recommendations to companies on how to behave to not violate the FTC Act” — since 2012. “We just need a clear timeline and a sense of direction of where that whole process is going,” Whitman told me. Additionally, he said that the government has a substantial and outstanding role to play in standardizing and streamlining emissions reporting practices for businesses — which, while perhaps not “very sexy,” are necessary to “relieve the administrative burden so companies can focus on decarbonization.”
The last piece: Make sure everything that’s already in place is actually working. “We’re seeing that states and local governments need additional capacity to manage [the IRA] money well,” Jillian Blanchard, the director of Lawyers For Good Government’s climate change program, told me. Harris could help by enacting “more tangible policies like granting federal funding to hire community engagement specialists or liaisons or paying for the time of community leaders to provide local governments with key information on where the communities are that need to be benefited, and what they need.” She also floated the idea of a Community Change Grant extension to help get federal funding to localities more directly.
Harris should go bigger — on everything
- Make investments in high-impact sectors
- Fund more Climate Pollution Reduction Grants
- Funnel additional resources into the states
- Reinstate the U.S. as a global leader on climate
“One of the criticisms of the Inflation Reduction Act is that it didn’t do ‘X’ — whatever ‘X’ is,” Costa Samaras, the director of the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation at Carnegie Mellon and a former senior White House energy official, told me. “And in reality, it probably did. It just didn’t do it big enough.”
As opposed to those who thought Harris should take a quieter, dare I say conservative approach to advancing the U.S. climate agenda, Samaras told me he wanted to see Harris pump up the volume. The current climate moment requires “attacking the places where we need to immediately make big emissions cuts and big resilience investments. This is the industrial sector, the cultural sector, heavy transportation, as well as making sure that our cities and communities are built for people.”
There are plenty of existing programs that could take some supersizing. Godfrey of Advanced Energy United brought up the home energy rebate programs, arguing that as things stand, those resources are only serving “a fraction of the eligible population.” Blanchard of Lawyers For Good Government also pointed out that the Environmental Protection Agency had almost 300 Climate Pollution Reduction Grant applications totaling more than $30 billion in requests — but only $4.3 billion to hand out. “There are local governments, state governments, tribal nations, and territories hungry for this money to implement clean energy projects,” she said. “There are plans that are ready to go if there are additional federal award dollars in the future.”
Another place Harris could expand on Biden’s legacy would be by reinstating the U.S. as a climate leader on the world stage. “We need to say, ‘climate is back on the table,’” Whitman of The Climate Change Project told me. “It’s a main course, and we’re going to talk about it” — something that would give us “a more credible seat at the negotiating table at the COPs.”
Perhaps most importantly, though, Harris needs to use her term to start looking toward the future. As Deveny of Climate Vision told me, “We designed the IRA to think about meeting our 2030 target. And now we have to think about 2035.” Looking ahead isn’t “just about extending policies,” in other words, but about anticipating new technologies and opportunities that could arise in the next decade — and Harris, if elected, should step up to the challenge.
Harris needs a bold, original vision
- Start an “industrial renaissance”
- Make polluters pay
- Invest trillions into transforming every part of the economy
Some believe Harris shouldn’t limit herself to the framework of the IRA as it exists now — that she needs to dream bigger and better than anything seen under the Biden administration. “The question is: Are we going to just ride the coattails of the IRA as if this problem is mostly solved? Or are we going to put forward a whole new, bold vision of how we can take things on?” Saul Levin, the political director of the Green New Deal Network, wondered to me.
According to Deveny of Climate Vision, that means continuing to build on “our industrial renaissance.”
“We have really awakened a sleeping giant of clean industrial manufacturing in this country to make solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries,” he explained. “We can also lead the world in clean industrial manufacturing for steel, cement, and other heavy industry projects.” Samaras of Carnegie Mellon, too, shared this vision. “By the end of a potential Harris Administration first term, the path to zero emissions should be visible everywhere,” he told me. Also on his wishlist were “abundant energy-efficient and affordable housing, accessible clean mobility infrastructure everywhere, schools and post offices as community clean energy and resilience hubs, and climate-smart agriculture and nature-based solutions across the country,” plus greater investment in adaptation.
“The fact is that both the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act are the largest investments in resilience we’ve ever done,” he said. But “we have to think about it the same way we have to think about mitigation,” he went on. “It’s the largest thing we’ve ever done — comma, so far.”
One of the biggest openings for Harris to distinguish herself from Biden, though, would be by taking a tougher tone with big polluters. Biden had shown less of an appetite for going after businesses, several times kicking the can down the road on a decision to what would have been his second term. Harris, by contrast, is well positioned with her background as a prosecutor and already went as far as to call for a “climate pollution fee” and the creation of an independent Office of Climate and Environmental Justice and Accountability during her 2019-2020 campaign.
“We love seeing her already reference from the stump that there is a lot that she can do with Congress or through the executive branch to hold polluters accountable for the toll that they have taken on families and our climate,” Moffitt of Evergreen Action told me. “That could look like a host of things, from repealing subsidies to using the Department of Justice to hold polluters accountable.” Maria Langholz, the senior director of Arc Initiatives, a strategy group that works with climate-related organizations, told me in an email that her team would also like to see the Harris administration revoke the presidential permit for Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline as high, in addition to developing a public interest determination “that fully addresses the social, environmental, and economic impacts of LNG.”
But Levin, more than anyone else, wanted to see Harris pursue a “moonshot campaign from day one,” he said. “Hoping that tweaking the IRA is an appropriate solution to climate change is totally out of step with mainstream scientific consensus. It’s absolutely ridiculous. At the end of the day, we need to fundamentally transform our economy so that all people can survive climate change.” To have a prayer of meeting the IRA’s climate goals — let alone putting a meaningful dent in America’s contribution to global emissions — the U.S. must “invest trillions of dollars in transforming our transportation system, our building sector, our food and agriculture sector, and every part of the economy so that we can create a livable, sustainable world forever that works for everyone.”
https://heatmap.news/politics/climate-policy-harris-walz
Banana Pi BPI-WiFi6 Mini is a cheap, tiny router board with WiFi 6, Gigabit Ethernet, and optional 4G or 5G support
date: 2024-08-19, from: Liliputing
The Banana Pi BPI-WiFi6 Mini is a tiny computer board designed for use as a DIY wireless router with support for open source software. It features the same processor and wireless chip found in the larger BPI-WiFi6 router that launched earlier this year. But, as the name suggests, the new “mini” model packs those components into […]
The post Banana Pi BPI-WiFi6 Mini is a cheap, tiny router board with WiFi 6, Gigabit Ethernet, and optional 4G or 5G support appeared first on Liliputing.
OpenAI kills Iranian accounts using ChatGPT to write US election disinfo
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
12 on X and one on Instagram caught in the crackdown
OpenAI has banned ChatGPT accounts linked to an Iranian crew suspected of spreading fake news on social media sites about the upcoming US presidential campaign.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/openai_iranian_accounts/
Elon bought the airport
date: 2024-08-19, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
Elon Musk bought the biggest airport on the social web. A major world hub like Atlanta, London or Dubai.
Bluesky is a regional airport in a cool place, maybe Austin.
Mastodon is a network of airports, like the ones served by Ryanair in Europe.
Threads is potentially one of the big airports like the one Musk bought, but it’s not as much of a hub yet. Orlando? Frankfurt?
There are lots of scheduled flights in and out of X because it’s where most of the traffic already goes. It’s quite possibly not running that smoothly, like perhaps JFK in NYC, always a mess, under construction, huge traffic, broken systems.
But it does actually work pretty reliably most of the time.
When
I was first getting started in tech, when we got the initial angel
funding for
LVT, I
asked the lead investor, Bill Jordan, if Apple was going to go out of
business. At the time, 1983, a lot of people said it would. He asked
what their sales were. $1 billion, I said. He said they’re not going
away. Companies that large don’t disappear. After 40 years of experience
in tech since then, Bill was right. Companies that lead markets very
rarely disappear. It
does
happen. But not often. More likely is Musk will right the ship, and it
will grow to dominate the market. Threads will possibly be Pepsi or
Avis. Mastodon will be Home Depot. Bluesky will be
Laurel
Canyon. Or who knows?
But there’s a high probability that Musk’s company will be the market leader for the forseeable future.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/19/200828.html?title=elonBoughtTheAirport
As Banksy’s Animal Art Series Ends, Caretakers Grapple With How to Preserve His Murals
date: 2024-08-19, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The street artist unveiled nine new pieces in London this month, and many have already been taken down or defaced
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-19, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
The Wikipedia page for Living Videotext begins with one of our slogans. It was a joke, and meant to keep us humble, so we listen to users. It was one of many such slogans. LVT made some important contributions to the networks we use today. Wikipedia should talk about that first, show some respect, for crying out loud. Otherwise, except for that snipe up front, the account is actually pretty accurate.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/19.html#a200025
NASA CubeSats Launch as Commercial Rideshares
date: 2024-08-19, from: NASA breaking news
A pair of CubeSats from NASA’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator, or PTD, series lifted off on SpaceX’s Transporter-11 rideshare mission at 11:56 a.m. PDT Friday, August 16, from Vandenburg Space Force Base in California. The two small satellites, PTD-4 and PTD-R, will help advance NASA’s efforts to validate novel technologies and increase small spacecraft capabilities in […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasa-cubesats-launch-as-commercial-rideshares/
Who Bought St. Anthony’s for $16.7 Million and What Are They Going to Do with It?
date: 2024-08-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Will the 11-acre property in the heart of the Mission District be developed as a hotel, a school, a retirement village, or just another mansion?
The post Who Bought St. Anthony’s for $16.7 Million and What Are They Going to Do with It? appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-19, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Apple debuts a web app for Podcasts, letting users log in to listen to podcasts, view the Up Next queue and library, and browse new shows, at podcasts.apple.com.
https://www.techmeme.com/240819/p13#a240819p13
Never not gobsmacked by how the massive waves at Teahupo’o create an…
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045148-never-not-gobsmacked-by-h
Hart school district set to dissolve Measure SA committee
date: 2024-08-19, from: The Signal
A new high school, two new auditoriums and the first two-story building for the district’s oldest school. Those are some of the things that Measure SA funds helped to produce […]
The post Hart school district set to dissolve Measure SA committee appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/hart-school-district-set-to-dissolve-measure-sa-committee/
Water board races set for November ballot
date: 2024-08-19, from: The Signal
The Santa Clarita Valley Water Agency will have six races for the nine-person board on the Nov. 5 ballot, and with the filing deadline passed, the races are set. The […]
The post Water board races set for November ballot appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/water-board-races-set-for-november-ballot/
Modern Manners in the House
date: 2024-08-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
“In the Making: Contemporary Art at SBMA” showcases seven decades of art of the modern sort in the museum’s permanent collection.
The post Modern Manners in the House appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/19/modern-manners-in-the-house/
Local Artist Felicia Tausig Presenting Solo Exhibition ‘Free Fall’
date: 2024-08-19, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Felicia Tausig, an award-winning photographer and artist, is set to present her inaugural solo show, “Free Fall,” at the Vernon Gallery, located within the Canyon Theatre Guild in downtown Newhall
https://scvnews.com/local-artist-felicia-tausig-presenting-solo-exhibition-free-fall/
Talking Totally Toad with Dean Dinning
date: 2024-08-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Toad the Wet Sprocket springs into action at Santa Barbara’s Lobero on August 29.
The post Talking Totally Toad with Dean Dinning appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/19/talking-totally-toad-with-dean-dinning/
High School Football Preview
date: 2024-08-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
It’s Friday night lights time for Bishop Diego, Dos Pueblos, Santa Barbara, and San Marcos, with Carpinteria a week later.
The post High School Football Preview appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/19/high-school-football-preview-2/
NASA Awards $1.25 Million to Three Teams at Deep Space Food Finale
date: 2024-08-19, from: NASA breaking news
NASA has awarded a total of $1.25 million to three U.S. teams in the third and final round of the agency’s Deep Space Food Challenge. The teams delivered novel food production technologies that could provide long-duration human space exploration missions with safe, nutritious, and tasty food. The competitors’ technologies address NASA’s need for sustainable food […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-awards-1-25-million-to-three-teams-at-deep-space-food-finale/
Multiple flaws in Microsoft macOS apps unpatched despite potential risks
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Windows giant tells Cisco Talos it isn’t fixing them
Cisco Talos says eight vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s macOS apps could be abused by nefarious types to record video and sound from a user’s device, access sensitive data, log user input, and escalate privileges.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/cisco_talos_microsoft_macos/
NASA Celebrates Ames’s Legacy of Research on National Aviation Day
date: 2024-08-19, from: NASA breaking news
NASA works every day to improve air travel – and has been doing so since its creation decades ago. On National Aviation Day, NASA and all fans of aviation get the chance to celebrate the innovative research and development the agency has produced to improve capability and safety in flight. NASA’s Ames Research Center in […]
A Soil Fungus That Can Kill Is on the Rise in California: What to Know About Valley Fever
date: 2024-08-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
About 80 Californians die every year after contracting Valley fever, a fungal disease that typically affects the lungs. A recent outbreak was traced to a music festival in Kern County.
The post A Soil Fungus That Can Kill Is on the Rise in California: What to Know About Valley Fever appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Rare Fossils Give Clues to How Tardigrades Survived Mass Extinctions by Hitting the Snooze Button
date: 2024-08-19, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Scientists have only four known tardigrade fossils, which preserve insights into how the hardy critters evolved their hibernation-like superpower of cryptobiosis
What Should an Electric Car Sound Like?
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/what-should-an-electric-car-sound-like
Five Productions Filming in Santa Clarita
date: 2024-08-19, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The city of Santa Clarita’s Film Office has released the list of five productions currently filming in the Santa Clarita Valley for the week of Monday, Aug. 19 to Sunday, Aug.
https://scvnews.com/five-productions-filming-in-santa-clarita-4/
Revisiting OSIRIS-REx
date: 2024-08-19, from: NASA breaking news
An OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule training model parachutes down in this image from Aug. 30, 2023. This drop test was part of NASA’s preparations for the return of samples from the asteroid Bennu on Sept. 24, 2023. OSIRIS-REx was the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from an asteroid. This photo was chosen by […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/revisiting-osiris-rex/
The Home Page | Celebrity News and Vibrant Views
date: 2024-08-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Dorothy, Marilyn, and a trio of visit-worthy open houses.
The post The Home Page | Celebrity News and Vibrant Views appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/19/the-home-page-celebrity-news-and-vibrant-views/
Station Science Top News: August 16, 2024
date: 2024-08-19, from: NASA breaking news
Locations designed as a maintenance work area and an exercise area on the International Space Station are commonly used by crew members for stowage and body maintenance activities, respectively. These differences between intended and actual use demonstrate that systematic observation of material culture can help researchers identify how astronauts adapt to life in microgravity and support better […]
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/johnson/station-science-top-news-august-16-2024/
Daily Deals (8-19-2024)
date: 2024-08-19, from: Liliputing
When the FIREBAT A8 mini PC debuted earlier this year for $550 and up, it was one of the most affordable PCs available to feature an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS “Hawk Point” processor, dual 2.5 GbE LAN ports, and support for up to four 4K displays. Now it’s even cheaper: Amazon is running a Lightning […]
The post Daily Deals (8-19-2024) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/daily-deals-8-19-2024/
ON Culture | Headless Households, Fab Fundraisers and Musical
date: 2024-08-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Entertainment up the wazoo.
The post ON Culture | Headless Households, Fab Fundraisers and Musical appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/19/on-culture-headless-households-fab-fundraisers-and-musical/
Scientists are puzzled by the presence of “little red dots” found by…
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045140-scientists-are-puzzled-by
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-19, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Conservative Legal Scholar Endorses Kamala Harris.
https://politicalwire.com/2024/08/19/conservative-legal-scholar-endorses-kamala-harris/
GM axes 1,000+ jobs in software and service division, majority in US
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Automaker claims it has to ‘make bold choices’
General Motors (GM) is cutting more than 1,000 salaried positions worldwide in its software and services division, with the majority based in the US.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/gm_axes_1000_jobs_in/
13,600-Year-Old Mastodon Skull Uncovered in Iowa
date: 2024-08-19, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The hulking creature may have overlapped with Indigenous people
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/13600-year-old-mastodon-skull-unearthed-in-iowa-180984931/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-19, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Harris, Trump, and Our Broken News Media.
https://weeklysift.com/2024/08/19/harris-trump-and-our-broken-news-media/
‘Santa Barbara News-Press’ Archives Languish Amid Decay
date: 2024-08-19, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Bidders for the assets of the once-mighty daily paper have a week to place their bets.
The post ‘Santa Barbara News-Press’ Archives Languish Amid Decay appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/08/19/santa-barbara-news-press-archives-languish-amid-decay/
The Double-Edged Sword of Air Conditioning in a Warming World
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: RAND blog
Last summer was the hottest on record and 2024 looks to be hotter still. Cranking up the AC can provide temporary relief but it could lead to greater vulnerability to extreme climate events over time. Fortunately, there are strategies that could reduce air conditioning’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Man killed on I-5 identified
date: 2024-08-19, from: The Signal
A man killed on the northbound side of Interstate 5 at the Calgrove Boulevard exit in the early hours of Saturday has been identified by the Los Angeles County Medical […]
The post Man killed on I-5 identified appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/man-killed-on-i-5-identified/
Microsoft closes Windows 11 upgrade loophole in latest Insider build
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Pretending you’re a server won’t stop the hardware police
Microsoft has finally patched a workaround exploited by users seeking an upgrade path for Windows 11 that dodged the company’s hardware requirements.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/windows_11_loophole_closed/
Aug. 30: The Rink Sports Pavilion Groundbreaking
date: 2024-08-19, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Join the city of Santa Clarita for a groundbreaking event, marking the construction of The Rink Sports Pavilion on Friday, Aug. 30, at 9:30 a.m
https://scvnews.com/aug-30-the-rink-sports-pavilion-groundbreaking/
Sols 4277-4279: Getting Ready To Say Goodbye to the King!
date: 2024-08-19, from: NASA breaking news
Earth planning date: Friday, Aug. 16, 2024 It’s time to move on from our “Kings Canyon” drill site, so today’s plan focused on our usual tidy up routine after a drill campaign. First we need to dump out any material in the drill chambers, in an action called “RAGE” – this sounds aggressive but stands […]
https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/sols-4277-4279-getting-ready-to-say-goodbye-to-the-king/
California goes to the Democratic convention: 3 things to watch for
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The LAist
The California delegation, the largest at the Democratic National Convention, will also play a key role representing the home state of Kamala Harris. What to look for this week.
https://laist.com/news/politics/california-democratic-convention-watch
A Rare ‘Super Blue Moon’ Will Be Visible Monday Night: What Does That Mean?
date: 2024-08-19, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Tonight’s full moon will be bigger and brighter than usual, and it’s the third of four full moons this summer
Procreate will not be building any generative AI features into their fantastic…
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045160-procreate-will-not-be-bui
City to Hold Official Groundbreaking on the Future Site of The Rink Sports Pavilion
date: 2024-08-19, from: City of Santa Clarita
Join the City of Santa Clarita for a groundbreaking event, marking the construction of The Rink Sports Pavilion on Friday, August 30, at 9:30 a.m. Located adjacent to the Gymnasium at the Santa Clarita Sports Complex, this state-of-the-art recreational facility will become a cornerstone of community engagement and wellness in Santa Clarita. The Rink Sports […]
The post City to Hold Official Groundbreaking on the Future Site of The Rink Sports Pavilion appeared first on City of Santa Clarita.
Firefighters Extinguish Blaze at London’s Somerset House
date: 2024-08-19, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The palatial complex’s historic artworks sustained no damage from the fire that broke out on August 17
Too Much Information
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2024/08/19/too-much-information/
Ken Striplin | Know Your District
date: 2024-08-19, from: SCV New (TV Station)
This quote by Thomas Jefferson emphasizes the importance of active participation in the democratic process
https://scvnews.com/ken-striplin-know-your-district/
Washington, DC, councilmember arrested on bribery charge
date: 2024-08-19, from: VOA News USA
Washington — A Washington, D.C., councilmember known for promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories has been arrested on charges that he accepted over $150,000 in bribes in exchange for using his elected position to help companies with city contracts, according to court records unsealed on Monday.
Trayon White Sr., a Democrat who ran an unsuccessful mayoral campaign in 2022, was arrested on a federal bribery charge by the FBI on Sunday. He is expected to make his initial court appearance on Monday.
An FBI agent’s affidavit says White agreed in June to accept roughly $156,000 in kickbacks and cash payments in exchange for pressuring government agency employees to extend two companies’ contracts for violence intervention services. The contacts were worth over $5 million.
White, 40, also accepted a $20,000 bribe payment to help resolve a contract dispute for one of the companies by pressuring high-level district officials, the affidavit alleges.
An FBI informant who agreed to plead guilty to fraud and bribery charges reported giving White gifts including travel to the Dominican Republic and Las Vegas along with paying him bribes, the FBI said.
White, who has served on the D.C. council since 2017, represents a predominantly Black ward where the poverty rate is nearly twice as high as the overall district. He is running for re-election in November against a Republican challenger.
White’s chief of staff and communication director didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment.
https://www.voanews.com/a/washington-dc-councilmember-arrested-on-bribery-charge/7748385.html
The Disciples
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/the-disciples
Gentoo Linux to drop Itanium support as Funtoo fork enters ‘Hobby Mode’
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Founder’s side-project is letting in water
News is bubbling up both from the Gentoo project and its successor, the tellingly named “Funtoo” – what Gentoo founder Daniel Robbins did next.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/gentoo_drops_ia64_funtoo_falters/
Gentoo Linux to drop Itanium support as Funtoo fork enters ‘Hobby Mode’
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: Liam Proven’s articles at the Register
Founder’s side-project is letting in water
<p>News is bubbling up both from the Gentoo project and its successor, the tellingly named "Funtoo" – what Gentoo founder Daniel Robbins did next.</p> LASD Asking for Public’s Help Locating Missing Santa Clarita Woman
date: 2024-08-19, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Missing Persons Unit investigators are asking for the public’s help locating at-risk missing person Donna Lee Puglisi
https://scvnews.com/lasd-asking-for-publics-help-locating-missing-santa-clarita-woman/
Homicide: Life on the Street is now streaming on Peacock. Alan Sepinwall…
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045155-homicide-life-on-the-stre
Book note: Moerdijk and van Oosten, Sets, Models and Proofs
date: 2024-08-19, from: Logic Matters blog
Back (slowly, slowly) to logical matters. My plan for the rest of the year is to put together a second edition of what is consistently the most downloaded of the Big Red Logic Books (and also, surprisingly, the second-best paperback seller), namely Beginning Mathematical Logic: A Study Guide. It won’t be a radical revision, though […]
The post Book note: Moerdijk and van Oosten, <i>Sets, Models and Proofs</i> appeared first on Logic Matters.
Don’t Mess With Texas Heat
date: 2024-08-19, from: Heatmap News
The heat is chilling out this week, meaning today’s update is a short one. If you’re in the Northeast, start dreaming of pumpkins and hot cocoa. If you live farther south … keep running that AC a little longer.
Fall is in sight — for some
Those in the Northeast can start airing out their sweaters this week. According to Paul Pastelok, AccuWeather senior meteorologist, a long-lasting jet stream should bring temperatures 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit below historical averages through the end of August. The region can also expect some precipitation and stronger storms, which will likely bring down temperatures even more.
The Pacific Northwest will also get fall-like weather this week, Pastelok told me, which will move into the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley on Thursday. For much of the South and the Gulf Coast, however, forecasts are not looking as optimistic. Pastelok told me it’s possible that both Albuquerque, New Mexico and Lubbock, Texas will break heat records this week, getting well into the 90s and 100s, respectively.
After a brief respite, the heat will also return to the western Dakotas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and southeast Montana. Some parts of the Pacific Northwest that started the week feeling fall-ish might end it back in summer, as temperatures creep back up on the eastern side of the region. By Friday, Texas will have it worst.
Park Fire slows down
The Park Fire seems to have finally halted — it hasn’t grown past 429,000 acres burned since last week. Containment is now at 53%. and no new counties have been affected. “I think there’s a reasonable chance that the fire has largely reached its final footprint,” said Climate scientist of the University of California, Los Angeles Daniel Swain during a live briefing on Friday.
After experiencing its hottest July ever, California will finally get a break from the heat this week as the low pressure along the northwest coast will send cool air down into California, Pastelok told me. “The combination of smoke and westerly winds will cool northern California, as well as the coastal areas down to southern California,” he said.
But that doesn’t mean fire conditions are going away, Swain explained. As long as things stay windy and dry, the risk will remain, and a new heat wave arriving around the end of August could up the danger even higher.
Greece’s worst wildfire of the year almost reached Athens
Gigantic wildfires in Greece stopped just shy of Athens. The fire spread incredibly quickly last week due to powerful winds, with flames as high as 80 feet — the mayor of Kifisia, Vasilis Xypolitas, told CNN that at one point, the fire was moving faster than cars. Thousands of residents had to be evacuated.
While the flames have since died down, they burned through almost 260,000 acres, causing extensive damage to cities and villages. Houses, schools, and hospitals have been completely destroyed and many residents might have to wait weeks before electricity is restored. One death has been confirmed.
The cause of the fire has not yet been determined, but Greece has been suffering through a particularly hot and dry summer — prime conditions for relentless fires. This year, the country saw its hottest June and July on record.
Another heat wave in the Balkans
Southeastern Europe has recently seen temperatures above 100 degrees during a heat wave that is expected to persist this week. This is the latest heat wave to hit Romania, which has already suffered through drought and extreme weather this summer. While some rain is predicted for the country this week, temperatures will continue to run above average
Bosnia has also been particularly hard hit, and farmers there have noticed a significant impact to production this year. Around Bijeljina, where most of the country’s grain production takes place, farmers estimate that half their crops have been damaged due to the heat. The whole country has seen little to no precipitation this summer, with temperatures constantly above 95 degrees.
https://heatmap.news/climate/summer-heat-fall-texas
Costco in Cancún, a piece about Costco’s travel service and how the…
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045151-costco-in-cancun-a-piece
Swift Could Sue Trump Under State Law for Fake AI Endorsement
date: 2024-08-19, from: 404 Media Group
Donald Trump accepted fake endorsements from AI-generated versions of Taylor Swift and her fans. Under a recently-enacted Tennessee law, the AI-generated images could be illegal.
https://www.404media.co/donald-trump-taylor-swift-endorsement-ai-images/
Archaeologists Stumble Upon a 2,000-Year-Old Dolphin Mosaic in England
date: 2024-08-19, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The Roman-era artwork was likely preserved thanks to a remodeling project in the third or fourth century C.E.
Ubuntu 24.04.1 will be late, but fresher kernels are coming
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Bad news for impatient LTS users, balanced out by tweaked policy
The launch date for the next Ubuntu point release is being pushed back, but there’s a silver lining: Canonical is promising fresher kernels in future builds.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/ubuntu_240401_will_be_late/
Ubuntu 24.04.1 will be late, but fresher kernels are coming
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: Liam Proven’s articles at the Register
Bad news for impatient LTS users, balanced out by tweaked policy
<p>The launch date for the next Ubuntu point release is being pushed back, but there's a silver lining: Canonical is promising fresher kernels in future builds.</p> https://go.theregister.com/i/cfa/https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/ubuntu_240401_will_be_late/
Livestreams of Watering Holes in the Namibian Desert
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/livestreams-of-watering-holes-in-the-namibian-desert-1
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-19, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
That’s a lot of pot! Major seizure made in Astoria.
What to know about Monday’s blue supermoon
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The LAist
The next blue supermoon will not happen until 2032, but supermoons occur more frequently.
https://laist.com/news/what-to-know-about-mondays-blue-supermoon
Your SoCal Weather Report For Monday, August 19: Warm up begins after a cooler weekend
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The LAist
Expect warming today and tomorrow, but another cooling trend by midweek.
https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/la-weather-report-august-19-warm-tuesday-monday-no-wind
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-19, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Phil Donahue Dead: Talk Show Host Was 88.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/phil-donahue-dead-talk-show-host-1235978074/
A disturbing report from ProPublica on the armed domestic terror cells that…
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045150-a-disturbing-report-from-
Manufacturing Is Back, Baby
date: 2024-08-19, from: Heatmap News
For my entire life, I’ve heard politicians talk about bringing manufacturing jobs back to America. Now it is finally happening. “We’re not going back!” has become Kamala Harris’s rallying cry, and it’s apt here too, because those jobs and industries of the future are what’s at stake in this election.
The Biden-Harris administration and the 117th Congress enacted a trio of laws — the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, otherwise known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — that made major public investments to cultivate and strengthen several key industries of the future: semiconductors, electric vehicles, batteries, solar and wind manufacturing, hydrogen-based energy, and clean steel.
Those new laws (and other Biden-Harris Administration actions on trade and tariffs) have directed and amplified a megatrend in “reshoring” and driven a huge surge in private sector investments in U.S. manufacturing, creating tens of thousands of good jobs in communities across America. Investment in manufacturing construction has more than doubled since passage of the IRA and CHIPS, and the U.S. has seen nearly 127,000 new jobs created, according to Energy Innovation policy analyst Jack Conness.
Just last week, on the occasion of the IRA’s two-year anniversary, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote about a new report finding that 6,285 utility-scale clean energy projects in the U.S. may be eligible for IRA tax credits, meaning 3.9 million jobs, all of which will be subject to minimum pay standards if they want the federal rewards.
These investments are supporting a diverse set of communities across America. Of the nearly $71 billion of clean energy manufacturing investments announced in 2023, more than $59 billion — around 83% — were in House districts represented by Republicans per the Clean Economy Tracker, a partnership between Atlas Public Policy and Utah State University. That’s tens of billions of dollars flowing into rural areas, including a significant chunk going to “energy communities,” areas that have historically produced, processed, or transported fossil fuels.
We all know that manufacturing plants can be an anchor employer for a community and play an even more important role than the direct jobs numbers reveal. The opening of dozens of new advanced manufacturing plants means dozens of communities across America have a brighter economic future — or at least, they do for now.
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s vision for “the next conservative administration,” contains a set of plans and policies that would put all those communities and hundreds of thousands of good paying jobs in jeopardy. Energy Innovation modeled the policy scenario outlined in Project 2025 against one in which the U.S. meets its stated goal of reducing emissions 50% to 52% below 2005 levels by 2030 and found that the former would lead to 3.9 million fewer jobs in 2030 compared to the latter, including 1.7 million jobs straight-up lost. The overall economic effect would be catastrophic: a $320 billion annual drop in GDP in 2030, compared to a $450 billion per year gain if the U.S. meets its clean energy and climate goals.
Trump has publicly disavowed Project 2025, but the evidence for his private alignment with its authors and principles continues to mount — most recently the release of secret Project 2025 training videos, featuring more than two-dozen former Trump administration figures.
Project 2025 calls for gutting the IRA and the infrastructure law, which would, in the words of a memo released last week by the center-left think tank Third Way, “end crucial federal investments in US manufacturing, scrap tax incentives that help U.S. manufacturers compete with China, and make it harder for U.S. manufacturers to obtain loans.” It would also have ominous implications for America’s geopolitical position in the medium- to long-term. “Funding basic research and then cutting all subsequent support, as Trump plans to do, opens the door for other countries to swoop in and claim market share,” the authors write. This has happened before: The U.S. developed much of the solar and battery technology China is now using to dominate those global markets.
That’s to say nothing of the overall environment of chaos and policy uncertainty that comes with a Trump presidency, which wreaks havoc on business investment. Business leaders would be wise to remember what it was like under Trump 1.0. Trump might promise corporate tax cuts, but with a strong economy, cooling inflation, and a vibrant manufacturing renaissance finally underway, the worst thing we could do is pull the rug out from under the entire U.S. economic policy framework — continuity and certainty are good for business.
As Greg Sargent pointed out in The New Republic, “All this gives Harris an opening.” The green transition can be exciting, a source of the kind of joy Harris and her vice presidential nominee, Tim Walz, have been stumping about. “Without getting entangled in cultural cross-signaling around fossil fuels, she can argue that the very last thing we should do is reverse the clean energy boom. It’s creating lots of jobs building cool, innovative stuff right in the American heartland.”
I, for one, will be looking to see if this contrast starts to show up in political ads and speeches at this week’s Democratic National Convention — something like: “Harris will continue investing in U.S. manufacturing and the industries of the future. Trump will blow that all up. The choice is on the ballot. And we’re not going back.”
What future do you choose?
https://heatmap.news/economy/us-manufacturing-election
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-19, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
It’s nice to see the DNC including influencers this year. I hear them say this is the first time, but I beg to disagree. A few dozen bloggers were at the DNC in 2004, and were treated well, in many ways. I think the word influencer and blogger have fairly similar meanings. Blogger is a broader term, because it’s possible to have a very small readership for a blog, thus not be influencing very much, but still have a lot of value. And you always can influence your mom and little sister, right? 😄
http://scripting.com/2024/08/19.html#a142623
Californians Affected by Wildfires May Be Eligible for Property Tax Relief
date: 2024-08-19, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The California State Board of Equalization (BOE), which is constitutionally and statutorily responsible for the oversight of California’s property tax system, reminds all Californians affected by this year’s wildfires that they may be eligible for property tax relief
https://scvnews.com/californians-affected-by-wildfires-may-be-eligible-for-property-tax-relief/
Diminishing Dark Energy May Evade the ‘Swampland’ of Impossible Universes
date: 2024-08-19, from: Quanta Magazine
The largest-ever 3D map of the cosmos hints that the dark energy that’s fueling the universe’s expansion may be weakening. One community of theoretical physicists expected as much.The post Diminishing Dark Energy May Evade the ‘Swampland’ of Impossible Universes first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Phil Donahue, pioneering daytime talk show host, dies at 88
date: 2024-08-19, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/phil-donahue-pioneering-daytime-talk-show-host-dies-at-88/7748199.html
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-19, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Respect
the reader. This isn’t exactly a new
rule for journalism,
but it’s worth mentioning anyway. If you wouldn’t want to read the piece
yourself, don’t let them put your name on it. Example. A
story
promises to tell you about 47 seconds that saved Kamala Harris’s career.
They do eventually tell you the words, but you have to wade through a
lot of pointless bullshit to get to it. If I were writing it, the first
words of the piece would have to be the words, and then explain it.
You’ve seen this over and over and it gets worse all the time. I still
don’t understand why they do it, if I’m reading the piece, I’m a paying
subscriber, right? Another example of disrespect, quit trying to upsell
paying customers. Once a month maybe, but not every 8th time I visit
your site. Most businesses have no regard for their customers’ time, but
the ones that do, really make an impression.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/19.html#a140827
The hottest invite in American economics
date: 2024-08-19, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Picture this: Lush greenery, the picturesque Tetons and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell in a cowboy hat. (Maybe.) This week, roughly 120 academics, Fed policy makers and journalists are descending on Wyoming for the annual Jackson Hole Symposium. We’ll hear more about the event combining mountain hikes and monetary policy. But first, inflation remains a raw nerve as Vice President Kamala Harris begins to outline her economic policy goals.
Reliable app storage over time is not here yet
date: 2024-08-19, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
I’m working on a project which may or may not ship, but it presents an interesting design challenge either way.
The idea is I want to write lots of little bits, less than 5000 characters each, they have titles, use styling, links, include images, etc.
Or it could also be as small as a single emoji.
This is what we’ve settled on in 2024 as the basic unit of writing. From a tweet to a long blog post.
I want to make an editor and storage system that fits this model perfectly based on all we know about this stuff, and the latest server and network technologies.
It should have the best simplest API we know how to make in 2024.
In every way it’ll be the nicest, fastest and most flexible way to create structures of writing over time.
In that last sentence is the gotcha – over time. It’s the frontier, the leading edge. Because in 2024 there’s no way for me, as an individual developer to create a structure that lasts over time.
I can create a structure that has a high probability of lasting a month. A pretty good chance of lasting a few years, but beyond that, it gets less likely probably at a pretty good clip and eventually goes over a cliff.
The way I have answered that in the past was with GitHub.
In 2017, I started an archive of my Scripting News writing on GitHub. It’s still just a fraction of my writing, I’m not doing anything like that for all my other sites and services. But at least I’ve managed to set up a system that only requires me to do something once a month, which is something I like to do because it gives me some assurance the other mechanisms are still working. Archive systems have bugs too.
So I guess for the project I’m doing I will again use GitHub to mirror the content in the database until and unless GitHub proves unusable for this purpose, or something much better comes along.
Note that GitHub has made no promise about the continued availability of their service, all we have to go on is that they have been reliable for enough time to present the illusion of persistence. 😄
http://scripting.com/2024/08/19/134815.html?title=reliableAppStorageOverTimeIsNotHereYet
Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Autonomy founder’s wife rescued, daughter and others unaccounted for
Updated Mike Lynch, often dubbed the UK’s answer to Bill Gates, is missing after his luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily this morning.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/mike_lynch_missing_yacht/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-19, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
The law of thermodynamics they didn’t teach you about in school: every vibrant social gathering space will eventually turn into a bank branch office.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112988988019545826
Installing FreeBSD with OpenZFS via the Linux rescue system
date: 2024-08-19, from: OS News
Hetzner no longer offers a FreeBSD rescue system but it is possible to install and manage FreeBSD with OpenZFS from the Linux rescue system on a dedicated server with UEFI boot. The installation is done on a mirrored OpenZFS pool consisting of two drives. ↫ Martin Matuska Not much to add here – Hetzner is a popular hosting and server provider, and if you want to use FreeBSD on their machines, here’s how.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140529/installing-freebsd-with-openzfs-via-the-linux-rescue-system/
Hubble Spots Billowing Bubbles of Stellar Floss
date: 2024-08-19, from: NASA breaking news
A bubbling region of stars both old and new lies some 160,000 light-years away in the constellation Dorado. This complex cluster of emission nebulae is known as N11, and was discovered by American astronomer and NASA astronaut Karl Gordon Henize in 1956. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope brings a new image of the cluster in the […]
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-spots-billowing-bubbles-of-stellar-floss/
House Republicans release impeachment report on Biden but next steps are uncertain
date: 2024-08-19, from: VOA News USA
Yearlong probe stops short of alleging any criminal wrongdoing by president
National Public Data tells officials ‘only’ 1.3M people affected by intrusion
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Investigators previously said the number was much, much higher
The data broker at the center of what may become one of the more significant breaches of the year is telling officials that just 1.3 million people were affected.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/national_public_data_breach/
Let’s remember how benign the internet can be
date: 2024-08-19, from: Logic Matters blog
In 2002, when the internet was still in its infancy, the philosopher Bernard Williams wrote: Moreover, the Internet shows signs of creating for the first time what Marshall McLuhan prophesied as a consequence of television, a global village, something that has the disadvantages both of globalization and of a village. Certainly it does offer some […]
The post Let’s remember how benign the internet can be appeared first on Logic Matters.
https://www.logicmatters.net/2024/08/19/lets-remember-how-benign-the-internet-can-be/
Raspberry Pi 5 with 2GB RAM now available for $50
date: 2024-08-19, from: Liliputing
When the Raspberry Pi 5 first launched in 2023 it was available in two configurations: customers could buy a model with 4GB of LPDDR4X-4267 RAM for $60 or an 8GB version for $80. Now the Raspberry Pi team has launched a cheaper model with a $50 price tag. But the smaller amount of memory isn’t […]
The post Raspberry Pi 5 with 2GB RAM now available for $50 appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/raspberry-pi-5-with-2gb-ram-now-available-for-50/
The Golden Age of Hackers in Vegas Is Over
date: 2024-08-19, from: 404 Media Group
After ransomware struck the strip, Vegas is more cautious and paranoid about hackers than ever, with businesses and casinos sending a clear message: hackers are not welcome here.
https://www.404media.co/the-golden-age-of-hackers-in-vegas-is-over-defcon/
Feeds for Threads
date: 2024-08-19, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
I was kvelling the other day about rss.app and how they have feeds for Threads accounts. They do. But there are two caveats.
- It costs $9.99 per month for 15 feeds. Could be a bit expensive for some people’s budgets.
-
The
second concern is more serious. It doesn’t handle titleless items
properly. It repeats the contents of the tweet in the title and
description of the feeds it generates. An
example.
This is not right, and it’s not the way Mastodon and Bluesky do it.
There’s nothing wrong with items that have no titles. When an item has
no title you do the common sense thing – omit the title. I’m happy to
help with this. I wrote the
RSS 2.0 spec, and
am something of an authority on this. It’s important to get this right.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/19/125603.html?title=feedsForThreads
Virginia’s datacenters guzzle water like there’s no tomorrow, says FOI-based report
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
AI’s thirst for power is only making things worse
Concerns over the environmental impact of datacenters in the US state of Virginia are being raised again amid claims their water consumption has stepped up by almost two-thirds since 2019, and AI could make it worse.…
Zotac Gaming Zone handheld gaming PC launches for $799 (with Ryzen 7 8840U, 120 Hz display, and dual trackpads)
date: 2024-08-19, from: Liliputing
The Zotac Gaming Zone is a handheld gaming PC that enters an increasingly crowded marketplace. But it has a few features that could help it stand out. It’s one of the first to feature an IR webcam with support for face recognition. It’s the first Windows handheld to feature a pair of Steam Deck-like trackpads below […]
The post Zotac Gaming Zone handheld gaming PC launches for $799 (with Ryzen 7 8840U, 120 Hz display, and dual trackpads) appeared first on Liliputing.
At Work and Beyond, NASA Employees Find Joy in Aviation
date: 2024-08-19, from: NASA breaking news
The first “A” in NASA stands for aeronautics. Glenn Research Center in Cleveland is just one of several NASA centers conducting revolutionary research to make flight cleaner, safer, and quieter. But an interest in flying goes beyond the professional for many at NASA. Meet a handful of NASA Glenn employees who have a personal connection […]
Kamala Harris to make her economic case at the DNC
date: 2024-08-19, from: Marketplace Morning Report
The Democratic National Convention kicks off in Chicago today. While Democrats will be touting the Biden administration’s accomplishments, Kamala Harris has to articulate a clear and distinguishable economic message to help sway voters — one that says the next four years will be better for their pocketbooks than the last. Plus, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is cracking down on homeless encampments. Where are all those people going to go?
Climate Change Will Be an Unavoidable Topic at the DNC
date: 2024-08-19, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Record rainfall swamped Vienna, Austria, over the weekend • Russia evacuated school children from summer camps in parts of Siberia as wildfires rage • It will be a pleasant 72 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny in Chicago today for the start of the Democratic National Convention.
THE TOP FIVE
- Climate advocates will be out in force at the Democratic National
Convention
The Democratic National Convention kicks off today in Chicago, where Vice President Kamala Harris will be officially recognized as the party’s 2024 presidential nominee. President Biden and first lady Jill Biden are expected to speak today, former President Barack Obama is scheduled to appear tomorrow, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will take center stage Wednesday to accept the vice-presidential nomination, and Harris will speak on Thursday. The rest of the schedule hasn’t been officially announced, but climate change will be an unavoidable topic. E&E News reported that climate will be a prominent theme on at least one of the event’s four nights, with Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, and EPA Administrator Michael Regan likely to tout the Biden administration’s environmental wins. Climate advocates will be out in force, making the case “for candidates up and down the ballot in November to speak often about the success of the Inflation Reduction Act,” E&E News added. Convention attendees reportedly will receive regular pop-up ads on their devices from the event’s “clean energy sponsor,” Chicago-based Invenergy, about the economic benefits of the solar boom. The event runs through Thursday.
- Connecticut hit by historic rain and flooding
Heavy rain inundated parts of the East Coast yesterday, triggering catastrophic flash floods and disrupting travel. The National Weather Service issued a flash flood emergency for parts of Connecticut, including Fairfield, New Haven, Litchfield and Hartford counties, after about 10 inches of rain fell across the region. Meteorologists called this a one-in-1,000-year event. “This amount of precipitation wasn’t expected by anyone today,” Kyle Pederson, a NWS meteorologist, told The New York Times. Streets and cars were submerged and multiple water rescues had to be carried out.
Flash flood warnings were issued for Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. In NYC, water poured from the ceiling into Chelsea Market. Amtrak trains were disrupted between New York and Philadelphia, and flights were delayed out of Boston Logan International Airport.
- Heat illness sickens 100 at Colorado air show
Meanwhile, in Colorado, more than 100 people who attended an air show were treated for heat-related illnesses on Saturday. Temperatures inched toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit at the Pikes Peak Regional Air Show in Colorado Springs, and there was little cloud cover or shade to provide relief. The fire department said most people were treated on-site but 10 were sent to hospitals. At the event’s second day, on Sunday, organizers put in place extra precautions like water stations and shade tents. “No one wants a repeat of Saturday,” said Colorado Springs Sports Corporation spokeswoman Lauren DeMarco. Parts of Colorado have been experiencing near-record high temperatures for August. In Denver, the extreme heat is also making air quality worse. Heat alerts were in place for more than 52 million people across the central Plains and South over the weekend. The heat index could reach 112 degrees today in parts of north Texas.
- Appeals court scraps some natural gas pipeline safety standards
In case you missed it on Friday, a U.S. appeals court scrapped some of President Biden’s natural gas pipeline safety standards. The rules, put in place by the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, said natural gas operators had to repair pipelines showing signs of wear and tear, like corrosion or cracks and dents. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the agency hadn’t adequately analyzed the costs of those repairs or explained why they would be justified, and tossed them out.
- Hailstone ‘library’ could help improve weather modeling
Researchers have created a “hailstone library” where they are collecting and studying hailstone samples to help inform weather models. The library, located at Australia’s University of Queensland, contains hundreds of samples of hailstones from all over the world to help scientists better understand how things like shape, weight, and size affect the way the stones behave in a storm.
“The end game is to be able to predict in real-time how big hail will
be, and where it will fall,”
said
Dr. Joshua Soderholm, an Honorary Senior Research Fellow from the
University of Queensland’s School of the Environment. “More accurate
forecasts would of course warn the public so they can stay safe during
hailstorms and mitigate damage. But it could also significantly benefit
industries such as insurance, agriculture, and solar farming which are
all sensitive to hail.”
Heatmap’s
Jeva Lange noted back in June that most climate models don’t look
specifically at hail trends, but that “it’s been hypothesized that
climate change could create larger and more destructive hail in the
future.”
THE KICKER
This is the first year since 2011 that tickets for the Burning Man Festival haven’t sold out. Last year’s event was spoiled by heavy rain that flooded the Nevada desert and left stranded attendees to fend for themselves in deep mud.
https://heatmap.news/politics/dnc-chicago-harris-climate-change
ESA’s Juice probe dances with Earth and Moon before shooting off to Jupiter
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Gravity assist flybys planned for tonight and tomorrow
The European Space Agency’s Juice probe is to thread the needle this week with a first for a space mission – swings around the Moon and Earth that will result in the spacecraft coming approximately 700 km from the lunar surface.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/esa_juice_gravity_assist/
CockroachDB scuttles away from open source Core offering
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Distributed database biz doesn’t like bigger customers using the free version of its software
CockroachDB, the distributed transactional system with a mostly PostgreSQL compatible front end, plans to retire its free open source “Core” product in favor of a new Enterprise licensing structure for self-hosted users.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/cockroachdb_abandons_open_core/
7-Eleven gets takeover offer
date: 2024-08-19, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: The owner of convenience store giant 7-Eleven has received a takeover offer from Canadian rival Alimentation Couche-Tard, which runs the Circle K chain. Then, long COVID has cost Australia’s economy over an estimated $6 billion, with 100 million working hours lost in 2022 alone. Then, Indonesia has inaugurated its new — and partially built — capital city of Nusantara, as part of an ambitious $30 billion plan.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/7-eleven-gets-takeover-offer
Fed’s pandemic-era vow to prioritize employment may soon be tested
date: 2024-08-19, from: VOA News USA
Washington — Four years after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell made fighting unemployment a bigger priority during the COVID-19 pandemic, he faces a pivotal test of that commitment amid rising joblessness, mounting evidence inflation is under control, and a benchmark interest rate that is still the highest in a quarter of a century.
High interest rates may be on the way out, with the U.S. central bank expected to deliver a first cut at its Sept. 17-18 meeting and Powell potentially providing more information about the approach to the policy easing in a speech on Friday at the Kansas City Fed’s annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
But with the Fed’s policy rate in the 5.25%-5.50% range for more than a year, the impact of relatively high borrowing costs on the economy may still be building and could take time to unwind even if the central bank starts cutting — a dynamic that could put hopes for a “soft landing” of controlled inflation alongside continued low unemployment at risk.
“Powell says the labor market is normalizing,” with wage growth easing, job openings still healthy, and unemployment around what policymakers see as consistent with inflation at the central bank’s 2% target, former Chicago Fed President Charles Evans said. “That would be great if that is all there is. The history is not good.”
Indeed, increases in the unemployment rate like those seen in recent months are typically followed by more.
“That does not seem the situation now. But you may only be one or two poor employment reports away” from needing aggressive rate cuts to counter rising joblessness, Evans said. “The longer you wait, the actual adjustment becomes harder to make.”
Inflation versus employment
Evans was a key voice in reframing the Fed’s policy approach, unveiled by Powell at Jackson Hole in August 2020 as the pandemic was raging, policymakers were gathering via video feed, and the unemployment rate was 8.4%, down from 14.8% that April.
In that context the Fed’s shift seemed logical, changing a long-standing bias towards heading off inflation at the expense of what policymakers came to view as an unnecessary cost to the job market.
Standard monetary policymaking saw inflation and unemployment inextricably and inversely linked: Unemployment below a certain point stoked wages and prices; weak inflation signaled a moribund job market. Officials began to rethink that connection after the 2007-2009 recession, concluding they needn’t treat low unemployment as an inflation risk in itself.
As a matter of equity for those at the job market’s margins, and to achieve the best outcomes overall, the new strategy said Fed policy would “be informed by assessments of the shortfalls of employment from its maximum level.”
“This change may appear subtle,” Powell said in his 2020 speech to the conference. “But it reflects our view that a robust job market can be sustained without causing an outbreak of inflation.”
A pandemic-driven inflation surge and dramatic employment recovery made that change seem irrelevant: The Fed had to raise rates to tame inflation, and until recently the pace of price increases had slowed without much apparent damage to the job market. The unemployment rate through April had been below 4% for more than two years, an unparalleled streak not seen since the 1960s. The unemployment rate since 1948 has averaged 5.7%.
But the events of the last two years, and a coming Fed strategy review, have also triggered a wave of research into exactly what happened: why inflation fell, what role policy played in that, and how things might be done differently if inflation risks rise again.
While the agenda for this year’s conference remains under wraps, the broad theme focuses on how monetary policy influences the economy. That bears on how officials may evaluate future choices and tradeoffs and the wisdom of tactics like preempting inflation before it starts.
Some of that work is already emerging from Fed researchers, including top economist Michael Kiley. He has authored a paper questioning whether policy “asymmetry” — treating employment shortfalls differently than a tight labor market, for example — really helps. Another recent paper suggested policymakers who believe public inflation expectations are formed in the short-run and are volatile should react sooner and raise rates higher in response.
The role public expectations play in driving inflation — and the policy response - was on full display in 2022. When it appeared expectations risked moving higher, the Fed pushed its tightening cycle into overdrive with 75-basis-point hikes at four consecutive meetings. Powell then used a truncated Jackson Hole speech to emphasize his commitment to fight inflation —a stark shift from his jobs-first commentary two years earlier.
It was a key moment that put the U.S. central bank’s seriousness on display, underpinned its credibility with the public and markets, and rebuilt some of the standing that preemptive policies had lost.
‘Too tight’
Powell now faces a test in the other direction. Inflation is progressing back to 2%, but the unemployment rate has risen to 4.3%, up eight-tenths of a percentage point from July 2023.
There’s debate over what that really says about the labor market versus rising labor supply, a positive thing if new job seekers find employment.
But it did breach a rule-of-thumb recession indicator, and while that has been downplayed given other indicators of a growing economy, it also is slightly above the 4.2% that Fed officials regard as representing full employment.
It’s also higher than at any point in Powell’s pre-pandemic months as Fed chief: It was 4.1% and falling when he took over in February 2018.
The “shortfall” in employment that he promised to respond to four years ago, in other words, may already be taking shape.
While Powell will be reluctant to ever declare victory over inflation for fear of touching off exuberant overreaction, Ed Al-Hussainy, senior global rates strategist at Columbia Threadneedle Investments, said it was past time for the Fed to get in front of the risk to unemployment - preemption of a different sort.
Al-Hussainy said the Fed had proved its ability to keep public expectations about inflation in check, an important asset, but that “also has put in motion some downside risk to employment.”
“The policy stance today is offside — it is too tight — and that warrants acting on.”
B2B ISP Fastnet staggers back to feet after VMware incident
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Company continues to investigate root cause
Brighton-based ISP and hosting provider Fastnet has emerged from a trying week which involved battling VMware/Broadcom tech issues that have downed a number of its customers’ websites.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/fastnet_vmware_outage/
Sorry, Moxie. Blaming Agile for software stagnation puts the wrong villain in the wrong play
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Innovation dead for twenty years? Tell that to 2004
Opinion Want a good time on stage, but you’re not a performance artist? Surprisingly easy. Fill a hall with an audience of your peers, tell them the world’s gone to hell in a handcart, then that they’re the only ones who can fix it. You’ll feel the love. Guaranteed.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/sorry_moxie_blaming_agile_for/
Merging Art and Analysis: The Collaborative Efforts Behind NASA Johnson’s Visual Legacy
date: 2024-08-19, from: NASA breaking news
In the heart of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, a team of photographers, imagery acquisition specialists, analytic scientists, and graphic designers work together to create visual narratives that capture the defining moments of space exploration with creativity and precision. From the Apollo missions to the Artemis campaign, these images, videos, and graphics chronicle NASA’s […]
2024-08-18 Indie search for Oddmu
date: 2024-08-19, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
2024-08-18 Indie search for Oddmu
This is a follow-up for 2024-08-16 JSON feed for indexing where I linked to IndieSearch, byJP. I want to see what’s required for this to work.
First, I need to install Pagefind. Lucky me, I already have a Rust build environment installed.
cargo install pagefind
Next, I need a static HTML copy of my site:
env ODDMU_LANGUAGES=de,en oddmu static -jobs 3 /tmp/alex
Create the index:
pagefind --site /tmp/alex
Upload:
mv /tmp/alex/pagefind .
make upload
It’s now available at
https://alexschroeder.ch/wiki/pagefind.
Adding the info to the page header:
<link rel="search" type="application/pagefind" href="/wiki/pagefind" title="Alex Schroeder’s Diary">
<link href="/wiki/pagefind/pagefind-ui.css" rel="stylesheet">
<script src="/wiki/pagefind/pagefind-ui.js"></script>
<script>
window.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', (event) => {
new PagefindUI({ element: "#pagefind", showSubResults: true });
});
</script>
And a div to the page body:
<div id="pagefind"></div>
And I had to add ‘unsafe-eval’ to the
script-src Content-Security-Policy header.
Too bad the search result links all end in .html … that
requires an extra rewrite rule, to get rid of. On the other hand, it
also allowed me to get rid of baseUrl: "/view/".
Since there are still rough edges, this search is only available via Pagefind. I’m also not promising any updates to the index.
2024-08-19. While I was experimenting with this all, I asked @byjp some questions.
Sites provide local indexes in the Pagefind format, as a static file?
Correct — except it’s many files, organised so as to allow minimal transfer for a single search query — but all can be retrieved to have a full local index
Clients register one or more of these files and allow searching them?
Correct — they can be retrieved/cached to query locally, or queried efficiently remotely.
Users can install a large number of them, locally? Like I have 23 local dictionaries installed for my dictd and I can query them, locally.
Yes. Many can be kept locally or remotely. The sites you “register”/add become your search index.
Is it possible for a website to offer just a Pagefind installation with a number of URLs to Pagefind indexes without hosting pages and indexes? Clients visiting this Pagefind installation would download all the indexes pointed to in the list and search them locally?
Yes (with minor hackery). Each Pagefind instance is the index, a small bootstrapping JS/WASM blob, and ~5 lines of init JS. Those 5 lines can include locations of multiple indexes for the (exclusively client-side) JS to query when searching; by default the only one configured is the “local” index that created with the Pagefind JS/WASM blob, but you could strip away an empty index and have what you describe — in fact, that’s what my IndieSearch demo does!
If instead of visiting a site with a Pagefind installation one installs a Pagefind browser extensions, is it possible to point it to a URL that hosts a list of indexes?
I haven’t built that (yet), but yeah — I’d want to build an mf2/IndieWeb compatible “new user experience” that’d guide folks to finding a good-for-them set of defaults. My demo automatically (provisionally) adds any site you visit that supports IndieSearch, so you’d get better coverage fast. I’d also consider default-importing from blogrolls and the like. (Management & performance gets tricky with 1000s of indexes. Probs an “if we get there” problem. 😅)
Is it possible to “merge” Pagefind indexes and pass those aggregates on? I’m afraid that having local copies of the indexes means that clients will have to at least query thousands of sites for updates to their page indexes.
Not yet, but I asked exactly this question of the Pagefind devs and they offered that it’s currently too hard, but that there is a potential route they’d consider, see #564.
Thank you so much for answering the questions!
I’m still thinking about the situation where I’m part of a community and we want to all share search, like using Lieu for a webring – except I’d like a solution where I don’t have to do the crawling.
Sadly, the communities I’m part of are planets such as RPG Planet or Planet Emacslife, each with hundreds of blogs. I suppose most of them don’t offer a Pagefind index, being hosted on Blogspot and Wordpress, but what I’m considering is ingesting their feed and indexing it. This could be a service I could perform for people. Luckily, it’s often possible to get all the blog pages via the feed. This is how I’ve made local backups of other people’s blogs. I guess that each site would be a separate index, however?
I’d like to find a way that doesn’t require me to always download all the pages. I’d like to find a way to update the index as it’s being used.
I’d need a way to figure out how to configure it such that the results link back to the original pages, of course.
Another thing I’m considering is that my own site is rendered live, from Markdown files… it’s not a static site. So ideally I’d be able to ingest Markdown files directly. Or I can go the route of exporting it all into a big feed and ingesting that, once I’ve solved the problem above, I guess. But the problem above might also be easier to solve by extracting HTML pages from the feed. It’s what I’ve done in the past. Create something that works, first, then improve it later?
Anyway, ideas are swirling around.
2024-08-19. I notice more things that aren’t quite working the way I like them to work.
The sort order of the results is less than ideal, for example. I like to emphasize more recent blog posts. Pagefind, however, returns them in some sort of scoring order so that I’ve seen quite a few results with pages around 20 years old.
Image previews seem to rarely work. I suspect the problem is pages in subfolders linking to images in that same subfolder. Such relative links don’t need a path – but they do if Pagefind is not in the same directory.
Here’s another thing to consider: The index takes up more space than the full HTML of the entire site, compressed!
alex@sibirocobombus ~> du -sh alexschroeder.ch/wiki/pagefind alexschroeder.ch/wiki/feed.json.gz
43M alexschroeder.ch/wiki/pagefind
9.7M alexschroeder.ch/wiki/feed.json.gz
So the Pagefind index takes about 4× more space than the full HTML, for this site. This matches my experience with better indexing for my own site where I experimented with full text indexes and trigram indexes. Back then:
the 15 MiB of markdown files seem to have generated an index of 70 MiB – 2023-09-11 Oddµ memory consumption
Of course, in terms of copyright incentives, handing off the entire site like that is tricky. Doing it with a feed feels OK. Doing it for a search engine seems like handing the keys to Google. This provides an incentive to use a pre-computed index.
It also reminds me that the idea I had of building a search engine out of feed slurping without consent is probably a bad idea – like all ideas based on non-consensual acts.
Whether self-indexing is a good thing in terms of avoiding an English-first focus I don’t know. I suspect that most people will be using free software and therefore there’s no reason to suspect that a search engine doesn’t have the means to process the languages. Then again, that’s a lock-in where in order to support a new language, you have to support the software your favourite search-engine supports. So people indexing our own pages might have long term benefits.
I’m still wondering about the comparison of Pagefind and Lunr, to be honest. How many such static search solutions are there? Is there a benefit of one implementation over another?
I guess now I should look into Pagefind some more? Indexing non-HTML pages, handling image previews for pages not in the root directory and relative image source URLs, the sort order of results, the use of the .html extension in results… there are still rough edges as far as I am concerned – and per discussion above the onus is on me to fix my indexing. 😭
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-08-18-indie-search
2024-08-16 JSON feed for indexing
date: 2024-08-19, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
2024-08-16 JSON feed for indexing
Recently, @dredmorbius wrote about Google and search and posed the question:
What if websites indexed their own content, and published a permuted index in a standard format, in a cache-and-forward model similar to how DNS works?
A while ago I wondered about self-published indexes. We have software to generate feeds. Why not software to generate indexes? Back then I proposed a JSON format. Today I finally took a look at JSON Feed. I think it has everything we need.
Take a look at the example for this site: .well-known/search-feed.json.gz. This file has about 9.7MiB. The source material is 6740 Markdown pages, a total of about 21.5MiB, or 8.4MiB compressed.
Using the next_url attribute, it would be possible to split
this file up into chunks of 100 pages each, or a chunk per year, if the
platform promises that older pages never change. This wouldn’t work for
my wiki, but perhaps it would for certain platforms.
Somebody will have write up a best-practice on how to use HTTP headers to avoid downloading the whole file when nothing has changed. Sadly, section 13 of RFC 2616 is pretty convoluted. Basically something about the use of If-Modified-Since and ETags headers.
We also need to agree on how to use some of the JSON Feed attributes.
content_text: If used, all markup should be ignored by the
server (no guessing whether the text is Markdown or not). It would be
fine if this contained just the text nodes of the HTML, separated by
spaces. This can be useful to see whether words occur in the text, how
frequent they are, etc.
content_html: This is the preferred way to include pages in
the index. It is up to the search engine provider to extract useful
information from the HTML, including summaries, extracts, scoring, etc.
It is up to index providers to provide the kind of HTML they think
serves search engines best. This includes using the semantic HTML tags
and dropping style, scripts, footers and other elements that might be
used by search engines to reduce the relevance of the item.
I also find RFC 5005 to be very instructive in how to think about feeds for archiving.
@jonny commented, saying that it was important to think about how search indexes were going to be used:
so given that no single machine would or should store a whole index of the internet or even all your local internet, you can go a few ways with that, take the global quorum sensing path and you get a bigass global dht-like thing like ipfs. if instead you think there should be some structure, then you need proximity. is that social proximity where we swap indexes between people we know? or webring like proximity dependent on pages linking to each other and mutually indexing their neighborhood?
It’s an interesting question but I think I want incremental improvements to the current situation. So if a person has a website right now, on server, what’s the simplest thing they can do so that they aren’t drowned in crawlers and can still be found via search? That would be publishing an index, analogous to publishing a feed. Having more search engines (even if using legacy centralized architecture) would be better than what we have now. Not depending on crawlers would be better what we have now.
In terms of decentralisation, I think I like community search engines like lieu. The idea is great: a community lists a bunch of sites. Lieu generates a web ring and crawls them to build an index of all the member sites. Instead of crawling, it could fetch the indexes. This would be much better than what it does right now, because right now, lieu uses colly for crawling and colly ignores robots.txt. This means that lieu instantly bans itself when it visits my site because it’s not rate limited. It’s just an implementation detail, but sadly I am biased. I’ve been on a Butlerian Jihad since 2009 when I discover that over 30% of all requests I serve from my sites are for machines, not humans.
It makes me want to raise my keyboard and scream “CO₂ for the CO₂ god!!”
Somebody should draw a Hacker Elric doing that, standing on a mountain of electro-trash with the burnt and dead landscape of the post-apocalypse in the background.
But back to the problem of indexing. Right now, search engine operators and their parasites, the search engine optimisation enterprises, crawl every single page including page histories, page diffs, and more, on my wikis. If every wanna-be search engine downloaded my index once a day, I would be saving resources. Whether that’s a step in the right direction, I don’t know.
@jonny also said:
i just think that the ability to fundamentally depart from the commercial structure of the web and all its brokenness doesn’t happen gradually and esp. not with the server/client stack we have now
Indeed, there must be another way. I just don’t see it, right now. It’s always hard to imagine a new world while you’re still living in the old one. I’m sure the solution will seem obvious to the next generation, looking back.
#Search #Feeds #Butlerian Jihad
2024-08-17. @splitbrain suggested that this was the same as the sitemaps.org concept, but I think the sitemap lists the URLs available and you still have to crawl the site. At least now you never miss a page.
Would having such an index generate too much traffic? I think it would worm if all other crawling would stop. That’s the necessary trade-off, of course. No stupid crawlers lost in my wiki admin links (history pages, diffs) wasting resources – that is my goal. Also, since I ask for a crawl delay, crawling has to reconnect all the time, negotiate TLS all the time, start up CGI scripts all the time… having basically a static snapshot for download would obviate that (in a world where crawlers are smart enough to understand that the don’t need to crawl).
2024-08-18. @zens mentioned Lunr but then suggested that @byjp’s solution to the problem is even better: the server provides indexes that are used client-side and a browser extension allows querying multiple such indexes, locally.
Lunr.js is a small, full-text search library for use in the browser. It indexes JSON documents and provides a simple search interface for retrieving documents that best match text queries.
After indexing, Pagefind adds a static search bundle to your built files, which exposes a JavaScript search API that can be used anywhere on your site. Pagefind also provides a prebuilt UI that can be used with no configuration. – Pagefind
Any time they visit the IndieSearch homepage (a page served from their browser extension) they can now search all the sites supporting IndieSearch they’ve visited and/or included. – IndieSearch, byJP
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-08-16-json-feed-for-indexes
a filename when none exists
date: 2024-08-19, from: Daniel Stenberg Blog
This is episode four in my mini-series about shiny new features in the upcoming curl 8.10.0 release. One of the most commonly used curl command line options is the dash capital O (-O) which also is known as dash dash remote-name (–remote-name) in its long form. This option tells curl to create a local file … Continue reading a filename when none exists
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/08/19/a-filename-when-none-exists/
Migrating Mess With DNS to use PowerDNS
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: Julia Evans
https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/08/19/migrating-mess-with-dns-to-use-powerdns/
Raspberry Pi 5 slims down for cut-price 2 GB RAM version
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Nobody really needs more than that, right?
Almost a year after Raspberry Pi 5 debuted, a cheaper 2 GB version has appeared for users that want to save a little cash or for whom 4 or 8 GB was just slightly excessive.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/raspberry_pi_5_2gb/
Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Debugging software on the waterfront is a strangely dangerous task
Who, Me? Welcome once more, dear reader, to Who, Me? in which Reg readers like your good self attempt to soften the blow of the working week with tales of techie misadventure.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/who_me/
50 years on, Harlem Week shows how a New York City neighborhood went from crisis to renaissance
date: 2024-08-19, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — In 1974, Harlem’s deserted streets and tumbledown tenements told the story of a neighborhood left behind. Decades of disinvestment had culminated in a mass exodus known as urban flight and residents watched as their wealthier, more educated counterparts left the New York City neighborhood in droves.
But the tide turned when Percy Sutton, then the Manhattan borough president and New York City’s highest-ranking Black elected official, launched a campaign to bring back vitality to the historically African American neighborhood that had been known as a global Black mecca of arts, culture and entrepreneurship.
It became known as Harlem Week and would go on to draw back those who had departed. On Sunday, organizers celebrated Harlem Week’s 50th anniversary after 18 days of free programming that showcased all the iconic neighborhood has to offer.
Harlem Week stands as “the constant line through the last 50 years of America’s most historic Black neighborhood,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, whose National Action Network is headquartered in the neighborhood. “The dream of Percy Sutton and his peers in government, arts, the church and other elements of Harlem lives on, stronger than ever.”
In the 1970s, Harlem demanded more than an ordinary festival, if it wanted a resurrection. Those who remained in Harlem during urban flight — mostly low-income, Black families — would turn on their televisions to constant despair: crime reports, bleak statistics and reporters who called their home a “sinking ship.”
Sutton knew Harlem was due for a revitalizing, uplifting moment.
That summer, Sutton rallied religious, political, civic and artistic leaders that included Tito Puente, Max Roach, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee and Lloyd Williams. Together, they devised an event that would pivot the spotlight from Harlem’s troubles to its vibrant legacy: Harlem Day.
Radio disc jockeys Hal Jackson and Frankie Crocker produced a concert at the plaza of the Harlem State Office Building, while actor Ossie Davis cut a ribbon at 138th street and 7th Avenue, announcing the start of the “Second Harlem Renaissance.”
The ribbon-cutting ceremony renamed 7th Avenue to Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, named for the first African American elected to Congress from New York, marking the first time a New York City street took the name of a person of color.
“About two or three weeks later, Percy Sutton called us all and said it was such a successful day,” said Lloyd Williams, one of Harlem Day’s co-founders and the current president of the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce. “It meant so much to the other cities that were being deserted in Detroit and Baltimore, Washington and Chicago, that they asked if we would do it again on an annual basis.”
They did, and Harlem Day evolved into Harlem Weekend and eventually Harlem Week, which, before the pandemic, expanded to a full month of programming.
“Only in Harlem could a week be more than seven days,” said Williams, whose family has lived in Harlem since 1919.
This year’s celebration featured entertainment, including a headlining set by hip-hop artist Fabolous, a tribute to Harry Belafonte and Broadway performances. Other concerts showcased jazz, reggae, R&B and gospel traditions nurtured in Harlem, alongside hundreds of food and merchandise vendors.
Organizers also included empowerment initiatives, such as financial literacy workshops and health screenings, at Harlem Health Village and the Children’s Festival. Every child who attended received a back-to-school backpack.
Harlem Week always has been a living tribute to Harlem’s history of greats, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Augusta Savage and Aaron Douglas. It recognizes the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement and honors landmarks like the Apollo Theater and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Many historians consider the late 1960s and the 1970s to be Harlem’s darkest years.
The area had been battered by unrest, including a 1964 riot that killed an unarmed Black teenager, Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965 and the turmoil after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. Household incomes fell dramatically and infant mortality rates were high.
“The neighborhood was blighted,” recalled Malik Yoba, an actor born in the Bronx in 1967 who grew up in Harlem and spent days playing in the dirt of vacant lots. Yoba attended school in the Upper East Side with peers who had country homes upstate in the Hamptons.
“I didn’t understand why where we lived looked so dramatically different than where they lived,” he said. “I knew something was wrong.”
But Harlemites are creatives and entrepreneurs, visionaries and leaders. Where others saw decline, they saw opportunity, and the determination to match Harlem with its potential ran high.
Yoba, now 56, built a career as an actor showcasing Harlem to audiences across the nation. His experiences with housing inequality also fueled his passion for real estate.
Yoba combats the effects of redlining through his company Yoba Development, which provides young people of color access to the industry and has active projects in Baltimore and New York City.
“When you grow up in disenfranchised and divested communities, you can’t see the forest through the trees,” Yoba said. “You can grow up believing that walking by burnt-down buildings is your birthright, as opposed to understanding that building is a business.”
Hazel Dukes, 92, a prominent New York civil rights activist and Harlem resident of 30 years, has spent her life fighting discrimination in housing and education. She lived in the same Harlem building as Sutton and organized alongside him, later becoming a national president of the NAACP in 1989.
“I know what it feels to be denied,” said Dukes, who was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama, and endured Jim Crow segregation. She moved to New York City with her parents in the 1950s.
Today, property in Harlem is coveted, driven by gentrification and its enduring cultural appeal.
“There was a waiting list, because everybody wanted to live in Harlem,” Dukes said. “People want to come to Harlem before they transition from this world.”
Today in SCV History (Aug. 19)
date: 2024-08-19, from: SCV New (TV Station)
2013 – COC breaks ground on Culinary Arts Education building in Valencia [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-aug-19/
2GB Raspberry Pi 5 on sale now at $50
date: 2024-08-19, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
With 2GB of RAM, this new entry-level product continues our mission to reduce the cost of high-performance general-purpose computing.
The post 2GB Raspberry Pi 5 on sale now at $50 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/2gb-raspberry-pi-5-on-sale-now-at-50/
Japan’s Astroscale wins contract for space junk harvesting robotic arm
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The plan is to do away with an H-IIA rocket upper stage – and prove it’s possible
Japanese space debris cleaning outfit Astroscale revealed on Monday that it will enter a ¥12,000 million ($81.4 million) five-year contract with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to remove the upper stage of the space org’s H-IIA rocket from orbit using a newly developed satellite.…
Japan’s Astroscale wins contract for space junk harvesting robotic arm
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The plan is to do away with an H-IIA rocket upper stage – and prove it’s possible
Japanese space debris cleaning outfit Astroscale revealed on Monday that it will enter a ¥12,000 million ($81.4 million) five-year contract with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to remove the upper stage of the space org’s H-IIA rocket from orbit using a newly developed satellite.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/japan_space_junk_retrieval/
How big are global wildfires this year?
date: 2024-08-19, from: Hannah Richie at Substack
They’re tracking much higher than the decadal average.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/how-big-are-global-wildfires-this
Chinese chip equipment maker AMEC sues Pentagon for entity list removal
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Plus: China’s richest man used to work for Google; Singtel profit jumps; most APAC governments don’t have AI governance policies, and more
ASIA IN BRIEF Chinese semiconductor equipment manufacturer Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment (AMMEC) is challenging its inclusion on a US blacklist for alleged ties to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), according to numerous reports.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/asia_in_brief/
RansomHub-linked EDR-killing malware spotted in the wild
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Also: Your external-facing NetSuite sites need a review; five popular malware varieties for Q2, and more
Infosec in brief Malware that kills endpoint detection and response (EDR) software has been spotted on the scene and, given it’s deploying RansomHub, it could soon be prolific.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/ransomhub_edrkilling_malware/
Brush fire in Castaic halted at 1 acre
date: 2024-08-19, from: The Signal
The Los Angeles County Fire Department quickly halted a brush fire, dubbed the Heather Incident, at 1 acre north of the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic on Sunday afternoon, according […]
The post Brush fire in Castaic halted at 1 acre appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/08/brush-fire-in-castaic-halted-at-1-acre/
Thousands of activists expected at Democratic convention to call for Gaza cease-fire
date: 2024-08-19, from: VOA News USA
CHICAGO — Thousands of activists are expected to converge on Chicago this week for the Democratic National Convention, hoping to call attention to abortion rights, economic injustice and the war in Gaza.
While Vice President Kamala Harris has energized crowds of supporters as she prepares to accept the Democratic nomination, progressive activists maintain their mission remains the same.
Activists say they learned lessons from last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and are predicting bigger crowds and more robust demonstrations in Chicago, a city with deep social activism roots.
Who is protesting?
Demonstrations are expected every day of the convention and, while their agendas vary, many activists agree an immediate cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war is the priority.
Things are set to kick off Sunday on the convention’s eve with an abortion rights march along Michigan Avenue.
Organizer Linda Loew said even though Democrats have pushed to safeguard reproductive rights at home, the issue is international. They will march in solidarity with people everywhere who struggle for the right to control what happens to their bodies, as well as to protest the money the U.S. spends to back wars that could be used for health care, she said.
“We believe that the billions of dollars that continue to flow to the state of Israel and the flow of weapons are having an inordinate and horrific impact, but in particular on women, children and the unborn,” she said. “All of these things are tied together.”
The largest group, the Coalition to March on the DNC, has planned demonstrations on the first and last days of the convention.
Organizers say they expect at least 20,000 activists, including students who protested the war on college campuses.
“The people with power are going to be there,” said Liz Rathburn, a University of Illinois Chicago student organizer. “People inside the United Center are the people who are going to be deciding our foreign policy in one way or another.”
Where are they protesting?
Activists sued the city earlier this year, saying restrictions over where they can demonstrate violate their constitutional rights.
Chicago leaders rejected their requests for permits to protest near United Center on the city’s West Side, where the convention is taking place, offering instead a lakefront park more than 5 kilometers away.
Later, the city agreed to allow demonstrations at a park and a march route closer to the United Center. A federal judge recently signed off on the group’s roughly 1.6-kilometer route.
Coalition to March on the DNC spokesman Hatem Abudayyeh said the group is pleased it won the right to protest closer to the convention, but he believes its preferred 3-kilometer march would be safer for larger crowds. The group is chartering buses for activists from about half a dozen states.
“We’re going forward, full speed ahead,” he said.
The city has designated a park about a block from United Center for a speakers’ stage. Those who sign up get 45 minutes.
The Philadelphia-based Poor People’s Army, which advocates for economic justice, plans to set up at Humboldt Park on the city’s Northwest Side and will feature events with third-party candidates Jill Stein and Cornel West, plus a march Monday to the United Center.
Some group members have spent the last few weeks marching the more than 130 kilometers from Milwaukee, where they protested during the Republican convention.
“Poor and homeless people are being brutalized, with tents and encampments destroyed and bulldozed away, from San Francisco to Philadelphia to Gaza and the West Bank,” spokesperson Cheri Honkala said in a statement as the group reached Illinois. “These preventable human rights violations are being committed by Democratic and Republican leaders alike.”
How does a new nominee change things?
Many activists believe nothing much will change because Harris is part of the Biden administration.
“The demands haven’t changed. I haven’t seen any policy changes,” said Erica Bentley, an activist with Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity. “If you’re going to be here, you’re going to have to listen to what’s important to us.”
Pro-Palestinian protesters in Chicago have been highly visible, shutting down roads to the airport and staging sit-ins at congressional offices. Some are planning their own one-day convention Sunday with third-party candidates.
“Regardless of who the nominee is, we’re marching against the Democrats and their vicious policies that have allowed Israel to kill over 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza,” said Fayaani Aboma Mijana, an organizer with the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.
It’s unclear if the convention will draw far-right extremists who ardently support former President Donald Trump.
Secret Service Deputy Special Agent in Charge Derek Mayer said last week there are no known specific security threats against the convention.
Is Chicago ready?
The convention will draw an estimated 50,000 people to the nation’s third-largest city, including delegates, activists and journalists.
The city says it has made necessary preparations with police and the Secret Service. Security will be tight, with street closures around the convention center.
To combat traffic concerns, city leaders are touting a new $80 million train station steps from the United Center. They also have tried to beautify the city with freshly planted flowers and new signs. City leaders also cleared a nearby homeless encampment.
Police have undergone training on constitutional policing, county courts say they are opening more space in anticipation of mass arrests and hospitals near the security zone are beefing up emergency preparedness.
Authorities and leaders in the state have said people who vandalize the city or are violent will be arrested.
“We’re going to make sure that people have their First Amendment rights protected, that they can do that in a safe way,” Mayor Brandon Johnson told The Associated Press in a recent interview.
But some have lingering safety concerns, worried that protests could become unpredictable or devolve into chaos.
Activist Hy Thurman protested and was arrested at the infamous 1968 convention. The 74-year-old now lives in Alabama but plans to come to Chicago to protest the war in Gaza.
“It’s extremely personal for me,” he said. “I see parallels.”
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has said that he expects peaceful protests.
“We intend to protect the protesters’ First Amendment rights, and also the residents of the city of Chicago and the visitors to Chicago at the same time,” Pritzker told the AP in a recent interview.
Overloaded fields, type safety, and you
date: 2024-08-19, updated: 2024-08-19, from: Educated Guesswork blog
https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/text-type-safety/
Pop quiz: what is wrong with this tar command?
date: 2024-08-19, from: Ze Iaso’s blog
It’s stupider than you think