Link. China’s decline is pushing money to Japan.
Kenyan Court Blocks Police Force to Haiti
Link. “Many developing nations view international security missions as a way to subsidize or reward their security forces.”
The US will contribute money but is loathe to send troops.
Latest Apple Beeper block disables iMessage for Mac owners with “irregular” use.
Link. “… After The New York Times contacted Apple, some Beeper customers began reporting that they had been unblocked in recent day..”
The NYT unlock makes it worse.
“China is only at 28% of U.S. per capita GDP. When the U.S., the UK, Japan, and Germany hit their relative peaks, they weren’t just among the largest economies on the planet, but also the richest…”
Link. Xi is a curse upon China.
Smith dissembles though about why Xi wants control. It’s not “lack of faith in the Chinese people”. Weird that he went that way.
Residential Solar and financial scams.
Link. Finance wizards created complex instruments that could be used to fleece homeowners.
Thoughtful regulation needed. Federal money (subsidies) should only be available for “certified” / “qualified” packages.
“allegations that some UNRWA staff were involved in the 7 October deadly Hamas attacks on Israel. The agency later announced it was sacking those employees.”
Link. Israel has good reason to distrust the UN; it is not surprising that UN agencies in Gaza would have staff who are also Hamas.
It reinforces concerns that aid distributed through UN goes to Hamas rather than civilians.
Rural areas 30% worse COVID impact: “Older age composition, worse pre-pandemic population health, lower vaccination rates,… completely explain the rural disadvantage in Covid-19 mortality.”
Link. Of these only vaccination could be changed.
“The Perils of Interpreting opens with the 1793 meeting of Lord George Macartney and the Qianlong emperor”
Link. Book illuminates the 19th century history of the imperial relationship through the stories on two interpreters.
Lupus: “when the BORC complex isn’t working properly, TLR7 can accumulate in immune cells, making them less sensitive to activation by intruder genetic material and more likely to attack our body’s tissues.”
Link. One possible cause.
“The world science fiction convention coevolved with fan-run volunteer conventions in societies where there’s a general expectation of the rule of law and most people abide by social norms irrespective of enforcement. “
Link. The esoteric and obscure Hugo Disaster of 2024 has many lessons for the world.
Pre-Industrial Societies: what was special?
Link. I liked DeLong’s brief list. I am very glad I did not live in these societies.
Stolen Device Protection for iPhone: Password access requires biometric authentication, passcode won’t work
Link. You can turn off SDP at home but not when out. There are times biometrics doesn’t work for me so I’m a bit wary of this.
Former GOP establishment leader and Never Trumper: “I wasn’t just wrong; I was completely, embarrassingly wrong.”
Link. Wrong about the GOP. It wasn’t the party he thought it was.
Gene therapy for 5% of inherited deafness in children: “one-time therapy delivers a functional copy of that gene to the inner ear during a surgical procedure”
Link. Chinese study, replicated in other centers.
“because of a mistake, the removal and re-installation of the door plug in Renton was never entered in the computer system”
Link. Boeing error. No signoff was done. Whistleblowers everywhere. Boeing workers are very angry.
Americans are working too hard.
Fani Willis and Trump Georgia prosecution.
Link. A good overview. She’s toast.
Serious bugs fixed in macOS Sonoma 14.3
Link. Might be the good release?
“we lack the infrastructure to return to a mass military, whether it’s staffed by conscription or traditional recruitment”
Link. It’s not 1939 and it’s not the Great Depression. Democracies with stable economies are not able to do mass military. See also Israel.
Canada overwhelmed by grad student immigrants, lowers visa cap by a third.
Link. “…. about 40%, of foreign students come from India, with China coming in second with about 12%…”
China I understand. Xi seems to hate Canada, but he is sending China’s finest to support Canada. India’s flow is interesting.
“Hamas’s tunnel network has been found to be far more extensive than previous IDF estimates, spanning over 300 miles in the south alone”
Link. It appears Israel did not exaggerate Hamas tunnels the way the US invented Taliban/al Qaeda tunnels.
“NYT is using the open source Ruffle as their Flash emulator”
Link. Archival Flash lives.
Bug: Ventura and Monterey updated to Sonoma unwillingly
Link. “Some macOS 13 Ventura and macOS 12 Monterey users are being upgraded to macOS 14 Sonoma after dismissing notifications that encourage an upgrade”
“what the AARO discovered was a web of governmental leaders who believed in bizarre conspiracy theories and were willing to spend taxpayer dollars on it”
Link. Congress flying saucer fans. Not all are GOP. “taxpayer money was being inappropriately spent on paranormal research at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah,”
Sonoma 14.3: Oakley likes the update.
Link. Makes me cautiously optimistic.
COU: Macintosh 128K to the M3: “With SIMD, registers are packed with more than one number at a time, and the multiply instruction works on them all at the same time.”
Link. Review of how computers got faster over the decades. Using Apple’s Accelerate library requires careful coding.
China screwed the Hugo awards. Uganda has next set.
Link. Scalzi is cautious but doesn’t leave a lot of doubt about what China did.
We can’t do international awards any more.
Boeing 1990s: “allow Boeing to follow “all the other industrial sectors in the United States to industrialization and outsourcing and globalization.”
Link. Software outsourcing killed a lot of 90s companies.
Six Reasons American Drug Prices are High. 🆓
Link. They even mention PBMs. Which need a lot more mentions.
Ackman gives whacked Biden challenger $1 Million and demands DEI policy language disappear.
Link. Gone the next day.
Billionaires lose money on news like everyone else: “The very rich find it very difficult to lose money year over year,” Mr. Doctor said, “even if they can afford it.”
Link. NYT article is quiet about NYT.
Indian courts globally kill Reuters news story about Appin — an Indian cyberhack company.
Link. Did Modi use Appin when his people hacked phones?
Bidenomics failure risks
Link. “Lack of bureaucratic state capacity
Onerous contracting requirements
Permitting, especially NEPA”
Set asides for underserved and other well intentioned restrictions have a terrible track record.
ScreenFloat 2 – macOS screenshots.
Link. I like the floating feature
New York Public Library’s Scholarly Press Backlist Revival Project: “published monographs that are neither in the public domain nor commercially available for the library to purchase or license”
Link. They are moving very carefully.
Meetup death watch begins.
Link. Bending spoons bought them. They are a scammy vendor.
Not receiving SMS two factor authentication codes for Facebook, Instagram, others: remove blocked numbers
Link. SMS authentication is easy but has risks.
Bluesky Adds RSS for public user feeds.
Link. More RSS goodness. I track Jedeed this way.
Feedbin now tries to fix broken feeds.
Link. “Visit your subscriptions page to get started. There will be a notice at the top of the page if Feedbin has detected any broken feeds it can help with”
Fixed 20 for me.
“we’ve reversed almost 40 percent of the rise in one key measure of inequality that took place during the great income divergence from 1979 to 2019.”
Link. I believe inflation made this possible.
“the gap between Black and white unemployment rates is the smallest it has been”
“previously reported increases in maternal mortality rates in the United States were an artifact of changes in surveillance. The pregnancy checkbox, introduced in the revised 2003 death certificate …” 🆓
Link. Watch this space.
Mail carriers mugged for mailbox keys: “Just 14% of attacks lead to an arrest, and even fewer attacks lead to convictions”
Link. Article doesn’t explain why low arrest rate.
7 Guiding Principles for Working with LLMs – Jon Udell
Link. The chorus technique was new to me. He uses ChatGPT and Claude to get cross-validation.
The history of KKK II – 1920s and beyond.
Link. Teen vogue has replaced Time magazine.
CEO of Boeing from 2003 to 2005: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”
Link. Was HP’s fall similar?
Covid-19 research roundup: Jan 11
Link. 1. Longer delays from symptoms to antigen positive. Don’t know if infectious before antigen positive. Wait 4-5 days before testing?
2. COVID spread maybe unaffected by humidity, temperature?
3. Vaccines are great and probably worthwhile even in teens.
ooh.directory: an index of blogs
Link. Very old web – but still active. A personal index to blogs.
More on Multiple Sclerosis and EBV
Link. “Denmark, in particular, seems to have gone through some population changes so complete and drastic that genocidal conquest comes to mind”
Or a novel disease.
“Perplexity.ai … the best implementation I’ve seen of LLM-assisted search …”
Link. “Perplexity has their own search index now and is running their own crawlers, and they’re using variants of Mistral 7B and Llama 70B …”
India government failure: “The next day, he lodged a police complaint, and investigators soon filed charges. That was 26 years ago.”
Link. A complaint — that 58 people were murdered. Bihar state is probably a worst case. Lots of corruption, a government that manipulates courts and blocks reform. (India is more a coalition of states than a country so presumably varies by state.)
It’s easy to see how SCOTUS could turn into India’s massively corrupt Supreme Court.
Ecuador’s Black woman Attorney General triggered the gangs by arresting the judges and police they owned.
Link. “Ms. Salazar, Ecuador’s first Black attorney general, was appointed in 2019. She prosecuted a former president, Rafael Correa, on corruption charges the next year.”