Archive for 2017
July 13, 2017
AT AMAZON, deals on Men’s Belts, Ties, Sunglasses, etc.
THOUGH WHAT COUNTS AS “HIGH INTENSITY” MAY CHANGE: High-Intensity Workouts May Be Good at Any Age.
THE COST OF DOING BUSINESS WITH TYRANTS: Uber cedes control in Russian market with Yandex tie-up.
For Uber, the deal marks the exit from another big market after it sold its operations in China last year to local rival Didi Chuxing.
Yandex said in a statement on Thursday that Uber and Yandex Taxi would combine into a new company in Russia as well as in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Yandex will own 59 percent, Uber roughly 37 percent, and employees the rest. The CEO of Yandex Taxi, Tigran Khudaverdyan, will become the chief executive of the new combined company.
You can’t fight City Hall, at least not when it’s located in Moscow.
MARK RIPPETOE: Your First Two Weeks of Strength Training: What to Expect.
THIS MIGHT EXPLAIN THE DISCREPANCY BETWEEN MARKET SHARE AND PROFITABILITY BETWEEN THE TWO OPERATING SYSTEMS: Android users want to get pregnant, iPhone users avoid it, fertility app study shows.
WE’RE GOING TO HAVE TO CREATE HEINLEIN’S “FAIR WITNESS” AS MACHINE RECORDS BECOME EASIER AND EASIER TO FAKE: AI Creates Fake Obama.
EVERYBODY CAN HEAR YOU NOW: Personal Data of 6 Million Verizon Users Leaked Online.
DON SURBER: Obama trapped Donald Jr. to justify spying on Trump. Well, if true that would explain why Loretta Lynch allowed a Russian who had been denied a visa to enter the country.
GOODNESS: Hundreds Of Coastal Communities Could Face Monthly Floods In The Coming Decades.
A special tax on coastal development projects, devoted to carbon reduction, ought to discourage homebuilding in risky areas — and certainly our coastal elites won’t mind paying their fair share to help save the planet.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I’ve proposed just such a tax in the past, but weirdly, coastal lefties don’t seem excited about it.
KIDS THESE DAYS: Goldman Sachs relaxes dress code for techs in fight for talent.
I’ve surrendered in my one-man war to save the suit.
KURT SCHLICHTER: This Time We Liberals Have Totally Got Trump. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. It does seem a bit repetitive.
IN THE MAIL: Project Smoke.
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
MY LATEST NY OBSERVER ESSAY: Options for dealing with North Korea’s ballistic missile threat.
VERY RELATED: Chinese trade with North Korea up ten percent this year.
LIU XIAOBO DIES IN CHINESE HOSPITAL: A deserving Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Chinese human rights prisoner Liu Xiaobo died Thursday at age 61 following a high-profile battle with liver cancer that made his death as controversial as his life.
Liu, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who spent his last eight years as a prisoner of conscience, passed away at a hospital in Shenyang, China, where he had been moved from his prison cell in the final stage of his illness.
I wrote a column about him in 2010.
Liu long ago joined the distinguished line of brave men and women trapped in police states who choose, in the name of liberty, to confront their nations’ authoritarian ideologies and instruments of terror. Many of these heroes die unheralded in a jail or an alley or a ditch. The tyrants erase their memory and hide their sacrifice.
He was a courageous man. His memory will be preserved.
BEGUN, THE DRONE WARS HAVE: USAF Wants Authority To Down Drones After F-22 Near Miss.
In early July, an F-22 Raptor pilot coming in for a landing just barely avoided colliding with a small, commercial unmanned aerial system (UAS). That same week, a base security guard watched another tiny drone fly onto the complex and over the flight line before heading back out.
In neither case did the airman have the legal authority to shoot down or otherwise disable the drone.
As drone technology becomes cheaper and more commercially available, the U.S. Air Force is increasingly worried about the threats posed by small UAS such as quadcopters. But while the service is developing the tools to defend against these systems—from jamming their electronics to shooting them down—it lacks the legal authority to use them, says Gen. James Holmes, commander of Air Combat Command.“Imagine a world where somebody flies a couple hundred of those, and flies one down the intake of one of my F-22s with just a small weapon,” Holmes said July 11 during an event on Capitol Hill. “I need the authorities to deal with that.”
China and others are taking notes, I’m sure.
I REMEMBER WHEN ANYONE WHO DOUBTED “PEAK OIL” WAS CALLED A SHILL FOR EXXON, AND WHEN BARACK OBAMA SAID WE COULDN’T DRILL OUR WAY OUT OF OUR ENERGY PROBLEMS: Significant Oil Discovery off Coast of Mexico:
An international consortium of oil companies has struck oil in shallow waters off the coast of Mexico in what could be one of the five largest discoveries in the past five years, and among the top fifteen in the last two decades. The find could be good for 1.4 to 2 billion barrels of light crude. . . .
This is a big win for Mexico, which two years ago decided to allow private companies to participate in energy projects. If this find turns out to be as significant as early indicators seem to have it, expect even more international companies to get interested.
It’s also yet another reminder of just how off the “peak oil” prognosticators have been. This is a substantive find of easy to process light crude in shallow waters; no fracking or next-gen technological requirements will be necessary to exploit it. Greens may not love it, but the age of oil appears to not quite yet be over.
Well, to be fair, the Greens are just colluding with Russia to weaken Western petroleum reserves.
NATHAN COFNAS: Look under the hood on climate change “science” and what you see isn’t pretty.
Let’s unpack this a bit, using actual science. The proportion of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is currently about 400 parts per million (ppm). The Cambrian explosion—when most animal lineages first appeared—occurred a little more than 500 million years ago when, according to all estimates, carbon dioxide levels were several times higher than today. The atmosphere of Venus is 965,000 ppm carbon dioxide, enveloped in clouds of sulfuric acid. And Venus itself is almost 26 million miles closer to the sun than Earth.
So Hawking’s claim that the earth is on the “brink” of becoming like Venus is preposterous. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change explicitly notes that the Earth will not experience a runaway greenhouse effect such as might have occurred on Venus.
What is really disturbing, though, is that Hawking has flagrantly given up on even the pretense of engaging with actual science. He speaks entirely from authority: I am a scientist. Adopt this political policy that I favor or suffer fire and sulfuric acid. The threatened punishment for noncompliance substitutes sulfuric acid for the regular sulfur (brimstone) that features in old-fashioned religion. As far as the justification for the claim, there is no important difference between this and a religious statement that is supposed to be believed simply because it issues forth from a high priest.
The real concern is how far the Climate Change Cult will go to smite the wicked.
NEITHER THE FIRST NOR THE LAST: I Was A High School Student ‘Feeling the Bern.’ Then the Left Turned Me Into A Trump Supporter.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: It’s not just Republicans who feel increasingly sour on colleges and universities.