TOO MUCH FREE TIME? We Broke Into A Bunch Of Android Phones With A 3D-Printed Head.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
December 18, 2018
PRICES, HOW DO THEY WORK? Venezuela’s 15-Cent Phone Bills Come Complete With No Service. “Investments dry up as rates are cheapest in the world.”
The price of Movistar’s top mobile internet plan is about 100 bolivars, or some $0.15 at the black market rate, compared to a $17 price tag for a similar plan offered by the firm in neighboring Colombia — leaves them with no money to invest or improve technology.
“By charging 3 to 4 dollars a month we could start to recover the systems,” Jose Luis Rodriguez Zarco, president of Telefonica in Venezuela, told journalists on Friday, adding that Venezuelan fares are the cheapest in the world. “We are not on the verge of a collapse, but each time we are going to compromise more quality.”
Rodriguez said that the company has no plans to leave Venezuela, but is in constant need of help from its parent in Spain to continue operating. Consumption has increased 73 percent in one year while a third of his staff has left the country, he said.
Bad luck.
ELI LAKE: Michael Flynn Is Owed an Apology. “One year after he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, there is still no evidence that he is a traitor.”
SORE LOSERS ARE STILL LOSERS: Hillary Clinton Writes Self-Serving Sympathy Letter to Third-Grade Girl Who Lost Class Election to a Boy. “It’s not easy when you stand up and put yourself in contention for a role that’s only been sought by boys.”
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela creditors demand payment on defaulted $1.5 billion bond.
President Nicolas Maduro’s government and state-owned companies owe nearly $8 billion in unpaid interest and principal following this year’s default on bonds amid a hyperinflationary collapse of the country’s once-wealthy socialist economy.
Five investment funds have demanded that Venezuela pay the principal and outstanding interest on its 2034 bond VE018389347=, said Mark Stancil of Washington-based law firm Robbins Russell, who represents the group. It is the first step in a potential legal campaign by creditors to recover their investments.
The decision could trigger similar efforts by investors holding $60 billion in outstanding bonds issued by Venezuela and state oil company PDVSA. That could pave the way for a creditor dispute similar to the one that roiled Argentina for a decade.
You don’t want to be the last creditor in that line.
SEA STORY: There Is Only 1 Thing Stopping Japan from Building Real Aircraft Carriers. “Politics.”
Something like the sixty-five-thousand-ton Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carrier is not at all beyond Japanese shipbuilding capabilities. With the F-35B, such a ship would immediately be competitive with, and indeed likely superior to, China’s Liaoning-class aircraft carriers. However, the dependence on the F-35B would limit Japan’s options down the road. Unless Japan decided to develop its F-3 stealth fighter as a STOVL aircraft, the F-35B would be the only plausible shipborne fighter for the operational lifespan of Shokaku and Zuikaku. However, these ships could still operate an array of advanced unmanned aircraft, as well as any F-35B replacements developed by the United States. Experience gained by operating the F-35B with the Izumos would feed directly into a “Queen Elizabeth” style ship. Pilots and crew will develop invaluable experience with landings, takeoffs, and shipboard maintenance that Japan has lacked since 1945.
But unlike China, Japan enjoys the benefit of extensive military and industrial relationships with countries that currently operate aircraft carriers, including the United States and the United Kingdom. Thus, Japan does not necessarily need to take the kind of slow, methodical approach to carrier development that China has taken.
To repeat: the only serious obstacles to Japan’s construction of fleet carriers are political. But political obstacles are still obstacles, and the appearance of “Shokaku” and “Zuikaku” would have significant repercussions at home and abroad.
Japan’s smaller Isuzmo-class “helicopter carriers” are already being made ready to fly F-35Bs, and for now at least the idea of them building bigger and more capable carriers is pure conjecture — but one possibly causing some sleepless nights in Beijing. And if Beijing doesn’t like Japan’s ongoing (and quite real) naval rearmament, well, they have no one to blame but themselves.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: James Comey, Tucker Carlson, criminal justice reform… and we’re just getting started. “After a closed-door meeting with Republicans and Democrats in Congress focused on the Clinton investigation and the Russia investigation, former FBI Director James Comey launched into the GOP, clearly attempting to distract from the gravity of something he admitted behind closed doors.”
Tyler O’Neil is filling in for Liz today.
PETER BRIGHT: Google isn’t the company that we should have handed the Web over to. “Microsoft adopting Chromium puts the Web in a perilous place.”
This is a company that, time and again, has tried to push the Web into a Google-controlled proprietary direction to improve the performance of Google’s online services when used in conjunction with Google’s browser, consolidating Google’s market positioning and putting everyone else at a disadvantage. Each time, pushback has come from the wider community, and so far, at least, the result has been industry standards that wrest control from Google’s hands. This action might already provoke doubts about the wisdom of handing effective control of the Web’s direction to Google, but at least a case could be made that, in the end, the right thing was done.
But other situations have had less satisfactory resolutions. YouTube has been a particular source of problems. Google controls a large fraction of the Web’s streaming video, and the company has, on a number of occasions, made changes to YouTube that make it worse in Edge and/or Firefox. Sometimes these changes have improved the site experience in Chrome, but even that isn’t always the case.
A person claiming to be a former Edge developer has today described one such action. For no obvious reason, Google changed YouTube to add a hidden, empty HTML element that overlaid each video. This element disabled Edge’s fastest, most efficient hardware accelerated video decoding. It hurt Edge’s battery-life performance and took it below Chrome’s. The change didn’t improve Chrome’s performance and didn’t appear to serve any real purpose; it just hurt Edge, allowing Google to claim that Chrome’s battery life was actually superior to Edge’s. Microsoft asked Google if the company could remove the element, to no avail.
Using market dominance in one field, streaming video, to gain market dominance in another, web browsing, looks like an antitrust violation to me. Maybe Glenn with his greater expertise will weigh in on this.
AND THEY DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TWITTER: Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive.’
A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.
Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640.
The whole thing is a fascinating read.
BUT OF COURSE: Left Savages Gay Writer For Saying People Stigmatize His Conservatism More Than His Sexuality. “Progressives proceeded to prove Chad Greene’s original point — and negate their manicured image of being a haven of tolerance for LGBT people — by savaging him on social media.”
Mean people suck, and modern progressives tend to be very mean people.
YOU HAD ONE JOB: Massive boom in Pacific Ocean not corralling plastic trash.
Boyan Slat, who launched the Pacific Ocean cleanup project, told The Associated Press in an interview Monday he is confident the 2,000-foot (600-meter) long floating boom will be fixed.
The 24-year-old innovator from the Netherlands says one of the main issues is the plastic is not staying within the u-shaped boom with a net that hangs below the surface is the device’s speed.
He says the boom is moving slower than the plastic, allowing the trash to float away.
Slat says a team of engineers is being sent out to sea to fix the speed problem.
I wonder if the boom is creating enough water motion to move the trash out of its own way.
FAKE SCIENCE: How a Dubious Forensic Science Spread Like a Virus. “From his basement in upstate New York, Herbert MacDonell launched modern bloodstain-pattern analysis, persuading judge after judge of its reliability. Then he trained hundreds of others.”
Its path — the steady case-by-case, decision-by-decision acceptance of a new forensic science by the justice system — is one that’s rarely, if ever, been retraced. But it reveals the startling vulnerability of judges, and juries, to forensics techniques, both before, and after, they’ve been debunked.
Although the reliability of blood-spatter analysis was never proven or quantified, its steady admission by courts rarely wavered, even as the technique, along with other forensic sciences, began facing increasing scrutiny.
In 2009, a watershed report commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences cast doubt on the whole discipline, finding that “the uncertainties associated with bloodstain pattern analysis are enormous,” and that experts’ opinions were generally “more subjective than scientific.”
Still, judges continued allowing spatter experts to testify.
Subsequent research, funded by the Department of Justice, raised questions about experts’ methods and conclusions. But little changed.
All along, attorneys like Bankston continued challenging the admission of bloodstain-pattern analysts. But they came to learn that a forensic discipline, once unleashed in the system, cannot easily be recalled.
What a mess.
IT’S EARLY YET, BUT THIS MUST BE THE BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Real Witches Offended Trump Keeps Using the Term ‘Witch Hunt.’
December 17, 2018
YES, BUT WHAT WILL CONGRESS MAKE OF THEM? Reed O’Connor’s Obamacare Ruling Opens Up New Possibilities for America’s Health Care.
DAILY BEAST: ‘Vice,’ the Dick Cheney Biopic, Might Be the Worst Movie of the Year.
The big complaint? The movie “at best marginally humanizes Dick Cheney and at worst lionizes him.”
Well, we can’t have that.
NOW THAT’S CHANGE I CAN BELIEVE IN: Colorado grocers can offer full-strength beer on Jan. 1.
Prior to 2019, the beer sold at grocery and convenience stores is limited to 3.2 percent alcohol by weight, or 4 percent alcohol by volume. To find beer with higher alcohol content — typically known as full-strength beer — you must shop at liquor stores.
The law that takes effect Jan. 1 essentially eliminates the two tiers for sales and allows all retailers licensed to sell beer to do so, regardless of alcohol content.
So this means you can soon buy full-strength beer at liquor stores, grocery stores, convenience stores, gas stations, and big box retailers, such as Walmart, Target, Costco and Sam’s Club. The hours for beer sales every day are 8 a.m. to midnight.
Where can I buy wine and liquor in Colorado?
The new law will not change where you can buy wine and liquor. Only licensed liquor stores can sell wine and liquor in Colorado. Hard cider is considered wine under the law, so to find the full-strength versions you will still need to buy from a liquor store.
We have a ways to go yet.
SHENANIGANS: Dozens of Dems Poised to Back Republican for Texas House Speaker, Sparking Backlash. “Some conservatives also don’t like scenario, arguing ‘the speaker ought to be elected by Republicans, not the Democrats and a group of turncoats’.”
I OFFER MYSELF UP FOR THIS HORRIFIC HUMAN EXPERIMENT: Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 15 Foods You Should Absolutely Stop Ordering, According to Fast-Food Workers.
Quarter Pounder with Cheese: Still safe.
THE PARTY IS JUST RETURNING TO ITS ROOTS: Kirsten Gillibrand Says It Worries Her That the Top 3 2020 Dems Are All White Guys.
COME SEE THE ANTISEMITISM INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: The New York Times Just Published an Unqualified Recommendation for an Insanely Anti-Semitic Book.
Over the weekend, the New York Times Book Review published a full-length interview with Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple. The very first question: “What books are on your nightstand?” Walker replied with four, the second of which was:
“And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” by David Icke. In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.
This passed without comment from the New York Times interviewer, and the publication passed it on to the readers without qualification. This is rather remarkable because the book is an unhinged anti-Semitic conspiracy tract written by one of Britain’s most notorious anti-Semites.
There’s no byline on the interview with Walker, so there’s no telling if it was conducted by a 27-year-old who literally knows nothing, or by someone at the Times who should know better.