I KNOW WHAT I’LL BE DOING THIS EVENING: Listen to 385,000 Vintage 78 RPM Records for Free on ‘The Internet Archive.’ “The 78 RPM disc format became available in 1898. Made of shellac resin, they came in several sizes but were known for their 78 rotations per minute. They were recorded through a horn (later a microphone), with sound causing vibrations that engraved a pattern in the disc. The shellac material has not aged well, and some records can break from even being picked up. As such, digitizing these recordings is crucial.”
Author Archive: Stephen Green
April 17, 2023
TALES FROM THE SWAMPLAND: Guess Who’s Behind the 51 Intel Officials Letter Dismissing Hunter Biden’s Laptop?
60 MINUTES OR IT’S FREE: Landmark surgery cures prostate cancer in under one hour.
CHANGE: Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back A.I. Rivals.
Google’s employees were shocked when they learned in March that the South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine on its devices.
For years, Bing had been a search engine also-ran. But it became a lot more interesting to industry insiders when it recently added new artificial intelligence technology.
Google’s reaction to the Samsung threat was “panic,” according to internal messages reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.
A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google’s search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology.
I’m not going to trust AI-enhanced search until AI stops making stuff up.
COME SEE THE RACISM INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: MSNBC Guest Goes on Racist Tirade Against Sen. Tim Scott.
NO MAN’S LIFE, LIBERTY, OR PROPERTY ARE SAFE WHILE THE LEGISLATURE IS IN SESSION: VPN Users Risk 20-Year Jail Sentences in the US Under New RESTRICT Act. “The RESTRICT Act is not limited to just TikTok. It gives the government authority over all forms of communication domestic or abroad and grants powers to ‘enforce any mitigation measure to address any risk’ to national security now and in any ‘potential future transaction.'”
WELL, THAT’S A PRETTY GOOD REASON: ‘Bad Thoughts’: Trans Teacher Canned for Wanting to Shoot Students.
THAT’S OK; HARDLY ANYONE CAN AFFORD A NEW CAR ANYMORE: From the ‘Everything Enjoyable Is Bad for You’ Files: New Car Smell Gives You Cancer.
MAYBE NEXT TIME WE JUST SHOOT THE DAMN THING DOWN? Leaked Pentagon docs show the shot-down Chinese spy balloon may have had a feature known as ‘synthetic aperture radar’ that can see through certain materials. “US intelligence agencies believed this because the balloon, which officials named Killeen-23 in an apparent reference to 1940s mobster Donald Killeen, was equipped with the ability to generate up to 10,000 watts of solar power — enough to power a typical home — which could support such abilities.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: California Hits the Gas on Its Way to Failed Commie Statehood. “Under normal circumstances, the governor’s vibe wouldn’t affect so much of what goes on in the state. The Wuhan Chinese Bat Flu Plague, however, gave Democrat governors like Newsom a taste of tyrannical power that they have been reluctant to give up. The Golden State is now very much a reflection of its Soviet-esque chief executive.”
WHAT A SHAME: Conservative social media platform Parler acquired and then immediately shut down by new owner.
Following Starboard’s announcement on Friday, the company immediately shut down Parler’s website. A note on Parler.com(Opens in a new tab) reads “no reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more.”
To be clear though, this isn’t an anti-conservative statement from Starboard. It’s strictly business. Starboard’s statement goes on to praise former Parler CEO George Farmer for Parler’s more recent move into providing alternative IT and cloud services solutions through its former parent company Parlament Technologies.
“We focus on working with groups that are advocating for or otherwise advancing conservative causes or conservative beliefs,” Starboard CEO Ryan Coyne told the Daily Caller News Foundation in 2021, back when Starboard was known as Olympic Media.
It’s a good thing the IT and cloud services will survive, but Parler’s social media platform probably never had a chance after it was kneecapped by Amazon, Apple, and Google.
THOMAS HOGAN: The Fed Is Bankrupt.
In the post-pandemic period, the Fed expanded the money supply significantly to support a swift economic recovery. It did so by purchasing vast amounts of US Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities. While those assets seemed like good investments at first, they are now a major hole in the Fed’s financial position.
When the bulk of the Fed’s quantitative easing (QE) programs took place in 2020 and 2021, market rates on long-term Treasury bonds fluctuated mostly in the range of 1.5 to 2.0 percent. At the time, the Fed was paying interest on bank reserves and overnight reverse repurchase (ONRRP) agreements of 0.15 or less. The Fed profited on the difference between the higher rate it received from its bond purchases minus the lower rates it paid on reserves and Overnight Reverse Repurchases (ONRRPs).
Now, the Fed has raised the interest it pays to 4.55 percent on ONRRPs and 4.65 percent on bank reserves, but the rates it earns on its QE purchases remain mostly unchanged. Assuming, as a rough approximation, that the bonds it purchased pay an average rate of 1.75 percent, and the average rate paid on bank reserves and ONRRPs is 4.6 percent, then the Fed is paying about 2.85 percent per year more than it receives on its $8 trillion dollar securities portfolio. That’s a loss of $228 billion per year!
The Fed is bankrupt — and I don’t just mean intellectually.
Like a private bank, the Fed maintains some level of capital as a buffer against losses. When those losses exceed the value of its capital, the Fed becomes insolvent, meaning the liabilities it owes to others are greater than the total value of the assets it holds.
The most recent data show that the Fed owes the Treasury over $41 billion, which exceeds its total capital. The Fed, by common standards, is indeed insolvent.
Previously: Federal Reserve Claims It Has ‘Infinite Amount of Cash.’
Milton Friedman always gets the last laugh.
DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: California Goes Full Communist: Utilities to Base What They Charge on How Much You Make.
April 14, 2023
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY: Me Tarzan, You Cop. “This week we have Florida’s best-ever (or at least most recent) Tarzan impersonator, assault with a deadly bar appetizer, and Michigan Man doing a real-life fish-slapping dance.”
THE LAMPS ARE GOING OUT: Germany bids farewell to its last nuclear plants, eyes hydrogen future.
For 35 years, the Emsland nuclear power plant in northwestern Germany has reliably provided millions of homes with electricity and many with well-paid jobs in what was once an agricultural backwater.
Now, it and the country’s two other remaining nuclear plants are being shut down. Germany long ago decided to phase out both fossil fuels and nuclear power over concerns that neither is a sustainable source of energy.
The final countdown Saturday — delayed for several months over feared energy shortages because of the Ukraine war — is seen with relief by Germans who have campaigned against nuclear power.
Yet with energy prices stubbornly high and climate change a growing concern, some in the country and abroad are branding the move reckless.
“Some”: Very last week for German nuclear power enters, but most Germans consider nuclear exit a mistake.
IT WOULD BE MORE ACCURATE TO SAY THAT HE (OR HIS HANDLERS) IS CAUSING A BOOK TO BE WRITTEN: Does He Have Enough Crayons? Joe Biden Says He’s Writing a Book.
IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Ex-Biden official Sam Brinton accepts plea deal in Las Vegas luggage theft. “The former Biden administration official accused in two separate stolen-luggage cases in different states was ordered to pay one of their victims back — but given no jail time — Tuesday after they pleaded no contest to the bizarre theft.”
He… he pleaded.
HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): State-Sponsored Kidnapping Will Soon Become Reality in Washington.
LAUGHING WOLF ASKS: Which Missile?
My search-fu is off today as I can’t find the link, but a while back Glenn Reynolds was — I think — the first to openly comment on the twenty percent concept. At the height of the Cold War, the Brass was pushing the concept of 100 percent EWO (Emergency War Orders) ready. If the brass asked ‘Are you EWO ready?’ the answer better be ‘Sir, yes Sir! I am EWO ready Sir!’ Anyone with a brain knew that this was impossible, but it ensured that we could make the 80 percent threshold. That is, with all those complex systems, 80 percent of them would work. I suspect that 90 percent really was the goal, but…
Anyway, if the codes went out, at least 80 percent of the bombers would take off, 80 percent of the missiles would launch, 80 percent of the bombs would explode, etc.
Glenn was the first to say, in effect, that we would be lucky if twenty percent worked. The old equation has been stood on its head. I hope and pray we never find out, but I’m hitting a point where I think that if 10 percent worked I would be surprised. Complex systems require maintenance, testing, and upgrades. What’s the first thing that gets cut when Gen. Cyrus wants to have another struggle session on white rage during one of the lowest budgets in decades? Or, your newly minted “officer” who is really a civilian there to loot so he can maybe become a true oligarch, looks for easy money? Old story, on pretty much every side out there. Sigh.
Read the whole thing.
SHAKEN, NOT STIRRING: Young Actors Lack ‘Mental Capacity’ to Play James Bond Says Bond Casting Director.
THE CALIFORNICATION OF EVERYWHERE: California’s Cautionary Clean Energy.
California and clean energy seem like a natural fit. The state’s sunny coastlines, bright deserts, windy mountain passes, and deep river valleys should offer bountiful sources of cheap, all-natural solar, wind, and hydropower. Unfortunately, they don’t. Nightfall, droughts, and windless days take these renewable power sources offline. And when intermittent clean energy sources cannot keep up with demand, California power providers turn to natural gas and electricity imports that backstop the state’s grid, but which are now more expensive due to the insufficient storage and pipeline capacity created by the idealized rush to “cheap” clean energy.
Inefficient energy markets, unpredictable price spikes, unreliable power sources, and a hostile regulatory environment have all contributed to a 40 percent increase in the average California electric bill over the last five years. Retirees, low-income households, and middle-class families bear the brunt of the higher prices. Millions of Californians now stretch their already strained budgets just to cover food, fuel, shelter, and an ever-rising electricity bill.
President Biden’s new clean power proposal for a pollution-free power sector by 2035 threatens to make this California experience one that every state may soon enjoy. Under the president’s plan, natural gas has virtually no future in America. California and the rest of the country will be forced to replace natural gas power plants with renewable sources that will make electricity production unreliable and therefore more expensive.
By design.