Nice! A late Beatlemania in Southeast Asia? Just kidding!
Monday, September 07, 2026
Thailand and Singapore prime ministers perform The Beatles' 'Let It Be' in Bangkok
Israeli government-owned company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems signs agreement to buy VW plant in Osnabrück, Germany
Good news!
"... The factory will be repurposed for the production of components for the Iron Dome air defense system. Confirmation of the deal came this morning after long months of complicated negotiations.
The deal that has taken shape circumvents the opposition of the Qatar investment fund, which holds 10% of Volkswagen shares, to cooperate with Rafael in the production of defense systems. The deal will save thousands of jobs at the factory, which is scheduled to be closed next year by the car giant. ..."
Volkswagen Osnabrück and Rafael set for Strategic Partnership (original news release) "Aurelius and the State of Lower Saxony, together with Rafael, are planning an initial anchor project in the field of air defense. Further industrial partnerships and project are to follow Strategic Partnership for a Center of Excellence in Security and Defense Technologies"
Digitale Diplomatie und Wahlkampfhilfe: Wahlsieger Ulrich Siegmund bedankt sich bei Elon Musk
Gute Nachrichten! Wieweit darf der externe Einfluss auf deutsche Wahlen gehen?
Die völlig unsinnige Brandmauer muss weg! Zustände wie in einer Bananenrepublik!
"Die Nähe der AfD zu Trumps MAGA-Bewegung ist bekannt. Dass der US-Präsident und Elon Musk regelmäßig die Werbetrommel für die größte Oppositionspartei in Deutschland rühren, kontrastiert das eingeübte Promi-Verhalten auf erfrischende Weise. Ulrich Siegmund bedankte sich auf X für Elon Musks Unterstützung. ...
Nach dem Wahlsieg bedankte sich Ulrich Siegmund artig bei Elon Musk für dessen wiederkehrende Unterstützung und schrieb in einem Tweet auf X:
„Thank you, @elonmusk, for your support and for your clear and highly important perspective on the political developments of our time — including here in Germany.
If we take responsibility here, I would very much welcome the opportunity for strong and constructive cooperation. Germany would once again be a place worth investing in. Best regards from Saxony-Anhalt!“ ...
Dass auch Präsident Donald Trump am Wahlabend eine Hochrechnung postete und diese unkommentiert auf seiner Plattform Truth Social stehen ließ, spricht Bände.
Während sie in Berlin, Brüssel, Paris und London darauf hoffen, dass Donald Trump bald wieder Geschichte ist, um zur Tagesordnung im globalistischen Gewand zurückkehren zu können, hofft man im Weißen Haus ganz offensichtlich auf eine politische Wende im blauen Ton. ..."
Hippocampus-free memory consolidation
Amazing stuff! It took only two years from preprint to publication! Caution irony!
"During sleep, consolidation of all types of memories is thought to be initiated by hippocampal replay of spatiotemporal context. However, whether the hippocampus is the driver of, and needed for, memory consolidation in all conditions remains a matter of debate.
Thompson et al. showed that the consolidation of procedural memory occurs in the striatum, without the involvement of the hippocampus. Bilateral hippocampal lesions did not affect memory consolidation, suggesting that the hippocampus is not necessary for triggering procedural memory consolidation."
From the abstract:
"Sleep is crucial for consolidating all forms of memory and a core mechanism underlying this process is offline replay.
Current models propose that replay originates in the hippocampus and triggers reactivation across cortical and subcortical networks. However, conflicting evidence about the role of the hippocampus in offline consolidation of nondeclarative memories raises the question of whether hippocampal replay drives their consolidation.
Here we show that replay occurs in the dorsal striatum during offline consolidation of a procedural memory in mice, independently of the hippocampus, and that its content predicts subsequent performance improvements.
Neural sequences linked to salient behavioral events were prioritized for replay, with positive and negative behavioral outcomes having opposing effects on individual replay events.
All features of replay persisted despite complete bilateral hippocampal lesions. These findings demonstrate that procedural replay occurs independently of the hippocampus, indicating that replay-driven memory consolidation can operate through parallel, independent mechanisms."
Replay of procedural memory is independent of the hippocampus (open access, preprint published in 2024)
Fig. 1 Fig. 1: Learning and execution of the sequence learning task is dependent on the DLS.
Fig. 3 Replay of procedural neural activity in the striatum during sleep
Alternative for Germany party wins big in regional election but falls slightly short of majority
Good news! This outcome was expected for several months.
It is absolutely disgusting that almost all news media outlets call the AfD a far-right party (as if the Nazis were resurrected).
The AfD is right of center, but not extreme. However, how do you define center for German politics? Has the center not clearly moved to the left since reunification in 1990? The Wall fell and socialism spread everywhere in Germany.
Perhaps one of the biggest issues with the AfD is their relation to Putin the Terrible! Does the AfD properly distinguish between Russia and the megalomaniac, warmonger and war criminal Putin the Terrible!
Let's find out which party is willing to form a coalition government? Maybe the CDU would be the best choice. However, Chancellor Merz is a fool!
Had I been a citizen of Sachsen-Anhalt, I would have voted for the AfD too. Let's give them a chance to prove that they can make a positive difference in the banana republic of Germany! If the AfD fails, then don't vote for them anymore!
Erststimme means voting directly for a candidate
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The Zweitstimme determines the seats in parliament
Putin the Terrible Burns Through $29 Million Every Hour to Fund Its War Against Ukraine
When will the lethargic, apathetic Russian Slav(e)s/Serfs finally get rid of their last tsar, the megalomaniac, warmonger and war criminal Putin the Terrible! He is an ugly remnant of the Cold War and a former KGB agent. He is a wannabe Stalin. Please Russian people make the world a better, more peaceful place again! How many more young Russian men will be killed or maimed before you act!
In addition, Russia reportedly suffers over 30,000 war casualties every month!
"... But Russia’s economic elites have plenty of reasons to be worried: The fiscal situation is deteriorating quickly as the costs of the war continue to soar.
Newly released data on Russian spending in the first half of 2026 shows that military spending rose by 30 per cent compared with the same period last year, reaching 10.7 trillion rubles, or 4.7 per cent of projected GDP for 2026. Russia had originally planned to cut military spending this year. So far, the opposite is happening: If military spending continues at this pace, it will exceed 9 per cent of GDP by December, marking a new record in Russia’s post-Soviet history. ..."
Russian military spending soars, upending the Kremlin’s budget plans (original news release) "At the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin tried to dispel concerns about the state of Russia’s public finances. But the numbers tell a more troubling story for the Kremlin, adding to doubts about how long Russia can sustain the war, says Janis Kluge."
IRS Rule To Strip the Tax-Exempt Status for Private Schools' at all levels when Using DEI
Good news! Long overdue! DEI is racism, no doubt it is about skin color and illegal discrimination!
Just look around how many US companies and schools of higher education still feature DEI prominently on their websites!
"The Trump administration is hitting private schools where it hurts the most: their tax-exempt status. A new rule proposed by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on Thursday would strip private schools at all levels of education of tax-exempt status for using racial preference policies like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
The Treasury Department estimates that the new rule could affect the statuses of 18,000 private elementary, secondary, and post-secondary institutions, including colleges, universities, and trade and professional schools. ...
Harvard University may have started the trend in 2023 after the Supreme Court decided Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, ruling that race-based admissions schemes like affirmative action are unconstitutional. Immediately after, then-President Claudine Gay, the disgraced plagiarist who still retains a job at the school after resigning the presidency, signaled that prospective students could still benefit from communicating their race on their applications, hinting that admissions boards would still consider that factor. ..."
The Big Problems with the "Biggest Oil Deal" Ever by Jonah Goldberg. Really!
Is this prominent conservative journalist having another fit of Trump Derangement Syndrome?
"Yes, conservative writer Jonah Goldberg is widely known as a prominent "Never Trumper"." (Google Search)
It is amazing how many journalists make total fools out of themselves when they report about President Trump!
When timid US oil company executives refuse to grab the opportunity, then perhaps the Pentagon has to step in (most likely only temporarily).
"... I have no love for the Venezuelan regime, run by, in Trump’s words, “the Highly Respected Interim President” Delcy Rodriguez. But this is a “deal” that Rodriguez couldn’t refuse. We invaded [???] her country, abducted her criminal dictator boss, Nicolás Maduro, and made her our satrap [???]. ...
And who is the American partner? Well, the Pentagon, of course. Trump couldn’t get American oil companies to invest billions in Venezuela’s decrepit oil industry. ..."
Jonah Goldberg
The Emergent Symbolic Structure of Artificial Neural Networks
This could be an interesting paper by Paul Smolensky & Tal Linzen and their team.
Unfortunately, I could not find any other interesting figure in this paper other than Fig. 1.
From the abstract:
"Modern systems in artificial intelligence (AI) somehow excel in domains for which they seem poorly suited.
Intelligence has traditionally been modeled as operating over structured combinations of symbols, such as logical formulas.
However, the strongest modern AI systems are based on neural networks, which instead represent information in continuous vectors. Vectors seem inadequate for capturing the structure of language, logic, and other cognitive domains, yet neural networks achieve impressive performance in these areas.
How do they do it? In this work, we propose a potential answer: Despite appearances, perhaps the internal representations of neural networks implicitly realize symbolic structure.
In support of this hypothesis, we show that the vector representations of a variety of neural networks can be closely approximated with symbolic structures: we can replace the network's entire representation-generating process with a closed-form equation instantiating a symbolic structure, and the network's behavior remains largely unchanged.
This finding holds for both small-scale neural networks trained to manipulate lists as well as large language models (LLMs) operating in four domains that are central in symbolic traditions: arithmetic, logic, computer code, and language. Further, our symbolic approximation allows us to modify an LLM's behavior in targeted ways via precise interventions on its internal representations, showing that the LLM's behavior is reliant on the symbolic structures we have identified. This work provides a potential way to reconcile longstanding symbolic conceptions of intelligence with the vector-based nature of modern AI."
President Trump posts AI image depicting himself stock trading in Oval Office: ‘I do this for our country‘
He is having too much fun in office and it gives his many opponents another fit! 😊
If you had survived multiple assassination attempts, what would you do?
The United States struck a light-touch AI regulation accord with G20 members at the Innovation Ministerial, establishing America’s preferred global framework
Good news! Bravo! It would be a serious mistake to shackle machine learning & AI for reasons of hysteria and alarmism!
"The United States secured unanimous consensus from G20 members at the Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to adopt the non-binding Carolina Principles.
The Carolina Principles
Hands-off approach: Urges governments to avoid creating new regulatory bodies or broad, AI-specific rulebooks.
Novel considerations: Recommends reserving new rules strictly for unprecedented or high-risk situations rather than treating every tech evolution as an isolated policy crisis.
Industry alignment: Backed heavily by U.S. tech executives—including leaders from OpenAI, Nvidia, Meta, and SpaceX—who argued that heavy oversight threatens global competitiveness and slows breakthrough innovation. ..." (Google Search)
The White House weekly briefing
G20 Innovation Ministerial Concludes with Consensus Statement
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Cissy Houston Performs "Always On My Mind"
Enjoy! Wow, the voice of Whitney Houston's mother is also very impressive! I did not know!
Whitney & her mother Cissy Houston • ("Ain't No Way/You Send Me") • LIVE 1983
Enjoy! Whitney was only 20 years old. She grew in a house of music and love!
TUTTI: Toward generalizable audio-to-score transcription via fully synthesized data
This could be an interesting, new paper by Maosong Sun and his team! Tutti frutti!
What about bidirectional, i.e. from Score-to-Audio (S2A)?
From the abstract:
"Generalizable Audio-to-Score (A2S) transcription is fundamentally constrained by the severe scarcity of high-quality, real-world paired data.
Relying solely on existing human-annotated datasets often restricts the generalization of A2S models, limiting their efficacy primarily to single-instrumentation domains.
To break this dependency on scarce real-world data, we introduce TUTTI (Transformer for Unified audio-To-score Transcription trained on Synthetic multi-Instrumentation Data), a pre-training paradigm driven by a purely synthetic, large-scale dataset.
Rather than using human-composed scores, we leverage a symbolic music generation model to generate a massive, highly scalable multi-instrumentation corpus and create audio-score pairs with expressive acoustic characteristics. Capitalizing on the generated data, we employ a standard Transformer encoder-decoder architecture.
We empirically demonstrate that pre-training a unified attention-based model on generated, multi-instrumentation data yields a consistently stronger foundational representation than single-instrumentation training.
When fine-tuned with downstream real-world datasets, TUTTI outperforms previous approaches, establishing new overall state-of-the-art results across various A2S baselines.
Notably, TUTTI shows remarkable cross-instrument transferability, effectively adapting to unseen instruments with highly competitive performance. ..."
A High Burden: The Growing Cost of Permitting Compliance in Arizona’s Home Improvement Market
Bad news! Are the bureaucratic hurdles in Arizona even for home improvement too high! It seems so!
From CSI email: "
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Comparing Business Investment per Worker In Canada and the United States, 2007–2024
Bad news! This blog post is delayed. The study was published in mid July 2026.
And now Canada's PM Carney wants a carnage with the US over bilateral trade? If you are in a glass houses don't throw stones!
"Comparing Business Investment per Worker In Canada and the United States, 2007–2024
- Economists have warned of Canada’s weak business investment, particularly compared to the United States. This should concern Canadians as strong business investment is key to higher incomes, greater economic prosperity, and improved living standards.
- Real ($2017) non-residential business investment per worker in the United States exceeded that of Canada in every year from 2007 to 2024:
Canada’s business investment declined by $852 per worker from $17,345 to $16,493 while US investment grew by $11,203 per worker from $19,352 to $30,555. - The gap between Canada and the United States increased significantly after 2014 as real business investment began to decline in Canada.
In 2014, Canada invested about 87 cents per worker for every dollar invested in the United States; in 2024, investment was 54 cents for every US dollar. - In 2014, three Canadian provinces had significantly higher real business investment per worker than the United States ($23,263):
Alberta ($56,401),
Newfoundland & Labrador ($53,779), and
Saskatchewan ($48,715)
By 2024, real US business investment per worker ($30,555) exceeded that of any Canadian province except Saskatchewan ($33,386).
..."
Staatsquote in der Schweiz ist laut IWP deutlich grösser als gedacht
Haben sich die Schweizer schön gerechnet?
"Der Schweizer Staat dürfte in den nächsten Jahren grösser werden. Bundesrat und Parlament wollen für die Armee und die AHV mehr Geld ausgeben – und dafür die Mehrwertsteuer erhöhen. So wird wohl bald ein grösserer Teil dessen, was jährlich in der Schweiz erwirtschaftet wird, durch die Kassen des Bundes fliessen. Und dadurch wird auch die sogenannte Staatsquote zunehmen. Sie ist definiert als der Anteil der Staatsausgaben gemessen am Bruttoinlandprodukt (BIP)."
"Die Schweiz ist stolz auf ihren schlanken Staat. Das bekannteste Mass scheint ihr recht zu geben: 2023 entsprachen die Staatsausgaben 33,4 Prozent der Wirtschaftsleistung.
Nach Irland war das der zweittiefste Wert Europas. Auch über die Zeit blieb diese Staatsquote bemerkenswert stabil.
Ein neues Policy Paper ... zeigt, dass hinter der tiefen Staatsquote mehr staatliche Dynamik steckt, als sie vermuten lässt. ...
Das BIP umfasst allerdings auch Abschreibungen, also den Wertverlust von Maschinen, Gebäuden und Software. Dieser Teil der Wirtschaftsleistung wird benötigt, um den bestehenden Kapitalstock zu erhalten, und steht daher weder dem Staat noch Privaten für zusätzliche Ausgaben zur Verfügung. Zieht man die Abschreibungen vom BIP ab, erhält man das Nettoinlandsprodukt (NIP). Der deutsche Finanzwissenschafter Prof. Dr. Alfons Weichenrieder hat jüngst gezeigt, wie stark die Wahl zwischen BIP und NIP das Bild verändern kann ...
Für die Schweiz macht dieser Wechsel des Massstabs einen besonders grossen Unterschied: Die Abschreibungen entsprechen hier 23,4 Prozent des BIP, dem zweithöchsten Wert im EU/EFTA-Vergleich. ...
Was hinter den ausgeglichenen [öffentlichen] Haushalten steckt
Neben der tiefen Staatsquote gelten auch die seit der Jahrtausendwende meist ausgeglichenen öffentlichen Haushalte als Beleg für die Schweizer Ausgabendisziplin. Doch die Entwicklung von Ausgaben und Einnahmen zeigt, wie dieser Ausgleich zustande kam.
Die Ausgabenquote blieb zwischen 1995 und 2024 mit 33,4 beziehungsweise 33,6 Prozent nahezu unverändert.
Die Einnahmenquote stieg im selben Zeitraum hingegen von 31,5 auf 34,2 Prozent. Der Haushaltsausgleich kam damit vor allem über höhere Einnahmen zustande. ..."
Who Was Eva Reuter? Ukrainian Artist-Turned-Medic Killed Rescuing Strike Victims at 25 engaged to an American serviceman
R.I.P heroine!
"... Born on Oct. 4, 2000, Eva was known as the woman who set aside brushes for tourniquets, paint for blood. ..."
Mourners gathered at Kyiv's St. Michael's Golden-Domed Cathedral before processing to Maidan Nezalezhnosti, where her fiancé, an American serviceman known as "Exile," delivered an emotional tribute to her courage and sacrifice."
A photo of Eva Reuter, brought by mourners to St. Michael’s Golden Domed Cathedral on Sept. 3, 2026, to honor Reuter, who was killed in a Russian double-tap strike on Kyiv.
Home delivery of groceries in the US is very disappointing
I spent a few hours checking out Instacart, Uber Eats, Aldi, Fry's Food Markets, Doordash here in the Phoenix Metro area!
Compared to how easy it is to get almost anything (including fresh) delivered to your home in China, this is a total failure in the US! The US is far behind!
There at least two issues that make it quite inconvenient to place orders for groceries to be home delivered:
- Separation of groceries and alcohol (a typical US problem)
- Separation of grocery stores. Do I as the customer care which store delivers the item that I ordered? At least one of the above mentioned services than has customer stuck with that same store for any following order for other items. This needs fixing! My suggestion have stores deliver ordered goods to a distribution warehouse and then to customer.
For now, I have settled on Amazon for home delivery of groceries. The ordering process was much more intuitive than those of the competitors. Unfortunately, Amazon only offers Bashas and Whole Foods. Amazon also tries to sneak in their Amazon Prime offerings. What I did not like was the goods were delivered to our entrance door without being boxed nor bagged.
The search function on many of these websites are a disaster! Here is a very typical example, I looked for "box red wine 5 liters". What did Doordash show me: White wines, 3 liter boxes, other bottled wines and so on.
The leaders of India and Kazakhstan recently made unusually direct remarks to the Russian president about ending the war with the Ukraine
Good news! However, will this have an impact on Putin the Terrible?
Will the Russian oligarchs be impressed?
Hopefully, the domestic and international pressure on the megalomaniac and war criminal Putin the Terrible is mounting!
"At a heavily scripted [SCO] summit in Central Asia recently [end of August], Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi appeared to break from the choreography momentarily to chastise President Vladimir Putin of Russia, a country that has been a close partner of New Delhi since the Soviet era.
It was time “to move on from an endless war to an end of war,” he told an expressionless Putin, seated next to him in an ornate reception room at the summit in Kyrgyzstan. ..."
"In a face-to-face meeting, Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev told Vladimir Putin that it was time to freeze Russia's war in Ukraine. The appeal to the Russian leader came at a summit in Omsk on July 25. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov later said "a freeze as such is impossible," adding, "The main condition is that we must achieve our goals." Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha welcomed the Kazakh leader's efforts calling it "a realistic, timely, and wise message." ..."
Global homicide rate fell by 14 percent between 2015 and 2024, from 5.9 victims per 100,000 people to 5.1.
Good news! Apparently, the male homicide rate went down much more than the female homicide rate (see chart below)
Louisiana will open a first recreational alligator hunting season for wild alligators in 50 years
How about some alligator steak?
"In October, Louisiana will open a new recreational alligator hunting season, thanks in part to a dramatic recovery of the state’s wild alligator population.
Since the early 1960s, the estimated number of wild alligators in Louisiana has grown from fewer than 100,000 to more than 3 million."
Louisiana gears up for first recreational alligator hunt in more than 50 years "State to offer up to 5,000 trappers chance to snare reptiles whose numbers have risen to 3m from fewer than 100,000"
Ukraine is considering legalizing its porn industry to fund its defense budget
Headline of the day! Necessity is the mother of invention.
"Ukrainian authorities have been unable to curtail a vast and lucrative pornography industry, which officials say operates with the protection of corrupt police. In a push to legalize porn in Ukraine, one lawmaker argues that doing so wouldn’t only help the fight against corruption, but would also raise up to $25 million a year in tax revenue—enough to pay for 30,000 drones for the war with Russia."
Ukraine Considers Legalizing Porn Industry to Fund Its War Chest (behind paywall) "Lawmakers say taxing the country’s thousands of OnlyFans models could collect $25 million a year"
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is using coffee, softball and speed dating to convert the curious and win new members
No surprise! DSA has to compensate with feel good for an offensive agenda!
When will the spook of DSA be over?
"The Democratic Socialists of America have an endless buffet of social events to attract new members and more closely bind existing ones to the movement. Across the country, fast-growing chapters host barbecues, beach days, running clubs, happy hours, karaoke and even “Socialist Speed Dating.” The goal is to turn the “DSA-curious” into active members."
The DSA Is Using Coffee With Comrades and Socialist Softball to Convert the Curious (behind paywall) "Fast-growing chapters use nonstop social activities to bring in new members and form closer bonds with existing ones"
AI is turning everyday retail investors into mini quant funds
Good news!
"Americans are vibe-coding trading algorithms and handing over their stock portfolios to AI agents that can buy and sell assets on their own. For the retail crowd, sophisticated strategies were once accessible only to the tech-savvy few. Now, AI assistants can build an automated strategy from simple written prompts, allowing traders to crunch numbers at a superhuman scale without even watching the market. But skeptics worry the technology could expose less-experienced investors to new dangers."
He’s Letting AI Agents Invest His Money. They Even Have Names (behind paywall) "Americans are vibe-coding trading algorithms and handing over their stock portfolios to AI agents. Welcome to the world of the robot retail investor."
Saturday, September 05, 2026
Led Zeppelin - Stairway To Heaven (Live at Earl's Court 1975) [Official Video]
Enjoy! This is an almost 11 minutes long version!
Whitney Houston • "Home" (Her National Television Debut) • 1983
Enjoy! What a great performance! She was only 20 years old then!
How can India stay ahead in the global medical tourism race?
Good news! Cheap, immediate access to expert doctors and more.
However, most medical tourists come from neighboring countries not Western countries.
Most recently, Indian medical facilities are rapidly advancing treatment and diagnostic technology by e.g. integrating AI.
Nepal Was the Warning. What China Is Building in Tibet Is a Real Threat to India and Nepal - a giant hydropower dam in Tibet near a active geological fault line
Very recommendable! China most likely has a lot do do with the latest natural catastrophy affecting Tibet and Nepal.
The video also mentions that China built a dozen or so dams along the Mekong river thereby controlling or worsen droughts in southeast Asia.
China is not bound by any international agreements regarding its massive use of hydro power on some of the most important rivers of the world reaching the Indian subcontinent and southeast asia.
Tether: a secretive $200 billion crypto currency company
Food for thought! The transition to digital currencies is not easy! Digital currencies provide a once in a lifetime opportunity to privatize money!
Why not privacy for a private company if it so chooses? Just because the company is large by some measure and executes significant transactions does not automatically impose or require more disclosure (as e.g. some journalists may wish).
Does the company break any criminal laws? Often banking and money transactions are more successful and best done discreetly!
"About Tether
Tether was founded by a group of Bitcoin enthusiasts and early adopters, passionate about facilitating the use of fiat currencies in a digital manner.
In 2014, the company launched Tether.to, a blockchain-enabled platform aimed at disrupting the conventional financial system with a more modern approach to money."
"Tether Operations, S.A. de C.V. is an El Salvador-based entity and part of the group of companies that issues and manages the USD₮ stablecoin." (Google Search)
"Tether, which mints the world’s most widely used crypto token, is likely one of the most valuable private companies on earth, with an estimated value of $200 billion, exceeding the total share value of McDonald’s.
The company’s token, known as USDT, is a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar that has become the backbone of a parallel banking system pervading parts of the world.
The token has also become a key tool for money launderers for industrial-scale scam centers, which operate out of grim office complexes across Southeast Asia. Tether’s assistance in law enforcement investigations has become highly sought-after by agencies around the world struggling to address surging crypto crime. ...
But who owns this powerful and controversial firm? The company has never given a full picture publicly. ..."
Russian General Tied to Kyiv Children’s Hospital Attack Reportedly Shot outside a home in Russia
This is not the first high ranking Russian military reported being assassinated inside Russia related to the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War.
"A Russian general accused by Ukraine of ordering the 2024 missile strike on Kyiv’s Okhmatdyt children’s hospital was critically wounded in a shooting in Russia’s Saratov Oblast on Thursday, Sept. 3, according to an unverified report.
The Russian Telegram channel Dosye Shpiona claimed that Maj. Gen. Nikolai Varpakhovich was attacked at around 7 a.m. outside a private home in the settlement of Probuzhdenie.
“Two shots were fired from a pistol, targeting the head and abdomen,” the channel said. ..."
"... Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky later alluded to the attack in his daily address, saying “we will also carry out our own asymmetric operations in response” to Russia.
“The Russian criminals did not hide - they will be found. And today brings another confirmation of this fact, a confirmation in the Saratov region,” he added. ...
The Security Service of Ukraine and the country’s Prosecutor General formally charged him with war crimes three days ago ..."
Nikolai Varpakhovich (Telegram)
IOP Publishing: Exploring inclusion, innovation, and equitable resilience in physics. Really!
The British journal publisher IOP Publishing still proudly promotes DEI ideology on their website. Appalling!
"IOP Publishing (formerly Institute of Physics Publishing) is a society-owned scientific publisher that serves as the publishing arm of the Institute of Physics (IOP). As a major international academic publisher based in Bristol, United Kingdom, it operates as a scientific charity where 100% of its financial profits are redirected back into the Institute to support public good, physics research, and professional resources for physicists." (Google Search)
"Exploring inclusion, innovation, and equitable resilience [???] in physics
As we also look ahead to the future of physics and STEM as a whole, we're reminded that progress in these fields is driven by diverse identities and perspectives.
Inclusion fuels innovation, and the contributions of BIPOC individuals, the LGBTQ+ community, women, immigrants, researchers with disabilities and neurodivergences, and all scientists from every stage and walk of life continue to shape STEM's trajectory in meaningful ways. ..."
German owned grocery store chain Aldi home delivery charges for bags in Arizona
This reminds me very much of good old Germany where such stupid rules (a fee for shopping bags) have been implemented at least since 2016 if not earlier!
"Q: How much does ALDI grocery delivery service cost?
A: Delivery fees are determined by a variety of factors, such as delivery window and location.
ALDI shopping bags will be used to bag customer delivery orders. Similar to an in-store transaction, customers will be charged a small fee for bags used. A service fee may also be included to cover operating costs for the service."
P.S. Plus the Aldi website product search function really sucks. Lot's of wrong articles to straight forward searches!
North Carolina on Friday became the first state to begin mailing midterm ballots. Really!
Way too early in my opinion! Mail in voting is a form of voting most prone to fraud (e.g. double voting).
Probably, a good practice would be not to send out mail ballots earlier than four weeks before election.
Midterm Mail Ballots Start to Go to Voters as Litigation Over Trump's Order Creates Uncertainty "Statewide mail voting for this year’s midterm elections is kicking off amid a churning legal battle over President Donald Trump’s attempts to limit the practice"
Look how totally Google AI fails on this simple question. Must be a hot potato topic!
What went wrong with the triple infanticide by mother in 2023 aka the Clancy murder case in Massachusetts
A lot! The news reporting about this case was incompetent and atrocious! Very lazy journalism!
Caveat I am not familiar with the details of the case. I did not follow the case very closely.
Here are some of the issues:
- Why did the prosecutor not indict the husband as well? What did the husband know and what did he do about it? My guess is the prosecutor in this case was a dilettante!
- When did the claimed postpartum psychosis first occur in the defendant? Only after the birth of the third child? If it occured after the first child, why did she have two more children?
- What kind of suicide attempt was it that the defendant committed? Very few news reports mentioned this at all that she cut her wrists and jumped out of the window after the infanticide.
Genome Duplication (polyploidy) Is a Radical Evolutionary Gamble
Recommendable, but a very long article!
"... Scientists suspect that an organism inheriting three, four, or more sets of chromosomes instead of two (a condition called polyploidy) is, in most cases, a fatal error of cell division. Only a tiny fraction of whole-genome duplication events are thought to stabilize in a lineage. But those that do can have significant consequences.
Emerging studies ... are revealing that genome duplication can be a dramatic, if risky, injection of genetic novelty that fuels evolutionary innovation. It’s “a cheap and easy way to generate a bunch of heritable variation that can be then quickly repurposed for new stuff,” ... who has watched yeast double its genome in his long-term experiments on multicellularity ...
Spiders’ silk-spinning organs
vertebrates’ large and complex brains
species radiations of legumes, grasses, and
brassicas (including broccoli and kale); and the tomato plant’s fleshy fruit
all of these evolutionary inventions, and more, were made possible by genome duplication events. ...
Advances in whole-genome sequencing are changing that. Studies across the tree of life are finding that genome duplication isn’t exactly an infrequent occurrence.
Among plants, it’s hard to avoid ...: All seed plants living today have experienced at least one ancient whole-genome duplication, and many have undergone more. Barnacles, insects, trout, and arachnids carry evidence of ancient duplications in their genomes.
Biologists hotly debate whether the significant evolutionary changes that led to jawed vertebrates, from hagfish to humans, are connected by ancient gene duplications hundreds of millions of years ago. ...
evidence of a past genome duplication event alongside indications that the cells were in the process of pruning back excess DNA. ... 1997 Nature paper on the subject helped turn increasing attention to both polyploidy and the inverse process, rediploidization, in which an organism retains some of its doubled genes and discards others, ultimately bringing the genome back to a streamlined diploid state. ..."
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