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Tucker is only 54, so he's a good American - not one of those degenerate communists collecting welfare from Medicare.
In any case Tucker and Alex Jones have volunteered to be leaders of the murder-squad liquidating older Americans taking Medicare benefits. Many members of the group, Tea Party Seniors with Guns, are vigilant and ready to join the Military Maneuvers Against Medicare at a moments notice, just as soon as Trump gives the word.
They're all excited by the chance to watch their elderly heads splatter open just like so many turkeys - maybe even on live TV. Or maybe just work these old wrinkle-bags to death on grand public work projects like Trump's GAWP, the Great American Water Project sending water from the Great Lakes to Arizona and Nevada.
All good leaders murder people, says Tucker Carlson the wildly popular Republican whisperer.
U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Jones has been appointed to manage Trump businesses in New York, following their fraud conviction decision which bars Donald Trump and his sons from managing any New York businesses.
Prior to becoming a judge in 1995 Jones was a federal prosecutor in charge of organized crime prosecutions, appointed by Rudy Giuliani. As a federal judge, she oversaw the $11 billion accounting-fraud case against WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers, sentencing him to 25 years in prison.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/meet-the-former-organized-crime-prosecutor-now-overseeing-the-trump-organization-077d4c34
Tucker Carlson says a good leader has to kill people, some kill more than others.
Little wonder Carlson supports Donald Trump - Republicans call to liquidate the socialists collecting welfare from Medicare.
Tucker Carlson, when asked about Alexei Navalny, opposition leaders and journalists in Russia: “Every leader kills people. Some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people.”pic.twitter.com/pE4SIKdaIO
— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) February 16, 2024
The City of Los Angeles and creditors move to seize the Billion Dollar Oceanwide Plaza project abandoned by Chinese Communist Party leader Lu Zhiqiang three years ago.
.
Lu Zhiqiang and his family spent tens of billions of Dollars of mysteriously acquired money around the world including the condominium and hotel tower next to Staples Center in Los Angeles, now covered in graffiti after being left unguarded for 3 years.
Lu's company Oceanwide Developments is being sued by banks throughout China - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2023-01-23/developer-oceanwide-and-tycoon-lu-zhiqiang-sued-in-1-billion-loan-dispute-101991718.html
Lu Zhiqiang voting as a member of the Communist Party Standing Committee
Oceanwide Plaza as imagined by architect CallisonRTKL
Oceanwide Plaza after being left unguarded for three years
Nvidia's long-teased GH200 CPU-GPU Superchips are finally going on sale, and the 1,000-Watt chip – built to run in servers and handle hefty AI training and inference tasks – is even available in a workstation from German startup gptshop.ai.
Bernhard Guentner, the brains behind the upstart, built the GH200 into a workstation after becoming unsatisfied with the performance of Nvidia's consumer grade RTX 4090s for running large models and due to his preference for keeping work out of the cloud.
He therefore modded a QCT server to fit into a consumer PC case. And if you happen to have between €47,500 ($50,900) and €59,500 ($63,700) handy, he says he'll build one for you too. - https://www.theregister.com/Author/Tobias-Mann Wed 14 Feb 2024
"I started experimenting with Nvidia's RTX 4090s. I bought a bunch of them and put them into a mining rack and just ran some tests. I quickly figured out that is not the way to go," Guentner explained in an interview with The Register.
While many large language models available from repositories like Hugging Face, Guentner quickly ran into a problem familiar to anyone who has tinkered with AI inference: the bigger the model, the more video memory you need.
This led Guentner to the GH200. First teased at GTC in 2022, https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/09/nvidia_gracehopper_hbm3e/ the chip combines Nvidia's 72-core Arm Neoverse V2-based CPU and 480GB of LPDDR5x memory with an H100 GPU equipped with 96GB of HBM3 or 144GB of HBM3e memory.
That's enough memory to run a model like Meta's LLama 2 70B at FP8 – or potentially FP16 in the case of https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/09/nvidia_gracehopper_hbm3e/ the 144GB config – entirely within the HBM. In theory, the high-speed interconnect between the CPU and GPU should allow you to fit even larger models into LPDD5x memory, if you're willing to sacrifice performance.
Performance and memory wise, the GH200 was exactly what Guentner was looking for. However, fitting it into a more traditional workstation platform with fans that don't spin at a deafening 20,000-plus RPM was another matter entirely.
"I looked at the power figures, and it's not more than 1,000 watts, so it was clear to me that it was totally possible to put it in a desktop," he noted.
While system builders have been packing server components into custom workstations for years, getting the GH200 and its motherboard to fit into the case wasn’t simple. Unlike most server platforms which have a high-degree of modularity – for example you can usually take a CPU or power supply from one system and swap it into another compatible one – Guentner was stuck using components sourced from the QCT system.
"I asked them if you can buy the super chip and everything separately, but they say not even that is possible," he said of OEM systems – adding that in the longer term he hopes to transition to more traditional ATX-style components where possible.
Getting everything into the case – an off the shelf full tower – took about two weeks and some modding.
Guentner rated cooling the toughest part of his build.
The GH200 isn't a cool chip. As we mentioned earlier, it's rated for a kilowatt of power and thermal dissipation when fully loaded up. If that weren't enough, the GH200 pulled from the QCT system features a heat sink designed for a low profile server – and you can't exactly go out and buy an aftermarket cooler for the thing.
But with enough Noctua fans lining the walls of the case, and even one blowing directly down onto the motherboard, Guentner was able to bring temps down to acceptable levels without the risk of hearing loss.
To validate the effectiveness of the cooling setup, Guentner has also provided FOSS-friendly site Phoronix https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-gh200-gptshop-benchmark remote access to the system for benchmarking. So far the team has only tested the GH200's Grace CPU, which has proven to be quite competitive against a variety of Epyc and Xeon Scalable-based systems.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/12/nvidia_workstation_gpu/ Nvidia reckons this itty-bitty workstation GPU won't run up your power bill https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/09/nvidia_custom_silicon/ Nvidia wants a piece of the custom silicon pie, reportedly forms unit to peddle IP https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/26/thermal_management_is_changing/
How thermal management is changing in the age of the kilowatt chip https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/06/amd_mi300_gpu/ AMD slaps together a silicon sandwich with MI300-series APUs, GPUs to challenge Nvidia's AI empire. For the moment, the system is just a prototype. But Guentner figures there's probably a market for high-performance workstations powered by Nvidia's Superchips, and plans to build and sell systems based on the design.
"There is demand – even higher than I expected. When I started, I expected to maybe sell one a month or so because it's highly specialized and the price tag is pretty significant," he told us.
These systems really won't come cheap. However, Guentner insists that there's not much he can do considering the prices Nvidia and its OEM/ODM partners are charging for the GH200.
The systems start at €47,500 and can be configured with a variety of add-on cards and storage – including Nvidia's BlueField 3 data processing units and RTX 4060 for video output. Guentner is also working on a liquid-cooled variant of the system.
Guentner may not have the market for GH200 workstations to himself for long, as Nvidia has https://docs.nvidia.com/dgx/dgx-station-a100-user-guide/intro-to-station-a100.html previously built workstations based on its top-specced accelerators. ®
The Lincoln Project turns to AI to bring back Fred Trump
Some Republicans are arguing that any 28 year old can run for President, but due to the "technicalities of the Constitution" they wouldn't be able to serve as President if elected, so maybe they could appoint someone else to serve as their substitute.
Or maybe the elected Vice-President becomes President if they're age 35 or older.
Technically, even a two year old can become the nominee for President.
Coldwell-Banker CBRE - Hard times in commercial real estate leads to building owners offering things like "double commissions" and sometimes a sports car thrown in for leasing a complete floor, which the brokerage firm benefits from as well as the sales agents.
It doesn't mean it's good times for building owners though.
Russia threatens to create a big nuclear flash 340 miles above the Earth to destroy those annoying Starlink communications satellites located over Ukraine.
"I've never liked those deep state satellites, I told Putin to just do what ever he wants to do to them - blow them out of the sky - let those Europe people deal with it, and you know they'll never do anything because they don't speak English, except the English, but they're really good friends of mine because they do what I tell them - which is really smart. Smart people always listen to me because I know more than nuclear people know about nuclear weapons - and that's a lot to know."
It seems pretty clear smaller wifi equipment makers, like Foxconn-owned Linksys/Belkin won't be able to or don't want to invest enough in the consumer software for mesh and other tech systems to provide the same seamless customer software experience that Google Nest and Amazon eero provide and want to provide.
The constant improvements in how our existing Amazon products work due to ongoing software updates - it's relentless. New and improved capabilities for free for existing older hardware. What's to object to?
It's like chipmaker AMD making virtually no investment in software vs Nvidia which focuses on customer users needs making their chips easier to use for many needs.
I see this with streaming too. All the innovation is coming from Google and their, to me horribly misnamed, YouTube TV internet-cable-TV product. I think the name misleads you to think this $72 a month cable TV replacement product has something to do with YouTube, but it has nothing to do with YouTube and uses a completely different webpage and superior experience to YouTube.
This financially massive Google company has stomped into the cable business, able to negotiate better deals than others, with software engineers creating the premier customer experience and the budget to do so.
Hulu+Live inevitably has to match almost every new thing Google offers, while the cable companies are simply in death spiral mode charging more and delivering less until one by one their customers leave them. Direct TV is the only real competitor to Google and Hulu, which can offer significantly more channels for $160 a month instead of $72. But there's a shitload of extra streaming options you can add for an extra $88 a month.
Nvidia’s Chat With RTX. - https://www.pcmag.com/news/hands-on-with-nvidias-chat-with-rtx-leverage-your-geforce-card-for-local
This software is designed to take advantage of the tensor cores in a typical late-model GeForce RTX card and give you an easy-to-use AI-driven tool for multiple tasks...including running your own local large language model (LLM) with documents and data you provide.
Nvidia’s Chat With RTX software is still in its early stages of development, but beta version 0.2 releases today, February 13. Currently, it offers support only for Nvidia GeForce RTX 30-series and RTX 40-series graphics cards. It’s designed to take advantage of the tensor cores inside of these cards to support various AI-driven functions.
Members of the Trump Brigade, dressed as Nazis, marched Saturday night through the Boston suburb of Arlington to the home of Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D) where they were met by by a significant force of Massachusetts State Troopers protecting the Governor's home.
As they marched through the liberal community with torches they chanted, "Whose streets? Our streets".
At Governor Healey's home, the group's members lit additional red traffic flares, and held these aloft with stiff arm Hitler salutes. They unfurled a banner reading: "WE'RE NOT GOING ANYWHERE."
Leader of the Trump Brigade posted a video of the encounter outside the governor's home on Telegram, a social network favored by many extremists, along with a message declaring that the point of the protest was "to show the world that lawfare will not intimidate New England Nationalists," as well as to whine about what the hate group terms a "migrant invasion." "New England is ours, non-Aryans must go."
I expect we'll see an increasing number of attempts by the Trump Brigade and their supporters to try to intimidate normal Americans across America.
Like the non-Aryan Hungarians, Republican leaders like Tucker Carlson, and these Trump Brigade members, who would otherwise want to murder each other, all want to join a united Russia under Putin.
Russia, a country with a GDP equal to Costco's revenues. Bizarre, but there it is.
Like RFK Jr and Donald Trump, they're mentally ill, but also armed and serious in intent.
That's good trading. You were able to get last week's price on ANET thanks to our shocking 3.1% annual CPI.
The UK CPI is announced tomorrow, expected to continue at December's rate of 4.1% with booze and transport pushing the indices higher.
I'm not sure Sequoia Holdings has IPOed and birds or squirrels
Russia increases the age limit of military personnel by 20 years, from age 40 to age 65 for troops and to age 70 for officers.
This legislation responds to critical personnel shortages following significant losses during their invasion of Ukraine. Putin desperately needs a Trump victory.
Elderly Russians prepare to be inducted into the military
The only green holding I have today is CFLT
Sequoia Holdings tend to support their children in downturns.
A Super Bowl ad touting the independent presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and invoked President John F. Kennedy drew the ire of the Kennedy family.
“My cousin’s Super Bowl ad used our uncle’s faces- and my Mother’s. She would be appalled by his deadly health care views,” Bobby Shriver, the former mayor of Santa Monica and the son of Eunice Kennedy and Sargent Shriver, wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Respect for science, vaccines, & health care equity were in her DNA. She strongly supported my health care work at @ONECampaign & @RED which he opposes.”
Former California First Lady Maria Shriver reposted the message, while her brother Mark Shriver wrote that he agreed with the message, “simple as that.”
--- The American Values Super PAC which funded the RFK Superbowl ad is a major donor to former President Trump. ---
**********************************************************************************************************
If I wanted to vote for a mentally ill person to become President, Robert F Kennedy Jr and Donald J Trump are the two obvious choices.
This is not pretend, or a joke, they're both actually mentally ill people running for President of the United States. How fucking stupid do you have to be to vote for Kennedy or Trump. 'Clubbed with two bricks in your face' level stupid.
Chat GPT4 aka Microsoft CoPilot
x
I just remembered this detail from the Linksys experience I know you'll appreciate.
When we bought the Linksys Velops mesh system 3 years ago their "phone app" to setup and manage the mesh was non-functional, so I opened the webpage in a browser with the usual 192.168.1.1
If you want to set up or manage a Linksys Velops mesh system you have to click on one particular item on this webpage
It's not in the 2 page manual of instructions. I had to make a long involved tech support call to find out "the secret".
This is STILL how this Linksys website works for their Velops mesh. Why is accessing the mesh setup a secret? "Linksys Smart WiFi" This gives a whole new tortured meaning to the word "smart". Even following many "upgrades" it's fair to describe the Linksys "smartphone app" as non-functional.
To access Velops mesh installation or management you have to click on the CA at the bottom right of the webpage.
This click refreshes this webpage, then showing additional mesh options, and your current mesh installation.
AI’s winners and losers have a clear precedent you’ve never thought about: The canal boom of the 18th century
https://fortune.com/2024/02/10/lessons-ai-investors-18th-century-canal-boom-oppenheimer-goldman-sachs/ - Will Daniel - Sat, February 10, 2024
With Wall Street lauding artificial intelligence as a driver of the “fourth industrial revolution,” and pushing investors to take advantage of the “gold rush” as soon as possible, AI leaders like Microsoft and Nvidia are soaring amid the rapid earnings growth. With all this in mind, investors are surely wondering: Just how long can AI stocks’ run last?
To answer that question, Peter Oppenheimer, Goldman Sachs’ chief global equity strategist and head of macro research in Europe, looks to history, which offers plenty of lessons.
Oppenheimer spoke with Fortune about his new book, Any Happy Returns, which details the rise of a number of groundbreaking technologies, and how investors have navigated the upheaval they’ve created. The discussion even included one under-the-radar, and somewhat unexpected, technological marvel: canals.
Now largely forgotten, canals revolutionized transportation, allowing for quick transport of goods to ports and creating tremendous profits to boot—at least initially.
The first canals in the U.K. were built in the mid-1700s to ferry heavy cargo, such as coal and iron ore, as well as fresh produce around the country. The new infrastructure shortened shipping times and its popularity allowed investors who financed canals to make strong returns. Their success drew in crowds of new investors, and by the 1790s, a bubble developed in canal stocks on the London Stock Exchange. As is typically the case, that bubble eventually burst, and canal stocks turned out to be a bad investment for many. But the canals themselves remained, helping to drive industrial output and productivity growth for years to come.
This rise and decline has a parallel in today’s AI boom, with two key lessons for investors.
Lesson 1: Networking effects take time—but maybe less time with AI
First, while canals were a revolution that enabled heavy cargo to be transported [url=https://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/The-Transportation-Revolution_.pdf]faster[/url] and more affordably than the horses and carts before them, their impact wasn’t felt right away. “Innovation that spurs change typically takes quite a long time to fully impact the real economy and boost productivity,” Oppenheimer said, arguing “networking effects” need to work their magic first.
“In other words, things like canal and steam technology were hugely transformative, but it wasn't until you actually built enough steam engines and dug enough canals, and then built factories by the canals, and so on and so forth, that you really saw the impact coming through,” he explained.
The Manchester Ship Canal, circa 1895.
So for all the hype about AI’s ability to boost worker productivity and reduce costs for businesses, the reality is, change takes time after a technological revolution.
But there is some good news for AI investors hoping to see the technology used effectively as soon as possible. “I think with AI, the gap between the technology being developed and its real impact on the economy may be a lot shorter,” Oppenheimer said.
AI already sits on the back of existing technologies, like the internet, cloud computing, and smartphones, which means it can “probably be employed very quickly, and have quite a big impact quite rapidly on productivity,” he argued.
Like canals (and, later, the steam engine), AI has the potential to radically boost productivity. In a 1904 book titled The Canal System of England, Hubert Gordon Thompson detailed the cost savings and production increases that new canals brought to England during the 18th century. In the middle of the century, he noted, trade was “greatly hindered by the heavy expense and the lack of adequate means of conveying” products to ports. Canals solved that problem. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Canal_System_of_England
Take the route between Manchester and Liverpool as an example. When the Mersey and Irwell canals were created in 1724 and 1734, connecting the two cities, the cost of transporting goods between them plummeted by 70%. And once the larger and more direct Bridgewater canal was completed in 1761, Gordon Thompson wrote, transportation costs were cut in half again—all with “a better service was given than that provided by either of the forementioned routes.”
Gordon Thompson also put some facts behind the increase in overall trade due to the canals. In 1761, it “was estimated” that the total quantity of goods carried between Manchester and Liverpool was just 2,000 tons per year, with an average cost of 1 pound sterling per mile over the roughly 35-mile trip, he wrote. A century later, volume had increased by a factor of 5,000. “For 1890…it was estimated that the traffic was not less than 10,000,000 tons, and the cost of transit from 3/- to 8/- per ton for the whole distance,” Gordon Thompson noted.
Docks and adjoining warehouses, Gloucester, Gloucestershire, 1932. The Llanthony Bridge bars the way to the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal.
Lesson 2: The long-term winners might not be AI-specific companies
The second lesson Oppenheimer drew from the canal stock saga is that the companies that benefit the most in the long run after the rollout of revolutionary new technologies aren’t typically the ones investors have their eyes on in the short term.
He noted that people often get “excited” about the first-mover companies that they imagine profiting from a new technological innovation. These are the firms that are spending to commercialize the technology, or creating what some analysts have labeled the “picks and shovels” of the revolution. “But often, ultimately, they're not the biggest winners,” Oppenheimer said. “The biggest winners are the people that can use the technologies to develop new products and services.”
Oppenheimer gave an example from the 1990s to prove the point. During that decade’s tech bubble, he said, excitement over the rise of the internet led investors to flock to telephone companies that were laying the actual “pipes,” or cables that would enable the internet to roll out to consumers.
“It was considered that these [telephone companies] would own a lot of the revenues from transporting data at very high speeds,” he explained.
But as it turned out, telephone companies “didn’t really end up benefiting” very much from the internet, he said. They spent too much money and time laying the groundwork for it, and, by the time they sold their bandwidth, prices had fallen considerably
“They didn't really get a very good return on the capital,” Oppenheimer explained. “The people that really benefited from the internet were companies that could utilize the technology once it was in place, like platform companies or online retailers.”
So what does this mean for the average investor? Well, Microsoft, Nvidia, and other tech giants that are currently benefiting from the AI boom because they are laying the groundwork for the technology to function may not be the long-term winners. Instead, it could be companies that use AI to create new products and services.
But here’s the trick: no one really knows which companies will utilize AI the best over the long-term. And Oppenheimer didn’t offer any stock picks, instead arguing that investors should diversify their holdings. So if you’re trying to learn from history, when it comes to AI, it may make sense to proceed with caution. Picking winners and losers during periods of technological revolution has always been easier said than done—and the early winners are sometimes the wrong call.
My design theory has always been using a lot of common parts,
three TRENDnet 8-Port Unmanaged Gigabit switches (fanless, super low-power) I've never had one go bad.
There's no great joy in using the Linksys mesh system, whose setup is far from automatic, but the Velops 4000/8000 was a costly right choice 3 years ago at $650 for four units at 7.4 watts each. Since the backhaul is mostly wired this leaves us with two 5 Ghz radios per unit and one 2.4 Ghz radio. I initially thought we'd be good with 3 mesh units, but we needed a fourth due to those 1920s thick walls and doors.
Today I'd try out the Amazon eero Pro mesh as we seem to have slowly gone all in on Amazon Eero and Google Nest mesh setup and diagnostics are supposed to be automatic, which is not the case with linksys, and everything you and I know about manually routers is counterproductive when setting up one of these non-standard mesh systems. WiFi Mesh systems work perfectly, but all brands of mesh systems are mutually incompatible, which is important to know.
The Amazon eero Pro 6e, $440 for three units 7.7 watts each, also provides 3 radios (one each of 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 6 GHz). At this popular price level both Amazon and Google give you one gigabit switch and one 2.5 gb switch. The 3paks are priced the same as two single units. All the new phones and laptops now have 6 Ghz radios. Three years ago choosing 6Ghz for that third radio would have added $1k to the $650 total price for four mesh units.
For businesses I assume, the eero Max 7, $1,700 for three units sucking up 45 watts per unit, provides two 10 gb switch ports and two 2.5 gb switch ports, and the three frequencies (2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 6 GHz), but I suspect there's more than one radio for each frequency - certainly far more antennas.
The Nasdaq and Nikkei over the past year contrasted with China's Marxist 300 Index
An ETF launched by China Asset Management Co. that tracks the Nikkei 225 index is currently trading at a 6.9% premium to its indicative net asset value, showing that investors trapped in China are willing to pay up to get exposure to assets outside of China.
German manufacturing orders rose 2.7% over the prior December, driven by 807 new orders for Airbus aircraft.
Back in Seattle, I hear crickets
perhaps they should focus on installing ALL of the screws, even if that seems too politically correct.
I was talking to my friend Paul in Miami tonight who negotiated these Digital Rights deals and learned a new word.
When I add a show to my YouTube TV Library, not only does the show appear in my library as soon as it's aired, but so typically do all of the prior episodes from this a prior seasons - in the DRM industry this is called "Stacking Rights". The "broadcast" of a show I've requested on Google's cable lineup triggers new DRM use rights for me to watch that content Goggle has already had a copy of for some time, as well as stacking rights to prior episodes.
My rights are typically good for 9 months, although if the show is "rebroadcast" during that period of time, my 9 month use rights start fresh again for 9 months from that new date. Without "stacking rights" added I only have a use right for the "Rolling Five" the right to view the most recent 5 episodes recently broadcast.
https://variety.com/2013/digital/news/in-season-stacking-rights-tv-biz-battles-for-binge-viewing-1200749002/
When I "record a show" Google negotiated stacking rights for me as their customer to watch anytime for nine months. Many content providers like giving stacking rights in the hopes of converting an occasional user into a follower of their show content.
Google with their YouTube TV is using their market clout and financial size to expand these rights, which Disney owned Hulu reluctantly has to match, and even cable companies have to pony up more.
Stacking rights are a different type of use from being offered VOD (video on demand) for the prior shows, in that I get to skip the commercials when content is stacked, where as the content provider can restrict the viewing style with VOD.
Paul had been negotiating these sort of rights in content distribution for more than 12 years, years before these options were first offered, or anyone outside of a small number of people had even envisioned these changes in cable and content viewing. Of course it would have to be that way, getting the contracts and the technology ready first long before it's used - but it's strange to see this change actually becoming part of our life now.
It seems arbitrary and random to consumers but this has been the subject of endless negotiations for a long time, with cable companies knowing that business product would go away.
Why Swiss inflation has remained low following Russia's invasion of Ukraine
68% Hydroelectric energy
11% Solar & Wind power
19% Nuclear energy
_ 2% Oil and gas
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/swiss-inflation-peaked-at-just-3-3-as-prices-surged-around-world-heres-why-26b6d928?mod=economy-politics
Trump's 2017 "tax cut" has been taxing software firms at a 100% rate since 2022
In order to satisfy Senate budget rules and pass the law with only Republican votes, the bill could not increase the federal budget deficit over a 10-year span, so Republican lawmakers included a provision that, beginning in 2022, drastically reduced how much research-and-development spending a business could deduct from annual revenue when calculating taxable income.
This change penalizes the software and information technology — where engineering salaries are often classified as R&D expenses — as well as manufacturing and pharmaceuticals
IntervalZero CEO Jeff Hibbard, whose Massachusetts-based company designs and sells software for installation on precision machines like semiconductor manufacturers, told MarketWatch that he has had to tap into company savings for the past several years in order to avoid laying off engineers.
He said that his firm brings in about $9 million in revenue annually with expenses of $8 million — but 60% of those expenses come in the form of engineer salaries, which can only be deducted from taxable income over a five-year period because Trump's "tax cut" treats it as R&D. As a result taxes consumed all of his profit in 2022, and he had to pay an additional $800,000 in Trump Surcharges, and then he owed an additional $600,000 for the 2023 tax year.
After two years of rejecting any solution to this problem the House of Representatives finally voted 357-70 to for the bipartisan compromise to restore full expensing for R&D as part of the $79 billion tax package that would boost the child tax credit and extend other business tax breaks, but only if they pass the border legislation they crafted and have now rejected.
There's always next year to reduce Trump's 100% tax rate on software and pharma companies, only if Republicans have lost the House.
We have very thick walls built in 1929 with timbers the size they don't make anymore, so we have a router mid-home wired to a switch there and wired from there to another switch at each end.
I used the best shield Cat-6 I could get at the time and all the heavy data user are all wired to a switch, along with 3 of the 4 mesh wi-fi.
The only wireless backhaul is 20 feet through a heavy door to a fourth mesh unit inside a dining room closet.
As a result I get 520 to 680 / 40 Mbps wi-fi speeds, out of our rated 1.0 Gb /40 Mb router, for the laptop, tablet and phones - along with all of the low-bandwidth consumers like the 12 Echos, vacuum cleaner, appliances and switches.
Wires through the basement are what makes our wi-fi actually work the way I'd expect wireless to work.
Over 3 years we've had one of the Linksys MX4200 units go bad, the one doing all the work acting as DHCP server of course, so I just swapped it with one of the other identical units and immediately back in business - with a new unit ordered for the closet. There was no real way of telling which had gone bad, I just assumed - correctly it turned out. The closet sees very little data, but needs constant reliable access. Without the mesh unit in the closet acting as relay it's not a reliable spot to connect.
Never doubt Kafka - although I'm not familiar enough with Java to decide its merit on my own.
The fact that you found utility in Nvidia chips is what made me realize there was far more to Nvidia chips than graphic processing.
Do you write your programs in Python, C or some front end?
Arista Networks (NYSE:ANET) reports on Monday after the close.
With their multi-vendor supported zero-trust networking architecture, and customers obtaining the complete suite of software, which they can turn on or off at will along with the associated licensing costs, they are very attractive to cloud providers and their customers.
Shameful
NVDA ran up 43% in a month.
I've sold a few NVDA shares along the way. Even CVX is buying Nvidia cores to better find oil and gas.
AMD has similar chips on offer for far less money, but no one is buying more than sample amounts because their ROCm interface stack and language has been described as "a shambolic advertisement for Nvidia's CUDA interface". A project developed in ROCm on one AMD chip doesn't work on their next AMD chip because AMD has given no regard for compatibility.
Given a choice between the two chips, META decided to spend $10 billion on Nvidia chips two weeks ago because Nvidia chips and CUDA reduce total project costs after adding in programming and maintenance.
Microsoft is working on an interface they'll probably sell to others as well, which will make the AMD chips a lot more competitive three years from now. Nvidia will likely see one to two product upgrades cycles between now and then.
The former head of Intel's graphics division has described competing with Nivida as "soul destroying", once they thought they had caught up, Nvidia released their new product that was further ahead in multiple ways than they had contemplated.
Through inaction on my part, NVDA has now become 20% of our total portfolios.
Russia claims Vladimir Putin's interview with Tucker Carlson will "blow up" the US
Tucker Carlson, one of the few Americans who remain part of Putin's inner circle, insists it is his "duty" to inform the public of Russia's success in suppressing Nazi forces in Ukraine.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-claims-tucker-carlson-s-interview-with-vladimir-putin-will-spark-civil-war-in-us/ar-BB1hUYJN
He is to become the first Western journalist to interview Putin since before the start of the war in 2022.
Pro-Putin broadcasters have welcomed Carlson's commitment to interviewing Putin and suggested the exchange could trigger a conflict within the US.
One Russian TV commentator remarked: "God willing, there will be a civil war!"
Political scientist Sergey Mikheyev told Russia-1: "If Tucker dares to broadcast this interview in the United States, first and foremost, this will blow up their informational blockade from within."
According to Russia Media Monitor founder Julia Davis, Mikheyev expects Putin's interview to be more interesting than any performance by American politicians.
Presenter Vladimir Solovyon commented: "It will blow them up into pieces!"
Russian presenters have been vocally supportive of Carlson in the past, using clips from his shows as part of their propaganda campaign.
As footage of Carlson's visit to Moscow played in the background, host Evgeny Popov bizarrely commented on the American reporter charging "his smartphone via a USB port and connected to a fast and free WiFi internet."
Popov added: "American citizens can't even dream about such wonders of civilization."
Carlson did not say when his interview with Putin would become available but said X owner Elon Musk promised to air it in full on the platform.
In the video announcing the interview, he claimed to be the only Western journalist curious enough to confront Putin about the war.
The comment sparked a furious reaction from colleagues both in the UK and the US, with BBC Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg noting he and colleagues had long been trying to get Putin on camera.
Rosenberg said: "Interesting to hear @TuckerCarlson claim that 'no western journalist has bothered to interview' Putin since the invasion of Ukraine.
"We've lodged several requests with the Kremlin in the last 18 months. Always a 'no' for us."
CNN colleague Christiane Amanpour added: "Does Tucker really think we journalists haven't been trying to interview President Putin every day since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine?
"It's absurd -- we'll continue to ask for an interview, just as we have for years now."
Russia is currently holding Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty editor Also Kurmasheva and Wall Street Journals' Evan Gershkovich in prison for reporting from Russia.
Carlson first hinted at his desire to interview Putin last year, when he claimed the Biden Administration had thwarted his efforts to interview the Russian leader.
He claimed the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted his communications and his emails circulated to discredit him.
Carlson said: "Late this spring I contacted a couple of people I thought could help get an interview with the Russian President Vladimir Putin,' Carlson told his viewers.
"I told nobody I was doing this other than my executive producer, Justin Wells,' Carlson said. But the Biden administration found out anyway by reading my emails."
In a break with tradition, the NSA issued a statement to deny his allegations.
Lost Tulare Lake has returned, drowning farms on land previously reclaimed from Lake Tulare, the largest body of water west of the Mississippi until the 1860s
The San Joaquin Valley of California, despite supplying a significant percentage of the country's cotton and almonds, is nevertheless a dry, arid place. Fresno, at the heart of the valley, receives just over 10 inches of rain a year on average, according to the National Weather Service, and sometimes as little as 3.
And yet, until the late 19th century, the San Joaquin Valley held a lake more than 100 miles long and over 30 miles wide.
Tulare Lake "was the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River. It's really difficult to imagine that now," says Vivian Underhill, formerly a postdoctoral research fellow at Northeastern University with the Social Science and Environmental Health Research Institute.
In research conducted while at Northeastern, Underhill describes the lake's recent, surprising return as a result of 2023's atmospheric rivers over California, and the effects the lake's return has had on wildlife and agricultural workers in the San Joaquin Valley.
Once, Underhill says, there was so much water that a steamship could carry "agricultural supplies from the Bakersfield area up to Fresno and then up to San Francisco"—a distance of nearly 300 miles.
Tulare Lake was fed primarily by snowmelt out of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Underhill says, as opposed to rainfall. And because "there's no natural outlet within the valley," the water collects to form a lake.
To many traveling through the San Joaquin Valley today, it's hard to imagine such a large body of water co-existing alongside such an arid landscape, Underhill says. But in the 1800s, "Fresno was a lakeside town."
One unnamed prospector, she continues, reported that "there was driftwood piled in the trees of downtown Fresno" because of recent flooding.
Where did the water go?
The lake first began disappearing in the late 1850s and early 1860s, Underhill says, propelled by "the state of California's desire to take public land and put it into private ownership."
However, Underhill continues, "when we say 'public land,' that is historically indigenous land that the state of California blanket-proclaimed as 'public.'"
"They really wanted to get [land] into private hands so that indigenous land claims—that were ongoing at that time—would be rendered moot by the time they went through the courts."
This process was called "reclamation" and often entailed "either draining inundated land or irrigating desert land to create arable farmland. Reclamation really was a process across the entire U.S. west," Underhill says.
If "people could drain that land," she says, they would "be granted ownership of parts of that land. So there was a big incentive for white settlers to start doing that work."
"It was a deeply settler colonial project" that "proceeded in fits and starts."
The first time the lake fully disappeared was around 1890, when its "water essentially was [used to] irrigate all of the arid lands around that area."
"Now the valley is crisscrossed by hundreds of irrigation canals, all of which were originally built to take that lake water and put it onto irrigated fields," she says.
But in 2023, Tulare Lake came back. "California just got inundated with snow in the winter and then rain in the spring," Underhill says. "If you have a rain and snow event, the snow melts really fast."
And all that snow and rain in the Sierra still runs into the depression where Tulare Lake once sat.
A complicated homecoming
Underhill's quick to note that this isn't the lake's only return since the 1800s, however. "It happened in the '80s, it happened once in the '60s, a couple of times in the '30s."
The repercussions for the lake's return are complex and layered, Underhill says, with sometimes oppositional effects between wildlife and the humans who live in the valley.
Before the lake's disappearance into irrigation canals and watering spigots, "People talk about there being so many wetland birds," Underhill says, "that if you startled them, when they lifted off it was like a giant clap that resounded across the landscape."
Now, after less than a year back, "birds of all kinds—pelicans, hawks, waterbirds" are returning. And Underhill notes that "the Tachi also say that they've seen burrowing owls nesting around the shore," a species described as "vulnerable or imperiled" by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Tulare Lake was once part of the Pacific Flyway, Underhill says—it was an important stopover area for migratory birds. "The loss of that habitat has been a major issue in bird conservation and bird diversity."
In addition to species returning—including fish and amphibians likely brought down from the Sierras by rainfall and flooding—winds off the lake can cool temperatures by as much as 10 or 20 degrees, Underhill says. A real benefit when San Joaquin Valley summers often spike well above 100°F.
Growers, "over the last five decades or so, have built a complicated system of flood prevention," Underhill says. In the latest flooding, these measures "protected some of their farmland, which was essentially the lowest elevation part of the historic lake."
By cordoning off this low-lying farmland with canals and weirs, it was the surrounding communities of workers that have now been flooded by Tulare Lake.
"Most of the news coverage about this time talked about it as catastrophic flooding," Underhill says. "And I don't want to disregard the personal and property losses that people experienced, but what was not talked about so much is that it wasn't only an experience of loss, it was also an experience of resurgence."
Efforts are already underway to drain the lake once more, but Underhill expects it to remain in some form for at least two more years — new atmospheric river events over California this year could completely change that prediction.
"Under climate change," Underhill says, "floods of this magnitude or higher will happen with increasing frequency."
"This was not actually a flood. This is a lake returning," Underhill notes, "this landscape has always been one of lakes and wetlands, and our current arid irrigated agriculture is just a century-long blip in this larger geologic history."
More information: Vivian Underhill, "The Return of Pa'ashi: Colonial Unknowing and California's Tulare Lake." Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community (2023). doi.org/10.24926/2471190X.10562.
Accident investigators in their report issued Tuesday stated that the absence of “contact damage or deformation” around certain holes “indicate that the four bolts that prevent upward movement of the 737 Max door plug were not installed” before it flew off the Alaska Airlines aircraft.
The bolts appear to have been left off after Boeing employees performed work on the plane’s fuselage shortly after it arrived at Boeing’s Renton, Wash. factory, the NTSB’s report said.
When I bought some QLYS I also sold all of our ZS as Z-Scaler lost their COO to four year old cloud security start-up WIZ to essentially become their head of sales. It was down 4.5% today.
I was delighted with the profits which came to a greater percentage than our profits on CRWD and PANW, but unexpectedly losing your COO says more to me about what he thinks of the relative merits of ZS in the market place.
He might have felt pushed as ZS had just hired a new Chief Revenue Officer, Rajec's former position before becoming ZS COO, as well as two other top exec positions.
At Wiz, former ZS COO Dali Rajic has announced he will be hiring 400 new people in sales and support at WIZ.
I'm comfortable with that decision, but this does leave me uxexpectedly with cash in both Roth and trading accounts that needs a home.
Worse still, it's non-stop rain here in Los Angeles which is making it too easy to say I'm not going to swim my mile today. The pool IS OPEN, but . . .