Casey is unlikely to change the result without counting defective or challenged ballots. Fortunately, law and precedent “does matter in this country.” There are still officials who can transcend their political preferences to maintain the rule of law. After the last presidential election, many Trump appointees ruled against the former president, and many Democratic judges rejected the effort to strip Trump from ballots.

That does not mean that Democrats who value the weaponization of law will not continue to embrace lawfare warriors like New York Attorney General Letitia James (D).

Others will use the rage of these times as a license to ignore legal and ethical obligations altogether. They are arguably the saddest manifestation of our political discord. They are people who have not just lost faith in our system but in themselves. They have become untethered from any defining principle for their own conduct. This election has left them adrift in a sea of moral and legal relativism, with only their rage as a following wind. They cling to that rage as reason vanishes like a distant shore.

For the rest of us, there is work to be done as a nation committed to the rule of law. We cannot win at any cost when that cost is the very thing that defines us.

hagaetc.eth

@hagaetc
So I tried to build a tech company from Norway and here’s what happened:

1. Two years of building without almost any money/funding, better part of a year without salary
2. Raise VC and become one of Norway’s first unicorns
3. Face unrealized gains wealth tax bill of many x my annual net salary. ofc the company is loss making and all the investors have preference shares so I can’t take out any money.
4. Call out publicly that this does not make sense. Independent of level, taxation needs to happen when you actually make money.
5. I move to Switzerland because no politician cares/listens.
6. I still don’t get any tangible and sensible answers to my criticism of unrealized gains tax, BUT I do get put up on the “wall of shame” at the socialist parties offices…

I’m Norwegian and I love Norway but the socialist politicians are taking the country down a dark path. It’s a real life Atlas Shrugged. //

Alex Svanevik 🐧
@ASvanevik
·
17h
Here’s how insane things have gotten in Norway:

The Socialist Party has a “wall of shame” in their office with “rich people who have left Norway” - due to the outrageous taxes they’re now being charged.

Who do you find on that wall?

Startup founders like @hagaetc -

Jonatan Pallesen
@jonatanpallesen
Here in Denmark I know an early contributor to successful startups (Unity and more). One year their stocks rose, and the next they fell. This left him with a tax burden much larger than his wealth. He is now a million dollars in debt for doing this successful work.

Orwell2024🏒
@orwell2022
·
5h
Plain evil. And intentional. Socialists do not want a country with business owners and entrepreneurs, but a couple of large companies which they fully control.

Pelosi won't go away because her ego won't let her. She's sociopathic in her pursuit of power and prestige, and while the press has long lauded her as a historic figure, reality tells a different story. Despite doing everything she could to take down the Republican Party, she ended up being the Speaker who lost the gavel twice. Worse, she helped usher Donald Trump into office twice.

She desperately wants to save her legacy, but pushing Biden out to defeat the bad orange man was likely her last chance at redemption. It's all downhill from here whether she wants to accept it or not, and if she doesn't, the civil war in the Democratic Party will only get worse. //

Hank Reardon
9 hours ago
Bonchie's last two paragraphs nail it. What else can be said about a Speaker who passed the lead to Jeffries so that she wouldn't be photographed handing the gavel to Kevin McCarthy? The woman is ill with hatred.

Ifill's conduct during the interview was so outrageous, an unlikely voice has now spoken out—a former Biden WH aide, Michael LaRosa, who was First Lady Jill Biden's press secretary. //

This st has to stop. Opposing DEI initiatives does not make you a white supremacist. Conversations and demonization like this are a big part of the reason we got our aes kicked.

The answer to extremism is not more extremism. Voices like this on the left are turning the Democratic Party into a joke. We've got to knock it off and get serious guests who are going to diagnose politics, not make it worse. Name calling, vilifying, and defaming nominees you oppose, even if there is very good reason to oppose them, represents everything the Democratic Party should be RUNNING away from.

Let's fight back with a strategy and tactics .... not pointless, defamatory, and juvenile invective. We need to get serious people opining about policy and politics, not one-upping each other or competing for who can make the most provocative insult about a Trump nominee you oppose. //

NavyVet
3 hours ago
"The answer to extremism is not more extremism."
For at least 40 years now, I have been the victim of anti-white discrimination. That has been bad enough, but with "DEI", it just got extreme.

To oppose DEI is to oppose extremism, not engage in it. DEI denigrates everyone. It denigrates minorities by stating they need favoritism to succeed, which they don't, and it denigrates white people because it declares anti-white racism open season. It is divisive, hateful bigotry and extreme racism.

Hare dare you divisive leftist hate-pushers pretend you are anything less than the extremists you project on people of common sense. That's right, common sense: the voters showed it when they rejected you.

zrepl is a one-stop, integrated solution for ZFS replication.

Today we have a quick guide on how to automate Proxmox VE ZFS offsite backups to Rsync.net. The folks at rsync.net set us up with one of their ZFS enabled trial accounts. As the name might imply, Rsync.net started as a backup service for those using rsync. Since then they have expanded to allowing ZFS access for ZFS send/ receive which makes ZFS backups very easy. In our previous article we showed server-to-server backup using pve-zsync to automate the process.

• Backup test

This is very primitive and is unix-centric, but if I rsync from a source to a destination, I will do the following on both:

 # find /backup | wc -l
 # du -ah /backup | tail -1

... and I expect them to be identical (or nearly so) on both ends. Again, very blunt tooling here and this is after a successful, no errors rsync ... but I'm feeling good at that point.

justpaul
4 hours ago
The lady at the bakery clearly knows who Goldman is, which suggests that she is a longtime customer. If so, any political issues would have come out years ago.

Goldman is lying. Again.

Nuclear medicine is one of those cool specialities that doesn’t get enough attention. While nuclear energy has enjoyed a revival in recent years, little attention has been paid to nuclear medicine. That’s probably partly because explaining it in technical terms inevitably removes some of the magic and partly because many people fear radiation and don’t want to think about it.

But nuclear medicine deserves attention. Not all of the world's nuclear reactors are used for producing energy; they are also used for producing radioisotopes for medicine and industry, training, and other purposes. They are known as research reactors, and there are currently around 220 research reactors in 53 countries. In the heyday of nuclear development, in 1975, there were 373 neutron factories in 55 countries. //

Outside of the wealthier nations, there is a significant shortage of equipment and workforce for nuclear imaging around the world, and one study found that:

A comprehensive scale-up of imaging, treatment, and care quality would avert 9·55 million (12·5%) of all cancer deaths caused by the modelled cancers worldwide, saving 232·30 million life-years. Scale-up of imaging would cost US$6·84 billion in 2020–30 but yield lifetime productivity gains of $1·23 trillion worldwide, a net return of $179·19 per $1 invested.

Healthy people benefit humanity. For those living in the poorest nations to gain access to improved healthcare, nuclear medicine will play a vital role going forward, although when and how that will happen remains to be seen.

Pearl Harbor
Faith Hill Hans Zimmer
"Heart of A Volunteer"

The Limehouse Golem
Johan Soderqvist

In reporting on a radiation study, a nearly universal practice of the 'experts' is to show us only the subjects' total doses. They do this despite the fact that usually what is measured is the dose rate profile, often in the form of daily doses. The total dose is computed by adding up these daily doses, and then tossing aside everything but the total. Analyzing radiation harm by only looking at total dose is like an electrical engineer attempt to analyze a complicated circuit by only looking at the annual energy input.

The human body is an extremely complex circuit. It has to be analyzed dynamically. The essential element of SNT [Signmoid No Threshold] is not the shape of the acute dose response curve, it is chopping the dose rate profile into repair periods, and analyzing each period separately. //

Where would we encounter 1 and 2 mSv/d dose rate profiles for decades? That's an easy one. Space travel. The astronauts in Low Earth Orbit get between 0.5 and 1.0 mSv/d, with occasional spikes during solar flares. High Earth Orbit or a trip to Mars will about double that. If LNT were valid, the shielding requirements would be prohibitively expensive.

NASA can't afford LNT. That's why it ignores all the EPA and NRC limits. The EPA says more than 1 mSv per year is unsafe. NASA says 1 mSv per day is routine. That's the difference between the top and bottom of Figure 1.

NASA is not the only entity that cannot afford LNT. Space travel is a luxury that humanity may or may not be able to afford. The benefits of manned space travel are at best speculative. The benefits of cheap nuclear electricity are undeniable and cornucopic. If we can correctly trash LNT to go into space, surely we can junk this counterfactual hypothesis to get cheap nuclear.

Though WaPo acknowledged Trump narrowly won Springfield, it did not disclose that he had lost it twice before //

That changed last week when Trump carried Springfield by a razor-thin margin of roughly 150 votes out of more than 20,000 cast. The flip helped drive up Trump's margin in Clark County to its highest level: Trump won 64 percent of the county vote this time around, the highest margin for a Republican presidential candidate in at least four decades.

In his latest bout of schooling his co-workers, a CNN panel that featured Jennings got onto the subject of RFK. Geoff Duncan said there's "intellectually" no reason by RFK Jr. should be the HHS secretary, and at best should be an "advisor." Duncan said that there's nothing on his resume that qualifies Kennedy.

It should be noted that the current HHS secretary is Xavier Becerra, a lawyer who was once California's Attorney General, who also has no health background, but this is never brought up by the left. The assistant secretary for the HHS is Rachel Levine, a man who thinks he's a woman.

Jennings tried to confront Duncan with this fact by asking what the qualifications of the previous heads of the HHS were, even before Becerra, causing Duncan to reveal his cards.

"RFK Jr. is a nut."

Again, I remind everyone of Rachel Levine, but I digress.

With Duncan's true reasoning now laid bare, Jennings began his offensive.

“Okay, so that's different from what you just said," said Jennings. "You just said he doesn't possess the requisite managerial experience, but then we get to the real issue here, which is you want to insult the man." //

These other panelists, who are clearly on the left, have no desire to put the blame on the institutions or the elitists who run them, elitists that many of these people are friends with. Notice that while they try to blame someone like Kennedy for spreading "misinformation," what they're ultimately saying is that you're still to blame for COVID spreading.

The institutions that told us to do all of these things ended up hurting us even more, as Jennings pointed out, but these elitists can't admit that. Notice they didn't linger on how the masks didn't work, or the lockdowns made it worse; the only attack they have is that "RFK. Jr. is a nut," and that our institutions aren't as trusted anymore because of nuts like him.

OCASIO-CORTEZ: That's right, that's right, and listen, it's not even to deny the fact that these ads were effective in certain areas. What I think people are paying too much attention to is the first half of that ad, which says, that said, "Kamala Harris is for they/them." Everyone is focusing on that. They're not focusing on the second half of that ad where he said, "Donald Trump is for you."

OCASIO-CORTEZ: And Democrats very often, in their messaging, they speak in this, in terms and in concepts, and not in the second person. "I care about you," and political races are not about one candidate vs. another candidate. Too often, it gets pigeonholed like that. It is a race about who cares about you more.

Is it too cliche to use the term "cope" to describe the above? Because that's cope. The idea that those Trump ads were not effective because they accurately described the Democrat position on transgenderism is nonsense. Sure, there is some truth to the idea that the now-president-elect successfully convinced voters he cared about them, but the juxtaposition with Harris' views on transgenderism in those ads was the entire reason that argument worked. Would an ad simply saying "I care about you" have been as effective? Of course, not.

Democrats won't want to admit the obvious, though, because that would mean admitting their obsession with transgenderism is actually the problem. This isn't a messaging issue for them. Speaking in the "second person," as Ocasio-Cortez says, won't suddenly make boys playing girl's sports acceptable to most Americans. Nor will it make "gender-affirming care" for minors popular.

In other words, Democrats have a position issue. Until they change those positions, which will in turn change how they talk about them, they will continue to lose support among normal Americans. Ocasio-Cortez and others who want to gloss over that are doing their party no good. On the contrary, they are inadvertently telling us exactly why they lost.

The Israeli attack on Iran in late October destroyed an active top secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, according to three U.S. officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.

Why it matters: The strike — which targeted a site previously reported to be inactive — significantly damaged Iran's effort over the past year to resume nuclear weapons research, Israeli and U.S. officials said.

   One former Israeli official briefed on the strike said it destroyed sophisticated equipment used to design the plastic explosives that surround uranium in a nuclear device and are needed to detonate it.
   Iran has denied it is pursuing nuclear weapons. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in a statement last week that "Iran is not after nuclear weapons, period."
   The Iranian mission to the UN declined to comment for this story.
   The incoming Trump administration will include several key national security and foreign policy officials who are hawkish on Iran, which could lead to increased U.S. pressure on the Islamic Republic.

Some added flavor here:

Flashback: Last June, the White House officials privately warned the Iranians in direct conversations about the suspicious research activities, Axios reported.

   The U.S. hoped the warning would make the Iranians stop their nuclear activity, but they continued, the officials said.

A U.S. official said that in the months before the Israeli attack "there was concern across the board" about the Iranian activity at the Taleghan 2 facility.

   The Iranian nuclear weapons research even led the U.S. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to change its assessment about the Iranian nuclear program.

You don't say?

The news comes on the heels of the arrest of a former CIA official for leaking classified documents regarding Israel's plans ahead of the strike. //

Cafeblue32 Musicman an hour ago edited

Just make us a net exporter of fuels again instead of an importer, and Trump can drop the price of oil by dumping more in the market. He did that in 2020, in April taking it down to 20 bucks a barrel. He told the bad actors that are oil nations that he would drop it down to 1o bucks if they kept it up. That's why we didn't have war. A strong military deterrent is smart. But using business to make it to they couldn't afford war is how we had no wars last time without firing a shot.

Trump knows what Democrats will never admit: whoever controls the oil controls the world. He proved it last time.

What is it Roosevelt said? "Speak softly, but carry a big stick"? With Trump we have the double whammy- a great business strategy to drive the baddies broke, backed by the most terrifyingly badass military ever seen on earth. Under Hegseth, I expect we'll see that.

A younger rival may have learned how to sabotage those showers by disrupting water flow.

I was driving with my brother, the preacher, and my nephew, the preacher’s son, on I-65 just north of Bowling Green when we got a flat. It was Sunday night and we had been to visit Mother at the Home. We were in my car. The flat caused what you might call knowing groans since, as the old-fashioned one in my family (so they tell me), I fix my own tires, and my brother is always telling me to get radials and quit buying old tires.

But if you know how to mount and fix tires yourself, you can pick them up for almost nothing.

FrontierMath's difficult questions remain unpublished so that AI companies can't train against it. //

On Friday, research organization Epoch AI released FrontierMath, a new mathematics benchmark that has been turning heads in the AI world because it contains hundreds of expert-level problems that leading AI models solve less than 2 percent of the time, according to Epoch AI. The benchmark tests AI language models (such as GPT-4o, which powers ChatGPT) against original mathematics problems that typically require hours or days for specialist mathematicians to complete.

FrontierMath's performance results, revealed in a preprint research paper, paint a stark picture of current AI model limitations. Even with access to Python environments for testing and verification, top models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o, o1-preview, and Gemini 1.5 Pro scored extremely poorly. This contrasts with their high performance on simpler math benchmarks—many models now score above 90 percent on tests like GSM8K and MATH.

The design of FrontierMath differs from many existing AI benchmarks because the problem set remains private and unpublished to prevent data contamination. Many existing AI models are trained on other test problem datasets, allowing the AI models to easily solve the problems and appear more generally capable than they actually are. Many experts cite this as evidence that current large language models (LLMs) are poor generalist learners.

Whatever your office setup, the most important thing is to move. //

Without question, inactivity is bad for us. Prolonged sitting is consistently linked to higher risks of cardiovascular disease and death. The obvious response to this frightful fate is to not sit— move. Even a few moments of exercise can have benefits, studies suggest. But in our modern times, sitting is hard to avoid, especially at the office. This has led to a range of strategies to get ourselves up, including the rise of standing desks. //

However, studies on whether standing desks are beneficial have been sparse and sometimes inconclusive. Further, prolonged standing can have its own risks, and data on work-related sitting has also been mixed. While the final verdict on standing desks is still unclear, two studies out this year offer some of the most nuanced evidence yet about the potential benefits and risks of working on your feet.