New York City singles need to earn a sizable $184,420 per year to live comfortably, new research has revealed. //
Using the 50/30/20 finance rule — 50% of spending for essentials, 30% for leisure, and 20% for savings — the researchers determined a salary of $92,210 was needed in New York City simply to get by living alone. The team then doubled that figure to determine their definition of “living comfortably.” //
Meanwhile, the most expensive American city in which to live comfortably is San Jose, per the GOBankingRates study.
Given that the average price of a single-family home is just over $1.5 million, mortgage costs are sky-high.
In 2021, she came across a notice in the Federal Register recruiting participants for a double-blind clinical trial led by Dr. Richard Frye.
“It was like something clicked. He went from one or two words to full-on sentences within six months.” -- Kathleen Schnier
The pediatric neurologist was studying whether leucovorin could help autistic children with cerebral folate deficiency — or a shortage of vitamin B9 in the brain.
Researchers believe up to 70% of autistic children have antibodies that block the transport of folate into the brain, leading to these deficiencies and contributing to speech delays and behavioral challenges. //
With his new ability to speak, Nathaniel finally found a way to express what had been locked inside for years.
“The TV in my brain, I can say it in my mouth,” Kathleen remembers her son telling her. “It was always there, he just couldn’t say it.”
“Having the ability to deal with trade, having the ability to use tariffs to help me make a point,” he said.
“The tariffs have brought peace to the world, I’m telling you. They have brought peace to the world.”
Of the seven — soon to be eight — conflicts Trump has resolved in the first year of his second term, five of them were settled “through trade,” he said.
“We are not going to deal with people that fight,” he declared — and that firm rule “gives you a tremendous road to peace and saving millions of lives.” //
It was a revealing moment that showed us just how deeply Trump has tied his domestic program and his foreign policy priorities together.
The president designed his tariff regime to reshore manufacturing and end the fleecing of America by countries that flood our markets with their cheap goods while putting a tax on our exports.
But he’s simultaneously using it to accomplish all manner of policy wins — from stemming the free flow of fentanyl across our southern border to bringing India and Pakistan to the negotiating table to forcing Pfizer to lower the cost of prescription drugs.
His Middle East peace plan is just the latest example. //
Previous administrations based their Middle Eastern forays on the fiction of shared values, or the fantasy of exporting American-style representative democracy to people who don’t want it.
They spent trillions of taxpayer dollars and sacrificed thousands of American lives in service to these foolhardy notions.
Trump doesn’t believe in shared values — he believes in sharing value.
He’s not bent on exporting democracy, but on exporting exports. //
And by intertwining the US economy with theirs, Trump was signaling the kind of friendship whose currency runs much deeper than the fictional shared values of previous administrations.
For Trump, the currency is, well, currency.
His moves to solidify friendship via joint economic prosperity and shared interests were crucial to getting the Middle East deal done.
I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.
Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that’s all I do.
You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery —more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, the wise G. K. Chesterton observed, “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”
I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that’s too much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.
Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year. //
Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.
No Master Mind
There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to which I earlier referred.
It has been said that “only God can make a tree.” Why do we agree with this? Isn’t it because we realize that we ourselves could not make one? //
I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human masterminding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.
The above is what I meant when writing, “If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing.” For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand— that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive master-minding—then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.
Once government has had a monopoly of a creative activity such, for instance, as the delivery of the mails, most individuals will believe that the mails could not be efficiently delivered by men acting freely. And here is the reason: Each one acknowledges that he himself doesn’t know how to do all the things incident to mail delivery. He also recognizes that no other individual could do it. These assumptions are correct. No individual possesses enough know-how to perform a nation’s mail delivery any more than any individual possesses enough know-how to make a pencil. Now, in the absence of faith in free people—in the unawareness that millions of tiny know-hows would naturally and miraculously form and cooperate to satisfy this necessity—the individual cannot help but reach the erroneous conclusion that mail can be delivered only by governmental “masterminding.”
Jul 31, 2014, 9:51am EDT
Today would have been the 102nd birthday of the late great Milton Friedman, winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Economics and 1988 Presidential Medal of Freedom. Needless to say, we miss him and could use his talents.
Friedman is considered one of the greatest economists of the 20th century, the most influential since World War II, and few would dispute, the greatest advocate ever for private markets in relation to their role of ensuring both our cherished economic and political liberties.
Influenced by Jeremy Bentham and many others of his intellectual stripe like Friedrich A. Hayek, Friedman became a celebrity in his time for his enthusiastic and unfettered discussion of the way the world really works, once taking famed talk show host Donahue to school on the role of government in society: “Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government-- in pursuit of good intentions tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player.”
“The battle for freedom,” Friedman wrote in his 1994 re-introduction to Hayek’s seminal work, The Road to Serfdom, “must be won over and over again.” //
As Friedman explained to Donahue in 1979, government enforcing contracts and preserving the rule of law and private property rights is at the core of prosperity and liberty. “Property rights, Friedman wrote in his memoir Two Lucky People with his wife Rose, “… are the most basic of human rights and an essential foundation for other human rights."
Read’s essay is no brief for anarchy. “I, Pencil” is a plea for humility among economic central planners that is desperately needed by the utopian thinkers of our day, and every era.
Leonard Read’s immortal essay “I, Pencil” has persuaded more people of the wonders of the free market than possibly any other comparable work—so many that the BBC recently posted an article attacking it. However, anyone reading both articles will conclude that Read’s pencil comes out looking sharper.
The mere fact that Read’s article can still elicit rebuttals 60 years after it appeared in the December 1958 issue of FEE’s The Freeman is testimony to its significance. As such a powerful and persuasive essay, it had to be destroyed. //
The ability to transport a product from factory to store shelf is a necessary condition for its sale—and thus, its mass production—but not a sufficient one.
If roads created businesses, then there should be no stretch of asphalt in the country not festooned with stores, shops, or offices. Roads facilitate commerce; they do not necessarily cause it. If the government bears responsibility for all the commerce that flows over its roads, then the federal government smuggled all but the 370,000 pounds of drugs stopped at legal ports of entry last year—and the U.S. Post Office trafficked all but the 40,000 pounds of drugs seized in the mails in 2017. Clearly, this is a reductio ad absurdum whether applied to narcotics or number two pencils.
The creative process begins when an entrepreneur senses the underlying need for a product or service, which is confirmed by someone’s willingness to pay for it. One might call this—to coin a phrase—the “magic of the price system.”
Furthermore, just as no Pencil Czar directs the construction of pencils, no Transportation Czar tells the company whether to transport its cargo by truck, rail, ship, drone, or private courier. The firm chooses the method of shipment that best fits its needs based on price signals. //
The second fallacious assumption is that everyone who supports the free market is an anarchist. The Lockean conception of ordered liberty tasks government with defending the right to life, liberty, and property—a position that Leonard Read and Milton Friedman happened to share. Read wrote in his lesser-known work Government—An Ideal Concept that the State should be confined to “protecting the life and property of all citizens equally, and invoking a common justice under law.” Friedman believed the government had three primary functions: to “provide for military defense of the nation,” “enforce contracts between individuals,” and “protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property.”
The point of “I, Pencil” is best captured by Read’s successor at the helm of FEE, Lawrence W. Reed. “None of the Robespierres of the world knew how to make a pencil, yet they wanted to remake entire societies,” he wrote. Ambitious bureaucrats, eager to impose their ignorance on economics or politics, lack the information and creativity generated spontaneously by free people. “Leave all creative energies uninhibited,” wrote Leonard Read. “Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow.”
Read’s essay is no brief for anarchy. “I, Pencil” is a plea for humility among economic central planners that is desperately needed by the utopian thinkers of our day, and every era.
All of which leaves Harford without a point to make.
Thankfully, pencils have erasers. //
The second fallacious assumption is that everyone who supports the free market is an anarchist. The Lockean conception of ordered liberty tasks government with defending the right to life, liberty, and property—a position that Leonard Read and Milton Friedman happened to share. Read wrote in his lesser-known work Government—An Ideal Concept that the State should be confined to “protecting the life and property of all citizens equally, and invoking a common justice under law.” Friedman believed the government had three primary functions: to “provide for military defense of the nation,” “enforce contracts between individuals,” and “protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property.”
The point of “I, Pencil” is best captured by Read’s successor at the helm of FEE, Lawrence W. Reed. “None of the Robespierres of the world knew how to make a pencil, yet they wanted to remake entire societies,” he wrote. Ambitious bureaucrats, eager to impose their ignorance on economics or politics, lack the information and creativity generated spontaneously by free people. “Leave all creative energies uninhibited,” wrote Leonard Read. “Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow.”
Read’s essay is no brief for anarchy. “I, Pencil” is a plea for humility among economic central planners that is desperately needed by the utopian thinkers of our day, and every era.
All of which leaves Harford without a point to make.
Thankfully, pencils have erasers.
If a radon test detects levels above the EPA’s action threshold (4 pCi/L), a radon mitigation system is typically installed. The most common design is a sub-slab depressurization system. This method uses a combination of PVC vent piping and a radon fan to draw the gas from beneath the building’s foundation and discharge it safely above the roofline, away from windows or air intakes.
The principle is simple but effective: by creating negative pressure beneath the slab, radon is prevented from entering the living space. These fans are often located in basements, attics, or outdoors to minimize noise and provide continuous operation.
However, because the fan and piping are usually hidden from view, it can be difficult for homeowners or facility managers to know whether the system is operating properly. ///
Radiation exposure is non-cumulative beyond a 24 hour dose rate. "Radon mitigation" is just another grift, sanctioned by the government.
Rhetorical question: If radiation is so dangerous (i.e., causes cancer so readily), why do we use it cure cancer? Doesn't it cause more cancer?
Lawrence W. Reed
Christian charity, being voluntary and heartfelt, is utterly distinct from the compulsory, impersonal mandates of the state. //
With the reputation of central planners in the dumpster worldwide, socialists have largely moved on to a different emphasis: the welfare state. The socialism of Bernie Sanders and his young ally Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is that of the benevolent, egalitarian nanny state where rich Peter is robbed to pay poor Paul. It’s characterized by lots of “free stuff” from the government—which of course isn’t free at all. It’s quite expensive both in terms of the bureaucratic brokerage fees and the demoralizing dependency it produces among its beneficiaries. Is this what Jesus had in mind?
Christianity is not about passing the buck to the government when it comes to relieving the plight of the poor.
- Rainmeter is a free, open-source app for highly customizable Windows desktop widgets.
- Skins (.rmskin/.ini) and community sites like DeviantArt let you mix, edit, and share themes.
- Edit skins via Rainmeter UI or .ini files to tweak position, fonts, icons, and interactions pixel-perfectly.
Turn Down or Disable Visual Effects
Next, you need to adjust the Windows visual effects to improve your system's overall performance. To do this, open the Start menu, type Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows, and press Enter. In the Performance Options window, select "Adjust for Best Performance," and then click "Apply" and "OK."
When dealing with such small tolerances between aircraft, it is important to keep in mind the limitations of ADS-B data. ADS-B data is reported in 25 foot increments, so a reported value of 50 feet is 50 feet ± 25 feet. The following values should then be taken with those qualifications in mind.
The altitude reported by the Nouvelair flight as it passed over the easyJet A320 was 50 feet. Both the Nouvelair and easyJet flights were operated by Airbus A320-214s. The A320 has a tail height of 38 feet, 7 inches.
China accounts for 70% of global REE mining and 90% of the world’s REE processing/refining. These minerals are essential for weapons systems and electronics. Beijing’s export restrictions on 12 REEs could very well disrupt the global economy and pose a risk to the U.S.’s defense supply chains. This is unsustainable and dangerous—and it has gone on for far too long. Washington must decouple.
Beijing’s practice of weaponizing its REE dominance is straight from the CCP’s unrestricted warfare playbook, a concept first outlined in 1999—combining elements of resource warfare, economic warfare, and lawfare (the CCP’s uses laws and regulations to further its national interests, when and where it sees fit).
China’s announcement to impose export restrictions on resources that it has monopolized aligns with its ongoing demands over recent months, including the demand that the U.S. change its official language regarding Taiwan independence. //
Without a state that is capable of protecting its citizens from foreign and domestic threats, its foremost responsibility, as well as ensuring economic independence, economic prosperity is not possible. National and economic security are essential building blocks.
China’s tightening of export controls should serve as a reminder of the need to decouple. //
But tariffs alone will not break China’s stranglehold on minerals. Achieving this goal will require sustained government intervention—although unfavorable to us small government proponents, it is the best path forward during such a national emergency—and a rollback of environmental and licensing regulations that CCP-backed environmental groups have been fighting for (green warfare). It was the Chinese state’s aggressive subsidization and regulation of its REE industry—coupled with destructive globalist policies—that made this dominance possible.
I have everything up and running, except for the boot screen and how I like it. Currently, it says: Password:
In Truecypt, I could change the message. After some Googling, I found it's a setting in Veracrypt: Menu > System > Settings > Edit Boot Loader Configuration
Here is the code below
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<VeraCrypt>
<configuration>
<config key="PasswordType">0</config>
<config key="PasswordMsg">Password: </config>If no PIM value is specified, VeraCrypt will use the default parameters used in versions prior to 1.12 for PBKDF2-HMAC (see Header Key Derivation). For Argon2id, default parameters are equivalent to PIM = 12:
- PBKDF2-HMAC defaults:
- For system partition encryption (boot encryption) that uses SHA-256, BLAKE2s-256 or Streebog, 200000 iterations are used which is equivalent to a PIM value of 98.
- For system encryption that uses SHA-512 or Whirlpool, 500000 iterations are used which is equivalent to a PIM value of 485.
- For non-system encryption and file containers, all derivation algorithms will use 500000 iterations which is equivalent to a PIM value of 485.
- Argon2id defaults: Memory Cost = 416 MiB, Time Cost = 6 iterations (equivalent to PIM = 12) //
The PIM minimal value for short passwords is 98 for system encryption that doesn't use SHA-512 or Whirlpool and 485 for the other cases. For password with 20 characters and more, the PIM minimal value is 1. In all cases, leaving the PIM empty or setting its value to 0 will make VeraCrypt use the default high number of iterations as explained in section Header Key Derivation.
23 hrs
jakeSilver badge
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Re: If You Don't Patch Your Devices/Software, You're Begging For It
"When I first got into computing there was no such thing as patching"
You must be very old indeed ... Here's a photo of a patched Harvard Mk I program tape that has been patched:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Harvard_Mark_I_program_tape.agr.jpg
One of the first jobs I had in computing partially involved physically cutting paper tape at the correct point(s), and then taping in either more code, or corrected code, or both, or occasionally undamaged paper with the original code after the tape got "eaten" by the machinery. The bits that got taped in were usually hand-punched. Yes, it was called "patching", for what I hope are obvious. //
21 hrs
that one in the cornerSilver badge
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Re: If You Don't Patch Your Devices/Software, You're Begging For It
Jacquard loom cards: sew them up in a different order to patch the pattern on the patch of material.
Ian JohnstonSilver badge
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Many (35?) years ago I had to use a PDP-11 running a copy of Unix so old that one man page I looked up simply said: "If you need help with this see Dennis Ritchie in Room 1305". //
Nugry Horace
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Re: Triggering a Specific Error Message
Even if an error message can't happen, they sometimes do. The MULTICS error message in Latin ('Hodie natus est radici frater' - 'today unto the root [volume] is born a brother') was for a scenario which should have been impossible, but got triggered a couple of times by a hardware error. //
5 days
StewartWhiteSilver badge
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Re: Triggering a Specific Error Message
VAX/VMS BASIC had an error message of "Program lost, sorry" in its list. Never could generate it but I liked that the "sorry" at the end made it seem so polite. //
Michael H.F. WilkinsonSilver badge
Nothing offensive, just impossible
Working on a parallel program for simulations of bacterial interaction in the gut micro-flora, I got an "Impossible Error: W(1) cannot be negative here" (or something similar) from the NAG library 9th order Runge-Kutta ODE solver on our Cray J932. The thing was, I was using multiple copies of the same routine in a multi-threaded program. FORTRAN being FORTRAN, and the library not having been compiled with the right flags for multi-threading, all copies used the same named common block to store whatever scratch variables they needed. So different copies were merrily overwriting values written by other copies, resulting in the impossible error. I ended up writing my own ODE solver
Having achieved the impossible, I felt like having breakfast at Milliways //
Admiral Grace Hopper
"You can't be here. Reality has broken if you see this"
Reaching the end of an error reporting trap that printed a message for each foreseeable error I put in a message for anything unforeseen, which was of course, to my mind, an empty set. The code went live and I thought nothing more of it for a decade or so, until a colleague that I hadn't worked with for may years sidled up to my desk with a handful of piano-lined listing paper containing this message. "Did you write this? We thought you'd like to know that it happened last night".
Failed disc sector. Never forget the hardware.
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But we haven’t yet talked much about the missing firefighters.
At least 3% of Los Angeles County firefighters lived outside the state as of 2022 — many of them senior commanders.
They reside in border states like Arizona or Nevada, and even as far away as Florida and Alaska.
There they can afford to own homes and can send their children to schools that don’t replace math lessons with gender-identity quizzes.
They fly in to do a 7-to-12-day shift, then fly home for several weeks off.
Who could blame them, given the Golden State’s exorbitant cost of living?
On the first night of the fires, when the winds turned a fever dream into a nightmare, the county put out an all-hands call for firefighters.
Everyone was asked to report to work as soon as possible, no exceptions.
But with 3% of the force residing in other states — and hundreds more firefighters living hours away, in Central and Northern California — the investigation may uncover some uncomfortable truths.
How many of our firefighters were missing in action as Rinderknecht’s fire raged beyond control?
How many homes burned because they could not take their posts when ordered?
Why hasn’t Los Angeles set any sort of residency requirement for its emergency personnel, like most other big cities do?
For a brief period of time, I had the honor of serving under General Raymond T. Odierno in Iraq. He was, without question, one of the finest officers I ever worked for—sharp, grounded, and with a great sense of humor that managed to shine through even in the worst of times. He was also hard to miss—towering in stature, both physically and professionally—and a proud graduate of West Point’s Class of 1976. I was only a year old when he graduated from the Academy, yet decades later I’d find myself in a war zone serving under his command.
I’ll admit, there was a time when one of his statements got under my skin. General Odierno once said, “We don’t need more M1 tanks.” As a young officer who grew up believing armored warfare was the backbone of modern combat, that rubbed me the wrong way. The M1 Abrams was sacred steel—a symbol of American power. The idea that we didn’t need more of them felt almost sacrilegious.
But with the benefit of time—and watching the tragic lessons unfold in Ukraine—I can now say he was right. When a $300 drone can take out an $8 million tank, the math doesn’t lie. Warfare has changed. The generals who understood that early on were thinking ahead, not backward. Odierno wasn’t anti-tank; he was anti-waste. He understood that technology, doctrine, and strategy evolve faster than the defense industry’s profit margins.