So, at the very least, five or six agencies chased dozens of witnesses, nine LLCs and general corporations, an untold number of other allegedly fake companies, a long list of bank accounts, a countywide network of real estate, and a series of credit card statements, the latter producing detailed statements in the complaint about the luxury goods Soofer allegedly purchased using public funds. His wife apparently has some quite nice Hermes sandals that Los Angeles taxpayers bought her, if the FBI is correct. I attempted to get more information from the city controller who started the ball rolling, but his office has yet to respond to questions. I’ve never once found that the FBI answers questions about its investigations, so I haven’t bothered to ask them about it.

Read the complaint linked above and form your own conclusion, but an educated guess is that it’s a description of hundreds of hours of investigation, and maybe more. It continues, and they’re clearly still digging.

Now, Soofer allegedly represents about $10 million in local fraud, and Mehmet Oz says that just the category of medical fraud in just that one county probably amounts to about $3.5 billion a year. In Minneapolis, Nick Shirley is visiting single addresses listed in public records as the office for multiple businesses that can’t actually be found there, and the X user who posts as Data Republican is suggesting that some single addresses in the city are actually the address of record for hundreds of potentially fraudulent businesses.

Do the math in your head: How many cops, doing how many hours of investigation, will it take to unravel tens of billions of dollars of overlapping fraud in government-funded health care, transportation, daycare, and homeless services nonprofits, in California and Minnesota and wherever else large numbers of nonprofits chase a massive pool of federal, state, and local public funds?

Americans are quite lightly policed, and should be. //

Our police do their work at the margins and are funded and staffed on the premise that they’re chasing small numbers of bad guys in a population of honest citizens. If that cultural premise fails, we don’t have the cops to fix it.

The first place to stop fraud is with a healthy culture. The second place to stop it is in a limited government that doesn’t offer a bunch of free cash for thieves to steal. The third solution, investigations and arrests, is clumsy, slow, and likely to prove grossly inadequate. //

The more we undermine the first culture and import the second, the more we’re going to foster public services fraud. That’s not what we want to do.

These are simple utilities to manipulate Microsoft Virtual Hard Disks (VHD/VHDX) from the command line.

Notepad2 is a free, open-source text editor created by Florian Balmer. I have been a user of Notepad2 for a few years; it is the primary text editor that I use every day. This page was created as a way for me to share some of my Notepad2 resources.

The HashCheck Shell Extension makes it easy for anyone to calculate and verify checksums and hashes from Windows Explorer. In addition to integrating file checksumming functionality into Windows, HashCheck can also create and verify SFV files (and other forms of checksum files, such as .md5 files). It is fast and efficient, with a very light disk and memory footprint, and it is open-source.

1. It should be both free and open source.
   1. The file format should be open or well-documented for future migration options.
2. It should be multi-platform: in order to be proposed as a standard, anybody must be able to use it. The program has to run on at least Windows and Linux, preferably including Mac OS.
3. It should have a (large) standard collection of electric/electronic components, with an extensible library: this way it will not be necessary to draw components from scratch, and, just in case, it will be necessary to do it just once.
4. Connections should be better than just lines. They should attach to components, default to right angles, move when the components are moved, autoroute around objects, and so on.
5. It should not require the user to learn a great deal of distracting or convoluted methods to draw schematics.
6. It should have Bezier curves to allow the creation of good audio curves, since most weighting curves are specified by points, not by an equation or circuit model.
7. It has to help the schematic drawing with the option to "snap" components to a grid (otherwise it will be hard to make a precise drawing).
8. Optional: It should be part of a complete, easy to use, drawing package, not just for circuit diagrams (though a 'circuit mode' might be good).

Labor wage is rarely the dominant cost in modern manufacturing. In semiconductor fabrication, labor contributes pennies to a few dollars per chip. Yet we continue to build trade narratives around wages.

When competition exists, innovation follows. When innovation stagnates, it is often a sign that competition has been suppressed—not that labor costs are too high.

We have structural problems within the US that often are prohibitive to manufacturing products efficiently. Prohibitive to innovation. Most of them come from these so called externalities. Now we face a choice. We can further protect this system that imposes very high costs or we can throw off the shackles.

This utility copies files and directory trees while fully preserving all timestamps, and when possible, NTFS compression and encryption attributes.

The primary benefit to using vcopy is that it preserves all timestamps and NTFS compression and encryption attributes, when possible. Normally, copy operations will fail to preserve any of the timestamps on directories and the creation and access timestamps on files. Especially in the case of directory timestamps, this default copy behavior wreaks havoc on people who depend on their files and directory trees having meaningful timestamps.

You can also suppress and strip out certain file attributes from being copied; for example, the read-only attribute when copying files from a CD-ROM.

Additionally, vcopy can compute hashes for files as they are being copied, eliminating the need for a wasteful second read pass.

winisoutils - Windows ISO Disc Image Utilities

Harrison Schmitt, speaking with a NASA interviewer in 2000, said his productivity in the Apollo suit “couldn’t have been much more than 10 percent of what you would do normally here on Earth.”

“You take the human brain, the human eyes, and the human hands into space. That’s the only justification you have for having human beings in space,” Schmitt said. “It’s a massive justification, but that’s what you want to use, and all three have distinct benefits in productivity and in gathering new information and infusing data over any automated system. Unfortunately, we have discarded one of those, and that is the hands.”

Schmitt singled out the gloves as the “biggest problem” with the Apollo suits. “The gloves are balloons, and they’re made to fit,” he said. Picking something up with a firm grip requires squeezing against the pressure inside the suit. The gloves can also damage astronauts’ fingernails.

“That squeezing against that pressure causes these forearm muscles to fatigue very rapidly,” Schmitt said. “Just imagine squeezing a tennis ball continuously for eight hours or 10 hours, and that’s what you’re talking about.”

Barratt recounted a conversation in which Schmitt, now 90, said he wouldn’t have wanted to do another spacewalk after his three excursions with commander Gene Cernan on Apollo 17.

“Physically, and from a suit-maintenance standpoint, he thought that that was probably the limit, what they did,” Barratt said. “They were embedded with dust. The visors were abraded. Every time they brushed the dust off the visors, they lost visibility.”

Getting the Artemis spacesuit right is vital to the program’s success. You don’t want to travel all the way to the Moon and stop exploring because of sore fingers or an injured knee.

“If you look at what we’re spending on suits versus what we’re spending on the rocket, this is a pretty small amount,” Rubins said. “Obviously, the rocket can kill you very quickly. That needs to be done right. But the continuous improvement in the suit will get us that much more efficiency. Saving 30 minutes or an hour on the Moon, that gives you that much more science.”

“Once you have safely landed on the lunar surface, this is where you’ve got to put your money,” Barratt said.