Forbes recently published the Forbes 400 List for 2024, listing the 400 richest people in the United States. This inspired me to make a histogram to show the distribution of wealth in the United States. It turns out that if you put Elon Musk on the graph, almost the entire US population is crammed into a vertical bar, one pixel wide. Each pixel is $500 million wide, illustrating that $500 million essentially rounds to zero from the perspective of the wealthiest Americans.
I found this posted in a Navy-related Facebook group, shared in February 2024. As a destroyer sailor myself, I thought it describes well what makes a sailor different. I have searched all over and cannot find this anywhere else on the Internet, so the author is unknown.
To a Young Person Considering Naval Service: Attitudes and Preparation
If you are considering Naval Service, it would be good to take a look at all the services and what they have to offer. They are identical in pay and benefits for a given rank, though they differ in the main type and setting of the work you will do.
Before we get into the small print, you should know that one very important aspect of military service is the overall attitude and bearing of the particular branch. This is, as much as anything, what you should consider when choosing one over another.
Nothing much has changed in this area in the many decades since I joined the Navy. From what I can see, things are about the same. If you want to get an idea, take a look at what the services consider important. Look at their monuments and memorials.
For nearly all of its existence the Navy didn’t really have a memorial, per se. The reason for this is that the Navy didn’t concern itself that much with how posterity viewed it. It was the Navy and would be the Navy, and if you didn’t know or like that, the fleet wasn’t going to lose any sleep.
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Atlantic hurricane activity is usually nearing its peak at this time of year, and it seemed as if this August would be no exception. Tropical waters are extraordinarily warm, and two hurricanes have already pounded U.S. shores.
So why — despite predictions that this year’s hurricane season would be historically active — are the tropics suddenly so quiet?
There is a combination of factors demonstrating how even the most confident long-term forecasts are subject to unpredictable short-term influences.
Source: Why hurricane season is suddenly quiet — and what could be next – The Washington Post
The US Air Force plans to bring the Pacific island airfield that launched the atomic bombings of Japan back into commission as it tries to broaden its basing options in the event of any hostilities with China, the service’s top officer in the Pacific says.
One day at the dawn of the 1980s, an FBI agent in his 30s named Rick Smith walked into the Balboa Café, an ornate, historic watering hole in San Francisco’s leafy Cow Hollow neighborhood. Smith, who was single at the time, lived nearby and regularly frequented the spot.
As he approached the oak wood bar to order a drink he suddenly spotted a familiar face — someone Smith had met about a year before, after the man had walked into the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco. He was Austrian by birth, but a denizen of Silicon Valley, an entrepreneur who operated as a middleman between American tech companies and European countries hungry for the latest hi-tech goods.
The Austrian had visited the consulate to drum up business behind the Iron Curtain. The tech entrepreneur may not have put much thought into how closely the building was being watched by FBI spy hunters. And why should he? At the time, there wasn’t necessarily anything suspicious about trying to conduct commerce with the Soviets. In 1979, for instance, there was $4.5 billion in legal trade between the U.S. and Soviet Union; about $200 million of that was in high-tech goods. But bureau counterintelligence routinely blanketed the consulate with surveillance. And their interest was piqued. After the FBI clocked the Austrian’s visit to the consulate, Smith had reached out.
International businesspeople could be important sources for the FBI. They had access to people who would never knowingly speak to a U.S. government official, and to all sorts of information of interest to U.S. intelligence. Some could even become secret agents of the U.S. spy services.?
Source: Moscow’s Spies Were Stealing US Tech — Until the FBI Started a Sabotage Campaign – POLITICO
You know why these Russian “illegals” spies can be here for a decade or more without getting arrested? Because they’re useless. It takes them that long to do something worth arresting them.
On the other hand, if they pull FBI resources away from the real spies, then it might be worth Moscow’s trouble.
I feel for these poor kids, though. I couldn’t stand lying to my kids for any reason but turning their whole world upside-down? Everything they thought they knew is a lie? These fake parents deserve prison time just for doing this to their kids.
Putting your country before your kids does not make you a hero. It makes you a monster.
It seemed straight out of an episode of “The Americans.”
The children — Sofia, 11, and Daniel, 8 — had no idea their parents were deep-undercover Russian spies pretending to be Argentine expats in Slovenia, according to the Kremlin, much like the characters on the television show that was based on similar Russian spies known as “illegals.”
Life as Sofia and Daniel knew it ended Thursday when they stepped on a plane destined, they would later discover, for Moscow, as part of a landmark prisoner swap. When President Vladimir Putin greeted them at Vnukovo Airport a few hours later, he did so in Spanish: “Buenas noches.”
The daughter and son of Anna and Artem Dultsev have always believed they are Argentines, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Friday. Their mother shed tears as Putin handed her and Sofia large bouquets of flowers.
Source: Children returned to Russia had no idea parents were spies, Kremlin says – The Washington Post
Let’s begin with a brief recap of the current state of play at Intel. For starters, despite bold promises to regain technology leadership, it remains miles behind TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited) in chip manufacturing and indeed is increasingly relying on TSMC to manufacture its latest and future CPUs, such as Meteor lake, Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake.
Meanwhile, it’s losing market share to AMD in server CPUs, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Arm-based chips are a real threat in Intel’s largest consumer market, laptops, Intel’s Arc graphics effort has been a bit of a flop so far, and now its last two generations of desktop CPUs are badly broken.
Most recently, Intel announced some very poor financial results and decided it needed to fire another 15,000 employees after already trimming 5% of its workforce last year, a move that CEO Pat Gelsinger branded “some of the most consequential changes in our company’s history.”
This week, to feed Wall Street’s insatiable demand for higher profits, Southwest Airlines killed it’s five-decade-old first-come, first-served open seating boarding process. It is now just another airline in my book and I will now be treating it as such.
Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary sets the right tone in discussing this sad change.
(Also, my blog needs a new category: “enshittification.”)
Et tu, Southwest?
It was only a matter of time. Southwest Airlines, which set itself apart from its nickel-and-dime competitors, will soon scrap its open-seat policy and charge folks for more legroom.
It’s a momentous change that, in some respects, speaks to a metaphor I’ve written about before — airline seating is much like America’s economic divide — the less room you have to be comfortable, the more likely you’ll get stuck in a miserable middle position.
Source: Money buys a better position. Just look at Southwest’s new seating. – The Washington Post
Earth’s atmosphere holds an ocean of water, enough liquid to fill Utah’s Great Salt Lake 800 times. Extracting some of that moisture is seen as a potential way to provide clean drinking water to billions of people globally who face chronic shortages.
Existing technologies for atmospheric water harvesting (AWH) are saddled with numerous downsides associated with size, cost and efficiency. But new research from University of Utah engineering researchers has yielded insights that could improve efficiencies and bring the world one step closer to tapping the air as a culinary water source in arid places.
The study unveils the first-of-its-kind compact rapid cycling fuel-fired AWH device. This two-step prototype relies on adsorbent materials that draw water molecules out of non-humid air, then applies heat to release those molecules into liquid form, according to Sameer Rao, senior author of the published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science and an assistant professor of mechanical engineering.
Source: Compact atmospheric water harvesting device can produce water out of thin air
Drive through Durham, North Carolina, where I live, and you might get the impression that marijuana is legal here. Retail windows advertise THC in glittery letters and neon glass, and seven-pointed leaves adorn storefronts and roadside sandwich boards. The newest business near my house is the Stay Lit Smoke Shop, where an alien ripping a bong invites you to use the drive-through.
In fact, neither medical nor recreational marijuana is legal in North Carolina. Technically, we’re getting high on hemp.
This is probably not what Congress had in mind when it passed the Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018, commonly called the 2018 Farm Bill, which made the production of hemp—cannabis’s traditionally nonpsychoactive cousin—legal for the first time in nearly a century. Lawmakers who backed hemp legalization expected the plant to be used for textiles and nonintoxicating supplements, such as CBD oil and shelled hemp seeds (great on an acai bowl). They didn’t realize that, with some chemistry and creativity, hemp can get you just as high as the dankest marijuana plant.
Source: Congress Accidentally Legalized Weed Six Years Ago – The Atlantic
