Look at that, you can absolutely combine fireworks with drones, very nice. This is in Irving, Texas, 500 drones
On this sequence of events, the likelyhood of Biden dropping out jumped to over 60%. What's more, Schumer's office leaked that they told Biden to withdraw on Saturday, Jeffries too. Pelosi has also been rumored to be working hard behind the scenes to get Biden to withdraw. If you're looking for another argument on why Biden should withdraw, here's one paraphrasing Eric Levitz: imagine Trump was trailing Biden in the polls and he voluntarily stepped down as nominee, as a Democrat, would you think it makes the Republicans more or less likely to win?
Nate Silver's summary is simple enough:"[they] held an intervention with Biden, and it didn't work, so now they're leaking the details publicly"
The takeaway seems to be that he was just looking to shoot a politician, and wasn't 100% sure what either of them looked like. Crazy, but then again as Yglesias pointed out: "The assassin community is typically made up of crazy people who exercise poor judgment." Not a surprise that his political compass also makes no sense.
Can you even see the Chrysler building in that picture?? Here's a few more details about the design, notably it almost entirely sits on top of a transit station, making it very hard to transfer the weight down into the actual ground. It's mostly offices, with some hotel rooms at the top.
Longer Reads
• Summary of an interesting article arguing that Rome had all the parts needed for the Industrial revolution at the same time, just not in the same place. TL;DR: they didn't have the printing press, and it's just not possible to transfer information fast enough without it. Here's the full article. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Egypt is bearing the brunt of the Houthis attacks, as all shipping is going around the Cape of Good Hope instead of the Suez. (src)(cached)
– Interesting data shows that a ton of common female fashion trends are not considered attractive by most men, and women understand this fact. (src)(cached)
– Ford CEO is very clear that EVs are going to take over worldwide, no matter what happens in the US. If they want to stay an international brand, they have to figure out how to make EVs. (src)(cached)
– US Government is paying Moderna to develop a bird flu vaccine. Seems like a good idea. (src)(cached)
– "Revealed preferences of billionaires prove that poasting on X dot com is the most sublime terrestrial joy yet conceived by man. Despair not, anon, for even a pauper can sip of this sweet draught." (src)(cached)
– Really impressive AI video that can add animations connecting arbitrary key frames (src)
– Based on senate polling, it seems likely that almost any democrat would outperform Biden. (src)(cached)
– "China is demanding acts of loyalty from young professionals living and working in the US", seems bad (src)(cached)
– Desalinating water has continued to get cheaper, dropping almost 50% in the last 10 years (src)(cached)
– Degrowther comic (src)(cached)
– China's “Taiwan Separatists” law is making firms consider pulling their employees out of China, a short thread (src)(cached)
– The Washington Post had an outage, and it turns out it's because they are using their own custom CMS. Why?? (src)
– Really seems like the main reason Marc Andreessen gave for turning against Democrats was Biden's push for a capital gains tax on unrealized gains. It was never going to pass, but it was a way to say they planned to only raise taxes on the rich. (src)(cached)
– Gruber argues that adoption of RCS messaging is a huge mistake by Apple, as shown by the massive AT&T data breach. Since texts aren't E2E encrypted all AT&T customer texts from 6 months of 2022 were leaked. (src)