European aviation is particularly exposed to the shortage of jet fuel, relying heavily on imports from the Middle East. Around 75 per cent of Europe’s jet fuel imports come from the region, making any prolonged disruption especially problematic for its aviation industry.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/16/jet-fuel-shortage-w...

As it happens, about 75% of Europe's jet fuel comes from the Middle East (I don't immediately have numbers for what of that goes through the Persion Gulf). That percentage puts it outside of the range you can correct with market changes (other than most flights don't fly... that is pretty drastic).

Since the original story here does not provide many details, we can't know which side of that fence this falls on (assuming it is real).

You would need to have significantly stronger lasers to try and "burn through" on something moving that fast.

For completeness I should mention that there was quite some work on trying to get laser defenses against ballistic missiles on their "boost" phase (when they were launching, so slow enough to track a point in the missile), for example George Bush's "Star Wars" defense system. These would have been space based (some of the testing involved mounting on 747s, but I don't think that was ever an end-goal), but never made it near production.

If the fight between them was started at some distance, the David should have been the expected winner by pretty much everyone on the field. Think "bright a club to a gun fight" sort of vibes.

The joke is that Apple owns the 17.x.x.x class-A range on the Internet (they got in early, the also have a second class-B and used to have a second class-B that they gave back), and what engineers were really saying is that they could not reproduce on the AD systems that Apple had setup (lots of times it was because AD had been setup with a .local domain, a real no-no, but it was in Microsoft's training materials as an example at the time...).

Now that we have moved to a 2 floor detached home (also in San Jose) we do not have that issue, and everything is gravity fed.

I think the problem is that people have gotten so used to seeing capitalism from the companies' perspective (i.e.: profits good), and forgot that it is supposed to be all about the collective good. So if you think sustained high profits are good... then you have missed the whole point (the market should always be driving them towards near-zero).

So that part could just be a blip. The rest seems on-trend.

We (humanity) have gotten comfortable with the way things are, and a change in that is going to mean that things are going to change for us, and we don't like change. Most of our biggest cities are all close to the coast and will be subject to massive flooding in the next 100 years (if not sooner). Much of those same large population centers are also fairly close to being too hot for general survival (without aggressive AC). Our agriculture is all setup for the temperatures we have now, and the rain patterns we are used to. So we are going to have to change both where we live, and how we grow our food (location and probably strains as well).

Global warming is (almost) definitely not going to destroy all life on earth, but many of the forecasts are in extinction-level for most of the large animals. So life in general will continue, and probably humanity (since we are so good at making environment for ourselves), but the (eventual) changes are going to make the world very different, in ways that we are not going to like.

Now those bonds are all coming up for renewal at much higher interest rates, and the companies don't have the growth to organically support the higher head-count (in addition to the interest payments), and so are cutting.

Was this all wildly irresponsible? Yes. But the people who made those decision are never going to personally pay for any of it.

This can be seen in the case of ChongLy Thao, the American citizen (who was born in Laos). This was the man dragged out into freezing temperatures in his underwear after ICE knocked down his door (without a warrant), because they thought two other men (of Thai origin I think) were living there. The ICE agents attitude was that they must be living there, and ChongLy was hiding them. That being wrong does not cost those ICE agents anything, and that is the source of the problems.

They likely could cause a lot of trouble for a local police force, but would not stand up to any infantry force in the world.

So in an actual conflict with the U.S. government, none of those tanks would be more than symbolic. And whole a general gorilla insurrection in the U.S. would be nasty, examples like Wako demonstrate that even mid-sized stands would be severely overwhelmed.

The whole idea that a Second-Amendment rebellion in the U.S., absent the military joining on the side of the rebellion, is just a fantasy.

So I don't think we can extrapolate confidently at all. So we really don't know whether it holds for the rest of the population at all.

The best one to watch at the moment is if Pixelmater Pro license holders from before it was bought by Apple get access to any of the new improvements.

Not only will they not grant future funds, but they have shown that they will not pay out previously agreed monies, and will even try (with government layers) to pull back funds from groups they have decided "do not align with the governments interests", for however they define that at that moment. There are a long list of court findings that these have been arbitrary and capricious, but every one of those findings (wins) cost the grant receivers a lot of money in court and later fees.

So any money taken from them is incurring a risk. You can disagree with the Python Foundation's calculus on this (saying it was not that large a risk), but please don't pretend that it was not an actual risk.

One of her biggest projects was shepherding a large group of very old donations through a legal process to remove provisions in the donation agreements that were now illegal. In these cases the donors were long deceased, and the most common rule that needed to be changed was targeting race or ethnicity (e.g.: funds setup to help black people, or Irish, etc...).

The sheer number of different variations on "donor intent", or even just the wording on that legal document was astounding. There was always a tension between my wife's group and the group that was bringing in the money ("stewardship"), her group wanted things to be simpler and the "stewarding" group wanted nothing to get in the way of donations. It was remarkably similar to the tensions between sales and engineering in many software firms.

It allowed for both HTML applications and Java apps (both JNLP and completely local). And before the transition to Java it was ObectiveC, and I think even had a scripting language (WebScript?). It was beautiful, fast, and for lots of things you could just wire up a small app to a database with almost no code (then later add the business code after the demo).

One of my first jobs was writing a web app using it, and those were fun days.

The EnterpriseObjects part (the part that managed data to/from the database) survived for a long time in parts of Apple's web back-end. And I have always thought that WebObjects was the model that Ruby-on-Rails was designed to mimic (in many ways, but not all).

Edit: here is some documentation I just found: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Le...

But even then, it was common knowledge that most "shrinkage" (generic term for stolen/damaged/expired/destroyed merchandise) was from employee theft (except in grocery stores... there it is second to expired goods).