Azerbaijan

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev also accused Russia of trying to

“First, the Russian side must apologize to Azerbaijan. Second, it must admit its guilt. Third, punish the guilty, bring them to criminal responsibility” Unpopular opinion: the parties that are criminally responsible for the shoot down of flight 8243 include the airline management and the pilots themselves. Purely from a passenger safety point of view it was criminally irresponsible to fly a passenger airplane into Russia. Ukraine is, quite rightfully, waging an extensive drone warfare war against Russia, and planes are going to get shot down. Secondly, it's obviously morally wrong to support the Russian economy by flying planes to Russia. And finally, it's Russia: we know they're immoral scrumbags. You can reasonably expect Russia to do things like intentionally try to kill off planes they shot down by accident. That significantly increases the risks. If the pilots hadn't died, they should have gotten criminal charges for agreeing to do this flight. As should the entire management chain above them who planned and approved this flight. As for the Russians manning the anti-air defenses, what they've done that was criminal was showing up to work at all. Trying to prevent Ukraine from winning is a deeply immoral act.

Found this old email from Sep 2016, just after OpenTimestamps came out: “I'm cautious about making bold statements about OpenTimeStamps because the Github commit history shows that until four weeks ago, you had not updated the code since 2013. The project looks incomplete and you're probably making changes on a daily basis. The many customers of Tierion find Chainpoint perfectly suitable for high volume applications.” Since the SEC shutdown Tieron and forced them to give back all the money from their token sale; OpenTimestamps is still going strong.

Blockchain

SEC Settlement with Tierion Requires Repayment to TNT Token Purchasers

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission continued to the very end of 2020 to pursue companies that engaged in ICOs without proper registration....

In fact, I'll soon have good news to share about future OTS development!

This kind of disaster is why I periodically backup my OpenTimestamps calendars to physical blu-ray disks. They're backed up on Amazon S3 Glacier too. But nothing beats offline media to screwup resistance.

Truck News

Are manual transmissions being regulated out of existence? - Truck News

Here is an example of how greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions credits, or a shortage of them, can impact fleets’ spec’ing decisions. Under current e...

Interesting read. Canada is effectively regulating manual transmission commercial trucks out of existence, as well as certain higher horsepower commercial trucks. Trucks in the commerical market are bought to be cost effective. Nothing more. $1 million trucks certainly aren't bought for fashion. Obviously, there's a market for manual transmissions and higher horsepower because commercial truckers need them, and the Canadian government doesn't care.