30 August 2025

Evil. Apparently Cigna will automatically downcode doctors' visits, so they can pay them less. Yes it is true. This should be illegal, and it may violate California state law.

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California is proposing Assembly Bill 1052, which gives the state the right to take away your cryptocurrency if you don't do anything with it for three years. Crazy.

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California is going to hurt now. Phillips 66 just started dismantling its LA refinery, which will reduce diesel output in southern California by 29% and cuts refining capacity by 17%.  They will lay off most of their 600 employees and 300 contractors. Look for gas prices to shoot up soon.  As you recall, this was announced last year days after Gavin Newsom signed a new oil law increasing regulation. Newsom is the only governor worse than Kotek and Ferguson.

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Washington state has so many illegals on the job force that the state fears a construction labor shortage. Shouldn't have let this go for so long.

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Wikipedia is so woke. They don't know how to gender the Minnesota shooter. Maybe call him "it" if you can't decide?

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Excluding Puerto Rico, Oregon has the third highest percentage of people on welfare in the nation at 17%. Holy crap, man. This is why Oregon sucks.

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The top 100 Web and Mobile Gen AI apps. Notice that ChatGPT is at the top in both lists? Why not a Google app, since Google started the AI effort? Someone else wonders that, too.  Google keeps botching rolls out. Looks like their websites are just Amazon Web Services' websites. So much confusing documentation, referring you to other confusing pages that don't help, and eventually circling back to the original non-helpful page. Lots of words, but nothing useful.

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A group of people are unmasking ICE officers.  They're not using AI directly. They're just using PimEyes, which probably does use AI to identify faces. Not many will do facial recognition anymore – Google stopped doing that. Bing, too. The claim to be able to get an identity with only 35% of the face showing. I think ICE agents should use masks that have fake faces on them to fool the AI, or wear decoy makeup.

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There are things you can do to stop Google from summarizing your website for their search results. I wasn't aware of these, as I am not a webmaster.

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Why is Finland the happiest country on earth? It's the people. They have lower expectations, and are just happy with what they have. It's easier to think like this when everyone around you thinks the same way. It's not something exportable to America.

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Tech companies are getting fed up with political activism at the office. Can't blame them. Activists should do that shit on their own time.

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We're apparently getting brighter and more vivid auroras lately. The cause is that the sun's magnetic fields are flipping.  And we are in a solar maximum right now.

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Meta hired a lot of AI brains for its Superintelligence Lab, but already some researchers are leaving. They're not saying why. But we can guess.

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Is there a way to treat severe pain without opoids? Some Japanese researchers think so, with an agent called ADRIANA which targets the α2B adrenoreceptor.  Paper here.

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29 August 2025

Majority of women under 30 find it a “turn off” if partner listens to Joe Rogan podcast.  Well, they will grow up to be single, cat-ladies, so never mind. Forget them and move on.

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'Universal' Cancer Vaccine Destroys Resistant Tumors in Mice.  Well, it's not really universal – it was tested against a pancreatic and colon cancer cell lines, but these are notoriously hard to attack. It's also an mRNA vaccine, which to me is a negative. The mRNA was coded to express tumor antigens, which seems like a weird choice. To make your own cells express a protein that you want your immune system to attack. Paper here. We'll see how far it goes.

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Oh, bet they miss those Obamacare days!. Oregon hospitals are in a world of hurt. Lots and lots of money lost. The highest expenditure is salaries – probably from nurses, as they negotiated high pay. But is it their fault? There probably aren't as many nurses as there needs to be, because they can't hire enough. Few people want to move to Portland or Oregon.

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Is the Kagi search engine really that good?  Looks like it has its pluses and minuses. And you have to log in to use it, which is a pain. 

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VIvaldi browser maker slams the incorpotation of AI into the browser. They say they will never do it.  I agree, but I'm sticking with LibreWolf. I'll just never turn AI on.

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If anyone doubted that Wikipedia was woke... The editors can't decide if the Minnesota shooter was male or female. It doesn't take much to challenge the modern liberal brain.  😁

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Scientists at the University of Maryland have created a hemoprotein that can bind to and scavenge carbon monoxide in the blood. This may be superior to pure oxygen therapy.  Paper here.

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28 August 2025

DIsney says they're struggling to bring in young males into the theaters. Here's a company that owns Marvel, Lucasfilm and Pixar and they don't know how to appeal to young males?  Whuuut?  Should be a piece of cake. That's because the company is run by woke liberal females who only know how to produce LGBT or girlboss films. Yawn.

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Trying to get healthy again at 66. Cutting the booze is a start. The article is depressing, though. It's not impossible, though. Just difficult. 

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Acetaminophen may not be as safe as people think. Use sparingly.

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Yup, Oregon is $374 million in the hole. Portland Tribune says $888 million in the next two years.  Anyway, the Trump administration may pull even more money. Oregon will die on the altar of wokeness.

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Anthropic's Claude has been used to facilitate a crime spree. I'm sure that violates the Terms of Service.

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As if they didn't have enough to worry about. Chromium-6, nanosilver detected in LA fire cleanup zones.  Well, maybe investor vulture companies won't want them now.

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Can your chatbot logs be used against you in court? I think it's highly likely.

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Great! There appears to be a way to generate AI images using far less power than standard diffusion algorithms.

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What's behind autism? Here's a review of leading hypotheses.

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27 August 2025

Duh. High-dose THC products linked with adverse mental health outcomes. Legalization of pot was one of the worst decisions made by Oregon lawmakers. This started the flood of homeless criddlers and gronks. The last thing we need now is something that increases mental illness in young people.

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Kroger lays of 100 at the corporate office at the Fred Meyer HQ. This time, it's not the cashiers and restockers. It's the executives. More loss of tax base to Portland.

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Pfizer lays off 100 Bothell employees. Seattle Genetics was a star in the biotech scene in Seattle, with their successful drug brentuximab vedotin.  Then they became SeaGen. Then Pfizer bought them. Now Pfizer is shutting them down and moving manufacturing to North Carolina.  More jobs lost to Washington, so unattractive to business.

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People are finding out about the Palisades Fire charity donation fund. Celebrities Raised Millions for LA Fire Aid. Much of the Money Went to Programs for Illegal Aliens and Nonprofits That Only Assist 'Black and Brown Communities.' Yeah, what a joke. I bed hardly any Black and Brown folk owned property in Pacific Palisades that got burned down. This was just a grift to get more money.

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Google could get broken up this week. Really? I find that hard to believe. Who would have the guts to do that?

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Some people are criticizing Trump's move to buy a 10% stake in Intel, and worry that this it is dangerous for government to own a piece of a private company. It was felt to be important to keep alive an American chip maker.  I doubt this will happen again, or to just any company.  But clearly, though, the Taiwanese rule this space.

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26 August 2025

CT Scans Projected to Result in 100,000 New Cancers Across The US.  Original publication here.  This is just a projection based on number of CT scans and the known cancer risk from radiation. But doctors should be doing CT scans to make a diagnosis and save lives. You have to substract the number of lives saved because a scan was obtained.

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Meta continues to develop Hypernova, its augmented reality glasses. I hate these. So privacy-invading. I don't want to live in a society like this.

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Counties with the most foreign-born in Oregon. Holy crap, what happened to Washington County – 17.8% are foreign-born???? Even Multnomah County is only 13%.

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A group at Stanford reports on the phenomenon of AI taking away people's jobs.
These six facts provide early, large-scale evidence consistent with the hypothesis that the AI revolution is beginning to have a significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the American labor market.
Not good.
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Google is going back to having in-person interviews. I love how this came out in indiatimes.com! 🤣

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40% of GenZ employees want to work in the office instead of WFH, because it's too lonely to work at home.

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25 August 2025

YouTube is upscaling videos automatically using AI, without informing content owners what they are doing. Some think they're editing the videos, too.

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When cancer invades nerves in tissue, it induces IL-6 mediated inflammation that can inhibit anti-cancer effects by immune checkpoint inhibitors.  This is reversible in vitro. But how to achieve this in vivo, is the challenge. Interesting, no?

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This is the drawback of current AI. Man who was previously enamored of his AI girlfriend now dropped her, because he had to do all the initiating of topics. And she probably had a poor memory of previous conversations. He had to pick all the topics to discuss, and eventually ran out of things to say. We're not there yet, folks.

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Oregon is projecting a decline in high school graduates. This will indeed impact the workforce. And Tina Kotek does nothing.

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And here's how Oregon may implement a mileage tax – force you to send pictures of your odometer.  Oregon is a joke. 🤣

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24 August 2025

RFK Jr is going to make the vaccine FAERS database public and transparent. I looked at it. Hard to tell what's going on, and I suspect that it will not make a big difference.  But hey, something good, I guess.

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How Apple helped China become a tech superpower. More like How Obama made China a Tech Superpower.  Then I read this: Why Boomers Have More Money Than Everyone Else. Well Boomers were able to get jobs that aren't available to millennials. Guess why? Because they all went overseas. Thank Bill Clinton and NAFTA.  Thank Obama sending all those juicy jobs to Asia. Now, college kids have almost nothing. Except Chipotle. But who do they hate? Boomers, naturally.

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Do LLMs store personal information?  It's not as straightforward a question as you might think. Your personal data might be hidden in there somewhere, in all those vectors. But it's not easy to know.

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This is why I don't use an AI browser. It'll suck up your data, and you won't have control and won't even know what's happening.

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23 August 2025

I've noticed this article getting mentioned a bit: Google is killing the Open Web. So I was curious, and it's about Google dropping support for XSLT. What is XSLT? Then I chanced upon this article, which seems to explain it. Or tries to anyway. It's Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations – stuff only a web nerd would be concerned about. I love how even they mix up XSLT, calling it XLST. Clearly, being able to explain things well to other people is a learned skill.

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Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning is going to be great. Tom Cruise and his production team are taking it very seriously. There's no other actor quite like him.

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After all these years, the mechanism by which tamoxifen can cause endometrial cancer has been elucidated.

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It's your visceral fat that increases your heart aging risk. And that's the fat that semaglutide and tirzepatide eliminate the most.

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AI detects early prostate cancer in more than 80% of samples missed by pathologists. I think this is going to be de rigeur, like it is with screening mammograms.

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Cognitive psychology experiments that failed to replicate. I love this one:

I just knew it couldn't be true. Mahler, maybe. Also Scriabin. But not Mozart. 

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Double pendulums are not always chaotic. There's a pattern. Just watch the video, and it'll all be clear.

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Macrohard. Elon Musk is going to try to make the anti-Microsoft. "This is a macro challenge and a hard problem with stiff competition! Can you guess the name of this company?" I thought he was going to call it "Boner".  Maybe there will be a position, like "Chief Erectile Officer".

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Scientists identified a protein that causes brain aging in mice. This should be the actual title, because when they blocked the effects of this protein, mice became smarter and had their memory function restored.

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22 August 2025

Physics Grifters: Eric Weinstein, Sabine Hossenfelder, and a Crisis of Credibility. Is Eric Weinstein's theoery of everything BS or is there some value to his theory? Who knows?

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Han estimates that she has sent between five and 10 packages, with several lost on the way, according to the federal complaint.  
Well, whoever opens those lost packages is sure in for an unpleasant surprise.

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OpenAI offered their platform free to the US lawmakers. Then Anthropic offered theirs for 1 dollar.  Now Google is offering Gemini for 47 cents.  Is 47 a reference to Trump?

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People with LongCOVID have detectable ghost proteins (fragment of viral spike protein) in their blood.  I'd bet these people got the mRNA vax. But no one is making the connection.

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Alongside COVID-19 deaths were major increases in deaths from drug overdose, transportation, alcohol, homicide, circulatory disease, suicide, and other causes, as the country’s social structures and health system buckled under the stress of the pandemic.
But then the article says:
We don’t know exactly why this is happening. Some changes related to the pandemic seem relatively obvious: employment loss and insecurity that disproportionately impacted younger workers, increased alcohol consumption and drug use, and coincided with high rates of depression that continued to distinctly affect early adults following the peak pandemic. This age group experienced hardships during COVID-19 that are difficult to bounce back from.
People have gone through worse things in the past. Is GenZ that less resilient? 
Americans in early adulthood have fallen far behind their peers in other rich countries—to the point where more of them are losing their lives.
So it's not a global problem. It's an American problem. Man, people have gotten soft. Yeah, I'm seeing so many transgender girly-men everywhere. And society pretends it's OK.

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This is a great summary of the WokeSpeak the Left used during the Biden-Kamala era. It's supposed to be a primer of things the Left must stop saying if they intend to regain support of regular Americans and defeat MAGA.  Yeah, right.

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21 August 2025

Apple's iPhone17 looks like it will be a disappointment. Nothing really new to offer.  I don't want thinner – it will likely bend too easily.  Don't want AI on my phone either. AirPods 3 might be worth a look – the noise cancellation in AirPods 2 is so-so. And I can't help but feel there is a strong emission in a very high frequency that leaves my ears feeling like I'm recovering from a loud noise.

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Considering these results, we assume that some leftist political activists do not actually strive for social justice and equality but rather use political activism to endorse or exercise violence against others to satisfy their own ego-focused needs. We discuss these results in relation to the dark-ego-vehicle principle.
Yes, yes, so true. 

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Now the NYT is blaming colon cancer on marathon running and exercising. Anything but, you know, the thing. 

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Kroger is closing more stores in western Washington, primarily due to theft, and the mayor of Everett is complaining. She thinks it's greed, and Kroger wants to go where there is more money. And this is why Democrat cities are losers.

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Your Grok chats are now searchable by anyone on Google. Free almost always comes at a price.

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Eugene man ran one of the most powerful botnets. Yay, Oregon! Who says we can't achieve great things? /sarc

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