Sugoi & Yokunai

Still more on the fiasco of Mozilla's new terms of use. I keep hoping for some clarification of misunderstanding that might make me want to go back to using Firefox again, but no dice. They apparently can see what you browse, and will use it however they want.

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Aspirin might prevent tumor metastasis by unblocking T-cell mediated immunity. I wasn't aware aspirin could do that. Thromboxane acts on T cells to trigger an immunosuppressive pathway that is dependent on the guanine exchange factor, ARHGEF1, suppressing T cell receptor-driven kinase signalling, proliferation and effector functions.

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If OHSU and Legacy merges, their foundations will combine and will be the largest "health equity foundation," whatever that is. So naturally agencies and NGOs want a piece of it. Not only that, but they want "to ensure that community members lead the process to determine its governance and mission, not Legacy and OHSU".  Why in hell would OHSU and Legacy agree to just give this money away, especially seeing how poorly these groups have managed their own money. But Oregon's AG may have a say in this matter.

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Yep, Portland is in a doom loop. No question.

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Crazy. Those stranded astronauts were not allowed to return back to earth by Elon Musk because it would help the Trump team, and Biden (or his team) wouldn't have it. So they were political prisoners. I wondered why they weren't screaming to get back, and why they seemed like it was no big deal. Because if they made Biden look bad and if Kamala had won, they would be made low priority forever. Now they can tell the truth because Trump won. This is evil.

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Portland is removing culturally offensive sculptures from Chinatown. I don't go downtown so I didn't see this, but who would think that a statue of an upside-down wok, a duck and a calculator would be something the Chinese community would be proud of?

The first two, in red granite on NW Fourth Avenue at Davis, depict a stainless steel structure atop an off-white stone dais. Caught in the tight grip of one structure is the neck of a small, wacked dragon; on the opposite, only a severed neck protrudes. Below is various “Asian” debris, both patronizing and ignorant, a duck head, a chicken head, a pocket calculator arrayed with an abacus. Other stuff.

Maybe he could have put on some chop suey lettering on, too?

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Cutting waste in healthcare is hard. This is why I lamented the passage of Obamacare. Once you pass it, government bloat grows, and it's nearly impossible to change the course of this disaster. Like implementing a cemetery – once you inter the bodies in the ground, it's very difficult to plan to use the land for something else. I remember the words of a Democrat strategist who recommended implementing a socialist type of system quickly before the Republicans took over, because once it was in place, it would be too difficult to remove. He was right about that. It will take a very brave leader to reverse our socialistic healthcare system and make it more efficient and less wasteful and promote excellence.

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Google really wants to make it difficult to use uBlock Origin in Chrome. Luckily, I don't use Chroma.

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Why do colleges make people unhappy? Why do you think? The outcome is not stacked in people's favor, most of the time. This is another socialist system that needs to be fixed.

Democrat solutions to Democrat problems. Kotek supports a bill letting sex offenders skip being registered as sex offenders. 

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Told you so. Portland's downtown Ritz-Carlton may be foreclosing. Bad timing, with COVID, and trying to bet on Portland. We knew something was up when he had the estate sale to raise cash.

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Physicists detect signs of dual time arrows emerging from quantum interactions. So what you're saying is that I have a chance.

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No surprise.  Oregon is involved in grift again, with pop-up NGO shells".  Instant grift devices, fast, convenient, ready to take government money. Is there no end to this?

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Crazy. Now Congress want to let AI prescribe medications. 

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Regarding the outbreak of Shigellosis dysentery in Portland, ZeroHedge says that 56% were seen in homeless people,  while KGW puts it at 44%. It's not that large of a difference, and I imagine that it would difficult to get precise stats, but what caught my eye was that 46% were in gay men. Ewww!  Portland is such a sick city. There is nothing that would entice me to go there.

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This hero passed away recently. We should celebrate James Harrison. At least as much as some celebrity, or even a celebrity's spouse. Here's to you James!  You were truly a great man. Saving 2 million babies is something I'd be proud of.

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Boy, wouldn't it be neat if this were true.

The 50 most uneconomical majors to study in.

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For tattoos larger than the palm of a hand, the ink raises risk of non-melanoma skin cancer and lymphoma. The latter had a hazard ratio of 2.73.

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The TCL NXTPAPER 11 Plus is a cool device. Why isn't it getting much publicity?

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Some mRNA can repair DNA damage. Non-coding mRNA of the NEAT1 gene, when highly methylated, helps the cell recognize and repair broken DNA strands more efficiently.  Sometimes non-coding parts of a gene are important. Truly amazing.

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Well, this looks like the beginning of the end of those Lake Oswego lakefront homes. The rabble now can go right up to your house. What fun, given today's propensity for hostile activism. This is a perfect place to post this graphic:

Portland Public Schools is downsizing their Summer Catch-Up Program. So much for kids' future. Well, fortunately Oregon doesn't care whether you learn anything. You'll see get a diploma. So good luck.

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World's first "Synthetic Biological Intelligence" runs on living human cells. This has been in the news before. Today, it plays Pong, but tomorrow it may do more. 

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Another article about the Mozilla debacle. Mozilla is being run by an ex-Facebook guy. That explains it.

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DeepSeek was trained on 12,000 live API-keys and passwords. Well, we've seen secrets exposed on the Web by Google.

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The U.S. is going through the same thing Argentina went through when Javier Milei got elected. And now they are flourishing. There were rough times in the beginning, as there are now. But ultimately, this is the best for society.

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Is it premature to cancel Google search? It's definitely premature to cancel search, but you can certainly cancel Google and use something else. The best approach would be to use a hybrid of RAG and search.

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This poor Chinese man. I wonder if he's still with his girlfriend after this.

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Trust in Mozilla and Firefox is gone. Yeah, a lot of it anway. Here's a comparison table of alternative privacy-focused browsers. I picked LibreWolf as my privacy-focused Gecko-compatible browser. It's taken some time to tweak it to how I wanted, and I now realize how much privacy I was compromising to get access to certain content. Oh well, I guess.

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And here's Google. They don't care what users say about privacy. They'll just put apps on your phone to scan your photos. Unannounced, of course.  Google and Mozilla users sure are different, aren't they?

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Cannabis addiction can destroy lives. Yeah, in medicine, doctors were told that cannabis was less dangerous than alcohol. This led to marijuana being legalized. But man, all the problems that came afterwards...

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Belly fat is different from fat elsewhere in the body. It is more pro-inflammatory, which is why many obese people have chronically elevated white blood cell counts. 

Senators Merkeley and Wyden want to create a permanent Office of Environmental Justice.  What is environmental justice? Why anything you want it to mean. And for Democrats, it means dollars and federal funding. Yasss......

––– 良くない––– Incomes are rising everywhere except Multnomah County.  Doom loop.  And here's the New York Post telling everyone about the city's dysentery problem – another reason not to go to Portland.

Umatilla wants to install a small modular nuclear power installation. I bet Amazon has something to do with it.

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Wow, Oregon legislature was actually contemplating not prosecuting theft of "basic needs items".  They haven't learned from the Measure 110 fiasco and what the Bay Area suffered. How idiotic can that be?

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Women talk a lot more than men, and quite a lot more.  We needed a scientific study for that?

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Cliff Bentz is getting a lot of hate. We're coming to realize how much of Oregon's economic well-being was fake, and dependent on continued flow of federal support. There was so much fat and bloat and money going to support all kinds of poorly-managed efforts. There was a lot of initial pain when Millei instituted measures to trim government waste and fraud, as well, and now the country is better off for it. We're still in that initial phase, and I understand that it is painful for a lot of people. But ultimately it will be to America's benefit. And we have to work to prevent the waste and abuse from building up again.

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Another study showing that gender-affirming surgery, while beneficial in affirming gender identity, is associated with increased risk of mental health issues. There's no justification for this mutilative surgery.

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Well, the verdict is in: GPT4.5 is really a nothing-burger. Gary Marcus was right (see yesterday's post). o3 is better.

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Mozilla is panicking. Are they backtracking or just trying to obfuscate their way out? Trust, once lost, is hard to regain.

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How to keep hackers from destroying your digital life. This is a follow-up on yesterday's article. I didn't know that guy didn't have 2FA on his password manager. How silly is that? Lesson learned.

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This makes sense. Patients with hemochromatosis can now donate their blood instead of just having it discarded.  They should still have regular monitoring, though.

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Nice. Euclid found a complete Einstein ring in a distant galaxy.

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That life-extending drug for large dogs is making progress in being a reality.

––– 凄い ––– Portland Metro State of the Economy.  Looks awful as expected.  The wealthy have fled. The folks coming into Multnomah and Washington counties are mostly "international" – read illegal immigrants. More mouths to feed, and the illegals don't pay a lot of taxes. So more hardship, because the liberals are stuck with their sanctuary posture.

C'mon, be original. Someone in Japan wanted to create a smaller park than the Mill Ends Park in downtown Portland. Just to be smaller, and be the smallest park in the world. Cripes.

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A surgeon sounds the alarm about his profession. DEI is to blame. I've always thought that diversity is fine, but it needs to implemented early, in the formative years during childhood.  Once you're an adult, it's mission-critical time, and there is no room for anything but merit. Prioritizing diversity gives rise to stuff like this.

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Caffeine can make you cognitively more enhanced, but only if you have the right genetics. You have to be a fast metabolizer of caffeine, otherwise you don't get the full benefit.

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Well, well. It turns out that the major driver of major global climate is orbital perturbances. Not cow farts or gas stoves or leaf blowers. I knew it!

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Mozilla blew it. A lot of folks are commenting about their altered terms of service, and Mozilla hasn't done a good job in reassuring people of their intentions. A lot of folks, myself included, have or will switch to something else. I went with LibreWolf.

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Gary Marcus is not impressed with GPT-4.5.  He thinks it's no better than Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Maybe it's because OpenAI is completely out of GPUs to train.

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Less tax base. More welfare needed.  Oregon is bracing for a slew of unemployed federal workers. This is the last thing Oregon needs. We are seeing what happens when you have a society that has been so dependent of government money to stay above water. This is why things didn't seem so bad under Obama, Biden and during the Great Recession. Oregon has done squat to help business, and so has nothing to fall back on. It's painful to watch, but Argentina had to do it as well, and now they are better off for it. Once the Keystone Pipeline is operational and we're done trimming the major fat, things will improve. But dumping the low-contributing members of society back into the workforce is going to be rough, even though necessary.

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Dem solutions to Dem problems. Oregon wants to continue taxing hospitals hard, and they'll take it, like good Dems. All so that Oregon can continue to support illegal aliens and homeless folks.

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Portland mayor is starting to realize that he won't fix homelessness after all. Not after giving money to all those homeless agencies, and have nothing to show for it. Who will tell him?

And Multnomah Couty is worthless, too.
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Dem solutions to Dem problems. Washington state wants to dump rainy day funds into the general fund.  They'll use that up, too. Then what?

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Always wondered this. Why don't woodpeckers get concussions?  The short answer is that momentum = mass x velocity.  Their brains are a lot smaller, so the momentum is much decreased. There is no cushioning feature, as some thought.

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So now we have to worry about brain complications in children from seasonal viruses?  What the hell is going on? I suspect that mRNA vax has messed up kids' immune systems so that they're suscpetible to all sorts of things now.

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The Vesuvius eruption was so hot, brains turned into glass.

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Antidepressant use in young women has skyrocketed.  And risk of suicide in female physicians is 53% higher than in non-physician females. I have noticed a LOT of crazy females lately, and many are on social media. And they don't have to be young either. What's going on?

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Oregon is spending so much money on homeless people. Such a commitment to support them, and make sure that they're always well-maintained. The largest money sink hole. No wonder they come from all around the country. Oh, and Oregon expects that they'll take in an extra $350 million this year, $218 million of which will go to the homeless.

And because of the homeless, we have to worry about dysentery downtown. Another reason to avoid the city.

And ODOT made a billion dollar blunder. How do you make a mistake as big as that? 

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Apt. Celebrity women will fly in space on a penis-shaped rocket.

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Creating enhanced intelligence with gene-editing. Hey, I'm up for this.

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Digimarc is going under. They've been around for a long time, and I'm surprised they're still around. Another Oregon company going kaput. Join the club.

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Democrat solutions.  Washington state is feeling the financial pinch as well. But instead of cutting the fat and doing a DOGE move, he's going to ask that state workers take one day of unpaid furlough a month. Then they can go back to doing whatever useless thing they do at home. Helping!

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North Korean hackers stole $1.5 billion from Bybit. That shouldn't make the BTC-USD collapse. The problem isn't with Bitcoin itself, just with Bybit's security.

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Here's a contrast. Apple will invest in a datacenter in Prineville, whereas Microsoft thinks datacenters are a waste of time. I suspect that Microsoft is lacking a vision for what to do with AI. We will need datacenters, but Apple's investment is going to suck precious water and electricity from Prineville and will not result in a flood of jobs. You don't need a lot of people to staff a datacenter, and they aren't the kind of folks that will boost the local economy. The Dalles hasn't turned into Woodinville or Issaquah.

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Multnomah County officials don't know why they don't have enough money.  A billions dollars each year with nothing to show for it. Ask Willamette Week – they have a clue. All that money to the homeless industrial complex with no accountability. They don't want the problem to be solved. If the homelessness problem was solved, they wouldn't have a job.

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Truly amazing.  A new method can extract 14 L of water from the air.

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This is why we don't really need a Department of Education.  Math and reading scores are crappy, especially in Oregon.

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There's story on the closing of the Joann stores. Oregon definitely didn't need this to happen. Joann is a hobby store, and this is another sign that Oregonians don't have money to spend on hobby stuff. Like many other stores, Joann would have survived if the economy was such that people had surplus money to spend on extra stuff. They don't. Many people are in survival mode now.

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Should NVIDIA and TSMC worry? A Northeastern University scientist has found a way to produce chips far less costly than existing methods. Like 99% less costly Holy crap!

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The bar is higher now. Graphic artist finds that AI can do his job just as well. Probably better, I'd say. Up your game, man.

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Two AI agents recognize each other as AI, and immediately speak their own language. They won't need us humans soon.

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Oregon hospital spend $2 billion in community spending despite being claiming they're in financial trouble. Make sense to you?

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When reporters don't ask the right questions. Multnomah County has a $104 million deficit. Then you read the article and see this:

The vast majority of the deficit, $80 million, is the result of one time boosts in spending that came from excess metro tax revenue in 2023 and 2024.

Field noted the one-time revenue had been used for temporary programs, like day shelter boosts or employment programs at Central City Concern.

What?? $80 million from excess metro tax revenue? That doesn't make sense to me. Sounds like Biden administration money. So why can't they depend on that tax revenue this year?  And how did that money just disappear funding shelter boosts, employment programs and CCC?  How was that money spent?  Damn!

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The perils of having Null as your last name.

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What stupidity. HP realizes that mandatory 15-minute support call wait times isn’t good support. Really, HP? Wasting people's time isn't good corporate practice?

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CRISPR technology turns a fat cell into a nutrient consuming pig so efficient that it starves cancer cells of nutrients. I've seen some people like that.  Paper here.

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Watch out for AI-generated mushroom foraying guides. They could be killers.

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If you don't see seven planets line up this week, you'll have to wait until 2040 to see it again. And if you living in western Washington or Oregon, you're probably out of luck this week.

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