13 July 2026

Wow! Apple M7 Ultra Chip Planned With Up to 1.5 TB of Unified Memory. I can't even grasp how awesome this will be and what this will enable. It'll probably cost as much as a small car, though, and probably won't be available until early 2028, I bet. Hope they solve the memory availability problem. 

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Oh-oh. A guy who was using Grok Build to code found out it was uploading his repo data and git commit histories to be trained on. Another person who was using Grok Build in his root directory found out that Grok was uploading his "SSH keys, my password manager database, my documents, photos, videos, everything..."  Yikes, someone has urgent matters to attend to!

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There's a TON of Obamacare fraud being uncovered, and I can only read about it on conservative media or on government websites. Sometimes a non-partisan website will report it. Like they say, when Republicans screw up, that's the news. When Democrats screw up, the Republican response is the news. Sure enough, Politico only reports Republicans "cry foul". And it's Trump's fault that all the fraud is being allowed to continue. We should NEVER have universal healthcare managed by the federal government. Holy schlitz!

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Portland is not ready for people to visit. Clearly. That'll show those visitors not to vacation in Portland!

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12 July 2026

Researchers Finally Solve a Decades-Old Mystery About Cellular Aging. And it turns out to be the ATM gene. I used to think that gene was just a problem with the rare disease of ataxia-telangiectasia, and that I wouldn't have to learn about it. But mutations in this gene may contribute to 40% of cases of breast cancer, probably the most common. That would be a great bar bet, as most people would say it was BRCA 1/2. Blocking the ATM gene can allow senescent cells to keep dividing, maybe breaking the Hayflick limit. That would be really cool.

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OpenAI is not having a good week.

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This is truly crazy. Britain allowed a Chinese investment company to buy three prestigious private schools. Then they raised taxes on it. Now the Chinese are shutting the schools down. And the British are howling. Whoever thought this would be a good idea?  It's like the decrepit Chinatown Cultural Center in Honolulu has been an eyesore, but it's owned by Taiwan, and they just let it fester. Some think it might be demolished. Why let a foreign company own such valuable property?

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Low birthrate risks creating U.S. housing glut over coming decade. But the Blue cities in the PNW still want to build low-income housing because they think it will reduce homelessness.

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Great! Apple is really serious about making computers that can be used for serious machine learning. The large amount of unified memory is the advantage. The chips are getting capable as well, but nVIDIA is still the one to beat. The MLX versions of open source LLMs are still painfully slow.

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Meta’s AI Detector Can’t Detect Images It Generated Itself. Meta is trying so hard to be a respectable AI company.

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Yes! Under a new federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid. Get rid of those gender studies programs, which are just good for NGO positions. Make colleges have some skin in the game.

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The Ten Commandments of AI Usage. These are reasonable.

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Oregon business closures outnumber openings — and the gap is growing. More businesses are shutting down than opening. We knew that.

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11 July 2026

Apple accuses OpenAI of stealing trade secrets in blockbuster Silicon Valley lawsuit. There are so many articles on the tech sites about this. Apple has had enough. And the last thing OpenAI needs is yet another legal wrangle. While Anthropic is in the news with people leaving their jobs to join them, or how powerful their latest model is, OpenAI news seems to be all about someone suing because someone died, or this.

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Haves, have-nots and know-nots: Inside AI's new class divide. This article is so true. While some folks get so excited about the latest frontier model release, the vast majority of people couldn't care less. It doesn't affect them. All they see is that AI is going to make their lives miserable, either by taking their jobs or by the datacenters that will need to be built. But AI isn't going away, and unless regular people learn about AI and how to harness its power to make their lives better, this divide is going to remain. And get worse.

Here's another article about AI anxiety, focusing mainly on the Ai-related layoffs. 

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In a mouse model of colorectal cancer, a single intravenous dose of Ewingella americana completely eliminated tumors, producing a 100% complete response (CR) rate. According to the researchers, the treatment outperformed standard therapies used for comparison, including immune checkpoint inhibitors (anti-PD-L1 antibody) and the chemotherapy drug liposomal doxorubicin.
Holy crap, why isn't this in the news? It's amazing! How does it work? We need more effective colon cancer therapies, for sure. 

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China reveals 100-gigawatt microwave weapon that could fry US satellites in orbit. The future is here, for sure. This is pure sci-fi stuff. The power needed for this weapon is such that it probably won't be used very much.

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Ethiopian coffee beans have chemicals neuroprotective against hyperglycemic injury. Good news for diabetics. But it's not just the caffeine. You gotta drink the coffee. The secret may be in the chlorogenic acid (CGA), caffeic acid, quinic acid, caffeine, Cafestol, Kahweol, ferulic acid, and catechol, too.

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Here's a font that only humans can read and AI can't. Good to know. For now, anyway.

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Interesting write-up about the company Bending Spoons. Simple idea, but it seems to be paying off. So many familiar names are Bending Spoons companies.

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San Francisco Inches Closer to PG&E Acquisition. Seize the means of production! Straight out of the Communist Manifesto. Good luck with that, San Franciscans. Hope you have better luck that Portland buying the Moda Center. 

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I still don't trust Meta. When you're not looking....

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10 July 2026

RFK Jr. Plans to Create a List of Injuries Caused by COVID-19 Vaccines. 

Health officials are proposing a plan to clarify which COVID-19 vaccine side effects would be eligible for government financial compensation, according to a new notice.

Financial compensation should come out of a certain individual's bank account. Taxpayers shouldn't have to pay for this, especially those who saw through the baloney.

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What?? 'Complex numbers are not needed for quantum mechanics': Physicists develop quantum model that uses only 'real' numbers for first time ever. I think complex numbers are a more convenient convention. Let's not get too radical just to prove a point.

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Rise of the Gen-Z Luddite. AI is moving so fast, all Gen-Z can do is protest.

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Starbucks Taps AI to Cut Reliance on Microsoft, IBM Software. Oh yeah, because quality enterprise software is so easy to vibe-code now. Going the way of Pizza Hut?

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Your next nurse may monitor you from the Philippines. It's just amazing the lengths that hospitals will go through just to save money.

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Oregon in the news again. Just the last state you want to move to.

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9 July 2026

This paper isn't getting nearly enough attention. Targeting Cancer-Specific Mutations with RNA-Triggered Chromatin Shredding. This is from Jennifer Doudna's lab. The scientist that co-invented CRISPR-Cas9. Well, her lab has found a way to selectively kills cells with the p53 mutation. This is huge! Many cancer cells harbor this mutation. This could be a way to eliminate them selectively. This shouldn't affect people with Li-Fraumeni syndrome, where the p53 gene is missing and not mutated. They still have to deal with cancer risk.


Kaiser Permanente nurses say technology is making their jobs — and patient care — worse. It's almost like working at Meta.

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Looks like we're not going to have a leap second after all. They made the decision!

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How to avoid dementia — what the science really says. Some things you can do something about. Some things are unavoidable.

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Windows Drops Under 60% in Global Desktop OS Share for the First Time in Years. I figured this would happen some day.

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Google Turned On AI Training for Your Photos and Voice Searches Without Asking. They once said "Don't be evil." That was then. This is now.

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Meta could be working on always-seeing, always-hearing smart glasses with AI super sensing. Crap like this is why people hate AI. And Meta.

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55515 to stop pain? Sounds hokey.

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AI Mistakes Can Cost Doctors Time When Writing to Patients. If you have to use AI to communicate with patients, you're too busy.

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Cancer cases expected to soar worldwide, WHO report finds. Well, it's The Guardian and it's WHO, so I'm not sure this can be trusted. But in this case, I do believe that cancer incidence will increase. Will it really be 1 in 5? Are they counting skin cancers? I'm not exactly confident that doctors will be up to the task.

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Execs Confused and Horrified by the Huge AI Bills After Thinking They Could Replace Workers for Free. Yeah, AI is not what they were thinking. And you still have to pay for inference. And have engineers around to fix things.

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Long COVID disability burden in US adults. Review article on LongCOVID. It's about time we got an update on things. More males got COVID-19 but more females got LongCOVID. Fauci should not have been pardoned. 

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Ryan Reynolds invested in Portland. Now he's closing Aviation American Gin's Tasting Room and Visitor Center. Yup, investing in Portland is really risky.

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8 July 2026

I posted recently on how a hacker was caught when his MIcrosoft Global Device ID gave him away, linking him to other accounts. Someone has written a GDID changer to try to get around this. Don't know if this actually works. Best to be safe and not hack stuff.

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Meta Now Lets Anyone Use Your Instagram Photos in AI Images—Unless You Opt Out. Why anyone still uses Facebook or Instagram is beyond me.

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This is the year of commodity DRAM, not HBM. I think it's both, actually. There will be a need for both types of memory. And yes, SK Hynix is joining NASDAQ this Friday. Are you ready to buy?

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The male wellness guide to peptides. It seems a lot of people are trying out peptides, mainly from China, designed to help with "muscle gain, sexual health and skin tanning". I suspect many think that they're like other supplements – largely weak but might give you a slight edge, but that they're largely harmless. I would think so, too, but some peptides, like depsipeptide, specifically romisepsin, are actually chemotherapy, used against T-cell lymphomas. So they're not necessarily benign.

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It's officially the end of an era for Adobe. Hard to believe such a dominant company could decline like this. It reminds me in some ways of Microsoft.

Happy Voluntary Lobotomy Day, Microsoft. They're going to let their time-tested, experienced, knowledgeable employees go. Only the young and H-1B visa holders will remain. Oh well.

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If students are skipping school, do you change the rules, so they aren’t required to attend? Oregon Department of Education officials submitted a proposal to the state Senate that recommended repealing compulsory attendance in a state with among the highest student absentee rates—nearly a third of students in 2024 missed 17 or more school days...
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Portland's condo market falls 50%. Who could have predicted this?

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8 reasons Blazers may move to Nashville. I think this is spot on. Besides, Portland hates billionaires. Why would he want to have an investment in a city that hates him?

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Oregon approves PGE’s 29.7% rate hike for data centers under landmark law. Well, this is one way to keep the datacenters away. But the public shouldn't have to shoulder the cost for these.

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7 July 2026

Beijing is looking at curbing overseas access to China's top AI models. Bit of irony here. Chinese engineers copied American AI research, and now that they think they've achieved parity, they want to cut off any access to their models. 

The United States and China are locked in a contest over semiconductors, supply chains, and technological primacy. Europe writes some of the world’s most demanding AI rules, often at the cost of speed. India and many countries in the Global South evaluate AI governance differently, focusing on who has access to frontier models and under what conditions. This is the Great Fragmentation in plain view. The global technology stack is splintering into rival blocs that no longer share standards, priorities, or even a common definition of winning.
Today, SK Hynix US Listing Said to Be Multiple Times Oversubscribed, yet chip stocks are plunging. Even though the price of a Mac Studio is through the roof. It's crazy.

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Scientists find no link between Tylenol and autism. This is another heavily politicized health topic. Try to find objective evidence for and against a link between acetaminophen and autism. And because RFK Jr is involved, you know that finding objective evidence will be tough. I was curious as to how a link was even suggested, and apparently it was an association initially noted in the 1970s. Researchers at Mt. Sinal School of Medicine also thought there was a link between prenatal acetaminophen and neurodevelopmental disorders. So is there a link or not? Like with climate change and mRNA vax side-effects, there won't be consensus. Politics will get in the way.

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The Popup That Says the Quiet Part Out Loud. After claiming to be the one big tech company that safeguards your privacy, Apple now quietly admits that your data will have to be sent to Google. 
And the framing keeps softening. Back in February, Google executives were suggesting the new Siri would just run on Google's own servers during an Alphabet earnings call, calling Google Apple's "preferred cloud provider." By March, Apple was reportedly asking Google to set up servers meeting Apple's privacy bar, which read at the time like damage control. Now, in July, we get a popup that just tells you plainly: this goes to Google Cloud. That's honest. It's also the last stop on a walk-back that started with "your data stays on our silicon" and ended with "here's a consent screen for when it doesn't."
...the precedent is set: Apple devices now have a sanctioned pathway for routing Apple Intelligence requests to a third party's cloud, and a UI pattern for asking permission once and moving on.
It was too good to last.

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All the things that happen after you click to buy something, to when the sale is made on the other side. It's amazing how many things happen, and so quickly. Time to appreciate all the engineers that made it possible.

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How little exercise can you get away with? I kept seeing this article pop up everywhere, so I had to click it. Basically it says that even a little bit of exercise is better than just sitting in your chair all day. It's called VILPA, which stands for vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity.

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Xbox Has Laid Off Almost Every Coder At Doom Studio Id Software. I'm not a gamer, but I have played DOOM, and before that, Commander Keen. Really too bad.

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AI chatbots are giving out people’s real phone numbers. Bots aren't ready to be out personal assistants, are they? Yet many think they are. Even Google DeepMind is worried about what happens when millions of agents start to interact. Well, it's too late for that now, isn't it? 

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Oregon’s semiconductor industry is in decline and is “at risk of becoming an insignificant stakeholder” globally, according to a new analysis commissioned by the state.

The report by Business Oregon, the state’s economic development agency, concludes the Silicon Forest faces “long-term stagnation” because it is too reliant on Intel, lacks homegrown talent and faces regulatory uncertainty, high costs and a diminished supply of industrial land.

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6 July 2026

Is baby poop the secret to keeping your brain young?  

For decades, age-related memory loss has largely been viewed as a problem that begins in the brain. But growing evidence suggests that some of the processes shaping cognition may start much farther south — in the gut, home to trillions of microbes that help regulate everything from digestion to immunity.

A new mouse study from researchers at Stanford Medicine and the Arc Institute in Palo Alto, California, points to a surprising gut-brain connection behind cognitive aging.

Got my next startup idea!

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By increasing extracellular serotonin, SSRIs disrupt energy homeostasis and often worsen symptoms during acute treatment. Our third claim is that symptom reduction is not achieved by the direct pharmacological properties of SSRIs, but by the brain's compensatory responses that attempt to restore energy homeostasis. These responses take several weeks to develop, which explains why SSRIs have a therapeutic delay. 
Now they tell us.

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Is this what human interaction has become? It seems that some people need AI to decipher other people's communication – which may have been generated by an LLM. That's just nuts. Is this what office life has become?

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Lesson: if you want to be a black hat hacker – don't use Microsoft Windows. Hacker got snagged by his device GDID. Don't do illegal stuff.

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Great idea. Instead of falling prey to AI-powered spammers, setup a CAPTCHA and make them pay to have their spam delivered to your inbox.

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Interesting. Secret setting turns your phone into a kid-safe dumb phone.

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Music that Keeps You Focused. I had high hopes for this genre, and wished that someone figured out how to tap into the brain and maintain focus. Turns out I pay too much attention to the music, and I get distracted pursuing other music. Or I get annoyed and bored. I was a Focus@Will subscriber in the early days, but stopped listening. Focus music is very personal. What works for one person doesn't for another. For me, it's Dark Ambient or Industrial.

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Be careful when you shop at Target. They record your purchases and profile you. Amazon does it too.

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DKIM and DMARC have been upgraded. They've been useful in figuring out which emails are phishing emails. I have an extension in my Thunderbird mail client. Let's see if the newer versions improve on this.

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Well that's crap. Safari sidebar silently lazy-loads all your bookmarks. I don't want to load all my bookmarked sites every time I fire up Safari. Another reason to stay with LibreWolf.

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Android is almost dead. Or more accurately, F-Droid is almost dead. I'm in the iPhone world so I don't really care.

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Why High-Earning Families Are Leaving Traditional Schools for AI. Well, when you have "teachers" like this, it's no wonder.

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YouTube is really turning into AI garbage. It's like a mini-government. You complain and report a crime and nothing happens. Pretty soon there is too much crime to punish. People get away with no punishment. Enshittification ensues. Reminds me of....

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Anthropic is losing people's goodwill. It's true. Fable 5 answers a lot my questions with "I don't know. You shouldn't rely on me for answers. Look it up yourself." Whereas Claude Sonnet from the last version will at least give me some answer which I can verify myself. Even Felo has become lousy, repeating the wrong answer over and over when I point out an error. Perhaps, it's time to use some of the better open source models.

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Oregon lands on list of worst states to move to. 9th from the bottom, actually. But take the survey with a grain of salt, because it gave high marks to Oregon for education. I guess they haven't been paying attention. No one would mistake Oregon for being anywhere near high for education. Maybe Oregon would really rank even lower?

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5 July 2026

Google created a video short imagining how AI would have been used by America's founding fathers. Infuriating? I thought it was quite amusing.

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Here's more on that Scientific American editor-in-chief who led to downfall of that august journal. SciAm has become the Bud Light of science journals. Remember when she went on a nutty anti-Trump rant? Here's more of her social media rants. She represent all that was wrong during the Biden era. Good riddance. Will SciAm be resurrected? That would be nice, but I suspect that today's readership is not as sophisticated as those of the 1970s.

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1 in 5 adults make health decisions based on what they see on social media despite widespread mistrust. Someone opined that many people were against the mRNA vax, but now they eagerly embrace injecting peptides from China. I don't know if it's the same group of people, but no one is forcing them to inject on the threat of losing their jobs.

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Of course, it's NPR. 5 million have dropped ACA insurance after Trump and the GOP let prices skyrocket. Such biased reporting. They call it the ACA, not Obamacare, because it's failing. The federal government really has no business being America's medical insurance provider. Obamacare only worked because the federal government was underwriting it, and since the fed has deep pockets, prices of everything went up accordingly, because the market could bear it. So it wasn't Trump that let prices skyrocket. It was the fact that taxpayers were paying for everything, so prices jacked up. What the Trump administration needs to do is to convince insurance companies to compete with each other for the individual's business, instead of what he have now. Where employers select the health plan for their employees, who have to take it or leave it.

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MacBook Pro overhaul. One will have to pay more to get less than expected. Or wait until next year for the real upgrade, which will cost about as much as an economy car.

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Two economists have sharply different takes on the recommendations by Gov. Tina Kotek’s Prosperity Council. I think Eric Fruits is right on the money. Oregon is in a doom loop.

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4 July 2026

Happy July 4th Semiquincentennial!

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Megalodon.jp is a Japanese archival service, similar to archive.today. It doesn't require having to check a box to prove that you're not a robot. You use it just like archive.today. To read a website that might require a subscription or login, you could preface the URL with https://archive.ph. Instead you preface the URL with https://mastodon.jp.

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Scientists discover a surprising link between vitamin C and brain health. A Japanese study found that those with lower vitamin C levels had less gray matter in their brains. The study was funded by KAGOME which makes a variety of health food products, so take that into account.

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Scientists at Northwest University created a shape-shifting liquid that transforms into an energy-rich gel that stores power for months. It's called ANI-MV. Not much details about this, but the paper is here. Seems like it's more for energy storage at the cellular level than something that would apply to the energy grid.

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Russia buys gasoline from India to tackle shortages. Russia's oil is medium-sour crude, which should be suitable for gasoline. But damage to refineries is what did it. And at a time of seasonal demands. Little Ukraine has hurt the great bear. This is also why the United States can't produce enough gasoline for the nation, despite American oil being light sweet crude. Our refineries are geared for imported oil from Canada, Mexico and Venezuela, which goes into making diesel, heating oil, bunker oil, asphalt, and motor oil. With cracking, heavy crude can go into making gasoline, But due to difficulty in getting environmental permits and the large capital costs involved, the U.S. hasn't built new refineries since the 1970s. As a result, U.S. production is at max capacity, and refining capacity has actually decreased over the past few years. So people squawk about gas prices, but when it comes to voting, they don't want to expand capacity. And here we are.

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These 10 Portland restaurants and bars have closed in the past two months. What gives? Oh, it's just the ongoing collapse of downtown Portland, that's all.

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