You’re likely already infected with a brain-eating virus you’ve never heard of. It's the JC virus (polyomavirus 2). It's mainly a problem with the immunocompromised, but certain drugs can increase the risk of viral activation. A fair amount of people get rituximab or immunosuppressive chemotherapy, but even so, the risk is low. Progressive multifocal leukoenceophalopathy is rare, but people on organ rejection drugs should be cautious. But I think this is mostly a scare article. There are a bunch of other things more likely to injure you, especially if you live in downtown Seattle or Portland.
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Record Number of Student Loan Borrowers Are in Delinquency and Default. This is.a NYT article, so naturally it's written with a slant. This is not a simple issue, and many students signed loan agreements that were absolutely insane, and it's no wonder they can't break free. The big mistake was when Obama took student loans away from banks and put it in the hands of government, which basically rubber-stamped approval to everybody, whether it made fiscal sense or not. Many people should not have gone to an expensive college they couldn't afford. But to outright forgive the loan is unfair. People should be able to declare bankruptcy if they can't pay it. And the government should not be in the business of giving out student loans.
Yeah, Americans are waking up to reality around college. In many cases, it's not worth it.
The House of Saud posted an informative article on the implications of the destruction of oil fields and refineries going on in the Middle East. The world could be seeing unfavorable oil prices for a long time. But this message is mostly directed at Europe. In the Western Hemisphere, things are much different, with Venezuela being a friendlier country now, and no longer supplying Russia and China. The United States is in a much favorable position now and has great leverage. Plus, Trump could re-activate fracking. Now that oil prices are higher, it makes sense for domestic oil companies to reactivate efforts to do this. This would lower inflation significantly.
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How many ways can you offend a Japanese person with chopsticks? More than you realized.
––– 凄い ––– A portable device that can alleviate lymphedema. This greatly needed as many breast cancer patients suffer from this. It's not life-threatening, but it is annoying.
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High meat consumption linked to lower dementia risk in genetic risk group. The high-risk group are those who have the APOE 3/4 or APOE 4/4 genotype. Well, don't want to take any chances, do we?
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AEI shows that the bigger and more credible studies tell a very different story. Among the four pilots with treatment groups of at least 500 participants, which together account for 55 percent of all treatment-group participants, the mean effect on employment was minus 3.2 percentage points. AEI also estimates a mean income elasticity of -0.18, which is consistent with standard labor-supply economics.
In plain English, when people receive more unearned income, work tends to fall at the margin.
Mole supposedly "deep cleans and optimizes" your Mac. I'll bookmark this, and maybe test it on a non-critical Mac first. Titanium's Onyx does this, too, and has a track record.
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Money isn’t going to solve the burnout problem. This is covered in the Veritasium video about the unsung hero (Lasse Collin) who has been providing a necessary app that keeps the Internet humming, but was getting burned out maintaining it on top of everything else he needed to do. And the unsung Microsoft techie (Andres Freund) who discovered someone wanted to take control of the Internet by hacking with this guy's code. Collin was desperate to have someone take over code maintenance. That was the vulnerability. So how do we fix this?
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KuraiMusik supplies AI-generated background music. AI-generation is the perfect way to get music for hacking. You want it to be pleasant to listen to, reasonably bland because you don't want to focus on the music and go off on a tangent. You want a wash of sound that keeps you working, and not boring so you don't try to hunt for new and better music. This may be better than Datasette's Music for Programming.
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Unbelievable. Hawaii just got blasted with the worst rainstorm in decades. It's a Kona storm, and I never heard about it until now.
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I thought Providence Health Plans was an asset to Providence. Turns out it was a liability. Who will want to buy it? Without the built-in hospital and the primary care network, what distinguishes it from any other plan?
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Portland's building and construction infrastructure is crumbling. People need to work. If they can't, they'll leave. Then what will happen?
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