24 February 2024

Strike! American resident physicians may have qualms about striking. Not so the South Korean resident physicians. The majority of them are striking and they don't care about patient health. The government's response to stressful conditions due to overwork is to just increased enrollment in medical schools, but that's not going to help the resident physicians today. It will be years before they experience any relief. I wish there were a way to solve this problem without hurting patients, but sometimes there is no other way.

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A report from the Universty of Cambridge says that having a regular doctor is better than having a rotating doctor, as in the Kaiser model.

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Scientists have discovered a factor in LongCOVID - a leaky blood-brain barrier. Here's the lay version. Not sure what it signifies, but it's a piece of the puzzle.

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Recriminalization of hard drugs like fentanyl should be a no-brainer, right?  Hard to believe that there are people opposed to it, but there are. Why do we need to compromise on something like this?
And Seattle is finding out the hard way that just providing homes is not the answer to the homelessness problem:


And the homeless in Seattle can do pretty much whatever they want.
Yes, the leadership in Seattle is amazingly stupid.  And here's the head of the Seattle City Council, dumbfounded that their effort to raise the minimum wage for food delivery workers backfired.

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About time. The Chinook Indian Nation used to dominate the Pacific Northwest. They pretty much owned the land of Washington state. The Chinook Wawa is still alive. But over the years, the tribe's dominance has greatly waned. Now, they may get tribal recognition back.

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Hospital workers will now be a protected class. Assaulting them will now be a felony. I can't believe that there are people who oppose this. Of course, it's the defenders of those with "disabilities". Sorry, but allowing this loophole weakens the law, because so many people can claim to have "disabilities". Heck, living in Portland is probably a disability.

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Yes! Oregon lawmakers want the Feds to halt efforts to build offshore windmill farms. Dems vs Dems.

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Crook County citizens will get to vote on whether they want to be part of Greater Idaho.

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NVIDIA is on a tear. Can Jensen Huang manage this and continue the company's dominance? Obvious other players want a piece of the action. But CUDA is dominant, and it will be hard to get around it. However, in the tech world, we've seen leaders get toppled by more capable competitors. But they're GPUs are incredibly expensive, and a lower cost but still capable competitor could take away business. We shall see.

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Oregon ranks last in math scores in 30 states in 2022 and 2023. So why are we paying teachers more? Are we getting our money's worth? Probably not.

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Google AI refuses to answer question about the Second Amendment. Who thought this A.I. model was ready to be released?

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So chronic stress promotes cancer metastasis. One of the things I've noticed is that those who constantly worried about their cancer and stressed out about it, were the ones who did worse. Those were more relaxed and accepting often did better. This may be why. The mechanism is that neutrophils in stressed individuals tended to spill their DNA, inducing the formation of fibronectin and causing a "sticky" web to form. Introducing an enzyme to destroy DNA (DNase 1) reversed this. So it's important to get those stress levels down, as this will lower inappropriate glucocorticoid release. But I worry about drugs like pegfilgrastim which increases neutrophil levels. Could those be causing harm?

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Vending machines have face recognition systems. Just do you know. They're everywhere, it seems.

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Uranus and Neptune add a few more to their moon count.

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Workplace injuries rise after states legalize recreational marijuana. Yeah, and car accidents, too.

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