28 March 2023

John Cook lays out some good reasons why you can't ever be sure about the promise "We will not sell your personal information."

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Some Seattle hospitals will still require masking, despite the state dropping the requirement.  The reason:  "immunocompromised and high-risk patients still need protective measures."  Well, if that's true, why is that hospitals in New York and California are dropping masking requirements?  I can't find reports of masking requirements being reinstated.  Why don't officials look at what's working in other states, and realize that it's OK to relax requirements?  As Voltaire said, "It's difficule to free fools from the chains they embrace."

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Samsung cameras add teeth to baby photos, and fake pictures of the moon.  Do you really want a camera like that? 

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Washington's vagrant population is increasing, sadly.  Seattle's and King County's grew by 32%. 

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I'd bet that real estate magnate Barry Menashe never dreamed that he'd someday own an open-air fentanyl market.  Strange times.

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Following New York City's lead, Oregon lawmakers have proposed a bill to lower penalties for major crimes.  A proponent thinks that lower punishment will be an incentive against recidivism.  Tell that to this guy.

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One keeps reading about battery breakthroughs, but then, nothing more.  Like an aluminum-sulfur battery.  Or the vanadium redox flow battery that the DoE allowed to go to China to develop.  Or solid state lithium batteries.  Now researchers at OSU have developed a zinc battery based on a different electrolyte solution that approaches "nearly 100%" efficiency.  The world is waiting for battery breakthroughs to reach the market.

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First, there was this Reddit posting about a guy who felt that AI had robbed him of his delight in coding for games.  Now his job feels "dystopian".  Now this posting about how "ChatGPT robs students of motivation to write and think for themselves".  I knew that AI would present a challenge to humans, but I never suspected that humans would capitulate to AI so easily.  Maybe the low-hanging branches will not be so low now, but is that a reason to despair? 

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Well now I'm glad the Northwest Ronin isn't on Substack.  I wouldn't want to have to migrate to some other platform after all this, and start from scratch.  I hope Substack survives, as there are some favorite 'stacks that I would hate to lose, like Portland Dissent and Oregon Roundup. 

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Student loan payments will likely resume by August 29.  This will put some extra financial stress on people.  Unless SCOTUS thinks it's legit for Biden to single-handedly indebt the economy by $400 billion.  Even money to Ukraine had to have the assent of Congress.

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The Fed has apparently lost money for the first time.  Wait, I don't get it - can't they just print more?  You mean, they can't just do that?  Why not?  Oh...

While the Federal Reserve Act requires the Fed to avoid taking credit related losses that could have an impact on taxpayers, it makes no mention of losses from interest-rate risk exposures. The act’s authors never imagined such losses. Monetary policy was all but assured to generate Fed profits prior to 2008. That changed once the Fed started paying banks interest on their reserve balances and making large open market purchases of long-maturity Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities.

Fed losses from its interest-rate-risk exposures—unrecognized taxpayer losses—are now being realized in ways Congress never intended and at magnitudes neither the Congress nor the Fed ever expected.


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