Dramatic drop in Stack Overflow questions as devs look elsewhere for help. StackOverflow is like Chegg now. At one time, we put up with all the lousy posted answers, because that's all we had to work with. Now, those days are gone.
Transcranial electrical brain stimulation to treat depression has hit the mainstream. A device for home use is now FDA-approved. This is good because mental health ratings in the U.S. hit historic lows.
I thought about this in reading that Sen Ron Wyden is in support of rescheduling cannabis to a Schedule III drug.
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Trump Cannot Slash NIH Research Funding. As I recall, the two issues were grant funding for DEI-related projects. Under the Biden administration, including woke language was done to increase chances of getting funded, because that's what lefty grant reviewers were looking for. Of course, such verbiage is now a liability under Trump. The second issue was the high percentage of indirect costs which universities were taking to put into their slush fund. The argument about using endowment money was likely a suggestion, not a contingency to justify the decrease in funding. But I do agree that cutting back on science grant funding should be a last resort. Researchers can't help it if Democrats run the show sometimes while Republicans run it at other times. You gotta go with the flow. And they can't control indirect cost requirements either. Trump should continue funding science and focus on the much greater fraud that's going on. That will save us money!
Update (8 Jan 2026): Appeals court says that OHSU must be paid NIH money. The 56% indirect cost figure is obscene. This is what the Trump Administration has been arguing, and rightly so. That's just abuse and indirectly hurts researchers, who end up getting penalized by working at universities which demand so much.
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Don't wait until the last day. USPS is now postmarking letters and packages based on when they are processed at a mail facility, not when they are dropped in a box -- meaning something mailed on deadline day could receive a next‑day postmark. You can always go in and have a postal worker timestamp it for you, though.
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I just learned that in Washington state, it's a misdemeanor crime to knowingly give someone a cold and also to knowingly expose yourself to a sick person to get a cold. Gee, was there some kind of work-avoidance scam going on, or something?
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Washington has the lowest business survival rate in the nation. Wow, worse than Oregon. And it's probably due to stuff like this: Seattle in freefall under hyperwoke mayor as new order allows drug users to avoid prosecution... with homeless encampments growing in city. Mayor Katie Wilson is in competition with Mayor Zohran Mamdani to be the most incompetent and destructive mayor of a major American city.
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Lawmakers call to help secure rural health funding. 2026 is really when we see the socialist model destroying the healthcare infrastructure. So much of healthcare has depended on federal government subsidies which only serves to drive up costs. When vendors know that the customer has really deep pockets, costs of everything goes up, and that's what's been happening. Now more of the country is on poorly-reimbursed Medicaid programs and nurses and hospital staff are more expensive to afford. Rural hospitals are the most vulnerable and are the canary in the coal mine. We need a complete overhaul.
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I saw this report on Fox Business and almost spit my coffee. Apparently Oregon tops the nation in "highest percentage of in-migration" which is 65%. Wow! The place where people were heading, though, was Eugene-Springfield. Huh? The reasons for in-migration were "tech and healthcare". Well there is no tech sector in that area - certainly not enough to move the needle. There is healthcare, but only one hospital in Eugene and a few clinics. PeaceHealth is the largest employer there and McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center is in Springfield nearby. Another large employer is University of Oregon, and so maybe it's more educational administrative bloat and union hires. Then there are the school districts - more union hires. It's not really healthy that the biggest employers in the state are hospitals and schools. These don't make money like businesses, and all rely ultimately on government subsidies. Even in Portland, the largest employers have been OHSU and Providence.
Yeah I see that Optum needs physicians in Corvallis and Eugene.
