7 August 2024

Why primary care physicians are becoming harder to find in WA. Nursing shortages were in the news, and now doctor shortages. Gee, maybe they shouldn't have forced out the doctors who didn't want to get jabbed?  The younger doctors embrace telemedicine and want to work from home. Especially as it gets more dangerous for females to venture outside. But you never get the same quality of care as when a doctor sees you in person.  Telemedicine is getting to me more like the "Dear Doctor" column on Oregon Live.  Right now, there aren't as many regulations for teleprescribers, and so we're seeing a lot of flaky internet doctors, but that could change. Another problem is the burden of unreimbursed EHR charting time. This takes up so much time. With lower Medicare reimbursements, no wonder why so many doctors are burning out.

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Could airplanes someday be powered by ground-based microwave antennas? I can envision the horrifying accidents waiting to happen.

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The FoxVox browser extension changes the language of a webpage to impart a more conservative or liberal slant. Might provide some amusement for a few minutes.  Maybe it can stimulate discussion.

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Psychotic symptoms in mass shootings v. mass murders not involving firearms: findings from the Columbia mass murder database. They conclude:
...policies aimed at preventing mass shootings by focusing on serious mental illness, characterized by psychotic symptoms, may have limited impact. Policies such as those targeting firearm access, recreational drug use and alcohol misuse, legal history, and non-psychotic psychopathology might yield more substantial results.
Well the data clearly show no clear connection between gun availability and murder rates. It's more the type of person who has the gun, rather than having a gun. But I agree with recreational drug use (especially cannabis) and alcohol misuse. But I would bet that many, perhaps most, of the mass shooters were taking antidepressants.

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2.9 billion hit in identify theft incident, with names and full SSN stolen. Why is no one else reporting this? This goes back 30 years, which would make more sense since there aren't that many people in the USA.

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Scammerlocker claims to be able to take down a fraudulent website for you.
Here's how it works:- The tool does a WHOIS lookup to get the domain registrar's abuse contact email. Then it uses Groq's mixtral-8x7b model to use the context and target URL provided by the user to generate an abuse report email with a matching subject. Using Mailgun, it emails the domain provider at their designated abuse contact.

The tool works for any illegal websites, including but not limited to investment scams, crypto pump, and dump, phishing pages, animal abuse, etc. All domain registrars, hosting providers, and TLDs are legally required to take action when they receive an abuse report. Typically, it takes several days to a few weeks to take the website down.

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Costly coding errors. The winner is a doozy. Funny in the rear view mirror, though.

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Here's why you should never let Democrats be in charge of expensive projects. So $42.5 billion was allocated to giving rural areas broadband Internet access under a federal modernization program.  To this date, not a single home or business has been connected to new broadband networks nearly three years after President Biden signed the funding into law, and no project will break ground until sometime in 2025.  The reasons:
  • Preference for hiring union workers, who are scarce in some rural areas.
  • Requiring providers to prioritize “certain segments of the workforce, such as individuals with past criminal records,” when building broadband networks.
  • Requiring eligible entities to “account not only for current [climate-related] risks but also for how the frequency, severity, and nature of these extreme events may plausibly evolve as our climate continues to change over the coming decades.”
Stupid, stupid, stupid.

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That unsightly Willamette Falls paper mill is shutting down. 158 jobs lost. More to be added to the unemployment rolls for the state to process. Lots of layoffs recently.

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Oregon lawmakers urge OHSU to increase pay for unionized researchers. Completely clueless that the reason why the need more pay is because the lawmakers have contributed to making it expensive to live here. Plus, the money to pay the researchers comes out of grants. It's not something you can increase just because you live in a high cost of living state. So if the researchers have to get paid more, it comes out of fixed grant money, and that means researchers will likely want to seek other venues for doing their research.

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