Sugoi & Yokunai

Not only do data centers have high energy demands, but they also need a good backup power supply when there are brownouts or blackouts. These aren't as easy to produce and maintain. It's becoming clear that the AI dream isn't going to come about as easily as some might have hoped. And it's going to compete with cryptocurrency interests, and all the government efforts to get everyone to drive EVs.

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Scientists in Beijing have discovered a new particle, which may be the elusive glueball.  Here's the paper, if you can read it. There's no shortage of authors, that's for sure.

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Look at the sudden increase in miscarriages since 2021. What could be the cause? I think I know. 🙄

Try it yourself. This is Google today:

The current powers that be are very much like those that our founding fathers were fleeing. We've come full circle. The tree of liberty needs watering.

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Macrolones might be a powerful new class of antibiotic. This is early stage, so I'll reserve my excitement for now.

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People are overdosing on the injectable weight-loss drug, Wegovy. Because they can't follow instructions? Or are they just impatient?

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WinCo customers can't have nice things. Stores on Washington and Oregon are removing self-checkout stands.  Call me unsurprised.

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DoorDash sends a message. Seattle needs to roll back the minimum wage law, or they'll add an increased delivery fee.  Then people won't be able to afford DoorDash, so Seattle will increase their pay even more, rinse, repeat.

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As this ronin gets older, he might need these exoskeleton pants to keep on hiking in the Pacific Northwest. Hills seems to be getting steeper.

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van Eck phreaking is real! Hackers can monitor wireless electromagnetic radiation coming from an HDMI cable and interpret the video by processing it with AI to read what you type on the computer.

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Discover new music at the Cosine Club. I suppose it finds similar music by looking at the cosine similarities of vector space representations of musical pieces.

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AP reports that Guardant's recently FDA-approved colon cancer blood test, which detects cell-free circulating tumor DNA, has an 83% accuracy.  But this was in patients who were already known to have colon cancer, so 83% accuracy isn't really that good. What is the accuracy in the general screening population? Probably less, I'd say, but that's what really matters. Here's the original study.

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Close to 60% of workers are not taking all their alloted vacation.  Why? The article suggests that vacations really don't have as much refreshing and relaxing effect as what should happen when you take a break. I can understand that.

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A gambling arms race.  Oregon doesn't want tribal casinos, because they'll take away lottery revenue. Tribes say – too bad! I was surprised to read that the idea of building a casino at the old Portland Raceway is still alive.  Would definitely change the scene in North Portland if it were built, and not necessarily for the better.

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Unforeseen consequences again.  Oregon passed a law that states that "any major infrastructure project over $5 million, or any renovation which exceeds 50% of the current building’s value, to devote 1.5% of its entire budget to 'Green Energy Technology'".  But the only thing you can really do is install expensive solar panels.  And "two-thirds of school projects are outfitted with solar panels that will not break even on their investment for the next 50 years. The industry-accepted break-even limit is 25 years, assuming they last that long before requiring replacement."  So what do you do?  Postpone necessary repairs and maintenance.  Because that's all you can afford.

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More Oregon government waste. Summer is nearly over, and now the Oregon Department of Human Services is on a race and media campaign to hand-out the free food money to people for whom they have no idea exist (in the way that they think they do), as part of their Summer EBT program. What a waste.

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Looks like Apple's iOS 18.1 is not going to include their AI Intelligence after all. Kudos on them for waiting until it is ready, and not falling for the hype.

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Seattle Democrat leaders just can't stop destroying the city.  Now it looks like many Seattle restaurants will have to shut down because of the increased minimum wage happening at the end of the year. Like many Dems, Seattle city council throught they could legislate wealth. Bet they just can't understand why more poor nations are doing it. That's what happens with DEI leaders.

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Non-Google search engines blocked from showing recent Reddit results. Not sure who's going to blink first. You can still get old results off Reddit, but not new ones. But with Perplexity, Farfaille, and OpenAI's search to be available perhaps soon, one may not need to consult Reddit. Unless you really, really want to get some Redditor's opinion.

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We've mentioned this before. Generative AI is going to need a lot of power, and the existing electrical grid won't be able to handle it.  Washington is already seeing that because of this, they can't push any green new deals.  Oh, and by the way, the Great Salt Lake is drying up, and it's spewing around 7 million tons of CO2 annually in the process. You're not going to win this battle with windmills and solar panels.

Look at poor Ethiopia. Someone sold them on "EVs or nothing". Now they have 70,000 electric cars and just 50 charging stations. What suckers. They can't legally purchase any other type of vehicle.

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But engineers found that aluminum and sea water can generate hydrogen, and the reaction is catalyzed by coffee grounds. This seemed like a joke headline, but I guess it's true.

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Google was going to turn off third-party tracking cookies, but decided not to when ad companies complained. That's how you know that they're making a lot of money off you. I can't believe that people are willing to just play in the Internet without privacy extensions and a VPN. Don't make it easy for them.

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This is so funny. Talking about the Trump attempted assassination.  Journalists are just puzzled and frustrated that people don't trust them. Listen:

I know that there are going to be wild rumors and reports in the early stages, but it's certainly better than the silence we would get before. The MSM were so eager to back the Russian collusion hoax. Even now, they erase that Kamala Harris was appointed Border Czar, and that she is among the most radical Democrat in the power circle. We've long lost trust in the MSM, and see no reason to trust them now. And a couple of millennials isn't going to change my mind. And notice in this video that they don't even mention that there should be no way that Thomas Crooks should have been able to climb on the roof unopposed and fire a shot. They're more focused on why social media is so unreliable.

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A blood test that measures blood levels of ptau-217 supposedly has a 90% accuracy in diagnosing Alzheimer's disease. The first thing I want to know are the sensitivity and specificity of the test, so that I have a sense of what the predictive-value-positive and predictive-value-negative would be. Saying 90% accuracy depends on the context. If you tested a bunch of 20 year olds, a positive test is surely false. But when testing a cohort of forgetful or impaired 65 year olds, and a negative test might not be as reassuring. The reporter should mention Bayes theorem.

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Are you feeling stressed? Try Coherent Breathing.

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Multnomah County can't get their act together on fixing the paramedic shortage problem. They should all resign and let more capable people fix this problem.

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Strike!  OHSU researchers are going to strike after all. They see everyone else doing it and scoring victories. Why not them? This may be the factor that drives researchers to leave OHSU. 

And guess who OHSU hired to replace the dysfunctional previous HR person. Yup. Couldn't they at least have found someone internal to do the job? Did they have to bring someone out of retirement to take the position? Just because?

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The City of Portland doesn't care about climate change when hard reality sets in.  The Olympics also is willing to look the other way. Don't want to hear anything about being forced to buy EVs that don't make sense. Or take away gas stoves. Or build ugly windmill farms.

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Waste of money. Multnomah County spent $250,000 for a new mission statement. This is why taxes need to be increased, folks.

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And it looks like our postal system won't be able to handle mail-in ballots.  But we'll have to have it because it facilitates cheating and delayed election results.

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Reed College is one of a remaining 22 that still require COVID-19 vax shots. Get with the program, Reed.

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Funny. The DOJ wants SCOTUS to cut an exception deal so that boys will still be allowed to use girls' facilities, compete in girls' sports, etc. That was the whole point of the ruling, guys! The Left is so used to two-tier justice, they forget how it was before. 

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Love it! A small Seattle restaurant had so much vandalism and theft that it lost its insurance. So now it won't pay taxes. Seems reasonable to me.

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A Pacific Northwest Energy Summit was held to discuss rising energy demands and how it will be met. They're still hoping that wind and solar will be the answer. While they delay having to do what's right (invest in nuclear), prices for energy will increase.

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WWeek interviews the guy behind the initiative to tax businesses and give their money away to everyone else.  Yesterday I posted about the study that shows that free money actually has a negative long-term impact on peoples' financial outlook. This is just governmental theft.  Wish the reporters were bold enough to pin him on this. Alaska gets its money from oil, so it's not the same. The vast majority of states have no such resource to tap.

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Cool. Minnesota follows New Hampshire as paving the way for flying cars. They can have tail numbers instead of license plates.

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Apple launches its Maps app for use on the web.  Don't be stopped by warnings that it's only for certain browsers.  It works fine with Firefox.  It's at https://beta.maps.apple.com/abc.  Compared with other maps, it's lacking in a lot details and placenames. Oregon's coast is sparsely labeled, but the app version is like that, too.  Apple Maps is good for Bay Area locales, and major cities like NYC and Seattle, but for other places, only urban locales get the love. It's not great for geographic or rural navigation, and it's what you'd expect for something to satisfy tech geeks.

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AI models trained on AI-generated data churn out garbage. At least for images. Might be for textual stuff, too. If this keeps up, LLMs will lose their usefulness.

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Universal Basic Income doesn't work. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that "recipients and their partners work and earn less, with the negative effect on wages and earnings getting worse over time". "Participants’ individual incomes declined $1,500 per year relative to the control group" – yup, they got poorer, despite being given money.  "...participants exhibited more entrepreneurial orientation and intentions” but that “this did not translate into significantly more entrepreneurial activity”.  "Participants spent their extra time on leisure, did not improve their quality of employment, and did not improve human capital investments such as training." So all that money just went to giving them time to be lazy. 

Easy street, I'd love to live on easy street
Nobody works on easy street
Just lie around all day, just sit and play the horses

When opportunity comes knockin'
You just keep on with your rockin'
'Cause you know your fortune's made

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Portland is thinking they might change the standalone "arts tax" to a combined "parks and arts tax".  You can't enjoy the park anymore, and all the art has been defaced and/or sawed off and put into storage. So they want you to pay more taxes to spiff up the places that the criddlers have destroyed. Because it's their homes now.

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Life in the Biden era. Now there's a shortage on blood culture bottles in hospitals.

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Remember that woman in Washington who had TB and was infecting everyone? She got arrested and forcibly treated and has now been rendered non-infectious. This is a conflict between personal liberty and public good. Ends justify the means, I guess.

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We good now, bro? CrowdStrike is offering a $10 gift card for your problems. Thought this was a joke, but it's real.

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Wow, are Indian men that bad? IndiGo airlines is offering flights where women can request not to have to sit with men. What next? From the comments: "Can I please request not to be seated next to anyone who does not look like me or come from my socio-economic class?"

If you have to ask.  Does ChatGPT have a mind?

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Nice.  Komodo dragons have iron-coated teeth to rip apart their prey.

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Now there are AI boyfriends for women. What a sad world, we're becoming.

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Nice biosketch on Grish Perelman.

Why are all the wacko protesters so heavily comprise young women? The linked article focuses on the pro-Palestinian protests and suggests that this is the opportunity that many women have to protest the hijab. But you see many young women protest elsewhere. For all kinds of things: BLM, gay "pride", transgender rights, climate change, etc. Hmmm. Question asked and answered.

And at Northwestern University, all the charges brought against the campus protesters were just dropped. No punishment, so no lesson learned.

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Saw this on someone's X feed: Multnomah County and Metro officials met at Skamania Lodge to discuss whether people are really fleeing the area due to higher taxes.  

There you have it.  Complete lack of self-awareness, folks. Wasting more tax money to study stupid questions.

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Researchers at the University of Sheffield think they may have stumbled on something that might help male-pattern baldness. It's just a sugar: 2-deoxy-D-ribose (2dDR).  Link to study is here.

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Scary. Chinese researchers invent a 4 gram solar-powered drone that can fly forever. At this point, it's too weak to carry a payload, but that won't take long to fix.

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The billionaire group that was going to build a utopian city in the San Francisco bay area has pulled their plans unexpectedly.  The locals are happy, but what it means for the future isn't clear.

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Good news for those who have allergies to red meat from being bitten by the Lone Star Tick. You can eat this synthetic pork. And also good news, the lab will give it to you free if you're an allergy sufferer.

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There's a dating service for the unvaxxed now. For some purebloods, people, it's really important to only date other purebloods. Dating is hard these days.

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Bummer to be a Democrat now, isn't it? Your betters are out picking the next candidate for you. You just need to cast your vote, not that it means anything these days. But they want to "save democracy" right?  Just as one emperor without clothes is gone, another takes his place, this time, an empress.  This isn't the United States as originally conceived anymore.  They're even going to clap for you.

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Is the Fed itself insolvent?  This is what happens when you aren't secure in being the world's reserve currency. Printing more money comes at a cost. The only real solution is a painful cutback in government spending, but that will take away the illusion of having a higher standard of living than most of the world. Because much of the U.S. wealth is propped up. And now we have all these mouths to feed.

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I didn't want to stray into national politics too much, but so much is going on. Is Biden near death?  Has he had any public appearances since announcing his stepdown?  And now, switching candidates so late in the game is creating havoc with Dem donors. It's all about the money.  There are calls for Joe to resign, but that puts the obvious glaring inadequacy of Kamala front and center.  Cackles is responsible for all the weird gay shit that goes into the White House, so we'll see more of that if she's allowed to be in power. We have about 6 more months to go, and we need a strong leader more than ever. There hasn't been a time when the United States had no one strong at the top, since the end of FDR days, but we just won the war, and no one was going to threaten us then. It's different now. 

Fox Business tries to say that Kamala's ecoonomic policies will be the same as Biden's so calm down folks. The commenters are not having it.
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Democrats will eat their own.  Hospital administrators (and many of their employees) are staunch Democrats. Now Oregon will impose a 3% gross receipts tax starting Septmember.  My response is: You voted for this.

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Mission creep. Is this why we need more "education" money? So we can feed kids all year around?  And despite all the money given to the schools, Oregon has the seventh worst school system in America.

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For your reading pleasure.  Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment.

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They waited 75 years to honor a physicist for her ground-breaking discovery.

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China uses Oakland, CA as an example of extreme poverty in the world in filming documentary. Looks like an enclave of some African nation. 

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Obamacare was passed 14 years ago. It's expansion of the socialism component – never made sense to me. It's letting government take over financial transactions in healthcare, instead of letting market (competitive) forces do the job. Incentives get perverted, you need more administrative overhead, people get compensated for being part of the growing bloat, because there's no reason to trim the fat. Giving the government more of a role in such an important part of civilization was a big mistake.

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Oregon's workforce demographic profile shows a shift to older workers from 1992 to 2022. What could be the cause? Maybe younger workers aren't as employable? Too much mental illness? Too much pot and other drugs, making them unreliable? Chronic illness perhaps, from vax side-effects? No clues given.  What's going on with Oregon's young workers?

Getting ready for war.  Well Biden supporters, you've got your war. Now it's time to send your kids to Ukraine to fight that bad Putin! The Selective Service wants volunteers to help get the process started.

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Marketwatch suggests that Boomer give their money to help their kids today instead of after they pass, so it can help them now. It'll be "life-changing".  Sure, but I think in many cases it will be like how Obamacare went to all those hospitals, who felt very rich when it rolled out, and where are the hospitals today?  After that money has been spent on the kids, and the elderly have no money left, they will have lost whatever cachet they had to these kids. 

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Is DeepL the best online translator out there? They claim to be.

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Who wrote the code for the Blue Screen of Death?  Reminds me of this famous video.

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Seattle can no longer have nice things. First it was the Sadako scupture, now it's Shorelines's Emissary Raven.  Another sign of city decay.

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Rachel Maddow thinks that liking Lord of the Rings is far-right. Not that we care, but I never understood how people like LOTR but still favored Joe Biden.

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