Sugoi & Yokunai

Starbucks closes their First and Pike store.  That was one of their most popular. Well, gotta adapt to changing times. Seattlites can't have nice things anymore.  And Seattle wants to have "drug-free zones" in the city. Good luck with that. It's like those old feminist responses to rape violence where they stood around with a candle and mumbled a chant about "I'm taking back the darkness". Sure.

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Jay Inslee wants to take taxpayer money and use it to con lower income people into buying EVs. Yeah, wait until the find out what a "good deal" owning an EV is. Especially in the winter. Or when copper thieves dismantle charging stations. And they can find Type 2 charging outlets near their low-income housing. Or when they get into a minor fender bender and damage their battery, and don't have the money to replace it. Or find that the resale value of their car is really low.

And after spending $1.1 million to get only 126 people to transitioned out of homelessness, Inslee wants more money. Man, can that guy leave office fast enough? He's like a male version of Kate Brown.

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Elon Musk's Ad Astra school is accepting applications in Texas. Curious to see how that goes. It won't be woke, for sure, and will probably stress STEM fields.  Could be good. We'll see.

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The AI boom is deflating. Microsoft has lost a lot of money on AI investments. No real returns just yet.  Zuckerberg says he'll need 10X more computing power to train Llama 4 than Llama 3. Plus, he already needs power for datacenters to support Facebook. Isn't he concerned about his carbon footprint? Oh, right. That's just for us to worry about.  And Amazon is shrinking their AWS offerings.  Everyone is cutting back.

Intel downtown is so bad, some are calling it an "existential risk".  15,000 are being let go, starting October, and ending November, just in time for Thanksgiving. Well, Intel overwhelmingly supports Democrats, so they got what they voted for.

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I remember when Portland Opera and All Classical Radio were so pleased with their nice new digs near OMSI. Nice views of the city and so near Tillicum Bridge and OHSU. Now they are moving out.  Can't imagine why.

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News from California.  Chevron is moving to Texas. And fast food workers want even more pay. Even after the recent minimum wage hike. Sure.

––– 凄い ––– And ODOT till have to cut a thousand jobs if they don't get more money from the State legislature.

Portland General Electric and Pacific Power want to raise rates by a lot. Everyone wants more money.

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Oregon health insurance rates will increase, too.  Why not? Join the club.

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Multnomah County blinked. Finally they will allow one paramedic per vehicle. Sorry, you can't be rigid when the situation in Portland is what it is.

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Fecal transplants can help boost responses to immunotherapy, given to treat cancer.  But it's not likely that this will be a widespread practice. Too icky, I guess.

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MIR scans generated by variation autoencoders are now so good they can be used in data analytics. Thay're that good.

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Hawaiian Electric warns of possible rolling blackouts as a power station went down unexpectedly. The grid is pretty fragile if you ask me.

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CRISPR technology may provide an inexpensive antidote to cobra venom. Cobra venom binds to heparan and heparin, which depletes tissues of anticoagulant, and so tissue thrombosis ensues. The drug works be flooding the circulation with decoy molecules designed to bind to and soak up venom, thereby avoid clotting and tissue necrosis. Heparin and heparan are inexpensive, and modifying these is also not expensive. Unlike cobra antivenom.

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Nifty. First time use of a titanium Maglev mechanical heart.

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Websites are being pestered by AI scrapers, who don't respect robots.txt. The inventors of the Web never figured that there would be problem of people wanted to avoid certain visitors to come to their site. Everything was supposed to be open and connected. We were so innocent back then.

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Yawn. COVID infections are rising again. And OHA is still pushing the vax. Give it up, guys. It's not working. Let people get natural immunity. 

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Oregon is one of the most expensive states to be driving.  That's maintenance, insurance and gas prices.

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Portland is a poor city. So much of the city is below the poverty line.  Man...

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Scammers are using Proofpoint to send realistic scam spoofed emails to people.  You can't tell them apart from a real company-issued email. Many companies got burned when they used Crowdstrike for security. I think these companies are going to get burned from using Proofpoint to route their emails.

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Telehealth is hurting rural hospitals. Telehealth visits only made sense for major urban hospitals. For rural hospitals, there was no real need to implement them. So they didn't. And now they aren't getting the business that customers prefer.

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Lilly's Zepbound (tirzepatide) decreases congestive heart failure risk by 38%. Coupled with weight loss, diabetes control, decrease in addictive behavior and now decreased congestive heart failure risk, it sounds like a winner.

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Uruguayans are upset because Google's planned datacenter is going to suck a lot of water and spew lots of toxins and CO2.  Plus it will probably raise energy prices, since there will be increased demand.

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Outpace is a Seattle biotech company that will synthesize proteins that can be used as targets for T cell therapy. This is the kind of research that should have come from OHSU.  Phil Knight's money was supposed to make stuff like this happen locally. The Knight Cancer Institute has been quiet lately.

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Documents, Whistleblowers, and Public Comments Are Clear: Oil Companies Know Carbon Capture Is Not a Climate Solution. No, it isn't, and the sooner people realize this, the better.

And many apparently want to amend the state constitution to say that we have a "right" to a clean environment. No, it's not a right. 

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Putting criminals in jail is not the answer.  How many times have we heard variations of this screed? The Multnomah County sheriff is saying something very similar, She won't arrest anyone violating city regulations. Even Ted Wheeler is unhappy with this.

And if someone abuses fentanyl, Multnomah County wants to do anything they can short of sending these criminals to jail. Bonham County is not buying it. Good for them.

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.