30 June 2024

Skeleton Key is a hack which allows chatbots to bypass safety guardrails.

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Maurice Ravel has been declared the legal sole composer of Bolero.  I didn't even know that it was contested.  It's interesting how the current inheritor of Ravel's intellectual property acquired this right:
When he died in 1937, Maurice Ravel had no children. His property and copyrights went to his brother, Edouard Ravel. He died in 1960 and, to everyone's surprise, he bequeathed everything to his housekeeper and caregiver, Jeanne Taverne.

When she died in turn, it was her husband, Alexandre Taverne, former driver of Ravel's brother, who inherited. He took a new wife, Georgette, his late wife's former manicurist. It was her turn to inherit when Alexandre Taverne passed away. Finally, when Georgette died in 2012, it was her daughter from a first marriage who received the inheritance.

The daughter from the first marriage of the second wife of the driver of Maurice Ravel's brother is named Evelyne Pen de Castel.
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There was no statistical difference in people’s reported use of illegal drugs. On average, people reported using illegal substances somewhere between zero and four times per month, both at the start and the end of the study.
And it seems that $50/month produced about the same results as $1000/month.

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Oregon makes things more difficult for itself. Even though SCOTUS overturned Martin v Boise, Oregon is unable to make changes due to HB 3115. 

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29 June 2024

Overturning Chevron deference was the best gift to America. Remember when the CDC got involved in prohibiting evictions? Or when OSHA got into the business of mandating masks and vaccines?  No more!

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Oregon only added 4000 jobs in May, and much of it in healthcare and social assistance.  That's making up the loss of jobs in healthcare and adding to government staff to help dispense for welfare and unemployment payments. Manufacturing, construction and retail saw job losses. Not a sign of a healthy economy.

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Tech is working on developing holographic doctors.  Has this actually been shown to improve health? This seems to me to be working on the shell, the outside, but not working on the inside, the infrastructure of healthcare. The lack of practitioners will be dealt with by creating shadow-practitioners. 

Amazon is going all in to transform doctors into commodities, whose time is worth $49 for a video visit. Well, if that's all that the market will bear, so be it, I guess. It'll be interesting to see what kind of doctors sign up for this.
 
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OHSU Board formally approves job cuts. And the union goes wild.  This bit of dialog was enlightening:
At one point in the presentation, someone shouted to Jacobs, “Why did you take a bonus?”

“I haven’t had a bonus — that was retirement,” Jacobs shot back.

“You’re not going to lose your house or car,” a voice cried out.

“I might,” Jacobs responded.
That's disingenuous. If Danny Jacobs is at risk of losing his house and car on his salary and retirement account, he's basically admitting to gross financial incompetence.

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I have like 5 years of experience of real life. What kind of tricks under their belts do people in their 50s, 60s, 70s have? What kinds of crazy heuristics and meta-heuristics they’ve got in their minds, hearts, and muscles after decades of poking the world? I have no clue and this is what makes me really worried about them.
Well, we old folks have something under our belts. Not sure if they are tricks anymore, though.

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Try not to lose both ovaries if you're young. And just supplementing with estrogen is not enough.

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Love this article on TED talks. I've felt the same way.  The old Scientific American approach doesn't appeal to modern Americans. We don't have Huntley-Brinkey Report or MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour or Ted Koppel's Nightline anymore.  No daytime shows where they bring on Milton Friedman. Today, we have Brian Stelter and Don Lemon type shows. We have The View.  America has gotten dumber, and TED talks are how we get high-brow science.  There are a lot of pop-math and pop-science videos which are fun to watch, but they're aimed at high school kids. Wish there was something for grown-ups.

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28 June 2024

SCOTUS overturns Chevron deference. This is the big news of the day. A lot of Democrats will find that what they've been doing is no longer allowed. Hopefully this will mean a reversal of a lot of agency over-reach crap. More here.

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SCOTUS also upholds Grants Pass government, overturning Martin v Boise. A lot of people seemed to have missed the point. Sleeping out in the open may not be a crime, but camping out and turning public property into one's own personal yard, should not be legal. If you want to sleep, then sleep. But by morning, pack up all your stuff and leave that spot pristine.

I'm waiting for these other rulings.
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The College Board has changed SAT testing. The tests are now digital, and the level of difficulty will change depending how well you are doing. If you are ace-ing the test, then apparently it will get more difficult. This sounds like equity efforts to me. Instead of everyone facing the same challenges, some people will get obstacles placed in their way to slow them down, to let the others catch up.

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Diversity Was Supposed to Make Us Rich. This was based on a study that now seems to have been more random luck than principle-based. Just being diverse doesn't generate excellence or competence, which are what really makes you rich. I've always believed that diversity is just good for art, food and music. For everything else, it's merit.

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Laid-off OHSU employees are getting half the severance pay than that Chief of People and less benefits. They don't continue to get paid like she is. They don't get COBRA benefits, like she is getting for just 19 months of work. OHSU probably just wanted to avoid expensive legal wrangling.

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Fentanyl is costing Oregon hospitals around $6 billion.  What are the hospital CEOs doing about this?

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Ambulances are being stolen now in Oregon. Because why not?

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There been a pause in the dismantling of Ha'iku Stairs. Because it's the home of the hoary bat, Hawaii's only native terrestrial mammal.  There's still the problem that the base of the stairs are in private property, though.

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This is dumb. Multnomah County is enforcing a camping ban, but will still give out tents and tarps. Does that make sense?

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Google Translate added more languages to its repertoire.  Almost double the number. I still use just a few.

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Interesting interview with Chris Cuomo and Dr. Robert Redfield, formerly head of the CDC.  Around 46 minutes into the interview, he suggests that LongCOVID is due to the vaccine. A lot of what he is saying would have been considered heretical and grounds for losing one's license in 2021. Wish guys like him spoke up more back then.  It would have avoided a lot of grief and headache.

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Nyobolt has developed a car battery that charges really fast – 80% in 5 minutes (under ideal conditions). I still won't buy an EV. Not until they make replacing the battery easier and reasonably inexpensive. And available in many retail outlets.

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Now the Biden administration wants to regulate research integrity.  Someone's got to do it, but I don't want Biden's government doing it.
...the Office of Research Intregrity has posted only 32 cases since 2008. No wonder there have been recent calls to criminalize research misconduct. No wonder, too, that some scientists are suspicious of the government’s attempt to solve with an oversight body a problem that has been besting established oversight bodies for years.

There is a bigger picture in play, however. As demoralizing as research misconduct is, we should hardly be surprised by its occurrence. The unscrupulous, like the poor, will always be with us. More demoralizing is how research misconduct is actually incentivized in our modern science ecosystem. Few people want to acknowledge that.
No easy answers, but the government should stay out.

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According to climate scientsts, a lot of tiny islands were supposed to be underwater. Some are but 89% are not, and some are enlarging.

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27 June 2024

What to consider when choosing a programming language. I start with finding out what the language was designed for, and also its staying power and support. It's got to have a sufficient installed base and potential for growth and development, which means popularity and wide adoption.

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What is AI washing? I didn't realize that Amazon Go was supported by emplloyees in India. It was supposed to be all AI. Very much like Tesla charging stations being powered by diesel.

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Downtown Seattle is dying.  We knew that. But Seattlites keep electing soft-on-crime Dem mayors, who refuse to get tough. Like Portland.

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The brain removes waste products during sleep. Including Alzheimer-related toxins. This is not news, but supports the paradigm. This is why we need sleep.

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The real reason why music has gotten worse. It's sad to see Rick Beato look so resigned about this. Technology should be fostering new creativity. Instead we're seeing people take the lazy way out, and just producing lazy music. We need real creators.
Here's an article that says training AI on music will get a lot more expensive due to risk of lawsuits, as has been seen with Udio and Suno.

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How Starbucks devalued its own brand.  The comments say it all.
I stopped going to StarBucks when all the employees started looking like the carnival freak show was in town. I just don't trust people who look that way to handle buy food and beverages.
Yeah, that'll do it.

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Looks like Perplexity.AI is developing cruft. Not a good sign when the article about your company is titled "Garbage In, Garbage Out". Like a lot of generative AI, things will look good, until the world is flooded with generative AI. Then thinks will stink. Perplexity is finding this out.

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Another reason Vega-Pederson should resign. Multnomah County hasn't been monitoring how well their contractors are performing. They just took $1.2 billion (with a "b")
The audit showed that each county branch had at least some standards to make sure the organizations they hired were doing their jobs, but that methods varied by department and individual division. That disjointed practice can make it difficult to keep contractors accountable, the report said.
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Oregon Health Authority fires their DEI chief. Naturally, people are unhappy.  Of course they are. I guess that's a "white supremacy" move.

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Who actually voted in favor of retaining DA Mike Schmidt? His supporters came from the area between the Willamette River and I-205. People in those regions must like it when criminals escape justice. Avoid these areas. 

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Taxpayer money to waste. The city of Portland now wants to provide free e-bikes to low-income people. Who cares about crime and drug abuse? People need free bikes. And not just regular bikes – no, costly electric bikes. Because why not?

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Raising the minimum wage for food delivery workers backfired. Now, Seattle is reversing the law, because people stopped using them.

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SCOTUS votes to let the government tell social media to squelch dissenting voices. For lack of standing, supposedly. The reliable originalists, Thomas, Gorsuch and Alito tried to uphold free speech, but were outvoted. This apparently may help Alex Berenson's case against Pfizer, though.

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Isn't that on the other side of the body?  New organ discovered in the human throat that lubricates an area behind the nose is found accidentally by researchers studying prostate cancer.  My question is that PSMA PET scans have been used for a while – why was this picked up only now?

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I saw this on one of the local X/Twitter sites:

In truth, Milton Friedman was not in favor of Universal Basic Income. He was in favor of a Negative Income Tax, where those at the bottom of the income tax bracket got some money back. This is no different from Earned Income Credit that the current tax system allows anyway. The difference is that you have to be working. You have to file a tax return, so it's different from just UBI. Friedman thought using the tax framework was better because you can monitor and control it, unlike just doling out cash to any address.  This would encourage people to get to work, and work harder, if you don't like the small amount of free money. But you don't get it by just taking up space.

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26 June 2024

Should we worry about global cooling too, now?  Can we stop worrying about global warming now? I'm confused. Is this a joke?

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Mail-Order Drugs Were Supposed to Keep Costs Down. It’s Doing the Opposite.  It's those pharmacy benefit managers again, marking up costs. Can't they be eliminated, already? If they're saving any money, it's not for the consumer.

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Alzheimer’s-related synapse damage reversed in mice by synthetic protein.  Japanese scientsts inhibited dynamin-microtubule interaction in vitro using a synthetic peptide named PHDP5. Interesting that there is mention of amyloid in this article.

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Scientists can detect the presence of antibiotics in fingerprints. It can be used to monitor compliance.

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A Great Resignation 2.0 is simmering as employees feel overworked and underpaid. Seems like everyone feels overworked and underpaid. What's new? Only the illegal immigrants don't feel that way. What a country this has become.

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States with the highest inflation are Democrat-run states, no surprise.

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Tina Kotek's 90-day drug state of emergency – nothing changed.  And Portland is going to enforce a camping ban starting this Monday. I'm betting nothing will change as well.

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New York Times writes about what happens after Biden's student loan debt reassignment plan was overturned. Things are on hold, and loan holders basically get more forebearance.  They should use this as an opportunity to save up, so they can pay off the loan, but I predict they won't.

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Can I Vote for the Same Person Six Times?  WWeek inadvertently exposes the flaw in ranked-choice voting. Only losers get to vote again and again, when their loser candidates lose.

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That video about Portland graffiti ended up with the arrest of the most prolific tagger. Very nice work.

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25 June 2024

Still not enough. Two courts block part of Biden's disastrous student loan debt transference program.  Much of the damage has already been done. Already $613 million of student loan debt has been transferred to the rest of us. Still, but than just giving up completely.

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Great! Gov. DeSantis signed a law requiring hospitals to ask patients about immigration status and suddenly Medicaid spending on illegal immigrants plummeted.  Weird how that happens, huh?

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This is the best Mandelbrot Set viewer that I've seen. Give it a try.

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Yawn. Ted Wheeler has put out more anti-camping in the streets rules. Nothing will change. The homeless don't listen to him.

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Only in lefty Seattle.  Seattle police violated graffiti protesters’ rights, must pay $680,000. Gee, did they misgender them, too?  Maybe there was microagression? Were the taggers minority? Under-represented? Rack up those oppression points!
This is why Seattle is losing police. Why bother?
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Does college pay off?  It turns out that a third of Pell grant award winners don't return on the "investment". Probably should be scaled back. Colleges are just indoctrination centers, anyway. Waste of taxpayer money.

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Stay in your lane. Scientific American wants the government to regulate home schools.  Why? Home schools turn out a lot of achievers. But the kids avoid getting groomed by mentally ill groomer teachers. Scientific American used to be such a scholarly magazine. Now, it's just another lefty magazine.

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Lefty Groups Launch Ballot Initiative to Enshrine Abortion and Trans Rights in Oregon Constitution.  They already have basic rights. What they want it to make it the law to force everyone to participate in their personal gender delusions. And get tax money to fund their kink. Idaho, on the other hand:

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OHSU Faculty Senate President gives the board an earful.  Her letter is included in this document. Yes, there is lack of trust in the leadership. I would say, lack of confidence. Reading the budget report, I smiled when they blame COVID for an increase in costs, when they should have been blaming Biden's and Kate Brown's policies instead. The virus was far less serious than the swine flu in terms of severity. (And I don't trust the statistics on what was called a COVID-19 death, since many were PCR-based.)

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Jet Li is looking much better these days. That's a relief. No mention of whether he'll be doing any more films, however.

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24 June 2024

The case for criminalizing scientific misconduct.  I think a case can be made for deliberate misrepresentation of something that is supposed to be a scientifically-derived fact. It can lead to a lot of wasted time, money and energy.

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Can a thin fabric make a 16 °F difference in keeping you cool? This is a...
three-layer textile. The top layer is made of polymethylpentene or PMP, a type of plastic commonly used for packaging; the researchers had to figure out how to spin it into a fiber. The second is a sheet of silver nanowires, which acts like a mirror to reflect infrared radiation. Together, these block both the solar radiation and the ambient radiation reflected off of surfaces. The third layer can be any conventional fabric, like wool or cotton.
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The Thousand Brains Project is an AI endeavor that will try to mimic the human neocortex. Not clear if this is the best approach, but the simple expansion of neurons could engender emergent phenomenon. Worth exploring.

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Mergers aren’t the only reason for escalating hospital prices, but they are a persistent one.

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How do you get to artificial general intelligence?  I like François Chollet's definition of the Singularity better than even Kurzweil's.  Chollet is a very smart guy, and listening to him speak, you can tell he's really thought hard about this.

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Citigroup says AI could replace more than half of jobs in banking. I suspect this is very much like X/Twitter firing the vast majority of the company and finding that it still works just fine.  Getting rid of folks who do stuff like "quiet quitting" is probably for the best.

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I read The Origin of Jupiter's Red Spot, thinking I'd get an answer.  The authors think it developed from a South Tropical Disturbance, but that just evades the explanation. What caused the STrD?

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The first multicellular organism that doesn't require oxygen to survive is discovered. Life finds a way, as Jeff Goldblum says.

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How to prolong lithium battery life.  Yes, it's safe to leave the computer plugged in all the time. Don't let the battery drain to zero. And avoid extreme heat.

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Delivery Drivers Got Higher Wages. Now They’re Getting Fewer Orders. This is what happens when professional politicians tell businesses what to do.

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Tina Kotek has been MIA. I thought she'd get involved in the nurses' strike, but she didn't.  What's she doing?

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Providence nurses' strike was a waste of time.  They put patients' lives at risk, and got nothing out of it.  The hospital survived it pretty well.

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California's revised jobs report showed minimal job growth in 2023, far less than estimates. (Caution, the graph in the article doesn't start at zero.)

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What happened to climate change concerns? The U.S. Olympic team is bringing their own air conditioners to Paris. And no one complains. Hypocrisy at its finest.

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Who wants a used Tesla?  Not many, it seems.  Why would anyone want to buy a car that has less battery life than a new car, and which costs about as much as a new car to replace?

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23 June 2024

Another reason not to buy a Tesla.  Arizona woman gets trapped in her car when the battery dies.  That was in Phoenix, AZ. It also happened in Coburg, OR. And in Scottsdale, AZ, it happened and a baby was trapped inside the car.  Shouldn't Tesla sales get suspended until this problem gets fixed? Do people need to actually die for there to be enough concern?

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Who will buy the Washington Post from Jeff Bezos?  Newspapers aren't exactly hot commodities now, especially when they're staffed with rapid lefties, needing an outlet to spew their lefty viewpoints. One daresn't take that away. So who is willing to take ownership of the adult kindergarten?

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Oregon is going to have government-owned public defenders now, even though that's more expensive to run.  There wasn't a problem until 2022. Gee, what started in 2022 that grew to make this a problem?  Well, Oregon needs public defenders. Let's hope there's money for that, too.

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Oregon Health Authority Fires Longtime Head of Equity and Inclusion. Well, that's great, but you gotta wonder what happened to make it so. It's not like Oregon suddenly became conservative, you know.

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Kudos to Rep. Dan Rayfield for calling out Multnomah County officials, the mayor and police chief, for not doing enough regarding reversing Measure 110.  Think they'll listen?

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"Attending college in Oregon costs 38 percent more now than it did two decades ago" but enrollment is down 10%.  Well, the two may be connected.  It's just as well, however. Colleges today seem to be places to go where kids lose their freaking minds.

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"Blessed is everyone who blesses you, O Israel, and cursed is everyone who curses you." -- Numbers 24:9.
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Here's a list of all the words you can spell on a calculator.

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22 June 2024

Was legalizing mariuana a mistake?  Yeah, I think so. What legislators thought they were legalizing is not what's out there. And the last thing we need is something else that will mess up people's brains and promote psychosis.

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Gimme!  Analog Devices got some CHIPS Act money, and the first thing that the employees think about is how to get some of that. The CHIPS Act money was to:
  • Bolster U.S. leadership in semiconductors with manufacturing incentives, R&D and workforce development, and international information communications technology security and semiconductor supply chain activities.
  • Promote U.S. innovation in wireless supply chains.
  • Advance U.S. global leadership in the technologies of the future.
  • Catalyze regional economic growth and development.
  • Provide STEM opportunities to more of America to participate in good-paying skilled jobs.
Not to give employees pay raises.

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OHSU is projecting a $35 million operating loss for the year. Still boggles my mind how they thought they could pay for President's Awards, and increase Danny Jacob's pay and retirement package.

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Well now they have nothing to do. Providence is apparently handling the strike quite well, and doesn't need to take the nurses back until after Saturday. So the nurses are going to picket some more.  And they claim that they were unlawfully locked out. Huh?

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Cancer-Drug Costs Skyrocket, Leaving Even Insured Patients In Financial Ruin.  Cancer cases are increasing, but there's still a shortage of cancer drugs. So costs go up, naturally. This destroys patients' financial health, too.  I'll bet they sure could have used some of that Ukraine money.

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We can't have nice things.  To no one's surprise, generative AI is being used by scammers to cheat you out of your money. And here's an article about OpenAI's chief technology officer saying: "Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place."
Generative AI is really helping those who know how to use it. For those who aren't able to use it, it's been bad news. So what do you do?

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Big change for Oregon and Washington real estate agents.  A settlement, reached in a lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors this spring, prohibits including sale commissions on real estate listings.  Who wants to be a real estate agent now?

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What caused the Easter Islanders to die out?  Turns out it wasn't ecocide due to irresponsible destruction of natural resources. It was European invasion. Yes, this is what happens when borders are open, and your country is invaded. It's easier to see on a smaller scale.

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Texas AG Bill Paxton tells Texan schools not to comply with Title IX revisions allowing transgender youth to invade into boys and girls activities. This is a response to Biden's DOE regulations. This is the start of the resistance.
Speaking of the Department of Education:

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21 June 2024

Lancet is finally agreeable to publishing a very shocking study that links the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines to a 74% death rate. That seems rather high. Obviously there's a component of data selection, but I agree that there ought to be an investigation. And this was last year. So far there has been nothing.

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A study from Cornell finds that plants can exhibit behavior that qualifies as intelligence.

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Article on Dave Sanders' new startup, Cody.MD.

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Nurses' union wants to extend strike two more days, because Providence seems to be handling it better than expected.

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Gilead may have a drug (lencapavir) that prevents HIV infection. Experiment was done on African women in South Africa and Uganda, to prevent them from getting infection.

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SCOTUS will release their opinion on the Chevron deference principle soon. Hopefully it will be in the interest of the American people.

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Freddie Mac wants to take over second mortgages. Which they will then proceed to forgive to certain classes of people to buy votes. Nah.

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The federal budget deficit will increase by $400 billion, mainly because of studen loan debt forgiveness. That was the biggest contributor.  Also shoring up ailing banks (because of high interest rates), and higher than expected Medicaid spending.

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Living in downtown Seattle has lost much of its lustre. Portland as well.  No surprises here. I'll bet many homes are now underwater.

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