20 June 2024

Woke Emerson College is laying off people due to decreasing enrollment, due to campus protests.  Hopefully this will happen to a lot of pocket elite colleges.

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The news always focuses on record-setting hottest days. But record-setting coldest days are happening, too.  So is it really "global warming"?

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Is the Perplexity search engine a "bullshit machine"?
The magic trick that’s made Perplexity worth 10 figures, in other words, appears to be that it’s both doing what it says it isn’t and not doing what it says it is.
If you're a user of Perplexity, this article is worth your read. It seems that the Perplexity bot scrapes websites, even when told not to, and conducts searches on search engines for you, just like a human would.

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Claude 3.5 Sonnet just came out. Faster and better than Claude 3 Opus.

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Someone used unsupervised machine learning techniques to see how the Supreme Court justices vote, namely, are there clusters of agreement amongst them. The answer is yes, there three clusters of justices that seem to vote in agreement with each other.
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Ilya Sutskever has formed his own company, Safe Superintelligence.  The article doesn't list any other big names. Jan Leike has already joined Anthropic, so he isn't a partner there.  Good luck, Ilya.

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Driving in Seattle is becoming more dangerous, actually in King County as a whole. What's going on?

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19 June 2024

This is probably the most hard science psychiatry has ever been. Functional MRI scanning reveals 6 different types of depression. This would explain why antidepressants often don't work, or work in some but not others. Treatment is likely to require being tailored to address the appropriate pathophysiology

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Holy crap. Oregon judge uses second-graders as special jury. More here.

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China is out to kill us. First with fentanyl. Also with pesticide-laden marijuana.

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Speaking of marijuana, THC-infused drinks will be sold at Portland Pickles events. Now the drivers might be stoned and drunk.

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$531 million was spent on the homeless in fiscal year 2023. And nothing has improved. We still have homelessness, with all the crime, graffiti, litter, and closing businesses.  Here's how they handle street drug use if you get caught – just get rid of the evidence in city-provided drop-off spots. Then you're on your way to get a fresh supply. No arrest, no problem. Even other commissioners object to it.

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Oregon hospitals are still financially struggling.  I thought Obamacare was supposed to be a good thing. Yep, money ran out.

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Wow, even Google is leaving their primo Spear Tower San Francisco office. Tax-base go boom!

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18 June 2024

An Alarming Thing Happens Whenever Magic Mushrooms Are Decriminalized. Guess what? People take too much and overdose. I haven't seen mention of this in the news, but then again, the local news agencies aren't going to report one case, because such matters are not told to the news media, and unless you're a public figure, it's not felt to be newsworthy. It would have to come from some intrepid reporter, doing journalistic work. So unless WWeek gets interested, we won't hear about it.

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TDK, that old cassette tape making company, has developed a battery that has high energy density  1000 Watt-hours/L. The beginning of the article sounds really exciting, but as you read on, it talks about barriers to production and other obstacles, competitors doing something similar, and by the end, your ready to close the tab and move on.

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Recycling Plastic Is a Dangerous Waste of Time.  Apparently it just generates microplastics and washes them into the water supply.  Only 6% of U.S. plastics get recycled anyway.  Maybe we need to cultivate this fungus.

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Tokyo government to launch dating app in bid to boost birth rate.  Government-sponsored dating app? Uh, no thanks.

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What???  This article was supposed to be a positive one, supporting mRNA vaccine research against cancer. But in the middle of the abstract, the authors make this statement:
Evidence is provided that adding 100 % of N1-methyl-pseudouridine (m1Ψ) to the mRNA vaccine in a melanoma model stimulated cancer growth and metastasis, while non-modified mRNA vaccines induced opposite results, thus suggesting that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines could aid cancer development.
Shouldn't the COVID-19 mRNA vax then be taken off the market?  Why is the FDA recommending that we continue to get mRNA shots?

And those German politicians don't want to be reminded of their COVID-era insanity and heavy-handedness.

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More Oregon insanity.  Proposed ballot measure to raise corporate taxes, give every Oregonian $750 a year likely to make November ballot. This is a great way to get large corporations to leave Oregon, and people not want to start a successful business here.  Nice going.

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This is what downtown Portland looks like now.  I think that someone mistook this for happiness when they said that Portland, Oregon was one of the happiest cities in the world.  Look at those people, dancing in the streets!  How happy they must be.

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Great!  Nanoclay can turn a desert into farmland.

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Australia has a new position: Ministry In Charge Of 'Changing Men's Behavior'. I kid you not.

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17 June 2024

The folks at Wielded.com benchmarked the performance of the major LLMs. GPT-4o came out on top, with Claude-3 Opus a close second, and Gemini 1.5 Pro a close third. I like Claude-3 the best anyway, in my experience.

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Mozilla acquired Anonym, an advertising company, but one supposedly dedicated to privacy, whatever that means. I don't like Mozilla's interest in advertising. If I wanted to be marketed, I'd stop using adblock software.

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Why student loan forgiveness sparks anger. Is it really that hard to understand? Democrats think that having people go to college is an investment by society. Maybe that was true in the past, when students actually took courses that taught meaningful and helpful skills and knowledge. That's certainly not true anymore. Besides, it makes inflation worse.
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It's called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback. Some people that lost their jobs are getting work helping to train AI models sound more human.  It started with InstructGPT and helped ChatGPT be the success that it is.

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High-far diets may fuel anxiety? How do they know? Maybe when you're anxious, you seek out high-fat diets for their comfort-food properties.

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How to do the jhanas.

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Doesn't it feel that AI is insinuating itself into healthcare and doctors are just watching it happen? Techies are pushing their idea of how medical care should be delivered, based on their experience in the tech world. And executives like it, and foist it on the doctors. Take Color Health's Cancer Copilot. It "helps doctors create cancer screening plans, as well as pretreatment plans for people who have been diagnosed with cancer". Sure, by following some template, designed by a small group of individuals. It's supposed to work by "eliminating some administrative work that leads to burnout".  I would prefer to have human assistants deal with administrative work instead of leaving up to an algorithm that is tied to OpenAI. Physicians had better get organized or their profession will be transformed from under their feet before the realize it.

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A new treatment for glioblastoma involves having a "skull-implantable ultrasound device...enhance the penetration of the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin and immune checkpoint blockade antibodies—a novel immunotherapy treatment combination—into the human brain".  Innovative treatment for a very tough malignancy.

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Does Miami have the solution to homelessness? Maybe. "Miami has managed to avoid large-scale chronic homelessness."  That's worth taking notice. How do they do it? The article is long-winded and doesn't just give you the answer right away. But it does say this:

The Cicero Institute was founded by Joe Lonsdale, an ex–San Francisco venture capitalist and co-founder of Palantir Technologies. Since 2021, the institute—now based in Austin, Texas—has been drafting model legislation for statehouses. The goal is to break the current model restricting how homeless grant funding is used across the country and expand the boundaries of how municipal governments can police homelessness. So far it has seen versions of its model bills passed in Texas, Missouri, Kentucky, Georgia, and Florida.

The think tank opposes what it calls the "homeless-industrial complex" and specifically the "Housing First" approach that currently dominates federal and state responses to the problem

One of the bill's most controversial provisions also requires local governments to construct encampments with adequate sanitation and security to place homeless people if shelters are over capacity.
Yes! Get the homeless off the streets, and eliminate all those agencies that don't want to solve the problem, lest their usefulness be eliminated. We need new solutions. The existing ones aren't working.
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Beware of urgent care clinics. You may still get billed as if you went to a hospital.  It could be an expensive mistake. 

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16 June 2024

Good on Mozilla for having integrity. You're an American company, with American values.

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The sun's magnetic field flipped in 2013, and I didn't notice. It's about ready to flip again. Flip away!

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An AI candidate is running for mayor in Cheyenne, WY. Can't be worse than a lot of human politicians, these days.

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Possible breakthrough in sepsis management.
Keynome gAST, an AI-driven genomic Antimicrobial Susceptibility Test that quickly predicts antimicrobial resistance by analyzing bacterial genomes from blood samples. This breakthrough, demonstrated at ASM Microbe, could drastically improve sepsis diagnosis and treatment, speeding up decision-making and potentially saving lives amidst increasing antimicrobial resistance.
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Polycystic ovarian syndrome has been a tough disease to treat. It looks like an antimalarial drug, dihydroartemisinin, made  "menstrual cycles more regular, and almost all the patients had lower levels of testosterone in their blood. Additionally, cyst development was reduced."  This drug isn't used much in the U.S., so it would be difficult to obtain here. 

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There's rumors going around that AirPods with noise-cancellation can produce and worsen tinnitus. I was going to buy a pair, but I'm going to wait and see. Some have reported tinnitus with Sony's noise cancelling headphones, too, so it may be more of a phenomenon with noise-cancellation. But there's no proof the active noise cancellation actually causes tinnitus.

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If there's ever a man motivated to cheat death, it's Ray Kurzweil. He now thinks AGI will be between 2029 and 2032. And he defines the Singularity different from just artificial general intelligence.  He says "it's when a human will not only be able to do everything that other people can do, but also create something new, like curing certain forms of cancer".  OK that's different from what I remember the Singularity to be, but I notice that he now feels that humans are still involved. Humans will be empowered, and that's what the goal really is, not to be replaced.

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Sigh. Apple still thinks that we just want thinner devices and new emojis. What's with Tim Cook and emojis. He also think that users want to sent fancier text messages, too. We'll see how the AI actually works out. Siri and Vision Pro weren't quite what we thought they were going to be. Apple has some convincing to do.

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Scale AI CEO says he wants to hire on merit, not DEI.  Good on him, as long as he can do it.

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Don't get sick. The Providence nurses strike looks to be messy and dangerous.

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There's actually a name for that. The March of Dimes syndrome.
For career activists, success is a threat. They can never declare mission accomplished.
It is no longer enough for conservative Christians to tolerate same-sex marriage—now they must be legally required to bake cakes and design web pages for the weddings. It is no longer enough to protect gay students from harassment—now these students must have access in elementary school libraries to how-to manuals for anal sex. Public schools must encourage prepubescent students to explore the many possible gender identities without their parents’ knowledge. Biological males self-identifying as females must be allowed to compete against females in sports.
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“There’s only one reason for appointing [an NSA director] to your board. This is a willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on earth.” Snowden finished off his tweet ominously: “You have been warned.”
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Always remember, it's not quite as good as you think, just yet. ChatGPT is bullshit.

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The Internet is worse than you think. It's full of predators.
The mom started the Instagram account three years ago as a pandemic-era diversion—a way for her and her daughter, a preteen dancer, to share photos with family, friends and other young dancers and moms. The mom also began to notice a disturbing trend in the data that showed up on the account dashboard: Most of the girl’s followers were adult men.
Men left public comments on photos of the daughter with fire and heart emojis, telling her how gorgeous she was. Those were the tamer ones. Some men sent direct messages proclaiming their obsessions with the girl. Others sent pictures of male genitalia and links to porn sites.
The Internet was never a place for kids. That's even truer now, with so much more going on behind the scenes.

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15 June 2024

Flashing a phone has indeed gotten easier. This video shows you how to install the CalyxOS on an Android phone. The title mentions Apple, although the video doesn't cover Apple phones at all. But if I had an Android phone, I'd do this.

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Sleep deprivation really disrupts memory.  And since many things can disrupt sleep, it's imperative to fix those things ASAP.  Much of the time, it's sleep apnea, which is so prevalent. Your life can improve so much with a good night's sleep.

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New transformer architecture without GPUs? What?! Really?  Yes, if you substitute the traditional attention weights with ternary-weighted Dense layers in a MatMul-free Linear Gated Recurrent Unit token-mixer, and use modified Gated Linear Unit channel mixers, avoid matrix multiplication, the performance closely approximates that of transformer models. But without GPUs.

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Is Long COVID an autoimmune disease? This research suggests so. And it suggests that those afflicted should not donate blood products. More clues to the puzzle.

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Oh-oh. Why is the former head of the NSA joining OpenAI's board? Was he asked to join? Or was OpenAI forced to add him to the board?

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Universal Basic Income Could Double World's GDP And Slash Emissions. So says this article. Then why don't just give everyone a million dollars? Legislate wealth? This is just like legislating higher minimum wage. Everybody gets rich, right? Stroke of a pen! We must destroy capitalism to save capitalism!!

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This got very little coverage in the mainstream media.  House of Representatives Passes Bill for Automatic Military Draft Registration of Young Men Between 18 and 26. This is because they haven't been able to get enough recruits the voluntary way. No one wants to fight in the Uniparty's wars. So who wants to be a man now?  Especially when they want to feed you fake meat in your rations. I'll bet Red State men will be drafted, while Blue State "men" will be granted exceptions.

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Facepalm. The FDA is still recommending COVID mRNA vaccines.

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Ketanji may not know what a woman is, but this app doesLesbian dating app uses AI to exclude trans M → F people..

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Don't get sick in Oregon. Oregon nurses, hospital system brace for record-breaking strike. The union says: “They want to be at the bedside caring for their patient, giving excellent quality care to the people who need them.” Providence just wants to be able to use non-union nurses to fulfill the strict staffing requirements. That the state requires. Because not enough qualified nurses want to move to Oregon to take on jobs. Who do you support?

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The Biden administration is going to pay for high-speed Internet for "all" in Oregon. Because equity of outcomes. Free stuff.

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Oh, brother. There's fake titanium being used in Boeing and Airbus jets. Tofu-dregs.

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Mail-in ballot fraud continues. We really need to go back to in-person paper ballot voting, ASAP.

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14 June 2024

Researcher in Texas is going to train an AI model to see if he can decode dogs' language. Sounds reasonable. It's just another application of supervised learning, right?

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Looks like aggressive Congressional investigation has forced the Stanford Internet Observatory to shut down. ZeroHedge has the scoop. Just in time for the election.

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Insane leadership. Seattle Police is following California's lead – hiring illegal DACA recipients to serve on the police force. Hey, if they didn't follow the law, why should you, right?

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52% of college graduates can't find a job that actually requires a college degree. That number is still 45% even a decade later.  So half of college graduates really never had to go to college.

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Incompetence everywhere you look.
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Is Portland gearing up for the inevitable protests when Trump wins the election?  Sounds like they're more afraid of screwing up than keeping the city safe.

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AMR couldn't make it work. LifeFlight couldn't make it work. Now MetroWest is taking over the hospital transport business. And 80 employees will be let go. More unemployment. And why will it be different for this company?

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13 June 2024

A simple logic question stumps the best AI LLM models.

"Alice has X brothers and she also has Y sisters. How many sisters does Alice's brother have?"
Seems pretty straightforward, right? Surprisingly models like Claude3 Opus, GPT4o, Gemini 1.5 got it wrong. This is good enough evidence not to put too much trust in the veracity of AI language models. Here, you can tell they were wrong, but at other times, you may not be able to tell.

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Meanwhile, the bizarre left-wing craziness of the Portland Teachers Union is exposed. Read the questions that the union wanted to ask Portland city council candidates. Very little had to do with actual education. Meanwhile, the Portland Public School district has to cut $30 million from their budget and 200 positions. Sad trombone.

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Gordon's Fireplace Shop is being foreclosed.

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It's Nazism again. Israeli Scientists Are Shunned by Universities Over the Gaza War. Where have I seen this before? Oh yeah...

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12 June 2024

Robert Kiyosaki was right. Silicon Valley companies' stock are hitting highs, but employee's salaries are shrinking and there is fear of being laid off. Don't be an employee for long. That's not how you achieve financial success. 

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Nearly half of U.S. job posting are fake. This is not good and is very disheartening. It wastes people's time and just gets hopes up.

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Free this, free that. The city of Portland is now giving away free air conditioners to Portlanders "in need". This is why they need more tax money.  To pay for the consequences of Democrat policies.

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Another one bites the dust. Bend Walgreens is closing

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Oh, the unions will love this. OHSU Leaders Mull Cuts to Employee Benefits as Budget Shortfall Looms. Danny Jacobs gets lavish benefits, but 500+ employees will be fired, and the rest get benefits cuts. OHSU is getting sucked dry, all to pay for a money-losing hospital chain. As one of the commenters said, the COVID money ran out. They probably can't afford to buy Legacy now, but dang it, they will try.

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Irony. According to Oregon law:
The law is best known for its landmark feature: caps on the number of patients per nurse. For oncology units like 7S, that ratio is four patients to every one nurse.
So that's what the nurses will see starting this Saturday. But at present, the ratio is three patients to every one nurse. Oops.

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Liberal economists want to destroy capitalism in order to save it. Yes, there are people in elite think tanks who think that we ought to just give people free money, and have government set minimum wage at some high level. 

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Nice meta-analysis of 100 ivermectin studies, the great majority of them show efficacy. Of course, the government couldn't have this, because if there was effective therapy, then there would be no need for an "Emergency Use Authorization" of the mRNA vaccines.
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Tech walkbacks:
They listened to all that negative feedback. But in Microsoft's case, the feature is not gone completely. You can still opt-in.

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Eh, you buggahs want tourists to come, o wat? It's so bad in Hawaii that the police are advising people to take their valuables with them into the water when they swim at the beach.

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FTC's Lina Khan thinks tech leaders are "robber barons".  Yeah, that attitude will get you far. At least she didn't call them "pariahs".

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Europe's largest depot of rare earth minerals was discovered in Norway. At least it's in a country that is not hostile to the U.S.

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11 June 2024

Fracking Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale basin has not only yielded petroleum fuels but also bountiful lithium, such that it could supply nearly half of America's lithium needs. Seems like great news, right? But lithium is only a small part of what EV car batteries need. Much of it is copper, of which there isn't enough in the world to supply EV manufacturing needs

Besides, car companies are losing money on the EVs they try to sell. Thinking people don't want them.  It's just not worth it.

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The mathematics behind emergent phenomenon. How order emerges.

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The layoffs at OHSU are beginning. Apparently this has spurred the nurses in the Providence system to strike, according to this article, although it's not clear to me how there's a connection.

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This is clear evidence that public schools are just lefty indoctrination centers. The public school teachers union will screen teacher candidates on their stance in the Israel-Hamas war. Wrong answers only. What does an Oregon public teacher have to do with Hamas? With the Hamas baggage will come other lefty beliefs, I'm sure. This is why Oregon spirals downward.

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It's starting. Hartford, Connecticut has citizen police walking the streets, because the police are inadequate. This may take off nationwide.

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Climate science is about to make a huge mistake. By changing from RCP8.5 to REP7.0 modeling, climate scientists are going to embrace implausible scenarios over more likely ones. Which means more unnecessarily dire warnings and dumb carbon policy (and more taxes).

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It's been almost a year since the tragic Lahaina fire in August 2023. Many residents are still homeless and staying in hotels. Now the money is running out, and now Hundreds Remaining in Hotels to be Kicked Out Monday, June 10. The linked headlines below made me shake my head:
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