Sugoi & Yokunai

Oregon is considering two options to prevent the switch to and from Daylight Saving Time. One is to stick with Standard Time. The other is to do whatever California and Washington wants to do. So lame. Do what's right. My prediction is that nothing will happen.

––– 凄い –––

I like the idea of billing datacenters for the increase use of energy and natural resources, like water. Instead of the consumer.

––– 凄い –––

No sign of any resolution of the impasse between OHSU and UnitedHealth. So if they can't come with an agreement, OHSU will lose 74,000 patients. This is a strong argument against OHSU and Legacy merging. This is precisely what people are worried about.

––– 良くない–––

Congress is finally realizing that they can't continue to cut Medicare reimbursement for doctors, or there won't be enough doctors. But it took a Congressman who is a physician to finally bring it to everyone else's attention. Doctors long lost control over their profession, sadly.

––– 良くない–––

Medicaid scam. I covered this already, where the state government adds on a hospital providers tax, which they are glad to agree to, because they will get reimbursed from the state, who now qualifies to scam more Medicaid money from the government. It's a scam, and only works if the central government agrees to finance the socialism, and you know how to work the system. This kind of perverse incentive system needs to end, and I'm confident that Trump will finally put an end to this. And why are we listening to Al Green?

Retirees become college kids again. I love this – it's a win-win. Keeps the mind stimulated and is certainly better than watching TV all day.

––– 凄い –––

Signals' Meredith Whittaker raises concerns about letting agent AI do all your tasks for you. Yeah, it's different for Tony Stark, because he designed his own system. For the rest of us, we are using a commercial, off-the-shelf software, created by someone else, that probably has other priorities in mind.

––– 良くない–––

Los Angeles can't account for $2.5 billion given to them to fight homelessness. I would bet that something similar is going on in Oregon and Washington. Nobody cares about responsibility anymore. The reset button needs to be pressed on California.  Oust everyone and start over.

It's official. The Ritz-Carlton is a failure. But look on the bright side – the City of Portland has places to put the homeless now!

––– 良くない–––

Portland Street Response now has permission to go just about everywhere – government buildings, libraries and restaurants, to deal with the mentally ill.  What the hell? Who would have thought we would need this crap ten years ago, when we had a normal city?  This is the new normal, and is why Portland is in a Doom Loop.

––– 良くない–––

A company called Bolt Graphic made a GPU called Zeus that is supposedly 10X faster than NVIDIA's RTX 5090 GPU. I haven't seen benchmarks, though, Nothing except what Bolt claims. Competition is good!

––– 凄い –––

A Safeway in north Seattle (CrownHill) tries to protect itself against theft. Instead, it gets into trouble with the city. I don't know why companies want to operate in Seattle anymore. They should get out of the city, and not bother dealing with Democrat policies.

––– 良くない–––

WTF?? Oregon advances a bill that makes taxpayers have to pay union workers when they go on strike. No. Just no.

And here's a nice cartoon summary of how Oregon doesn't need to tax us more. They have the money – they just misspend it.

Good! Venture Portland, a large enabler of the Homelessness Industrial Complex, might go under. 80% of their money was going to administration, staff, and operational costs, so I say good riddance. They made the homeless problem worse, not better.

––– 凄い –––

Still more on the fiasco of Mozilla's new terms of use. I keep hoping for some clarification of misunderstanding that might make me want to go back to using Firefox again, but no dice. They apparently can see what you browse, and will use it however they want.

––– 良くない–––

Aspirin might prevent tumor metastasis by unblocking T-cell mediated immunity. I wasn't aware aspirin could do that. Thromboxane acts on T cells to trigger an immunosuppressive pathway that is dependent on the guanine exchange factor, ARHGEF1, suppressing T cell receptor-driven kinase signalling, proliferation and effector functions.

––– 凄い –––

If OHSU and Legacy merges, their foundations will combine and will be the largest "health equity foundation," whatever that is. So naturally agencies and NGOs want a piece of it. Not only that, but they want "to ensure that community members lead the process to determine its governance and mission, not Legacy and OHSU".  Why in hell would OHSU and Legacy agree to just give this money away, especially seeing how poorly these groups have managed their own money. But Oregon's AG may have a say in this matter.

––– 良くない–––

Yep, Portland is in a doom loop. No question.

––– 良くない–––

Crazy. Those stranded astronauts were not allowed to return back to earth by Elon Musk because it would help the Trump team, and Biden (or his team) wouldn't have it. So they were political prisoners. I wondered why they weren't screaming to get back, and why they seemed like it was no big deal. Because if they made Biden look bad and if Kamala had won, they would be made low priority forever. Now they can tell the truth because Trump won. This is evil.

––– 良くない–––

Portland is removing culturally offensive sculptures from Chinatown. I don't go downtown so I didn't see this, but who would think that a statue of an upside-down wok, a duck and a calculator would be something the Chinese community would be proud of?

The first two, in red granite on NW Fourth Avenue at Davis, depict a stainless steel structure atop an off-white stone dais. Caught in the tight grip of one structure is the neck of a small, wacked dragon; on the opposite, only a severed neck protrudes. Below is various “Asian” debris, both patronizing and ignorant, a duck head, a chicken head, a pocket calculator arrayed with an abacus. Other stuff.

Maybe he could have put on some chop suey lettering on, too?

––– 良くない–––

Cutting waste in healthcare is hard. This is why I lamented the passage of Obamacare. Once you pass it, government bloat grows, and it's nearly impossible to change the course of this disaster. Like implementing a cemetery – once you inter the bodies in the ground, it's very difficult to plan to use the land for something else. I remember the words of a Democrat strategist who recommended implementing a socialist type of system quickly before the Republicans took over, because once it was in place, it would be too difficult to remove. He was right about that. It will take a very brave leader to reverse our socialistic healthcare system and make it more efficient and less wasteful and promote excellence.

––– 良くない–––

Google really wants to make it difficult to use uBlock Origin in Chrome. Luckily, I don't use Chroma.

––– 凄い –––

Why do colleges make people unhappy? Why do you think? The outcome is not stacked in people's favor, most of the time. This is another socialist system that needs to be fixed.

Democrat solutions to Democrat problems. Kotek supports a bill letting sex offenders skip being registered as sex offenders. 

––– 良くない–––

Told you so. Portland's downtown Ritz-Carlton may be foreclosing. Bad timing, with COVID, and trying to bet on Portland. We knew something was up when he had the estate sale to raise cash.

––– 良くない–––

Physicists detect signs of dual time arrows emerging from quantum interactions. So what you're saying is that I have a chance.

––– 凄い –––

No surprise.  Oregon is involved in grift again, with pop-up NGO shells".  Instant grift devices, fast, convenient, ready to take government money. Is there no end to this?

––– 良くない–––

Crazy. Now Congress want to let AI prescribe medications. 

––– 良くない–––

Regarding the outbreak of Shigellosis dysentery in Portland, ZeroHedge says that 56% were seen in homeless people,  while KGW puts it at 44%. It's not that large of a difference, and I imagine that it would difficult to get precise stats, but what caught my eye was that 46% were in gay men. Ewww!  Portland is such a sick city. There is nothing that would entice me to go there.

––– 良くない–––

This hero passed away recently. We should celebrate James Harrison. At least as much as some celebrity, or even a celebrity's spouse. Here's to you James!  You were truly a great man. Saving 2 million babies is something I'd be proud of.

––– 凄い –––

Boy, wouldn't it be neat if this were true.

The 50 most uneconomical majors to study in.

––– 凄い –––

For tattoos larger than the palm of a hand, the ink raises risk of non-melanoma skin cancer and lymphoma. The latter had a hazard ratio of 2.73.

––– 良くない–––

The TCL NXTPAPER 11 Plus is a cool device. Why isn't it getting much publicity?

––– 凄い –––

Some mRNA can repair DNA damage. Non-coding mRNA of the NEAT1 gene, when highly methylated, helps the cell recognize and repair broken DNA strands more efficiently.  Sometimes non-coding parts of a gene are important. Truly amazing.

––– 凄い –––

Well, this looks like the beginning of the end of those Lake Oswego lakefront homes. The rabble now can go right up to your house. What fun, given today's propensity for hostile activism. This is a perfect place to post this graphic:

Portland Public Schools is downsizing their Summer Catch-Up Program. So much for kids' future. Well, fortunately Oregon doesn't care whether you learn anything. You'll see get a diploma. So good luck.

––– 良くない–––

World's first "Synthetic Biological Intelligence" runs on living human cells. This has been in the news before. Today, it plays Pong, but tomorrow it may do more. 

––– 凄い –––

Another article about the Mozilla debacle. Mozilla is being run by an ex-Facebook guy. That explains it.

––– 良くない–––

DeepSeek was trained on 12,000 live API-keys and passwords. Well, we've seen secrets exposed on the Web by Google.

––– 良くない–––

The U.S. is going through the same thing Argentina went through when Javier Milei got elected. And now they are flourishing. There were rough times in the beginning, as there are now. But ultimately, this is the best for society.

––– 凄い –––

Is it premature to cancel Google search? It's definitely premature to cancel search, but you can certainly cancel Google and use something else. The best approach would be to use a hybrid of RAG and search.

––– 凄い –––

This poor Chinese man. I wonder if he's still with his girlfriend after this.

––– 良くない–––

Trust in Mozilla and Firefox is gone. Yeah, a lot of it anway. Here's a comparison table of alternative privacy-focused browsers. I picked LibreWolf as my privacy-focused Gecko-compatible browser. It's taken some time to tweak it to how I wanted, and I now realize how much privacy I was compromising to get access to certain content. Oh well, I guess.

––– 凄い –––

And here's Google. They don't care what users say about privacy. They'll just put apps on your phone to scan your photos. Unannounced, of course.  Google and Mozilla users sure are different, aren't they?

––– 良くない–––

Cannabis addiction can destroy lives. Yeah, in medicine, doctors were told that cannabis was less dangerous than alcohol. This led to marijuana being legalized. But man, all the problems that came afterwards...

––– 良くない–––

Belly fat is different from fat elsewhere in the body. It is more pro-inflammatory, which is why many obese people have chronically elevated white blood cell counts. 

Senators Merkeley and Wyden want to create a permanent Office of Environmental Justice.  What is environmental justice? Why anything you want it to mean. And for Democrats, it means dollars and federal funding. Yasss......

––– 良くない––– Incomes are rising everywhere except Multnomah County.  Doom loop.  And here's the New York Post telling everyone about the city's dysentery problem – another reason not to go to Portland.

Umatilla wants to install a small modular nuclear power installation. I bet Amazon has something to do with it.

––– 凄い –––

Wow, Oregon legislature was actually contemplating not prosecuting theft of "basic needs items".  They haven't learned from the Measure 110 fiasco and what the Bay Area suffered. How idiotic can that be?

––– 良くない–––

Women talk a lot more than men, and quite a lot more.  We needed a scientific study for that?

––– 凄い –––

Cliff Bentz is getting a lot of hate. We're coming to realize how much of Oregon's economic well-being was fake, and dependent on continued flow of federal support. There was so much fat and bloat and money going to support all kinds of poorly-managed efforts. There was a lot of initial pain when Millei instituted measures to trim government waste and fraud, as well, and now the country is better off for it. We're still in that initial phase, and I understand that it is painful for a lot of people. But ultimately it will be to America's benefit. And we have to work to prevent the waste and abuse from building up again.

––– 凄い –––

Another study showing that gender-affirming surgery, while beneficial in affirming gender identity, is associated with increased risk of mental health issues. There's no justification for this mutilative surgery.

––– 良くない–––

Well, the verdict is in: GPT4.5 is really a nothing-burger. Gary Marcus was right (see yesterday's post). o3 is better.

––– 良くない–––

Mozilla is panicking. Are they backtracking or just trying to obfuscate their way out? Trust, once lost, is hard to regain.

––– 良くない–––

How to keep hackers from destroying your digital life. This is a follow-up on yesterday's article. I didn't know that guy didn't have 2FA on his password manager. How silly is that? Lesson learned.

––– 良くない–––

This makes sense. Patients with hemochromatosis can now donate their blood instead of just having it discarded.  They should still have regular monitoring, though.

––– 凄い –––

Nice. Euclid found a complete Einstein ring in a distant galaxy.

––– 凄い –––

That life-extending drug for large dogs is making progress in being a reality.

––– 凄い ––– Portland Metro State of the Economy.  Looks awful as expected.  The wealthy have fled. The folks coming into Multnomah and Washington counties are mostly "international" – read illegal immigrants. More mouths to feed, and the illegals don't pay a lot of taxes. So more hardship, because the liberals are stuck with their sanctuary posture.

C'mon, be original. Someone in Japan wanted to create a smaller park than the Mill Ends Park in downtown Portland. Just to be smaller, and be the smallest park in the world. Cripes.

––– 良くない–––

A surgeon sounds the alarm about his profession. DEI is to blame. I've always thought that diversity is fine, but it needs to implemented early, in the formative years during childhood.  Once you're an adult, it's mission-critical time, and there is no room for anything but merit. Prioritizing diversity gives rise to stuff like this.

––– 良くない–––

Caffeine can make you cognitively more enhanced, but only if you have the right genetics. You have to be a fast metabolizer of caffeine, otherwise you don't get the full benefit.

––– 良くない–––

Well, well. It turns out that the major driver of major global climate is orbital perturbances. Not cow farts or gas stoves or leaf blowers. I knew it!

––– 凄い –––

Mozilla blew it. A lot of folks are commenting about their altered terms of service, and Mozilla hasn't done a good job in reassuring people of their intentions. A lot of folks, myself included, have or will switch to something else. I went with LibreWolf.

––– 良くない–––

Gary Marcus is not impressed with GPT-4.5.  He thinks it's no better than Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Maybe it's because OpenAI is completely out of GPUs to train.

––– 良くない–––

Less tax base. More welfare needed.  Oregon is bracing for a slew of unemployed federal workers. This is the last thing Oregon needs. We are seeing what happens when you have a society that has been so dependent of government money to stay above water. This is why things didn't seem so bad under Obama, Biden and during the Great Recession. Oregon has done squat to help business, and so has nothing to fall back on. It's painful to watch, but Argentina had to do it as well, and now they are better off for it. Once the Keystone Pipeline is operational and we're done trimming the major fat, things will improve. But dumping the low-contributing members of society back into the workforce is going to be rough, even though necessary.

––– 凄い –––

Dem solutions to Dem problems. Oregon wants to continue taxing hospitals hard, and they'll take it, like good Dems. All so that Oregon can continue to support illegal aliens and homeless folks.

––– 良くない–––

Portland mayor is starting to realize that he won't fix homelessness after all. Not after giving money to all those homeless agencies, and have nothing to show for it. Who will tell him?

And Multnomah Couty is worthless, too.
––– 良くない–––

Dem solutions to Dem problems. Washington state wants to dump rainy day funds into the general fund.  They'll use that up, too. Then what?

––– 良くない–––