10 December 2025

We might have laptops that are better suited to run LLMs and other AI models. That would be cool. Apple could make a killing by selling outboard GPU boxes, connectable through Thunderbolt 5. I'd get one.

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Should You Trust Your VPN Location? So many VPNs fake their server locations. This is why I sometimes can't access stuff because they think I'm in another country. I use NordVPN but used to use IVPN. I switched because I thought IVPN was too slow, but maybe they've improved. And everyone was touting NordVPN as the best. Maybe I should take a second look.

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Microsoft has a problem: nobody wants to buy or use its shoddy AI products. One major problem with Microsoft products is that so much is tied into their stupid Live portal, where you have to login in for just about anything. Even if you just wanted to use Excel or Word. And they always want me to use Azure. Their system is getting bloated and complex, just like Amazon's cloud service. It's hard to figure out how to get to where you want to go. Links go to unhelpful places. (If you find what you want, bookmark it fast so you can go back to it when you need it.)

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...nanoflowers are made from an inorganic compound called molybdenum disulfide, which is able to trigger the process cells use to make more mitochondria. However, nanoflowers enable the stem cells to produce double the normal amount of mitochondria, which they then transfer to ordinary aging or damaged cells.
Not sure if this is going to go anywhere. But it sounds interesting.

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A professor in Yunnan recounted how one evening during dinner, he began seeing swirling shapes and colors after eating stir-fried mushrooms. Since the psychoactive effects are familiar to most locals, he began looking for xiao ren ren but was disappointed to find none—until he lifted the tablecloth and peeked underneath, seeing “hundreds of xiao ren ren, marching like soldiers.”

Even more curious, he said, “when I lifted the tablecloth higher, the heads came off and stuck to the bottom of the cloth and the bodies kept marching in place…I did this many times, at two-minute intervals, and each time they were there, marching and grinning… I measured them, too…they were 2 cm high.” According to records at Yunnan Hospital, 96% of patients affected by this mushroom report seeing an abundance of “little people” or “elves,” often dancing, jumping, or marching around their real-world environment.
The mushroom is  Lanmaoa asiatica, and the hallucinogen is apparently still unknown. Seems to be harmless but it can trigger some pretty wild visions.

Speaking of mushroom, Portland's psilocybin gathering place, The Sacred Mushroom, is shutting down. The owners are moving to crypto. 

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Tragic. “The Matilda Effect”: How Pioneering Women Scientists Have Been Written Out of Science History. Especially hurtful when male colleagues get the awards and glory, the promotions and the scientific support, off of your own hard work.

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Nice try, FBI. Here's a website where you can "say what's on your mind without fear of judgment". I wouldn't trust this. You have to provide your email address, so you're not really anonymous. This is bait for the naïve and gullible.

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Most of the food people donate to feed the homeless goes to feeding the rats. Liberals are so naïve.

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Oregon has lost its mojo.

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9 December 2025

Could this be why Apple struck a deal with Intel to start manufacturing its M-series chips? Time to outsource chip expertise?

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Trump's overturning the Humphrey's Executor rule is HUGE. One of the agencies he can gut is the National Labor Relations Board, which shapes how unions operate. This could be the end of unions telling companies how to operate. The labor landscape of much of the West Coast would be radically transformed if public unions were disbanded. Oh boy! Trump certainly is a transformative president. 

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This came out of OHSU: Insufficient sleep associated with decreased life expectancy. Not only that, but you increase your risk of dementia. Making doctor trainees perform while sleep-deprived was the worst thing that was done in medicine. Didn't medical leaders know that Halsted was abusing cocaine to maintain his work routine? Yet he was able to set the pace for residency programs in the U.S.

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Nuclear physicists are always discovering amazing things.  There's a new "island of inversion" located in a very different and unexpected place in the N-Z plane. How did that happen? Such is our universe.

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We’ve finally cracked how to make truly random numbers. Well, it was known how to generate them, but now it's just more practical. The device used is the Colorado University Randomness Beacon, nicknamed CURBy. The process involves quantum entanglements and Trevisan extraction. But it's provides an explainable pathway to prove randomness, and the process can't be gamed.

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Not good. Ponderosa pines are disappearing in the West.

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I agree – RSS matters. I love what RSS can do, but the spec is brittle. You don't really need an RSS reader if you can webscrape that sites you follow and create your own CSS styling and formatting.

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The Oregonian disable comments in their paper. But on Tina Kotek's X feed, comments are allowed. And boy are they brutal. 😂

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Mayor Keith Wilson wants to increase foot traffic in Portland, while he peppers the city with crime-ridden shelters and recovery centers, and lets tents and campsites sprout up everywhere. Is it my imagination, or is he slowly turning into Lori Lightfoot?

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Portland Public Schools is finally realizing that trying to create the Center of Black Excellence at the One North commercial building was a big and expensive mistake.  Really looks like they didn't do a lot of planning and thinking before they made that purchase. So cui bono?

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8 December 2025

A phone call speaks to all that’s wrong with American medicine. This really resonates with me. Often insurance companies won't approve some expensive therapy unless there is a conversation between the ordering doctor and an doctor on staff with the insurance company. Sometimes these doctors are qualified, but sometimes they have only tangential expertise. Yet they are supposed to be able to judge whether an order is appropriate or not. They call this a "peer to peer" discussion, which must be scheduled and is a pain in the butt. All these hoops you have to jump through to get care for your patient.

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A drug called clascoterone, which is already approved as a topical treatment for acne, was shown to regrow hair lost in androgenetic alopecia. It may be approved as Breezula, but currently it is still undergoing testing. The final concentration hasn't been determined, apparently. Perhaps it will be more effective than minoxidil. It is a steroidal anti-androgen, similar to exemestane being a steroidal anti-estrogen. The side-effects haven't been posted for this drug given for male-pattern hair loss. I wouldn't take it if it's like finasteride. Topically, it might be acceptable, though.

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Scientists discover first gene proven to directly cause mental illness. It's the GRIN2A gene and variations are linked to early schizophrenia, epilepsy and intellectual disability. Deleterious mutations reduce the function of the NMDA receptor (which is modulated by nitrous oxide). It is thought that supplementation with L-serine – a dietary supplement that activates the NMDA receptor – might mitigate this.

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Microsoft is quietly walking back its diversity efforts. Reported by the woke periodical The Verge. Good that Microsoft is emerging from the left-wing fog and will focus on merit and excellence again.

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Interesting article on the scents of Chistmas. Cinnamon has always reminded me of my childhood Christmas days.

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Crazy. Lift tickets at Timberline now cost $224.

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7 December 2025

What happened to the U.S.S. Arizona.  Worth a visit if you ever get to go there.

And you had better go there, because Hawaii needs your business. They taken a new tack – target the ultra-rich. Although the ultra-rich will probably be a bit disappointed at what they see. 

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This is an important paper.  It suggests that Pfizer had claimed that their vax was free of DNA because they treated it with the enzyme DNase I, which they knew was very ineffective against digesting RNA-DNA hybrids.
 
Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) was told or recommended to check for DNA contamination only by check for the kanamycin resistance gene (KAN), which is double-stranded DNA.  
The KAN gene does get digested by DNase I and because the levels measured were low, the TGA declared that there couldn't be spike protein DNA, which could incorporate into the host's DNA.

McKernan showed the reason why they missed the spike protein coding sequence – because that part is hybrid RNA-DNA.  He thinks Pfizer has secretly run the assay for single-stranded spike DNA, but is refusing to release their results (cycle threshold) because it would be damning evidence that spike DNA is present.

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Waste of money. Multnomah County is still hiring DEI officers. WTF, guys? The Biden era is over. No one cares anymore. 

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ODOT warns more highway homeless camps over cuts.
People are trying to get homeless addicts off of drugs, but the City’s free-drug supply program keeps people hooked.
WTF is the City doing supplying them with free pipes and snorting kits?  And they claim not to have enough money?

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Why Washington is more successful than Oregon.  Washington had Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon (among others). Oregon has the manufacturing arm of Intel and Nike. Washington's companies made a lot of people wealthy. Oregon's companies only made Phil Knight and a few other people rich.

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Which Oregon universities, and what degrees, produce the biggest paychecks for graduates?  Look at Oregon's graduates. If you don't get a tech degree, you practically live in poverty, at today's rates.

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Beware when buying Chinese technology. You might find a secret kill switch.

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These Fortell hearing aids are supposed to be really good at isolating conversation in a noisy room. And they're not too clunky. 

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Mathematical urban legends.
Apparently, there was Asst Professor X at a provincial department Y, and he was up for tenure. Professor X's advisor was a famous Japanese mathematician Z at an Ivy League school. Naturally, he was asked for a letter, which he duly sent. The letter said:

X has a very nice body of work, he proved the following interesting theorems, extended such and such results, used such and such techniques... and so on for two pages. The last sentence was: all in all, X is a very good second-rate mathematician.

The committee was mortified, but figured that the rest of the letter was so good, they should call Z, since maybe since English was not his native language... So, call they did, and the phone conversation went about the same as the letter: did this, improved that, ..., all in all a very good second-rate mathematician.

The committee then said: look, we don't understand why you say he is second-rate!!!

To which Z replied: Well, I really can't understand why that would be a problem -- after all, you are a third rate department.
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6 December 2025

The Oregonian has an article about how the renegade West Coast Health Alliance vaccine group has come out with their own recommendations stating that the hepatitis B vaccine still should be given to all newborns. Since newborns typically don't abuse IV drugs, share needles or come into contact with hep B positive people, this makes sense. Yet the WCHA claims to have data and they link to this recommendation. Yeah, one of the authors is Rochelle Walensky, of COVID-vax fame. Haven't we already been misinformed by her enough. Give it a rest, Rochelle. You and your ilk (like Sidelinger) are no longer considered credible. 

The fact is that maternal hepatitis B infection is much more prevalent in "marginalised poor individuals: sex workers, rural migrant workers, irregular immigrants, homeless adults, and underprivileged individuals". Babies born to affluent parents where there these risk factors are absent, are not likely to have babies subject to this risk. No need to expose them to a vaccine that could cause harm when there's little benefit. Walensky sure has a track record in recommending such vaccines, doesn't she? So in the name of "equity", the WCHA feels that everybody has to get the vaccine.  The CDC isn't restricting the hepatitis B vaccine. If you want your baby to get it, go right ahead. It's just not a universal requirement.

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Watch out when cheap Chinese electronic devices that seem like a good deal. This KVM switch device phones home to China, has hacking tools built in, and has a hidden undocumented microphone. The authors wonder:
How many similar devices with hidden functionalities might be lurking in your home, just waiting to be discovered? And not just those of Chinese origin.
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The World Is Losing Trust in Women Leaders. They sure have been making a lot of bad decisions lately. Including Oregon. I guess people have noticed.

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New Study Investigates How Diet May Slow Normal Brain Aging. It's caloric restriction. Sigh.

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Physicists prove the Universe isn’t a simulation after all. Were you worried? I wasn't. And the key to this insight was Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. How versatile that theorem has turned out to be.

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Interesting article that suggests that having a never-forgetting companion can get quite dreary. There is value is selective forgeting. That's how we grow. It would be nice to have the ability to say "Forget this". Even in our regular brains.

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Apple is losing a lot of top level executives lately. What's going on? It's showing in the product for sure. No longer inspiring or awe-inspiring.  Really sad. 

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Working From Home Is Harming Young Employees. They’re Starting to See That. Is this what's causing young people to go wacko? Or is it the mRNA vax? Or microplastics? It's definitely something.

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Young Chinese scientists are dying at "an alarming rate".  76 compared with 44 for the previous year. 44 still seems like a large number for young people. Shouldn't it be closer to 0? Is it just stress that's killing them off?

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One social worker from Oregon once described how an 18-year-old high school graduate wanted to look like “a Barbie down there.”

Amy Penkin, a social worker with the Transgender Health Program at the Oregon Health & Science University, spoke of the case study at the 2021 conference of the US Professional Association for Transgender Health.

The patient, only identified as Sky, had indicated they were asexual, had no desire to have sex in the future and was hoping to have a procedure to remove “all erogenous tissue.”
How is this evidence-based medicine? We're going to look back at this and wonder how a institution like OHSU ever allowed this to happen. Their leadership sees this and is too scared to raise objections.

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5 December 2025

Crazy.  What's with the "disabled students"? At Brown and Harvard, 20 percent of undergraduate students are disabled. At Amherst College, that's 34 percent. At Stanford University, it's a galling 38 percent. Most of these students are claiming mental health conditions and learning disabilities, like anxiety, depression, and ADHD.  Why can't kids be normal? What has high school done to their minds?

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Last April, Nature release a study that suggested that if we didn't meet climate targets, the world would see a 62% decline in economic output by 2100. But it all hinged on bad data from just one country, Uzbekistan. If you removed that country's datapoint, global output would just be reduced by 23%. Which makes you question the validity of their other data.

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OpenAI is burning through so much cash. Is anyone concerned? This really reminds me of the Abilene Paradox in some way. When things crash, everyone will look at each other and say "Well you didn't seem concerned, so I wasn't."

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AI Doesn’t Kill Expertise — It Kills Mediocrity. This is exactly the fact that no one wants to admit. AI is killing so many jobs because it's the ones that mediocre people had. Experts are still doing OK. It's just the low-hanging fruit jobs that will be affected. So tell me why we need to support that with universal basic income? 

Take the case of this idiot attorney – who makes this kind of AI mistake anymore?  C'mon, it's 2025 already! Educate yourself.

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This article about building a "second brain" is interesting. Doctors in training always talk about their peripheral brain, because it's hard to know everything in medicine. You have to be able to get to your facts quickly. I get what this guy is saying, though, and you can't just dump a fact into a repository without reading it and understanding it first. Even if an LLM can extract and summarize, you need to know what it's going to say. There's no substitute for that. It helps to know that there is a fact there, and you can go and retrieve it. That's better than nothing. And sometimes I'll go through a repo and discover something I forgot was there, and then I delete it or re-remember it. I would like to expand my RAM and my SSD, but it's not that simple.

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It seems that people hate people who are really good at extracting value from AI and are not afraid to show their skills. Nerds just don't the appreciation they deserve.

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Meta is giving up on investing in the Seattle area. Can't blame them. Economic conditions are too unfavorable. Seattle's loss for sure. This is the canary in the coal mine.

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Now this is an interesting article.  Portland housing authority reverses planned rent hikes at two buildings as apartments sit empty. Portland needs money and the knee-jerk response is to raise rents, taxes, fees. But here, there was pushback. I never knew that tenants in Portland could unionize. But, yeah they can.  I'd never rent in Portland because of this. Well, now Portland is experiencing the bad aspects of unionization. It's not just the fat cat rich people that suffer. It's you, too!

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Taxpayer suffer again.  Funding cuts halt Portland-ODOT partnership for homeless camp removal. Yup, you pay taxes, Portlanders, but that money goes to supporting the homeless, not clearing them away. Portland has the money, but they choose to spend it poorly.

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Asante Hospitals wants to pull out of Oregon.  Asante Ashland Community Hospital is closing. Some people are mystified. Why would they want to do that? Why indeed. Now Ashland will suffer. Tick tock, Oregon. 

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This is Portland justice.  A Black man stabs you with a knife. But if you call him the "n-word" in anger, he gets off without a charge.  Bonus: we have to read the DailyMail to get this article, because they won't touch this story locally. 

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4 December 2025

Collagen supplements can actually make a difference with osteoarthritis, decreasing joint pain. Now a paper showed that the proper ratio of amino acids can lead to life prolongation and better quality of health.  This old ronin could use some of that.

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Does every techie in Seattle hate AI?

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Man cured of HIV after stem cell transplant. It's amazing that HIV patients are even being transplanted at all. Stem cell transplants are a very immunosuppressive process. This could easily have gone the wrong way. And he did not receive stem cells from a CCR5 mutated donor either. Lucky patient. 

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Sam Altman Quietly Tried To Buy A Rocket Startup To Compete With Musk's SpaceX. Somebody stop this guy before he hurts himself.

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After 25 years, the article that Monsanto had been touting saying that glyphosate (Round Up) is safe, is now retracted. 
The retraction confirms that the “science” used to defend the world’s most widely used herbicide was built on industry manipulation — including ghostwriting, undisclosed payments, and reliance on a narrow selection of unpublished Monsanto studies.
Wow.
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Washington state wants to punish their wealthy with a new payroll excise tax on high-income earners to shore up falling federal subsidies, in order to continue to fund unions and illegals and their own special interests. Time to move out of Washington state, if you haven't already.

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More than 23,000 Canadians died while waiting for health care this past year. "Notably, this number excludes Alberta and parts of Manitoba due to incomplete data. If anything, the real number is likely higher." The socialist model for healthcare never works.

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Great idea. Datacenters generate heat – let's use that.  Datacenters are heat centers.

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Amazon announced the Tritanium4 chip. It's for AI (of course) but the reporter didn't tease out any details about its architecture. I didn't know Amazon was making their own chips, too. Is this going to be a common thing? Then why isn't ASML doing better?

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Ken Ono is a 57 year old established mathematician, but he's going to quit to join an AI startup run by a 24 year old. Brave move. Hope it works out.

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Hundreds of Porsche owners in Russia unable to start cars after system failure in their factory-installed satellite security systems. What kind of cars are being made now? Everything's got to have a satellite link to work? How about just having a car. These satellite links are there so that the company can shut things off when they want. Or track you. They can install all kinds of crap, and you can't do anything about it.

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I didn't know the market for treatment for hereditary angioedema was crowded, but I guess it is. Now there's a new treatment called deucrictibant from Pharvaris.  There's already three approved treatments for this rare disorder. Well, it's nice to have too many treatments than none at all.

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Portland public schools in North Portland gotta consolidate because enrollment is in steep decline. And no one wants to go to those schools. "It won't please everyone" is the understatement of the month.

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Portland’s oldest brewing supply store to close after 108 years. It survived for so long, only to succumb under Democrat Socialist leadership. I know, the clientele is changing, too. Craft brewing was the pride and joy of Portland, but nowadays people want cannabis or fentanyl. Gotta get with the times, you know.

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3 December 2025


And speaking of rear-end, scientists have made it possible to breathe through your intestines: with a single intrarectal dose of non-oxygenated perfluorodecalin. This was the first human trial, and was left in for only 60 minutes. But it's a proof of concept and may be useful in patients with poorly-performing lungs. 

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Sundar Pichai says Google will start building data centers in space, powered by the sun, in 2027. Orbital space is going to get awfully crowded. Hope these satellites can stay out of everyone's way.

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Physicists are devising a system for coordinated time on Mars. Time flows faster on that smaller planet.

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Someone else realizes that healthcare is in a death spiral. The socialist model can't continue indefinitely, and we are now at the breaking point, where Congress is being pressured to fix the problem by renewing subsidies. This is just feeding the beast for another year or so. We can't keep doing this. This is much like the broken immigration system. Everyone felt it was too big to fix, and Trump continues his efforts to deport illegals. It's tough, unpopular work, but it needs to be done. Until then, we'll keep seeing extinction bursts as people complain.

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There's a sword-wielding man hired to kick squatters out of empty Oakland homes. Hire him and he'll move those squatters out with threat of force. Yeah, it's unconventional but times are different now. I think we will need a paramilitary parallel law enforcement arm, because the existing way, under Democrat mayor control, isn't working.

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Gov. Tina Kotek says she’s ready to tackle Oregon’s lousy business reputation. This is a joke, of course, and Oregon Catalyst sees the flaws in her plan. Oregon has depended on federal subsidies for so long, and now all of that is gone. Cost of living has gone up so much locally. Everyone is unhappy with inflation, but it is mainly a Blue state phenomenon. 

At this website one can see how each state's policies contribute to declining Real Income and CPI.  Oregon is the second worst state in loss of real income and second worst in decline in Personal Consumption Expenditure. The only thing that saved Oregon overall was that it doesn't have a sales tax to abuse. Washington did somewhat better, but was still lousy.  

And Washington wants to institute a new 5% payroll excise tax that will affect the richest companies. The money will go to "higher education, housing, health care and SNAP benefits. Currently the bill does not include a sunset clause."  Unions, homeless and illegals.


Marketwatch says that Americans are unhappy with the economy. It's just people in Blue states.

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So we don't have an AI bubble? Just an air pocket?

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China is taxing condoms to try to get people to have more babies. How about making people feel wealthier?

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2 December 2025

A physician was hired to work at an AI health startup and revealed that they were just a ChatGPT wrapper that was committing HIPAA fraud. They fired him, and now he's suing.

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Earth is spinning faster. Maybe we'll have a negative leap-second.

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Apple names former Microsoft, Google exec to succeed retiring AI chief. They need someone to buff up Siri, for sure. Steve Jobs probably would have fired the guy a lot sooner. Steve never suffered those who made their software the butt of jokes.
Mac software has really been channeling Microsoft of the 2000s. Remember those "I'm a Mac and I'm a PC" commercials? The reason for this is because Windows software was so bad it was a joke. 

And it looks like Intel will get back to making Apple's M-series chips. The stock sure went up. 

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More on Wisconsin's war to ban VPNs. What's wrong with those northern states, anyway?

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Michael and Susan Dell donate $6.25B to fund 'Trump accounts'. Ach, no. This is the wrong approach. Funding Trump accounts only feeds the beast. We need to dismantle the ACA instead and replace it with a better system than the one we have that just puts insurance companies in control and makes them rich. Your hearts are in the right place, Dells, but this is not the way. 

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OpenAI's Altman is begining to panic. Competitors are catching up. And OpenAI is not going to get much sympathy when they try to capture pictures of children in a ChatGPT powered Santa elf toy.

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Legacy nurses and nurse practitioners and physician assistants go on strike. Man, can't the hospitals catch a break here? It's either nurses or teachers in Oregon. The hospitals will cave, of course, what can they do? No one wants to work in Oregon. Then they'll close some care unit or a small auxillary center somewhere. Eventually they'll run out of smaller things to close. Then what? A fire sale to some national chain, is what. And watch what happens to healthcare then.

In other news, Vibra is closing in East Portland.  This is huge, if you're a hospital in Portland, because Vibra took people who were too ill to go home or even to a skilled nursing facility. This will have an impact on discharge planning. 

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So many breweries and public houses in Bend. That's why Bend Police arrest more people for DUI per capita than any other department in Oregon.

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Another one bites the dust. Nordstrom Rack is closing downtown. Dominoes keep falling.  And get this:
The flagship store remains open but its future has been in doubt since last summer, when Mayor Keith Wilson said CEO Erik Nordstrom had told him, “I don’t know how long we can continue to operate in Portland.”
The Oregonian goes on to say:
Downtown foot traffic has been improving steadily in recent months and Portland officials have been hopeful that the newly renovated Portland Art Museum and the new James Beard Public Market will help bring people back downtown. Thousands packed into Pioneer Courthouse Square last weekend for the annual Christmas tree lighting. 
Yeah, it's not the kind of foot traffic you want. Portland's Christmas Tree lighting ceremony was a Palestinian activism stunt. Who let that happen?

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Portland's new dilemma. Nearly 1,900 affordable Portland apartments sit empty while thousands need homes. They're empty because rent is too high. They can't lower the rent because they need the income because expenses (think employees and debt obligations) still need to be paid. Can't refinance because interests are still too high.  
From the article:
One solution, Salazar said, would be for the state to provide operating subsidies that would allow affordable housing providers to buy down debt at some properties.

With those resources, affordable housing operators like Reach could restructure their properties, she said, but high mortgage payments and other expenses preclude that option today.

“We can’t just drop the rents,” Salazar said.
Yeah, if only they could get more of them "state subsidies". You know, throw more money on the problem. Welcome to reality.
Anyone wanna rent in of these "affordable" apartments?  Don't mind the needles or the trash. Don't leave valuables in your cars. Don't go out after dark. And always pay attention to your surroundings. Why aren't these units renting?

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1 December 2025

Yet another reason I don't believe the climate change hype. The aftermath of the COP30 meeting in Panama is just garbage everywhere.  These climate meetings are just social gatherings for the elite. $2 billion for the elite to spend on themselves.

Yeah, and now we know that environmental activism is linked to dark triad traits and left-wing authoritarianism.

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Linoleic acid in soybean oil contributes to obesity. This is not new since the LA is unconjugated, as opposed to the linoleic acid in meats and dairy products, which may actually counter obesity. This is probably why America got so fat. Well, it helps to know some of the factors, so that they can be countered. 

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Beware of datacenters. Living in proximity to them can be hazardous to your health.

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Economist explains Portland’s decline.  You don't really need an economist to explain it. Everyone knows, except the Democrats in charge.

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Washington Must Break Its Promise on Social Security. Why are we always running out of SS money, but never run out of foreign aid and NGO money? That's what I'd like to know.

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Most corporations don't know how to implement generative AI.  A report from MIT suggests that 90% of initiatives fail.

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Prices must always continue to go up. This is something my younger self never understood. The short answer is that only having prices go down but wages remain the same is not only unfair but destabilizing. Producers would be losing out and leaving money on the table, and that's never going to happen. So everything must get steadily more expensive. This is why I hate unions striking for higher wagers, instead of letting the market determine salaries. Employers are restricted by law from firing striking union members as well as other ways of fighting back. Some have demanded that companies be forbidden to go out of business, and hire striking employees back. Utter crap. So if you don't have a way to increase your pay to stay above inflation, you are screwed.

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90% of Wikipedia articles contain an error.  Higher than I thought, it includes typos, so perhaps this is not surprising.

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Google's NanoBanana Pro steals content. Imagine my surprise.

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Portland mayor declares victory on homeless shelter bed goal. This is meaningless. It's like saying that you're going to attack the cuts-and-scrapes problem by manufacturing 1000 Band-Aids.  You can do it, but it won't solve the underlying problem.  And now, Portland housing authority cuts staff amid budget uncertainty. So who's going to administer and monitor all these shelters.

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