Sugoi & Yokunai

In conclusion, the banking industry continued to show resilience in the first quarter, as net income rebounded, asset quality metrics remained generally favorable, and the industry’s liquidity was stable. 

However, ongoing economic and geopolitical uncertainty, continuing inflationary pressures, volatility in market interest rates, and emerging risks in some bank loan portfolios pose significant downside risks to the banking industry.  These issues, together with funding and margin pressures, will be matters of close supervisory attention by the FDIC in 2024.  

When asked whether “my schoolwork challenges me in a good way,” just under half of middle and high school students agree, with only 14% agreeing strongly.
What’s concerning is that students say they feel much less engaged in school than they did just last year, compared to Gallup’s 2023 Gen Z survey.
...about half of Gen Z students say they plan to go to college, their K-12 schools spend a lot of time talking about it — way more than they talk about alternatives.

Hydrogen is also hard to move around. To get the gas to move through pipes, it has to be compressed and pushed along using compressors. This process requires energy: the losses in moving hydrogen through pipes are ten times greater for hydrogen than for methane; up to 30%. In other words you need to use up almost a third of your gas just moving it from A to B.

The infrastructure for hydrogen does not exist, neither for the most part do the production facilities and they will cost billions to build. Then the underlying cost of storing hydrogen is probably at least four times that of storing methane. Huge amounts of energy are lost in each stage of the process due to the fundamental properties of hydrogen.

In 2022, the federal government reported that, in samples seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration, average levels of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC—the psychoactive compound in weed that makes you feel high—had more than tripled compared with 25 years earlier, from 5 to 16 percent. That may understate how strong weed has gotten. Walk into any dispensary in the country, legal or not, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single product advertising such a low THC level. Most strains claim to be at least 20 to 30 percent THC by weight; concentrated weed products designed for vaping can be labeled as up to 90 percent.

In the past few years, reports have swelled of people, especially teens, experiencing short- and long-term “marijuana-induced psychosis,” with consequences including hospitalizations for chronic vomiting and auditory hallucinations of talking birds. Multiple studies have drawn a link between heavy use of high-potency marijuana, in particular, and the development of psychological disorders, including schizophrenia...

“It’s entirely possible that this new kind of cannabis—very strong, used in these very intensive patterns—could do permanent brain damage to teenagers because that’s when the brain is developing a lot..."

“If you block KIBRA from PKMzeta, you’ll erase a memory that’s a month old.” The specific molecules will have been replaced many times during that month, he adds. But, once established, the interaction maintains memories over the long term as individual molecules are continually replenished.

Three years ago, it seemed like the U.S. had a real shot at hitting Biden’s ambitious target of building 30 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind. Then came the perfect storm of supply chain bottlenecks, rising inflation, and high interest rates. Since then, offshore wind developers have cancelled more than 7 gigawatts (GW) of planned projects on the East Coast.

Not so fast. CIDRAP published this report stating that a medical study showed that getting myocarditis from the mRNA vax is less severe than getting it from the virus itself. But let's take a look at the study itself.  The time span of the study is December 2020 to June 2022 so it covered the period of all the strains, from Wuhan ancestral to omicron. But look how they define myocarditis from COVID-19 infection vs from the vax:

Individuals admitted to the hospital for myocarditis within 7 days after receipt of any dose of a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine were categorized as having postvaccine myocarditis.  Individuals admitted to the hospital for myocarditis within 30 days of SARS-CoV-2 infection and who did not receive an mRNA vaccination within the preceding 7 days were categorized as having post–COVID-19 myocarditis.

How was 7 days determined as the cutoff? I've always felt that those who have had COVID-19 and later get the vax have it harder, because the immune system attacks spike protein, which the vax places onto the surface of myocardial cells. I bet they didn't even check to see if a vaxxed person had COVID-19 before (natural immunity). This may be why the cohort considered unvaxxed and COVID-19 infected had a higher rate of hospitalization. And I always am suspect of studies that don't take into account all the problems after the first 14 days after the first jab. This is why trust in the medical profession has fallen.

“Evolution to strategies that are neutral to race and ethnicity is essential. Ultimately, all who aspire to a profession in medicine and cardiology must be assessed as individuals on the basis of their personal merits, not their race and ethnic identities.”

...even anonymised data can sometimes be linked back to you if it’s specific enough, Woollven warns. “So while Apple isn’t directly storing your conversations in a way that’s linked to you, there’s still a small risk that a very specific query could potentially be connected to you.”