Sugoi & Yokunai

Awesome. OHSU's rally to support David Jacoby gets a decent turnout, despite the weather.

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Seattle City Council president has had it with protestors. There's no civility anymore in Seattle. Millennials thinks that their opinions are important enough to get in your face. Arrest them all.
And thirty years ago, this guy would have been laughed out of town. But in today's world...

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The crazy is strong in California. Illegal aliens will get interest-free home loans. Man, if you didn't have enough reasons to leave the state, here's another.

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Alcohol deaths rising, hitting women the hardest. And antidepressant use is increasing, also hitting women the hardest. That's probably why Democrats seem so dominant in politics these days. The crazy is strong. That's why someone said this on X:

Also this is worth an encore:

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Ugh. Parent's trauma can leave epigenetic traces in children. Well that's not good.

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Some are saying that the nursing profession isn't fun anymore. Suicide rate is increasing. It starting with COVID-19, but you can't really blame that anymore. It's policy, and the deterioration of American society as a whole. No safety. Lousy economy. Lots of unpleasantness to deal with.

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Largest helium deposit discovered in Minnesota. Great! We can have MRI scans now. And party balloons.

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And Google admits that it can't guarantee that Gemini A.I. won't be unbiased. Why use it then? I guess it's facing a "right-wing backlash". How about just calling it a reality backlash? Why does having common sense get labeled "right-wing".

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Bike vigilantes exist!  They'll use their expertise to help you get back your stolen bike. There's one in Portland, too, called BikeIndex. Also Project 529 and BikePortland.

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CDC recently recommended that people get their ninth jab. This is despite warnings that have been put on the mRNA product.

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Should you ditch you mobile phone like Justin Bieber? Most of us can't, because we don't have personal assistants. Oh well.

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There have been tech layoffs, but the headcount at major tech companies is about the same. This is because they are changing their focus, and weeding out the oldies, to make room for the new. But also, they want more scut workers, like at Amazon, to do manual labor jobs. But white-collar jobs are being pared, and some engineers are being let go. Probably managers, too.

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C|Net is no longer a trustworthy source of tech news. Reputation, once lost, is hard to regain. If C|Net can be fooled by A.I., it's clearly not a tech authority.

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Multnomah County's ambulance service is a sinking ship. Workers are leaving, and the County wants to punish the ambulance service. Soon, we won't have ambulance service. What inept leadership. I suspect the rich will somehow take care of themselves.

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There goes recycling.  Downtown Portland will close two bottle drop centers because they're just fentanyl abuse hangouts. Everything nice is falling apart in this clown world of a city.

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PGE wants more money. Can't they take it from their CEO's enormous compensation?

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Love to see Seattle Democrats get a taste of Democrat policy. They're just seeking a better life, right?

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This has gotten strangely little media mention. On Tuesday, a federal court ruled that Congress lacked the constitutionally required quorum to pass the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, and therefore the Biden administration cannot enforce the new mandates imposed on Texas by the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which was part of the omnibus spending bill. Well what about the other stuff in the bill? Like the $1.7 trillion in appropriations? Well?

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Regarding the strike by South Korean doctors, if they don't go back to work, they'll be arrested. They clearly have a different culture and legal system there. Imagine – strikers being arrested if they don't go back to work. Imagine if they did that to, say, Portland public school teachers. Wow.

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Hackers upset with Biden may royally screw up the Georgia case against Trump. Fulton County prosecutors are skeptical that the hackers have anything. We'll see today.
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There goes the tax base. Weiden+Kennedy laying off 90.

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Oregon will only ditch DST if Washington and California do it, too. Oregon is only bold and fearless when it comes to legalizing vice. Not when it comes to practical matters. In those cases, Oregon becomes a follower, not a leader.

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NYT discusses Sam Altman. Seems like OpenAI is just Sam Altman's company. He does what he wants to do, but at least he seems to be active and laying the groundwork for ambitious projects. He operates like someone with a vision. Can't say the same for anyone else in the field.

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I like this guy. Brian Heywood of Redmond, WA is putting six initiatives on the ballot that I really like.

Yipee!  Sun Sui Wah is coming to Bellevue this April. This is some of the best Chinese food around. Won't have to go to Richmond for this.

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I've noticed that even though it might be cloudy, as a solar eclipse reaches totality, the clouds seem to part. I thought I was just lucky, but it turns out that this often happens. There's science behind that phenomenon.

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Senior OHSU physician is trying to organize a protest over David Jacoby's ouster as Dean.

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This makes no sense. Harvard is planning a sale of $1.65 billion in taxable bonds to raise revenue.

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Leave it to Oregon. While the nation's average gas prices decrease, Oregon's average gas price increases.

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40 Hz sound and pulsating lights, for an hour a day, alleviates Alzheimer's disease? Call me skeptical.

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New search engine (PimEyes) checks to see where your picture is online. And supposedly it lets you delete that image, although how it can do that without write permission on someone else's server is unclear.  But you can set an alert when your picture appears somewhere. Seems a little sketchy.

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Want to learn something new in a technical field? Plunge into a new field? Try GlobeExplorer.

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Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, is buying up much of Waimea, Hawaii, and locals there are concerned. I feel like Hawaii is just a dish of expensive desserts, which used to be enjoyed by everyone, and now the ultrarich are coming and reserving parts of the dessert for themselves. I think the locals have a point.

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So many startups are failiing, that taking care of the failing procedure is now a viable business. Wow, life during the Biden administration sure is full of new business opportunities.

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That homeless tweaker that was building a cabin in the middle of José Rizal Park in Seattle is finally arrested, and his shack taken down. No one expects that he'll stay jailed for long.

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Yowza.

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First Japan's lunar lander lands upside-down. Now Intuitive Machine's Odysseus lands sideways and becomes inoperative. Now their stock is crashing, too.

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Oregon's efforts to switch to permanent standard time may not be quite dead. Pfft. We'll still be switching our clocks for a long while more.

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Scientists have achieved building a time crystal that lasted 40 minutes. Way longer than just milliseconds. Maybe we'll get workable quantum computers someday.

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Those great entrepreneurs may have a hidden secret – toxoplasmosis. So it may give us crazy cat ladies, but it may also give us business leaders.

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Does math get in the way of physics being able to explain things?  This guy think so. Nah, don't blame math. It's just a matter of figuring out how to define the right context to apply the math.

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Jensen Huang thinks that kids should not learn to code. Let A.I. do it. I strongly disagree, but that's just me. But I do think that the kind of code that kids should be working on needs to accelerate. The world is different now, and A.I. can help kids learn faster. At least in theory.

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Top public school employees made a bundle last year. Why? They should be fired for this kind of embarrassement. Why reward them with generous salaries when they get an F-grade?

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Microsoft is also partnering with the French A.I. company Mistral. That experience with OpenAI probably gave Sadella PTSD.

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Remember Kozmo.com? The Bay Area delivery service started during the dotcom era? It tried to get bigger, but the business wouldn't scale. Well, this guy Tony Illes is doing the same thing. As long as he doesn't try to over-expand, he might do OK. Better than just sitting around and letting Seattle City Council's liberal ladies ruin your dreams.

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Let Seattle crap stay in Seattle. Mercer Island passes ordinance forbidding camping in public parks. Good on them. Just because Seattle can't get it together doesn't mean everyone has to suffer.

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Lesson: When you grift an insurance company with a disability claim, don't enter a Christmas tree throwing contest.

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Are Portland thieves noticing Biden's inflation.

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Good example of how the legacy media has degraded.

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Idiots. The town of Madras, OR is going to fine supermarkets when their carts are found littering the area (by the homeless, who use them as carts). Seems unfair to the supermarkets, when the problem is those who steal them. Ideally, the solution should be to arrest the thieves for removal of property. But you can't count on Oregon Dems to do the right thing. Nope. Punish the store instead.

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Davis, CA woman reveals what a joke "gender-affirming care" is at Kaiser. She pretends to be non-binary, and Kaiser docs are ready to push her forward into having surgery and taking hormone therapy. This is another reason why the medical profession has lost its credibility lately.

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I saw this article about the Albedo satellite that will launch in 2025, that can spy on individuals, and there was concern worked up over privacy and face recognition. But that's the Daily Mail. I wanted to see more detail, and if the pictures shown in the NYT are any indication, then it will be more like what you see from the top of the Burj Khalifa. Making out individual faces will still be difficult though, but who knows what the tech will be like in a few years. But yeah, when you see contrails overhead, be wary.

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Don't rely on Generative AI for medical advice. Up to 30% of what LLMs say is unsupported. There's no substitute for a human physician. (Although during COVID-19, what some human doctors said about things like the vax product was also unsupported as well.)

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Great! A referendum to repeal rank-choice voting will be on the next ballot.

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Man is cured of acute myelogenous leukemia and HIV at the same time. He needed an allogeneic bone marrow transplantation for his leukemia, but luckily, his bone marrow donor carried a CCR5 delta-3 mutation, which made his T-lymphocytes, monocytes and dendritic cells resistant to HIV entry. So when his bone marrow was replaced, he became resistant to HIV, too. Lucky guy.

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Strike! American resident physicians may have qualms about striking. Not so the South Korean resident physicians. The majority of them are striking and they don't care about patient health. The government's response to stressful conditions due to overwork is to just increased enrollment in medical schools, but that's not going to help the resident physicians today. It will be years before they experience any relief. I wish there were a way to solve this problem without hurting patients, but sometimes there is no other way.

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A report from the Universty of Cambridge says that having a regular doctor is better than having a rotating doctor, as in the Kaiser model.

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Scientists have discovered a factor in LongCOVID - a leaky blood-brain barrier. Here's the lay version. Not sure what it signifies, but it's a piece of the puzzle.

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And the homeless in Seattle can do pretty much whatever they want.
Yes, the leadership in Seattle is amazingly stupid.  And here's the head of the Seattle City Council, dumbfounded that their effort to raise the minimum wage for food delivery workers backfired.

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About time. The Chinook Indian Nation used to dominate the Pacific Northwest. They pretty much owned the land of Washington state. The Chinook Wawa is still alive. But over the years, the tribe's dominance has greatly waned. Now, they may get tribal recognition back.

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Hospital workers will now be a protected class. Assaulting them will now be a felony. I can't believe that there are people who oppose this. Of course, it's the defenders of those with "disabilities". Sorry, but allowing this loophole weakens the law, because so many people can claim to have "disabilities". Heck, living in Portland is probably a disability.

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Yes! Oregon lawmakers want the Feds to halt efforts to build offshore windmill farms. Dems vs Dems.

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Crook County citizens will get to vote on whether they want to be part of Greater Idaho.

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NVIDIA is on a tear. Can Jensen Huang manage this and continue the company's dominance? Obvious other players want a piece of the action. But CUDA is dominant, and it will be hard to get around it. However, in the tech world, we've seen leaders get toppled by more capable competitors. But they're GPUs are incredibly expensive, and a lower cost but still capable competitor could take away business. We shall see.

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Oregon ranks last in math scores in 30 states in 2022 and 2023. So why are we paying teachers more? Are we getting our money's worth? Probably not.

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Google AI refuses to answer question about the Second Amendment. Who thought this A.I. model was ready to be released?

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So chronic stress promotes cancer metastasis. One of the things I've noticed is that those who constantly worried about their cancer and stressed out about it, were the ones who did worse. Those were more relaxed and accepting often did better. This may be why. The mechanism is that neutrophils in stressed individuals tended to spill their DNA, inducing the formation of fibronectin and causing a "sticky" web to form. Introducing an enzyme to destroy DNA (DNase 1) reversed this. So it's important to get those stress levels down, as this will lower inappropriate glucocorticoid release. But I worry about drugs like pegfilgrastim which increases neutrophil levels. Could those be causing harm?

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Vending machines have face recognition systems. Just do you know. They're everywhere, it seems.

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Uranus and Neptune add a few more to their moon count.

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Workplace injuries rise after states legalize recreational marijuana. Yeah, and car accidents, too.

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Go woke, go broke. Vice.com is shutting down. And glad to see that Soros lost some investment money, too.

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California’s Budget Deficit Is Even Worse Than Originally Projected. As Rand Paul warned, Newsom should be kept as far from the White House as possible.

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Somehow I don't believe it. Clackamas Co. records 65% decline in homelessness from 2019 to 2023. Really? With the proximity of Johnson Creek and the Springwater Corridor? Maybe that proximity made is easier to shove things over onto Multnomah County. Let's keep Portland shit in Portland.

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Could be big. Oregon lawmakers could limit corporate ownership of medical practices. When Obamacare disincentivized independent medical practices, because you couldn't compete with hospitals for hospital pricing, many doctors dissolved their clinics and became hospital employees, or their practices were bought out by private equity. This law could force the latter to try to make it independent docs again, or become hospital employees. That would be unfortunate. No longer could your physician recommend what he/she thought was best, but rather had to conform to hospital policy. What they're after seems to be Amazon buying practices. But while I understand where they're coming from (where were they all these years?) it limits the options doctors will have. Since independent clinics are financially tricky, many docs will have no choice but to work for one of the hospitals. How does that help the public?

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Funny story about FedEx. It's like they're behaving just like scammers trying to phish you.

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Student loan holders might like the thought of "debt cancellation" but it's really insidiously evil and unfair for all these reasons. It's really debt transfer, and why should I have to pay off someone else's loans? Plus it adds to inflation and the national debt, and taxes will have to go up to support it. Biden needs to go.

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Stable Diffusion 3 is out. We'll see how it compares with Sora.

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So basically we have no southern border now.

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Oregon has more mental health problems than most states.  I can believe that.

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Digital anti-piracy messages have the opposite effect on men than women. It causes them to commit more piracy. Decreased by 50% in women and increased by 18% in men. Strange, no?

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