Sugoi & Yokunai

What do you do when you're a small emergency department, and suddenly there's been a large mass shooting? This is what you do. Hats off to these guys.

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Urban birds, not rural birds, spread multi-drug resistant bacteria around.

The law contains 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups, including one creating a Chief Diversity Officer at the National Science Foundation, and several prioritizing scientific cooperation with what it calls “minority-serving institutions.” A section called “Opportunity and Inclusion” instructs the Department of Commerce to work with minority-owned businesses and make sure chipmakers “increase the participation of economically disadvantaged individuals in the semiconductor workforce.”

requirements that chipmakers submit detailed plans to educate, employ, and train lots of women and people of color, as well as “justice-involved individuals,” more commonly known as ex-cons.

Some timezones have really weird offsets.  Makes life difficult for programmers who have to take into account users in these areas.

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Just because the country isn't technically in a recession doesn't mean that individuals aren't hurting at recession levels. More Americans are carrying credit card debt than in 2020.

Just look at how the U.S. is doing compared with other OECD countries:

Shameful. This is Build Back Better? It's three years out now. Can't blame the COVID economy for this. If you couldn't solve it, you should have stepped aside and let someone more capable do it.

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Well that's good.  Dems and GOP agree that Measure 118 is bad. Even Kotek agrees with this, bless her heart.

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Beer sales are tanking, so 20% less hops are being planted this year. Everything economy-wise in Oregon seems to be tanking.

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DOJ may want to break up Google.  Maybe this is why Google is enabling "glitches" that favor Kamala Harris. Corruption everywhere.

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As expected, Portland city camping ordinance violators will go unpunished. Those citations will end up in the trash.  And the more that crime goes unpunished, more crime is encouraged.

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Seattle continues its steady decline. South Lake Union streetcars shut down. 

Another reason to avoid the city.

Rogers also confirmed prosecutors would not refile charges against protesters who already had their cases dismissed because they couldn’t get a public defender. Freije said nine people couldn’t get public defenders and had their cases tossed as a result.

The city is falling apart.

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Lots of places on Earth are named entrances or gateways to some kind of hell. Of course Oregon has a few. There's also Hell's Canyon.

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Plans are to create an interactive hologram of Alan Turing. Should be interesting, especially if we can't tell if it's a computer or a human.

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Portland is finally paying the piper. Who wants to invest in downtown Portland? Not many, it seems.

Sad trombone. Even San Francisco is paying the piper. The city is sinking in bad hotel debt.

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Lack of money and lack of planning.  Oregon Health Authority can't fix mental health crisis.

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So why should we? Nike CEO, like other CEOs, celebrities, pollute the skies with their carbon, and don't really care about it. I'll treat climate change like an urgent issue when those who say it is, really act like it is.  Until then....

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Criminals who escaped to Mexico won't be expedited back to Oregon to face trial.  Why? 

Remind me again what Oregon is really "sanctuaring".

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Wallet Hub rates Oregon as the 9th worse state in the nation overall.  When it comes to personal safety, Oregon is the 2rd worst state.

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Scientists discover that gluten enteropathy (celiac disease) occurs as at an earlier stage than previously thought. Even at the surface of the epithelial cell, CD4-positive T-cells are activated, and pre-digestion of gluten protein by bacterial enzymes enhances the process. The only way to avoid this reaction is not to eat gluten – easier said than done.

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Quanta Magazine talks about tensors. I hoped I'd finally learn what the physics tensors are, but they only discuss the simple high-dimensional matrix explanation that you hear about so often, and of which physicists always say "Well, that's close to what it is, but...." 

Then you read things like:
"Tensors are not generalizations or formalizations of vectors or matrices" (usually with exclamation points and raising of voice).

"A tensor is any multilinear map from a vector space to a scalar field."

"A tensor is a vector field that obeys the rules of tensor calculus."

Yeah, real helpful.

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Nutrition science can be so inexact. Here's an article that addresses how much cheese should be in your diet. The short answer is, they don't know, and reasonable amounts are probably OK.

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Now young people have to worry about accelerated aging along with their turbo cancers. And why do so many people seem to have autoimmune diseases now? Gee, what could it be? Climate change?

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I saw this article about American IQs dropping over the past couple of decades. Here's the study.  What's remarkable to me is that over time, the IQ score of college women has decreased to the level of high school women back in 2006.  By now, it's probably even lower.

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Do people really think like this?  The media has been upset about a comment made about "single childless cat ladies". Ouch. But then read this article. I wonder if this thinking is common, or considered normal.

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What's going on at Seattle Childrens Hospital? Holy cow, the east coast Lefty woke mind virus has invaded Seattle. Really sad for those docs.

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Lenacapavir has been successful.  Kudos to those women in Africa who agreed to be subjects for the HIV vaccine. Hope they truly enjoy the benefits of being immunized.

––– 凄い –––I saw this article in Financial Times – Kamala Harris is more trusted than Donald Trump on the US economy. I thought, Really? Let's see where that came from, because it goes against all intuition.  Nope, no data. Here's the AI summary of this article:

So it's really just editorial, not a real analysis. And then they published an editorial about why the writer is no longer interested in a Tesla. Here's the AI summary:

What the hell is going on at FInancial Times? Or with quality media in general?

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Take a look at what Measure 118 is all about? What a sad waste of money.  And what a sure way to drive away whatever business Oregon has left.

––– 凄い –––Here's some promising news on voter registrations, although Oregon needs work.

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Well well.  Tina Kotek is the least popular governor in the nation.  Just like her predecessor. No surprise there. So why does she and her party keep winning? Stupid voters in the state's biggest cities? Cheating? Both? Does she represent all of Oregon? Or just some of it?

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Coding with AI. "I'm never going back."  Yup, I feel the same way. You may hesitate, thinking that it's cheating, but you learn a whole lot of things that you never knew. It's like having a smart colleague advising you and giving you helpful tips and tricks. I'm never going back either.

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A speech prosthesis in the hippocampus and frontal lobe. What?? I gotta see how this works, but I can't get access to this article. It converts impulses from the anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortices, and hippocampus, and converts them into vocalizations. I suspect that machine learning was used and wonder which ones.  Pretty cool tech.

Download Speech.mp4

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Chinese drones are being used to remove trash from Mt. Everest.  That'll help clean things up a bit.

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This is why so many people think that everyone agrees with them. Tiktok makes you think that, and feeds your ego. But Facebook has been doing that as well for years, so it's not something new.  This sure explains the stark political divide we see.

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Another one bites the dust. Dosha is closing after two decades. Yeah, in the place where they're located, there probably aren't many who want to risk getting the latest cosmetics and getting pampered. Those were for the better days. The article doesn't say where they're going. Where would they go? I don't see the Pearl District as being any better. Lake Oswego has wealthy residents, but they were probably looking for urbanites looking to give themselves a treat. I don't see L.O. ladies being the NYC East Central Park types. Not even West Linn. Downtown Beaverton isn't there yet, and with the shelters that are being built downtown, I would be careful about relocating there, too.

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Chronic anxiety increases dementia risk, but chronic benzodiazepines usage really increases dementia risk. So if you have chronic anxiety, look for other solutions for relief.

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Today is supposedly Chinese Valentine's Day. Because it's the 7th day of the 7th month in the lunar calendar. First time in my life I'm hearing this. Oh well. Is it really a thing? Do Chinese women really care?

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The "Oregon Rebate" (more truthfully known as stealing something that doesn't belong to you) is now $1600 instead of the original $750.  Because they miscalculated what raising taxes by 3% would be. They're even happier about the larger amount, but theft is theft. Taxes should be collected just for security and infrastructure maintenance and improvement. Not to direct behavior. Not to give people more disposable income to spend. Oregon lawmakers would do well to read Davy Crockett's letter Not Yours to Give.

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Classical music can synch the depressed brain. Currently I'm reading the series of music and its ancient meaning by Ted Gioia, the Honest Broker. Being able to affect the brain is not limited to classical music. I am impressed by what music can do to affect thinking.

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Hawaiian Electric is now admitting that the $4 billion Lahaina settlement is going to be hard on them to pay, but they don't expect that they'll raise rates to get the money for it. They're hoping that their investments will do well to earn them the money to pay it off. Boy, that's risky. And I would bet those investment were earmarked for other things. I think rates will have to increase.

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Boy, I'd hate to lose a job in Oregon with the state this incompetent. Is it because they don't have enough competent workers? Or is it because they just don't have money available to give away, so they stall? 

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Speaking of the economy, Peter Schiff thinks we're going to see a great downturn again. Schiff has said this a lot, so in a sense, this is not news. Marketwatch.com posted two articles:

I think Powell should hold off on lowering interest rates, because inflation is still present, and lowering interest rates makes sense when a hot economy cools off, not when a struggling economy starts to enter stagflation. Yes, higher interest rates made people poorer and so there is less demand, and therefore, less demand-pull inflation. But that's not a sign of health.  The cure is to fix the underlying cause, which is release restrictions on oil and natural gas, for starters.

Here's one of Biden's economic advisors: Jared Bernstein. Listen to his grasp of what the Fed does.

Now listen to this video by El Salvador's Tayib Bukele, who clearly knows a lot more than Jared.

Download Bukele_MMT.mp4

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Climate science is inexact and cannot make accurate predictions. Certainly not ready to get billions in support, when we don't even know how much it would cause the changes they want to see.

And now, there are reports that we have seen the coldest nights on record.  Yet one has to read news from outside the mainstream media to learn about this. Because one-sided reporting is the norm now.

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How has Seattle changed since 2020?  Redditors asked themselves this question, and everyone reports that they have to pay a lot more, and that the city has gone to shit and there is more crime because of lack of enforcement of the law. But anyone want to bet that these "smart people" are still going to vote Democrat?  What will it take to make them see clearly?

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CalTech scientists find a way to monitor blood pressure continuously in a non-invasive way.  It's 2024, but well, better late than never.

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The cancer-predicting blood test Grail got a lot of hype several years ago.  Now, there's concern that maybe it's not as good as initially thought.  

Grail is facing a class action lawsuit in the US. Embittered investors, faced with steep losses, claim the company exaggerated Galleri's effectiveness in order to increase share price.

Oh-oh.

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Sugar-substitute erythritol may enhance platelet aggregation, leading to strokes. All the sugar substitutes are flawed. Except maybe monkfruit sweetener, which actually tastes pretty close to sugar. That's the only one I'll use.

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A substance, compound DDL-920, was shown (in mice) to "restore cognition, memory in Alzheimer’s disease".  Sounds promising, but many a drug has failed phase III clinical trials. Don't get too excited yet.

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Sounds like Gilligan's Island. These two were supposed to be in space for only 8 days. Now they can't return until 2025, earliest.  Jeez.

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Nice review of Universal Basic Income, and why it fails. The people that need to read it, probably won't.

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The first nasal-spray delivery anaphylaxis treatment drug was FDA-approved. It's called Neffy.

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Interesting. Breast cancer cells stimulate sensory nerves to release substance P, which interacts with the tumor's TACR1 receptor, killing them, but the dead cancer cells' single-stranded RNA (ssRNA) stimulates the tumor cell's toll-like receptor, TLR7, which activates a pro-metastatic gene expression program. Kudos to them for not stopping at the first step and figuring out what it was that produced the end result of metastatic stimulation.  The good news is that aprepitant can stop this process, and oncologists are already giving it with very nauseating chemo regimens. The bad news is that ssRNA can come from other sources – such as the COVID mRNA vax. Do you think all the side-effects of RNA injection have been really studied well?

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Google, Microsoft and Amazon are taking a different tack with AI startups. Instead of buying up the startup, they just license the technology, hire all the top employees, buy out the shareholders, but the founders and investors are no longer in control. They'll still get money for their efforts, but it's not quite the same. Maybe this is a better way? This is because of increased scrutiny over monopolization.

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Boiling water that has enough calcium carbonate is a way to reduce microplastics. But you need the calcium, so it doesn't work for water that doesn't have minerals. There are filters you can buy, but they aren't as convenient to use, and I note that many of them are plastic-based anyway.

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The Mac Mini with M4 chip will basically just be an iPad Pro running on MacOS. Will it be significantly better? Remains to be seen.

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Practice works, but genes work better. This piece says that you can work hard and practice a skill, but innate talent will be better. But better to practice than not practice.  So "choose niches which are so small or esoteric that there is less competition, or lower expectations accordingly." Is this something we didn't already know?

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Taiwan Semiconductor finds that what works in Taiwan doesn't necessarily work in Arizona.

Jefferson Patz, an engineer fresh off a master’s degree from the University of California, San Diego, went to Tainan in 2021 for 18 months of training shortly after he joined the company.
“Oh, my gosh, people work hard,” Mr. Patz said. He recalled that this initial impression had given him a strong sense of what it took to succeed in the industry.

After returning to Arizona, Mr. Patz said, employees were expected to pitch in with work outside their job descriptions because construction of the facility was behind schedule.
This approach did not sit well with everyone.

SunPower, a major solar panel company is filing Chapter 11. Green isn't working, and maintaining a business in California adds an additional burden.

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Republicans are fighting to prevent ballots received after election day from counting. Dems love this because they can calculate how many ballots they need to create to defeat the real winner. We've seen this so many times. In fact, we've been warned that results may not be known for several days. They're already preparing us for this: AP news, PBS news, LA Times, Politico.

Heh. Now Oregon is having second thoughts about Clackamas county. They didn't cave and criminals will have to face jail time. So they agreed to a second review.

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What happens when private equity buys hospitals?  

Private equity firms spent $505 billion on health care acquisitions between 2018 and 2023. Financial infusions may augment resources for care. However, firms have sometimes sold acquired hospitals’ land and buildings, repaying investors with proceeds and burdening hospitals with rent payments for facilities they once owned. Financial outcome of private equity hospital acquisitions and effects on patient care require further study.

Looks like they buy assets for cheap, squeeze whatever juice there is, and hospitals are left with less than they had before.

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Another one bites the dust.  Mt Tabor Brewing is shutting down. 

OHSU researchers are getting closer to striking, unless their demands are met.  It worked for the nurses, right? Except, they aren't nurses.

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AI leaders hail California's SB1047 artificial intelligence safety bill.  This is a start but should be a national regulation, than just California.

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Mental health crisis.  I note that Reddit and Imgur are full out of posts were people try to make light of their mental health problems. A combination of letting off steam, trolling for support, and trying to make sense of it all. In the beginning, it was funny and we could relate. But man, it's getting tiresome now. Everyone is making excuses for slacker behavior.  Now the CDC thinks the mental health crisis in youth is still grim.  Then I read that mental health of liberal girls fell first and fastest.  And this is why there is so much triggering and cancel culture, because they must be protected against assaults on their fragile mental health.  And that fear of participating has replaced fear of missing out.  So maybe JD Vance was on to something?

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Ewwwww.... Being the world's richest man was a hell of an aphrodisiac. 

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Why primary care physicians are becoming harder to find in WA. Nursing shortages were in the news, and now doctor shortages. Gee, maybe they shouldn't have forced out the doctors who didn't want to get jabbed?  The younger doctors embrace telemedicine and want to work from home. Especially as it gets more dangerous for females to venture outside. But you never get the same quality of care as when a doctor sees you in person.  Telemedicine is getting to me more like the "Dear Doctor" column on Oregon Live.  Right now, there aren't as many regulations for teleprescribers, and so we're seeing a lot of flaky internet doctors, but that could change. Another problem is the burden of unreimbursed EHR charting time. This takes up so much time. With lower Medicare reimbursements, no wonder why so many doctors are burning out.

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Could airplanes someday be powered by ground-based microwave antennas? I can envision the horrifying accidents waiting to happen.

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PIPE-307 could be a new drug against multiple sclerosis.

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The FoxVox browser extension changes the language of a webpage to impart a more conservative or liberal slant. Might provide some amusement for a few minutes.  Maybe it can stimulate discussion.

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Psychotic symptoms in mass shootings v. mass murders not involving firearms: findings from the Columbia mass murder database. They conclude:

...policies aimed at preventing mass shootings by focusing on serious mental illness, characterized by psychotic symptoms, may have limited impact. Policies such as those targeting firearm access, recreational drug use and alcohol misuse, legal history, and non-psychotic psychopathology might yield more substantial results.

2.9 billion hit in identify theft incident, with names and full SSN stolen. Why is no one else reporting this? This goes back 30 years, which would make more sense since there aren't that many people in the USA.

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Scammerlocker claims to be able to take down a fraudulent website for you.

Here's how it works:- The tool does a WHOIS lookup to get the domain registrar's abuse contact email. Then it uses Groq's mixtral-8x7b model to use the context and target URL provided by the user to generate an abuse report email with a matching subject. Using Mailgun, it emails the domain provider at their designated abuse contact.

The tool works for any illegal websites, including but not limited to investment scams, crypto pump, and dump, phishing pages, animal abuse, etc. All domain registrars, hosting providers, and TLDs are legally required to take action when they receive an abuse report. Typically, it takes several days to a few weeks to take the website down.

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Costly coding errors. The winner is a doozy. Funny in the rear view mirror, though.

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Here's why you should never let Democrats be in charge of expensive projects. So $42.5 billion was allocated to giving rural areas broadband Internet access under a federal modernization program.  To this date, not a single home or business has been connected to new broadband networks nearly three years after President Biden signed the funding into law, and no project will break ground until sometime in 2025.  The reasons:

• Preference for hiring union workers, who are scarce in some rural areas.
• Requiring providers to prioritize “certain segments of the workforce, such as individuals with past criminal records,” when building broadband networks.
• Requiring eligible entities to “account not only for current [climate-related] risks but also for how the frequency, severity, and nature of these extreme events may plausibly evolve as our climate continues to change over the coming decades.”

That unsightly Willamette Falls paper mill is shutting down. 158 jobs lost. More to be added to the unemployment rolls for the state to process. Lots of layoffs recently.

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Oregon lawmakers urge OHSU to increase pay for unionized researchers. Completely clueless that the reason why the need more pay is because the lawmakers have contributed to making it expensive to live here. Plus, the money to pay the researchers comes out of grants. It's not something you can increase just because you live in a high cost of living state. So if the researchers have to get paid more, it comes out of fixed grant money, and that means researchers will likely want to seek other venues for doing their research.

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Google is not having a good week. Their stock has tanked, along with the rest of NASDAQ. They were declared a monopolist in a U.S. District Court.  And now comes word that they disclose search histories to the government. You probably already suspected that, but it's now shown to be true. If you use Google, don't access the search engine straight.  Use a different interface.

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I read this article on "What should we do with lazy and ungrateful migrants?" The author agrees with Trump, but he has to say "At the risk of sounding Trumpian". What is wrong with echoing Trump's policies? Maybe they are the reason why Trump is supported. This is like when other people preface a statement with "Now, I'm not a Trump supporter by any means, but...."  Who gives a sh#t?

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Moar! Moar!  California fast food workers want to be paid a $30/hour minimum wage now.  Imagine that? For unskilled labor.  Good luck with that passing.

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Homeless camps next to your property? You could have a problem, as this person discovered.  Further evidence that we can't have nice things anymore in Portland is the fence going up around the Lan Su Chinese garden.  Kinda spoils the serenity and tranquility feeling, doesn't it?

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Seattle is running out of jail space, so they want to rent out the SCORE facility in Des Moines. And the Des Moines residents don't like it. Who can blame them?

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"For a ‘quality’ education in Oregon, the price tag tops $13.5 billion."  Everything is just beyond the horizon. Just a little bit more money and everything will be fine. Haven't we heard that enough?

Soon, you can get legal psilocybin edibles in Oregon. Just what we need – more substances to abuse. Like we didn't have enough. Now its psychedelics. Just great.

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It won't be that easy for China to invade Taiwan. Nice explanation. Plus, I hear they have missiles aimed directly at the Three Gorges Dam.  That'll keep China busy.

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Apparently some people are excited about cerebrolysin.  Seems like snake oil.

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Calling someone too old is "ageist".  I have two problems with this essay. The first is that the author falls into the trap of many lefties. If you call someone X, you're an X-ist. The desire to categorize someone, so you can dismiss him from serious consideration, is a common Lefty tactic. I refuse to buy in. The second is the sentiment that it's wrong to say that something can be "too THIS" or "too THAT". Like "too Asian" or "too female".  Well, sometimes things are too much of something. And we have every right to call it out. The problem with putting Diversity hires in charge is that once they are in a position of power, they hire more like them solely because of an irrelevant identity characteristic, such as being female, etc. Suddenly, no one else can have a position in that power structure. It's all that one minority thing. We've seen it everywhere, and people are afraid to call it out. We see it in Oregon's government leadership, and even in Washington D.C.  Yeah, diversity was cool at one point, but no longer. We need to recognize this and call it out.  With regard to age, sometimes age is indeed an issue. It wasn't really Biden's age that we complained about. It was his dementia,  Trump is fine.

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X/Twitter is moving out of San Francisco. More taxbase loss for the city.  They're moving to South Bay, but I predict Elon Musk will move them out of the state entirely.  One step at a time.

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