Sugoi & Yokunai

That $426 million – we don't know what happened to it.  Nearly half a billion emergency rental assistance money – unaccounted for. Oregon Housing and Community Services doesn't know where that money went. They think it went to the right place. They hope so. But there are no records, so who knows? Oregon Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade still thinks they did a good job.

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2023's Billionnaires – how they fared. Lots of Chinese in the losers column. That shows you how brutal 2023 was.

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Seiji Ozawa has passed away. Now, there's only Kent Nagano, and you hardly hear of him these days.

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Oregon's Truffle Festival is coming up. They'll even train your dog to hunt. Would love to go, but man, those prices.

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There's a new opioid that's 25 times more potent than fentanyl, and it's already on the streets in Quebec City. It's called protonitazepyne. Just what Portland needs. The withdrawal from these drugs won't be pretty to watch.

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The American College of Pediatricians finally admits that there is no science behind gender-mutilating surgery for children. Too bad, Rachel Levine. Don't try to convince others to follow your path. Your choice was yours. Leave other people's children alone.

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Happy Lunar New Year!

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Harvard and 69 other schools will re-institute COVID vaccine mandates. Elon Musk needs to hurry on building his science and tech university.

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Washington backed down on increasing caps on property tax. This time voters met a tax hike they didn't like, probably because it would hit them, too.

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A friar with little tech background is advising the Vatican and the Italian government on artificial intelligence. It's not what you know, but who you know.

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Getting harder to do. How to avoid making other people angry on the internet.

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I was wondering about this the other day. Who were the people that traversed from Asia across the Bering Strait to North America? The so-called Beringians?

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Yikes. The billionaire who wants to live almost forever now has LongCOVID. Who knows if his bizarre self-treatments are really helping. No mention of whether he got the vax product. This reminds me of Nathan Pritikin, who strived to live a long life, only to succumb to complications of having leukemia. Or Ray Walford, another longevity enthusiast, who died of ALS complications.

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Even two Portland City commissioners understand that Portlanders have had enough with new taxes. Good grief, already. Curb your spending.

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SB1583 will diminish the right of parents and the school board to stop the crap that they want to put into the schools. This is why parents are putting their kids into private schools.

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Poll finds Portlanders pessimistic about Portland. Homeless, lack of safety and high taxes were among the top concerns.

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Physics for Mathematicians.

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Boeing workers confirms what we already suspected. If you are worried, you can use apps like Flight View to check what plane you will be flying when you book your flight.

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Hawaii Judge strikes again.  Hawaii court says 'spirit of Aloha' supersedes Constitution, Second Amendment.

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Looks like Legacy has more balls than Providence. If Regence doesn't accept Legacy's offer, then Legacy will drop Regence. Legacy would probably like to throw more support to PacificSource anyway.

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Seattle broke a record in 2023 for fentanyl overdose deaths. Probably better get more diversity, Seattle.

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I don't get it. We were told that Multnomah County had a surplus of funds to pay for the preschool program. Even when the wealthy folks "forgot" to pay their share. So now, they can't fund the preschools without another 0.8% tax? What gives?

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As Warren Buffet said, "For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit."

They're inefficient, ugly and take up a lot of valuable space. The only winners are the windmill owners, getting that valuable tax credit.

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Biden Hits Worst Approval Rating. Yup, still 37%. These reports are a joke. Wake me up when it's below 30%.

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Portland’s only earthquake preparedness employee on budget chopping block. The only person Portland has on staff to make sure that when disaster hits, there is an organized response, has retired. Now due to budget cuts, they're thinking of eliminating that position. Obviously to give free monetary stipend to the homeless. And free preschool. And teachers unions.

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And then Kotek called for the three-year tax moratorium in December, throwing the district’s plans into chaos.

Of course. What do you do when you're a failing city, and everything is more expensive to fix now, because you ignored it when it was cheaper to solve. Many are leaving, because the leadership is crap and ranked-choice voting makes sure that problem will never be solved.

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Rachel Levine under fire after HHS offers single study to back claims that child sex changes are 'necessary' healthcare.

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A search engine in 80 lines of Python. Wow!

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Watch out when you go through Seattle. The I-90 rock thrower is back again. Ready to dispense more life-altering injuries again.

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The small intestine has five distinct parts. In medicine, the small intestine is usually divided into three parts, the duodenum, jejunum and ileum, but this group has found five distinct parts, both in terms of function (what gets absorbed in each segment) but also distinctions in stem cell derivation. It's amazing that we're still discovering things about the body.

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Tritium-based fusion breakthrough. Five seconds of fusion action, resulting in a ground-breaking record of 69 megajoules using a mere 0.2 milligrams of fuel. Great!

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COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines: Lessons Learned from the Registrational Trials and Global Vaccination Campaign. I missed this when it came out a few weeks ago. It contains this statement, which is amazing to be seen in an American medical journal, instead of in some foreign journal, or as a Letter to the Editor in the BMJ:

Given the extensive, well-documented SAEs and unacceptably high harm-to-reward ratio, we urge governments to endorse a global moratorium on the modified mRNA products until all relevant questions pertaining to causality, residual DNA, and aberrant protein production are answered.

And this Korean doctor gets it right.

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Five sneaky things the Oregon Legislature always does. But Congress does this, too, not just Oregon.

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Tina Kotek is unhappy with the PSU report that homelessness in Oregon has increased. But then the Legislature proposes this: free pizza and fries for the homeless.

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Ed Diehl looks good on paper. But will he deliver?

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How dare they run a preschool downtown right in front of Portland's favorite drug abuse site? How thoughtless of you, Portland.

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Is this Satoshi Nakamoto?

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The A.I. Math Olympiad has some serious brainpower on their advisory board.

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Could excessive dietary folate be the cause of the increase in colon cancer? Wow, folate is regarding as generally safe, and many doctors are not afraid to prescribe more than is probably necessary to pregnant women and those with anemia caused by hemolysis. But apparently excess folate promotes gene methylation, which is important in suppressing gene expression. And when an important gene like MLH1 is suppressed, you get cancer.

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Feeling stressed? Here are two ways to get quickly get back in control. One requires the Internet, one doesn't. 

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Now Regence Blue Cross is wrangling with Legacy Health. The terms of how it settled with Providence were not disclosed to the public, but I bet Providence hospitals patients will know about it soon. I'm beginning to think that the problem is with Regence, and perhaps Providence hospitals and Legacy Health should have negotiated with Regence together, instead of separately.

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Zoozve lives!  This is a funny story of how a guy saw "ZOOZVE" as a satellite orbiting Venus on his child's solar system poster. He posted his puzzlement on X/Twitter here. (If you can't get Twitter, here's the thread.) Well, thanks to him, ZOOZVE is now for real.

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Yup, Seattle efforts to boost the minimum wage of food delivery drivers ended up destroying their business. As they say, the real minimum wage is ZERO.

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Huggingface is going to make it easy to generate custom chatbots just like OpenAI. Competition is good.

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Metabolized SARS-CoV2 proteins can reassemble and interact with your immune system, causing proinflammatory responses. Tell me again, why we need so many boosters against a virus that is like a common cold now.

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Watch out for "indefinite optimism". It's why so many brilliant people are losers. It may not be a special talent that all that young multi-millionaires have. They may just be blindly naïve. Too optimistic to see the reality of their ideas that almost everyone can see. Once in a while, they succeed, but most of the time, they don't.

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While in the short-term, cannabis might mellow you out, in the long term, it causes increases risk of anxiety. Just what the millennials need – more anxiety. And just what our country needs – more people with mental illness. No wonder Reddit is full of neurotic posters.

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Bluesky is now open to the public. This is where things will start to deteriorate.  But as X/Twitter becomes more difficult to access through Nitter, more people may be compelled to migrate to this. Sorry, but Mastodon, Discord and Lemmy are suitable. Those sites are either too cumbersome to use, and are mostly populated by gamers and "neurodivergents".

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Academics vs the Normals. Excellent essay. I never thought it would be an encomium of Trump, but it sums up well what will be the Trump 2.0 administration, and why the Dems fear this. As one commenter said "we need a game changing asshole like Trump to change the sad dynamic of this country". Yes we do!

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China is building six times more new coal plants than other countries. This is why all the efforts by Western countries to fight CO2 production will ultimately be futile. All it takes is one player not to cooperate, and the endeavor just falls apart. Here's why China will not cooperate – an excellent speech by Konstantin Kisin.

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I always wondered why autoimmune disease were so heavily weighted to females. Stanford researchers have uncovered the effect of a special kind of RNA called Xist. It is an lncRNA (long non-coding). Apparently it triggers autoimmune responses by its very presence.

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Thank goodness the Oregon GOP are working on eliminating mail-in ballots, making it illegal for teachers to strike, reversing Measure 110, and making it harder to be subject to the CAT tax.

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Oregon is the second highest state in the nation in unepmloyment claims. Only New York was higher. Even states like Mississippi and Alabama did better.

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The numnber of homeless increased 8.5% from 2022 to 2023. Yeah, I think I can tell. And there are more illegal immigrants than previously estimated.

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This is why EVs are still a bad idea.

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Portland parents are continuing to choose private schools over public schools. Who can blame them?

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Generative AI makes it easier to generate realistic fake IDs. And this works, because the government will let to submit a photographed copy of your driver's license as proof of identity.

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An ancient scroll from around Vesuvius was burned to a crisp. Opening it up would cause it to disintegrate. Now using A.I. and advanced scanning techniques, we can read the Herculaneum Papyri. That's just magical.

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Stating the obvious. SAT and ACT score predict academic success in college. Water predicts wetness. This is why diversity advocates want to eliminate standardized testing, so that minorities can enter college. Where they would be set up to fail, if not for special diversity programs. Where they would fail after graduation, if not for diversity hiring programs, such as at United Airlines.

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Someone wanted to know what happened to the plastic straw ban. Apparently it just got changed into a more compostable plastic, made of polylactic acid (PLA).  But are those straws really biodegradable? Only under certain "extremely rare" conditions where there are enzymes that can break it down. Otherwise, they aren't really very more green than regular plastic straws.

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‘It is not up to the rich to decide how much they should pay in taxes’. This is Obama thinking, right there. Remember the "If you got a business, you didn't build that" argument? Rich talk from a guy who really didn't build anything himself, but took a lot of credit. The rich got rich mostly because they built something that others wanted, especially what other people with disposable income wanted. Or needed. Someone needs to acquaint Mr. Zucman with the parable of the 10 men in the bar. It helps when you break it down simple.

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Blame the cars. Seattle City Council still has some crazies left over. Tammy Morales wants to ban Kias and Hyundais because its easier to steal them than other cars. Instead of enacting policies to fight crime, like having more police.

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Thunderbird is going to be revamped. You won't need a plug in to access Outlook emails, for one.

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Biden forbids Andrew Slavitt, the guy who spread misinformation about the vaccine and the virus, to respond to a Congressional subpoena. What does he have to hide? I would love to see him grilled.

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Quora used to be good, But then it became lame. Here's the story. I stopped going there when I was forced to log on first.

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Puget Sound Energy is going to restrict natural gas to customers. Really? Have you not learned from this ice storm? Gas stoves and fireplaces are what saved a lot of people. Why restrict it? Will Tina Kotek and Elizabeth Warren give up their gas appliances?

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As Elon Musk says, what's the point of being a citizen?

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Seems to me that the sentiment of Providence in Washington is so different from the sentiment in Oregon. Almost seems like two different operations. Here in Oregon, Providence is viewed as basically benign (unless you are a private medical group). But in Washington, it seems people have no love for Providence. Look here and here and here. Does the Oregon part have a better PR division?

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Biogen is discontinuing Aduhelm for Alzheimer's disease, admitting that it isn't working. Lecanimab (Leqembi) is favored instead, but even that drug disturbingly causes brain shrikage. Do we really know what we are doing? Is amyloid-β the right target?

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"All kinds of crime are down in Portland". Does it seem that way to you? I agree with commenters – crime is just not reported as much anymore, because people don't feel that it will do anything. But if you look at X/Twitter reports of ongoing incidents, it seems that the city is on fire everywhere, and many folks downtown are stuporous walking zombies, passing out before they can pull the trigger.

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Mental health treatment is hard to come by in Seattle. That's not good when so many folks up there are mentally ill.

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Scientists keep discovering new things about the body. There are a network of lymphatics in the posterior nasopharynx that are critical for CSF drainage. Circulatory patterns for CSF flow had not been fully known.

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NTP TImelord passed away. Salute to David Mills, who made so much possible in coordinating time synchronization around the world.

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