Sugoi & Yokunai

Happy π day! In celebration, here's a beautiful finding of π in the Mandelbrot set.  How does π get in there? As usual, it's because calculus is involved.

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This is how we know that the climate change worry industry is really a grift.  They don't really care. Why should you?

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We're still learning things about water. Apparently under certain conditions, it can exist in two forms of liquid at once, one being denser than the other. 

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Saturn is once again the king in terms of number of moons, as scientists discover 128 new moons (274 total). When I was a kid, I remember that the books said that Saturn had 9 moons and Jupiter had 12. Rookie numbers. Ya, gotta pump them up. And so they did.

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Some new study says that drinking alcohol is good for lowering cholesterol levels. But lowering cholesterol levels isn't the goal here – it's lowering cardiovascular risk. And that hasn't been shown.  I'm not buying it.

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Hospitals are going to hurt some more. Oregon lawmakers are going to force them to lower "facility fees". This is going to be especially important as competition will almost non-existent if OHSU merges with Legacy.  OHSU is apparently packed to capacity, and doesn't have enough beds or staff to accommodate the patient load. If you read the article, the problem is lack of staffing. This is Oregon's perennial problem, and the leadership ignores this. Why can't Oregon hire quality people? And see below.

Speaking of which, the leaders of OHSU and Legacy wrote an opinion piece supporting the merger, the main argument being that they promise to be accountable and act in the public's best interest. They also state that the merger would improve healthcare, but don't present any compelling argument for this. I think it will decrease competition and choice, as we've seen with the failure of UnitedHealth negotiating terms with OHSU. I don't want the choice of healthcare system to be just OHSU, Providence and Kaiser.

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What to do when you have so many criminals and not enough public defenders. Because Portland is a magnet for ne'er-do-wells, and the state is so unattractive to the nation as a place to move to. The Doom Loop continues.

Update (2025-03-14): OPB covered this as well.

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Tektronix is now owned by a Raleigh, NC company. How the mighty have fallen.

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How many Portland-area jobs could be affected by AI? A lot!  And the higher-educated positions could be the most affected. Learn to code, baby.

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Some folks are going to cover graffiti-prone walls with synthetic ivy instead.  I like it.  Looks like a workable and reasonable alternative to just painting over the graffiti, leaving those unsightly blotchy rectangles.

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Two tech insiders are not happy with Apple's strategic direction. The first is long-time writer, Robert Scoble. The second is John Gruber (Daring Fireball). I agree with them both. It's long past time for Tim Cook to step down as CEO and hand the reins to someone else with vision.

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Downtown Seattle continues its decline. Cheesecake Factory is shutting down.  Such is life under Democrat rule.

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While Oregon can't hire quality people, they can hire this person to be on the mental health board. She identifies as a turtle! Oregon is such a national joke.

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The new M3Ultra MacStudio is blazingly fast, and just the thing for data scientists and machine learning professionals. Not just for artists.

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How rich is Elon Musk? I know, everybody's picking on the guy, but I love infographics like this. A hundred billion is already a lot of money, and it's hard to grasp how much money this is.  Elon is able to do it because he's hired great people who can manage his company for him. He doesn't need to be around. He read the E-Myth. Wait until his fleet of autonomous taxis go into operation. The income will flow in, even as companies like Uber and Lyft find their businesses cut substantially.

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Why do elephants rarely get cancer? Because they have extra copies of the p53 gene, apparently. That would help.

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Regence Blue Cross is going to lose a LOT of customers in Seattle soon. Are those alternate hospitals ready to pick up all that slack?

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Climate group funded by Bill Gates is getting their funding slashed. It's likely that it wasn't Bill Gates' own money that was being spent, but NGO money, which is now effectively gone.  So much of things were NGO-funded from the federal government.

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What happens when you get an email containing some offhand slight against Trump or Musk? This is what happens.

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F*ck.  Oregon lawmakers pass tuition funding for "asylum seekers". AKA illegal aliens. This is why Oregon doesn't have any money. And why Oregon taxes are so damned high.

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Portland is the only major metro area where the non-religious outnumber Christians. Because BLM is their religion.  Or the Ukraine cult.

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Age and cognitive skills: Use it or lose it.  We knew about this, but it's nice to get confirmation about it, that it is possible to keep the gray squish working well.

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A breakthrough in the Internet of Things. It is possible to harness energy from the environment. No this isn't just solar power. It's power from other sources "including vibrations from equipment, machinery, and even entire buildings, or from temperature differences between pipes, radiators, valves, and their surrounding environments". Cool.

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Things are happening at the NIH. I can certainly see how people who are grant-dependent are anxious. But in the past, a lot of research funding was going to dubious causes, so I'm glad there's a bit of sanity now in the process. Everyone had to put some kind of DEI spin in their applications. Now, those things will come back to bite them.

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Some detective work in the French Alps links amyotropic lateral sclerosis to the consumption of the false morel mushroom (Gyromitra gigas). That's amazing. The books mainly focus on the nausea and vomiting, but not so much the neurotoxicity.  Certainly not ALS. Well, I don't eat those mushrooms anyway. Interesting that a mushroom with such neurotoxicity would look like a brain.

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How to sleep sitting up. Apparently that's how Tibetan monks sleep, and supposedly the quality of sleep improves. I am not yet convinced of that. I tried this, and I ended up more at a 45° angle. Does that count?

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Stupid.  Washington Democrats will give early release and free rent money for murderers and child rapists, provided they didn't kill more than two victims.  Because you know, more than two murder victims is really unacceptable. What are they smoking there?

Doom Loop.  Oregon is the 12th unfriendliest state to start a business.  This is why the state will continue to go downhill. Just like the federal government, we are now seeing how much of the economy was just propped up by injected money. Taxing people will go only so far.  And everybody seems to weep for the fired government worker. Yet government policies led to private sector layoffs, and I don't recall any sympathy for those folks.

Oregon lawmakers want the state to go back to having metrics to evaluate student performance. What for? So that they can be ignored?  We already have standardized tests. Why re-invent the wheel? 

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Today is Mario Day, according to my son. Mar 10, get it?

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There's truth behind gender stereotypes. I knew it. Stereotypes don't usually form out of nothing. Humans observe and form opinions and develop preferences and bias, which are certainly understandable.

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Here's another ranking of the states, and if not for Oregon's scenic natural beauty, we'd rank at the bottom. Worst in crime, education and economy.

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The City of Portland can't find takes for a $250,000 /year job, because no one wants to move to the city.  The reputation is so bad. This is why we can't hire enough nurses or good doctors, either. Portland is a sh*t city. 

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And speaking of doctors, here's what some states want to compromise to get enough doctors – lower the requirements for foreign doctors to practice here.

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More human fecal matter in the streams and water around Cannon Beach. 

Oregon is considering two options to prevent the switch to and from Daylight Saving Time. One is to stick with Standard Time. The other is to do whatever California and Washington wants to do. So lame. Do what's right. My prediction is that nothing will happen.

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I like the idea of billing datacenters for the increase use of energy and natural resources, like water. Instead of the consumer.

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No sign of any resolution of the impasse between OHSU and UnitedHealth. So if they can't come with an agreement, OHSU will lose 74,000 patients. This is a strong argument against OHSU and Legacy merging. This is precisely what people are worried about.

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Congress is finally realizing that they can't continue to cut Medicare reimbursement for doctors, or there won't be enough doctors. But it took a Congressman who is a physician to finally bring it to everyone else's attention. Doctors long lost control over their profession, sadly.

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Medicaid scam. I covered this already, where the state government adds on a hospital providers tax, which they are glad to agree to, because they will get reimbursed from the state, who now qualifies to scam more Medicaid money from the government. It's a scam, and only works if the central government agrees to finance the socialism, and you know how to work the system. This kind of perverse incentive system needs to end, and I'm confident that Trump will finally put an end to this. And why are we listening to Al Green?

Retirees become college kids again. I love this – it's a win-win. Keeps the mind stimulated and is certainly better than watching TV all day.

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Signals' Meredith Whittaker raises concerns about letting agent AI do all your tasks for you. Yeah, it's different for Tony Stark, because he designed his own system. For the rest of us, we are using a commercial, off-the-shelf software, created by someone else, that probably has other priorities in mind.

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Los Angeles can't account for $2.5 billion given to them to fight homelessness. I would bet that something similar is going on in Oregon and Washington. Nobody cares about responsibility anymore. The reset button needs to be pressed on California.  Oust everyone and start over.

It's official. The Ritz-Carlton is a failure. But look on the bright side – the City of Portland has places to put the homeless now!

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Portland Street Response now has permission to go just about everywhere – government buildings, libraries and restaurants, to deal with the mentally ill.  What the hell? Who would have thought we would need this crap ten years ago, when we had a normal city?  This is the new normal, and is why Portland is in a Doom Loop.

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A company called Bolt Graphic made a GPU called Zeus that is supposedly 10X faster than NVIDIA's RTX 5090 GPU. I haven't seen benchmarks, though, Nothing except what Bolt claims. Competition is good!

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A Safeway in north Seattle (CrownHill) tries to protect itself against theft. Instead, it gets into trouble with the city. I don't know why companies want to operate in Seattle anymore. They should get out of the city, and not bother dealing with Democrat policies.

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WTF?? Oregon advances a bill that makes taxpayers have to pay union workers when they go on strike. No. Just no.

And here's a nice cartoon summary of how Oregon doesn't need to tax us more. They have the money – they just misspend it.

Good! Venture Portland, a large enabler of the Homelessness Industrial Complex, might go under. 80% of their money was going to administration, staff, and operational costs, so I say good riddance. They made the homeless problem worse, not better.

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Still more on the fiasco of Mozilla's new terms of use. I keep hoping for some clarification of misunderstanding that might make me want to go back to using Firefox again, but no dice. They apparently can see what you browse, and will use it however they want.

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Aspirin might prevent tumor metastasis by unblocking T-cell mediated immunity. I wasn't aware aspirin could do that. Thromboxane acts on T cells to trigger an immunosuppressive pathway that is dependent on the guanine exchange factor, ARHGEF1, suppressing T cell receptor-driven kinase signalling, proliferation and effector functions.

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If OHSU and Legacy merges, their foundations will combine and will be the largest "health equity foundation," whatever that is. So naturally agencies and NGOs want a piece of it. Not only that, but they want "to ensure that community members lead the process to determine its governance and mission, not Legacy and OHSU".  Why in hell would OHSU and Legacy agree to just give this money away, especially seeing how poorly these groups have managed their own money. But Oregon's AG may have a say in this matter.

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Yep, Portland is in a doom loop. No question.

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Crazy. Those stranded astronauts were not allowed to return back to earth by Elon Musk because it would help the Trump team, and Biden (or his team) wouldn't have it. So they were political prisoners. I wondered why they weren't screaming to get back, and why they seemed like it was no big deal. Because if they made Biden look bad and if Kamala had won, they would be made low priority forever. Now they can tell the truth because Trump won. This is evil.

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Portland is removing culturally offensive sculptures from Chinatown. I don't go downtown so I didn't see this, but who would think that a statue of an upside-down wok, a duck and a calculator would be something the Chinese community would be proud of?

The first two, in red granite on NW Fourth Avenue at Davis, depict a stainless steel structure atop an off-white stone dais. Caught in the tight grip of one structure is the neck of a small, wacked dragon; on the opposite, only a severed neck protrudes. Below is various “Asian” debris, both patronizing and ignorant, a duck head, a chicken head, a pocket calculator arrayed with an abacus. Other stuff.

Maybe he could have put on some chop suey lettering on, too?

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Cutting waste in healthcare is hard. This is why I lamented the passage of Obamacare. Once you pass it, government bloat grows, and it's nearly impossible to change the course of this disaster. Like implementing a cemetery – once you inter the bodies in the ground, it's very difficult to plan to use the land for something else. I remember the words of a Democrat strategist who recommended implementing a socialist type of system quickly before the Republicans took over, because once it was in place, it would be too difficult to remove. He was right about that. It will take a very brave leader to reverse our socialistic healthcare system and make it more efficient and less wasteful and promote excellence.

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Google really wants to make it difficult to use uBlock Origin in Chrome. Luckily, I don't use Chroma.

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Why do colleges make people unhappy? Why do you think? The outcome is not stacked in people's favor, most of the time. This is another socialist system that needs to be fixed.

Democrat solutions to Democrat problems. Kotek supports a bill letting sex offenders skip being registered as sex offenders. 

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Told you so. Portland's downtown Ritz-Carlton may be foreclosing. Bad timing, with COVID, and trying to bet on Portland. We knew something was up when he had the estate sale to raise cash.

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Physicists detect signs of dual time arrows emerging from quantum interactions. So what you're saying is that I have a chance.

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No surprise.  Oregon is involved in grift again, with pop-up NGO shells".  Instant grift devices, fast, convenient, ready to take government money. Is there no end to this?

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Crazy. Now Congress want to let AI prescribe medications. 

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