Sugoi & Yokunai

It boggles the mind that there are still defenders of Measure 110.

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There will be an injectable medication (LOY-001) that will extend the life of large dogs. An FAQ here. Available in 2026.

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Japanese tourists made Hawaii rich in the 1990s. Those were heady times in Hawaii. All those luxury shops and fancy gourmet restaurants opened up. It was unreal. Now, Japanese tourists are steering clear of Hawaii. It's partly due to the weak yenm but also inflation in Hawaii, driving up prices.

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Huh? Graffiti crimes in Washington won't be prosecuted, because a Seattle judge thinks it infringes on the graffiti "artist"'s First and Fourth Amendment rights.

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Main-in voting, so easy to cheat. 140 mail-in ballots were found in a mailbox. Uncounted, of course. This needs to stop. We can vote in person.

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Maui still has no leader for their Emergency Management Agency four months later.

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Gen-Zers are not even trying anymore. They can't get the jobs they want, so they are just "radically resting". Yeah, whatever.

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ChatGPT can leak private details. Kind of like when Spock tricked a computer to computing the last digit of pi. Asking ChatGPT to perform an impossible task can cause it to derail.

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Taxpayers are footing a bill of $1 million/month for Fauci's security detail.  Even though he's "retired". How about we fund his jail cell instead?

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Number of nonbinary-identifying students spikes nearly 57% in Oregon.

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This is what happens when you let a problem get massive. It's a lot more expensive to fix. Kotek plans to seek $600 million more for housing, homelessness in 2024 session.

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Republicans are really fleeing Washington. The Democrats can have their dystopia all to themselves now.

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Well that's not going to make people want to help anymore. No Aloha Spirit anymore. No love for tourists. This is the second phase of the Lahaina debacle. Auwe.

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Progress?  Have you seen any progress?  Pearl District will stop removing graffiti. Funds ran out. I guess the taggers won.

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Tinnitus is linked to hidden auditory nerve damage. I know a couple of folks that have a severe case of tinnitus. Now that they have more insight, treatment may be directed to reversing this. But to me, it looks more serious, and a treatment might be even father away.

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How do you miss that many?  Japan just found 7,000 islands it didn’t know it had. i can see one or two, but 7000? Were they not paying taxes? Did they not receive government services? So many questions.

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This is why PTSD is so strong.  Brain Study Suggests Traumatic Memories Are Processed as Present Experience.  It feels like it just happened.

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In mice, researchers restore lost brain function after stroke. The mice were given a metabotropic glutamate receptor (mGluR5) inhibitor. Sounds promising.

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And in C elegans, it was found that neural transmissions can occur wirelessly. Yes, it's like they have WiFi neural transmissions. How does that work? Neurons release neuropeptides into the milieu, and this drifts away and stimulates another neuron far away. It's unclear how efficient this is.

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Guess which tiny country is grabbing 15% of NVIDIA's chips? Singapore! They're building datacenters, and plan to be a hub for A.I. research, cryptocurrency, online gaming and business digitalization.

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Who was the worst politician in 2023?  So many contenders. That sicko Eugene teacher is definitely up there.

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What post-COVID recovery? Pioneer Place is an abandoned dystopian shopping mall. Really sad. So many people were expecting a resurgent economic boom as we came out of quarantine. It was going to be glorious, they said. And here's Portland's 10 worst neighborhoods to live in.

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And speaking of medical misconduct, here's a guy who is accused of falsifying stroke research, where it almost became a treatment to give people an agent called 3K3A-APC.  It was supposed to "reduce the brain cell death, bleeding, and inflammation that can follow a stroke" but "the experimental remedy might have actually increased deaths in the first week after treatment". 

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New SARS-CoV2 variant.  Do we care?

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So all that talk about Sam Altman being fired because there was some problem with AI safety and dangerous technology being released – was all smoke.

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Not good. More Americans (2.3%) are taking out 401(k) money to cover expenses. Not good, because things aren't going to get better. This is kicking the can down the road, but the road is going to get steeper, and kicking the can is going to get harder to do.

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Mental health problems.  Nurses describe Seattle Children’s Hospital as a ‘combat zone’ after dozens of alleged attacks.  Pretty soon, there'll be a shortage of pediatric nurses, too. Children's hospitals weren't combat zones before. Why are things so bad now?

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So the Oregon Governor Establishes AI Advisory Council. I wondered if this might be a way to increase A.I. programs in Oregon, to train data scientists and develop deep learning programs and research. But it's going to be staffed by someone from the Department of Administrative Services Cultural Change Officer and someone from the Governor’s Racial Justice Council.

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Easy to see why.  Higher Education Linked to Increased Risk of Depression and Anxiety. 

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This is why taxes have to increase.  City’s Transportation Bureau Paid Contractor $299,000 to Develop App It Won’t Use. Waste, waste, waste.

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Why does the Oregon Food Bank bank need more money? They should be loaded.

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You get what you pay for.  All you need is a swipe of your phone, a few taps, and voila, you're diagnosing your ailments with AI.  All of this magic happens under the watchful eyes of a remote doctor (yes, they're still there in the mix), who writes up your prescription post-instant diagnosis. The best part? All you pay is a $99 monthly subscription fee.  Might be a way for a hungry doc to make side money.

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AI faces look more real than actual human face. For white faces, especially. And it's not just the face. The whole body, too, and advances in video simulation make it more realistic. These AI influencers are apparently making good money.

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More Bay Area craziness. Ghost kitchens are a thing.  Uber creator Travis Kalanick has created sites where you can pick up the Uber eats food you ordered.  But it's causing traffic jams and hazards, as the locales are not suitable for high traffic.  Neighbors are rankled, as suddenly the area becomes congested with cars. How did this get past the regulators?

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Is wisdom tooth extraction a racket? This paper says that only 12% of the time are wisdom teeth problematic.

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Fingerprint readers are not secure on Windows. The problem is that some computers don't utilize Microsoft's Secure Device Connection Protocol, so it's possible to bypass security and enroll a new fingerprint. 

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As I've said before, the Internet is not for kids.  How Your Child’s Online Mistake Can Ruin Your Digital Life. Oh yeah. This isn't 1999, Dorothy.

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The planned iPhone 16 is so boring. New metal battery casings. 60Hz displays.  Still a 48 megapixel camera. New kinds of buttons.  Yawn.

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Portland is no longer the cool city.  Yeah, we knew. It doesn't help that that progressives are taking over and ruining Christmas for everyone else.

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Vaccinated People More Likely to Suffer Blood Disorders, Ear Disease.  I have never regretted not getting the mRNA product.  Never. And now Dr. Robert Kedlac is spilling the beans about the origins of SARS-CoV2. 

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But now commercial air travel has been opened up to everyone, and now we have this.  Say what you will, but I'll take life back in the old days, when we could have nice things.

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As if people didn't already need more financial stress. Thousands are told that they owe thousands to Oregon due to overpayment of COVID unemployment money.

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Yikes! Portland’s Burnside Bridge to close for 5 years during seismic rebuild, starting in 2027. Disruptions galore.

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Multnomah County is NOT the place to be.

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What?!?  County’s Downtown Homeless Resource Center Faces $3.3 Million Funding Gap Next Year.  That makes no sense.  They spent less than half their budgeted money. They also got a $25 million tax windfall. How can they be out of money? 

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Yes, it's time to switch to Firefox.  This ronin swears by it.

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Elon Musk is convinced that something was discovered, significant enough to alarm Ilya Sutskever.

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This keeps coming up.  Dunning-Kruger is just autocorrelation. I don't think so, as I see this over and over in daily life. Someone tried to debunk this claim with more statistical arguments.  But what Dunning and Kruger observed was not just a statistical construct. Just because of the way they portrayed their ideas in a graph doesn't mean that it's all statistical hand-waving. Dumb people really do overestimate their abilities and smart people really do second-guess themselves to their detriment.

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Well now Darth Vader is really more machine than human. James Earl Jones agreed to have his voice used by A.I. to be the voice of Darth Vader forever. Fitting, I guess.

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Will there be a crisis next March?  Banks have taken loans from the BTFP to stay afloat. This is why we haven't seen another Silicon Valley Bank catastrophe.  But the loans come due in March 2024. What will happen if they can't pay? Jerome Powell admits that he hasn't thought that far ahead. Yikes! Well, I'm sure he'll extend the due date, or something like that. Construction on the house of cards continues.

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North Koreans are going bald. Kim Jong Un's latest problem. What could be the cause? Can't be nutrition – that's been present for years. Could it be ambient radioactivity?

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No surprise. Richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than poorest 66%, report says. Yeah, but they say that they just purchase carbon credits, so all's good. Of course, who knows if they do or not. And they get to set the price on those credits. Are you awake, yet?

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Another reason to think twice about buyinv a Tesla. Unless your commute is limited and you live in an area set up for EVs, I can't see that buying an expensive EV makes any sense.

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Everyone needs to read this. Reddit has a post on surprise financial hits that can ruin you.  Gotta be prepared, but hardly anyone is.

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Rite Aid isn't done with the store closings. It's bad to lose your job at any time, but especially around the holidays.

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Electric vehicles are quiet.  Sometimes too quiet. So companies like Tesla have to incorporate speakers to output sounds to make you feel like you're still driving a car.  Here are the sounds.

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52% of Americans are gun owners now. Greater than any Army.  This is what the Founding Fathers intended.

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Eat more meat.  Trans-veccenic acid, found in meat from cows and sheep and their associated dairy products, helps boost CD8+ T-cell mediated immunity.  This helps the T-cells penetrate into tumors. Will it actually make a difference? Why risk it, I say.

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Like back in the Dickens era. Oregon is placing foster children in unlicensed short-term rental homes and paying millions to do so. So much money is being doled to the homeless, and so there isn't enough money to help foster children?  And yeah, about that spending $1.3 billion on the homeless.  What did it give us?  More homeless, that's what.

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More bite the dust. Can't believe LaRog Jewelers is closing.  And a couple of Beaverton outlets are closing as well. People who bet on a robust recovery after we recovered from the coronavirus epidemic are losing out.  There's no recovery in Portland, where rampant drug abuse, crime and the homelessness blight have increased. Rioting and arson remain a threat – that didn't go away when Trump left office.

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What's happened to the medical profession? Why are so many medical institutions so political now? And always far-left? Why do doctors still advocate so strongly for vax product that has demonstrable harm against a disease that we now know is no worse than other illness that we've faced in the past?  We do we have to support Palestine and get involved in that mess?  Why can't you just treat disease and make people well?

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SLIT2 and CXCL2 – are these the keys to delaying senescence?  Sounds promising.

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