Sugoi & Yokunai

I never understood the appeal of Tesla cars. And articles like this confirm my suspicions.

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I wasn't aware of the Bay Area's "huge" underground mushroom market. The kind you eat, not to trip on. I'm glad it's not like that in Oregon.

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Mexico's first lunar mission? I thought, Wow, good for them. But it's just adding a few items to what NASA is launching. It's not Cape Cuernavaca, or anything.

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Seattle ruins another business. Much like how California ruined it for Pizza Hut. Seattle City Council raised minimum wage and  implemented a new mandatory sick leave policy, which apparently made the numbers not pencil out for Shipt. Redditors complain (like they always do) but they always seem to think that good service should always come at a price that should suit them. And when it doesn't, it must be corporate greed.

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California's healthcare delivery system is terrible. At least around Monterey. The insurance companies are in control and can charge what they want. And it sounds like hospitals are participating in this collusion. Why change when you don't have to? This should be a great reason to switch to a Kaiser facility, and this is exactly why insurance plans should be own by the person instead the employer. Jen Villa is a teacher, and the school district determines her insurance. Health insurance should follow the car insurance model. Why people don't see that is beyond me.

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The 2024 Federal deficit is already on track to be the third worst on record since COVID. And this time we have no reason for it. No black swan virus, no Great Recession. Just out-of-control migrant problem expenses, student loan forgiveness and endless money to Ukraine.  And nothing to show for it.

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The real minimum wage is zero.  California Democrats were never good in economics. They tried to legislate wealth to unskilled laborers. Now people have lost their jobs.

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7 Oregon Towns People Are Fleeing As Soon As Possible. Of course Portland is one of them. All these municipalites are bleak and gray. Being poor is not fun.

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Maui realtors can't wait to make money off the Lahaina burn. Those poor folks – the odds are too high against them.

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A computer has been built in Sydney, Australia that mimics the human brain. It's called DeepSouth.  Hopefully it will perform better than Google's Bard.

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Don't let anybody say that we should have socialized medicine. Here's what happens in Canada when you have this system. Why do you think they have an option where you can opt for "MAID" (medical-aid in dying)?

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Early exposure to aspartame in males may cause autism.

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Download rescuing_a_ruined_economy_carefully-trrlj86w8j8c1-270.mp4

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Kottke's 52 Interesting Things I Learned in 2023. 

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Portland Jesus

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It's who you know. Sam Altman’s Knack for Dodging Bullets—With a Little Help From Bigshot Friends. Reminds me of SBF.

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So T-Mobile will start reading your texts, and if it finds content that goes against the Lefty narrative, you will be fined.

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California has lost 25% of income taxes.

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The tech that died in 2023. Quite a long list. To some of them, I say good riddance.

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Methamphetamine, fentanyl drive record homeless deaths in Portland, Oregon, annual report finds. This is the real problem. The underlying problem that underlies everything. Portland's answer: "harm reduction".

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Some states are making gold and silver transactions like money (legal tender) now, instead of as a commodity. That would be great, and remove a lot of the allure of cryptocurrency.

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I was wondering why Apple was not releasing any A.I. like everyone else. Turns out they did – it's called Ferret. It's multimodal, and it's designed to be lightweight enough to run on your phone. Looks like it was missed by others as well.

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"Around seven million men in their prime working age neither have jobs nor are looking for one, creating a huge hole in the labor market" says this YT video. Something similar was covered a year ago. This is why unemployment is so low, because you have to be actively looking for work to be considered unemployed. Unemployment statistics are meaningless.

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This guy is launching a new video uploading site, called Flare. Hey, I thought YouTube was going to be a dumb idea, but look what it became. Flare will let you monetize no matter what the content. It won't censor. We'll see how well that philosophy goes a year from now.

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Age discrimination. Company refuses to hire older guy. Now they have to pay for that discrimination. Yay.

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Download Vivek.mp4

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Class of 2024 Can’t Land Jobs as Hiring in Tech, Finance Wanes. School's over, kids. Welcome to the real world.

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Researchers uncover on/off switch for breast cancer metastasis. This report has been all over. There have been reports like this over the years. The researchers found a protein (ENPP1) that correlates with metastatic potential. But it also correlated with response to pembrolizumab, which is significant since breast cancer hasn't been responsive to checkpoint inhibitor therapies (except for triple-negative cancers). This might be something to assay for, if there was a commercially available test for it, that was covered by insurance.

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Making Synthesized Sounds More Acoustic. What makes synthesized music by Tomita more interesting than a lot of other classical synth artists, is that Tomita makes each voice sound like it was being played by an organic musician, and not just a MIDI channel. I was able to envision magical lands inhabited by these creatures, instead of a sequencer, sitting on a table. MIDI is the cheater's way of playing classical music. Play it manually. There are no shortcuts. Nathan goes into other considerations, many of which were discussed by Wendy Carlos many years ago.

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Woman chooses assisted death because Canada’s treatment wait time was ‘weeks to months’ I don't ever want to hear about how Canadian healthcare is superior to that of the United States. This is what you get when you don't make sure you have enough qualified people, and just make "healthcare" available to everyone. Healthcare can be affordable, available and high quality, but you only get to pick two.

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Can't believe anything newspeople say these days. Doesn't any journalist research stories anymore? Turns out that the story of the landlord unable to evict a nighmare tenant and having to sleep in his car was more complicated than what has been told.

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They don't want you to do your own research. Search engines promote misinformation. Doing your own research makes you believe conspiracies. Yeah, just listen to the mainstream media. They'll set you right. /sarc

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Regarding the previous item, take this story, for example. So the FDA had similar misgivings about the vax product, but never told us. And approved it anyway.

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Everyone wants a Chinese name in SF now. Because it's so cool, and it gets you votes.

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This is the future of software engineering. Scared yet?  Or happy as heck?

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The first proven pheromone? Female tears lower male testosterone. Well, guys, what do we do with this information?

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Oregon has highest rate of homeless families in the country. Feels that way.

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What did Oregonians get this year? Name one nice thing? We got to pump our own gasoline.  So that's something.

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The position of director of the Measure 110 program is still unfulfilled.  No one wants the job. And it seems people don't want to move to Oregon to take the job. Because people know that Oregon doesn't want any solutions that might fix the problem. Like the "Harbor of Hope" navigation center downtown. How's that going?

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Portland traffic deaths hover near 30-year high record in 2023. Maybe a lot of drivers are stoned on cannabis or meth.  Probably pedestrians, too.  Maybe fentanyl, too, who knows?

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Absences mount throughout Portland Public Schools’ makeup week.

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Everything's worth half of what it was when Trump was in charge. LA’s Third-Tallest Tower Sells for 45% Below 2014 Price. How symbolic.

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What's going on Verizon?  Verizon Once Again Busted for Handing Out Sensitive Wireless Subscriber Information To Any Nitwit Who Asks For It. Is anyone going to get fired for this?

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No one wants a used EV. Makes sense. Unlike a used iPhone or iPad, where you can change the battery without spending a fortune, changing the battery on a EV is so expensive, that you might as well get a new car.

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Good for Substack. It seems that some who use Substack are actual Nazis. So naturally some want to censor them. Because, censorship is so commonplace now that many on the Left no longer see it as a problem. Or something to be done just occasionally. But Substack is standing firm. Good on them. If you don't like it, don't use Substack.

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Thousands of Doctors Take Legal Action Against Transgender Mandate. Nice to see that there are still doctors willing to stand up for their beliefs.

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How To Turn Off Google’s “Privacy Sandbox” Ad Tracking—and Why You Should. Better yet, avoid surfing the Internet with Chrome. It's amazing how open Google is about wanting to insinuate itself in your life. Such creepiness.

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Physics Girl is still grievously ill. Not good. What is going on? Why is identification of the root cause so elusive? This is consistent with my hypothesis that this condition is a genetic susceptibility, possibly related to WASF3 dysfunction.

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Why are only certain Target stores closing? CNBC reporters says that Target's claim that it's due to crime is unfounded because they analyzed when police were called, and it didn't correlate with store closures. But then they admit that they didn't count “mental health crises, overdoses, vehicle thefts, vehicle burglaries and other events that weren’t directly related to Target or appeared to happen outside the confines of the store." Maybe those were a factor. Maybe it's because in the more conservative areas, people simply boycotted Target because of their woke policies.

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Some people want Oregon to pull Trump off the 2024 election ballot, too. They think that their viewpoints give them the right to deprive everyone else.

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Nuclear fusion is now a reality. I used to see articles where they'd say "we're close" or "we think we see net energy output, but we're not quite sure". Now, it's apparently reproducible and beyond doubt.  We're on our way.

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Zorin OS 17 Has Arrived. I never heard of Zorin before. It's an alternative OS you can load on your Mac. Like Cydia for your iPhone.

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Don't feel Christmas-y this year? You aren't the only one. The best part of Christmas for me as a child was that everyone seemed a little happier. I saw more smiles and people were nicer to me. It used to be the "hap- happiest time of the year".

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Oregon extends domestic partnerships to all couples regardless of sex in 2024. This is that slippery slope Lars Larson talked about after approval of gay marriages. But I suppose it could lead to an interesting tax strategy. For example, if you're a single parent and want to bequeath something to your unmarried child, you could enter into a domestic partnership, and then when you die – no estate tax!  Slippery slope.

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Portland Public School teachers are openly truant. They don't care. Why should you?

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Don't use Chinese apps! Apple allows applications to track user locations without authorization.  Especially HotSpot Helper, WeChat and AliPay. Avoid!

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Feeling sleepy while driving? It could be the CO2 in your car. It's amazing how quickly it builds up to impactful levels, especially when there are three people in the car.

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Bloomberg reveals a secret longevity research lab backed by Sam Altman. This one specializies in autophagy approaches, and using plasma from young people to rejuvenate older people. Sounds creepy but that's one of the strategies people are pursuing. More info here.

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Nobody knows what’s happening online anymore. The Internet has become so fragmented now. Everybody has retreated to their own Mastodon instance, or Lemmy, or Discord, or whatever.  Teens are on TikTok. Much of the rest are still on X/Twitter. There's not as much of a town square anymore. That's life.

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The price of being successful. In an internal meeting, Nvidia's CEO addressed a question about employees in 'semi-retirement' mode as unusual tension grows.  Heh. Unforeseen issues. This is the "problem" Microsoft had during the dotcom era. Everyone got rich and suddenly they didn't want to work so hard.

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‘Do we think the world is better off with more or less intelligence?’ Always interesting to read what Andrew is thinking about.  By the way, FT reporter, Andrew uses Zephyr, not "Zefa".

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I didn't know Rite Aid was using face recognition.

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Math team.  Brings back memories. This is a rite of passage for many Asian kids but also geeks in general, and you gotta wonder if there is a better way. Especially as the reward for all of this (getting into an elite school) is far less attractive today than it was before. With forced vaccinations, having your conservative voice silenced by the woke Left, who are not just your dorm mates, but your professors. Plus the debt.  Harry is the real winner in this story – because he followed his own path.

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59% of non-citizens are on welfare. Just as we suspected. We gotta have some control over how much of the world's poor we have to support, or we will go broke.

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Rich people are leaving California. Increasingly, the economy of California rests on the fortunes of the very wealthy.

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Ouch. Africa's first female billionaire Isabel dos Santos loses £580m High Court case. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

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In China, Quiet Quitting Becomes Let It Rot and Lying Flat. Oh-oh. Young Chinese workers realize that the window of them getting rich and living large has closed. Now they are acting like the Japanese. And Gen-Zers/Millennials. This is a global problem now.

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Self-censorship is on the rise. It's probably OK if some people kept their opinions to themselves, but the problem is that certain factions don't self-censor, and it ends up that the Internet is increasing filling up with hateful filth, while other valid opinions get canceled. Sometimes this results in tragedy.

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PopSci thinks that health misinformation is rampant. What do they consider "misinformation" you ask? It's people who doubt the benefit of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, of course. What irony. Total lack of self-awareness.

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I call this Providerism: the ability to ignore political-economic reality because everything is provided for you, and the underlying mechanics and costs are abstracted away. Europeans may not be consumerists, but they are hardcore providerists. Growing up, virtually every consumer good I interacted with was made in Japan or made in China, and in 18 years that never gave rise to more than 15 minutes of conversation. The goods that you want appear from far away in your local store: they are provided. And if you fall on hard times and cannot afford these goods? The state will provide the basics. If you’re 22 and don’t know what to do, the state will provide more time and will provide a master’s degree. Or two. And if there is war, the state will call NATO, and NATO will provide defense.

How fitting: the European Commission assembled around an iPad. On the back, in fine print, it will read: Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China. There is no European iPad. There is no European computer. There is no European search engine. There are only European consumers, to whom things are quasi-magically provided, and so they regulate the providing and consumption of those things.

Europe is falling behind. It largely missed the internet and personal computing booms, and now it sits in danger of missing the coming AI boom. Today’s Europeans are not yet poor — they are still living off the prosperity created by prior generations, and that enables their passive consumption7 — but tomorrow’s Europeans may be.

Some in Congress think we should emulated Europe in many ways (looking at you, Bernie).  Parts of Europe are becoming very dystopian. Only those with great wealth can escape it. But for how long?

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Some tech writer is not happy with Apple's weather app. He doesn't realize that micro-prediction is a fairly recent development. I've been pretty satisfied with BriefSky. Not perfect, but accurate enough to make plans.

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