Sugoi & Yokunai

Giving up on Portland. J.K.Gill building is up for sale – no one wants it.  And the Pine Street Market owner gives up – puts property up for sale. Hope he can find a buyer and recoup some of his investment. Truly, a city in decline, while the media continue to pretend everything is rosy.

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Mercer Island synagogue targeted with graffiti. Getting real tired of this.  The lack of law enforcement just encourages more of this crap.

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Remember this? Well, thank goodness for a sane judge who realized that this was all an unconstitutional knee-jerk on the latest mentally ill shooter episode. Banning guns of any kind violates the Second Amendment. It won't make America safer.

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Jeff Bezos sell more Amazon stock and people have a problem with that, since he fled Washington, depriving them of tax money. Even when he donated to help the homeless, the lefties aren't happy. Good on Jeff to leave that hellhole. And why stay in Seattle? Their core taxes increased 4X more than the economy since 2013.  And Washingon is the state most heavily impacted by retail theft.  I mean, if you can leave, why stay in a place where you can't have nice things?

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Attractive men are more likely to achieve socioeconomic success. Is it true? I'm thinking of Rupert Murdoch, George Soros, many politicians, many of the current billionaires. Some of the techies were above average when they were younger, but this "rule" is not hard and fast. Good thing this ronin can focus on living a peaceful life and not having to compete in the rat race.

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"Hey y'all! Wazzup?" is not how to start a cover letter.  Do we really need a course for that?

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Sign of the times. There are Anti-Loneliness Clubs. But only if you're good enough to join the club, however. Sorry, incels.

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Too much of a good thing. The success of Wegovy is destabilizing Denmark's economy.  Too much money, too fast. Enjoy it while it lasts, I say.

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Five big governance mistakes in OpenAI. The existing board has got to go.  No question. They're irresponsible, and don't know how to do things. Especially Sutskever – what a novice.

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Me want. Wow, who would have guessed that little ol' Prineville was a center of aeronautic innovation. The Switchblade looks yummy.

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Seattle has the 9th highest cost of living. No surprise there. And millennials say they need an income of $525,000 to be happy. Guess we're going to have to put up with a lot of unhappy millennials. But what's the best city for techies? Seattle!

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I never thought of this. What if you inventoried the contents of your refrigerator and asked an LLM to suggest a recipe that uses those ingredients? Well, don't bother. It makes lousy suggestions.

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So this is why people want to work from home.  Guess you can't schedule time to do that at the office, can you?

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Take care of your red blood cells.  If they are damaged or grow old, blood vessels in the brain will clog up with them, resulting in your blood vessel lining cells to pass them through to where macrophages can get rid of them, but causing a microbleed in the process.

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Email is like digital currency. Be careful where you give it out. Use throwaway email addresses when you can.

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Today's college grad is more likely to be unemployed. This is a time of flux and what might have been marketable before may not be so today.

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We really have to keep politics out of the classroom.

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Metformin – what can't it do? Adding metformin to chemotherapy makes chemo work better against lung cancer. Just like in breast cancer.

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Very true.

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Guess which city in America has the highest cannabis consumption per capita?  Aw, how'd you know?

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Yeah, say what you will about Trump's style, 2 out of 3 people admit that life was better when Trump was president.

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Download El_Salvador.mp4

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18 reasons why you really should really own an electric car.  All good reasons. Seriously.

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Cancer Stem Cells Induce Senescence in Macrophages.  Interesting strategy – make your opponent grow old instantly, so that he cannot defend himself against you.  Well, the first step in a successful defense is to know your opponent well.

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Three Charts Explain Much of What Is Happening on Portland’s Streets.  Rampant mental illness all around.

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I feel sorry for these students. They put their trust in the public school system, and it has failed them.

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Someone on Seattle's subreddit has noticed that the medical system is in financial decline. Lots of reasons for it. The coronavirus epidemic started it, but people have lost trust in doctors now. Plus the economy is in decline, and more people are unemployed and forced to take the low-reimbursement Medicaid plans, if they bother to get insurance at all. And hospitals laid off perfectly good employees who didn't want to get the untested mRNA product and didn't take into account natural immunity, and so have been short-handed, forcing them to hire expensive traveling nurses. And the people they desire to move to the city to hire don't want to live in Blue Cities with Blue policies and politics. So they have to make do with what they have, and those people have used their unions to raise their pay and cut their workload. All spiraling down, as predicted. I'm sure it's the same with Portland.

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A million dollar net worth isn't what it used to be. Those with $1 million net worth don't think of themselves as rich, just upper middle class.  In today's world, you can't retire with only $1 million invested. Unless you want to really live like a monk.  To have a  "rich" lifestyle, you need to have at least a $10 million net worth, I think.

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Neuroscientists engineer a protein that enhances memory. It's a modified LIMK1 protein, involved in the formation of dendritic spines in neurons.  I don't understand why they chose rapamycin as a switch to turn it on.

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Big Business doesn't want to come to Seattle now.  There's no demand for Seattle office space.  No surprises, eh?

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Nice summary of what's going with the firing of Sam Altman at OpenAI. Now I hear, investors are demanding that he be re-instated and they are in negotiations to bring him back.  I think Ilya Sutskever is too young to have heard of what happened to Fairchild Semiconductor, when Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce left to from their own company – Intel.

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American men are dying more quickly than American women. Why is that?

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California students will now be programmed to recognize and reject any news that goes against whatever the accepted narrative is.

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UK is the first to approve using CRISPR technology for the treatment of sickle cell anemia and thalassemia.

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Lessons learned along the way in trying to create an A.I. girlfriend. Remember, every good idea turns to crap when you release it to the world. Same here.  You knew people would turn it into a porn factory. Or the developer is crazy.

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Payroll taxes are increasing, because of all those disabled and unemployed people. Great way to hurt struggling businesses. And at the same time, they're actually bragging that they can lower taxes that unemployed people pay when getting their unemployed benefits. 

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Another one (ones?) bite the dust.  Remember Burgermaster in the U-District in Seattle? Soon to be gone.  And Bartell's on Capitol Hill is closing, too. 

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Immigrant to Seattle gets red-pilled. Welcome to the Blue City, pal.

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This could be big. Social media platforms can't hide behind Section 230 and allow kids to access social media sites and be vulnerable to "design defects—including lack of parental controls, insufficient age verification, complicated account deletion processes, appearance-altering filters, and requirements forcing users to log in to report child sexual abuse materials (CSAM)—and failed to warn young users and their parents about those defects".  As I've said before, the Internet is not for children.

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United Health Care uses an A.I. algo with a 90% error rate to deny care.  Seems like this is mainly in the realm of the elderly and length of stay in rehab facilities and nursing homes.

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Videoconferencing fatigue is real. Did we really need a research paper to confirm this?

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Is ChatGPT automated bullshit? Well it can be, and you'd better know your stuff to be able to tell the difference. Right now, without appropriate prompting to promote accuracy, ChatGPT generates output that just looks like it's the correct answer. I've caught it several times at just making stuff up. It's not the authority many people think it is.

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Does California want clean energy or not? Newsom makes rooftop solar less attractive.  How any business can function in the golden state is a big mystery to me.

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Could explain a lot.  When we see what others do, our brain sees not what we see, but what we expect.

...if we observe actions in such meaningful sequences, our brains increasingly ignore what comes into our eyes, and depend more on predictions of what should happen next, derived from our own motor system. "What we would do next, becomes what our brain sees,..."

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IBM is trying to bring back the defined benefit plan and take away the 401(k). This is getting mixed reactions. We all know that most Americans aren't doing what they should to save for retirement. So you could see IBM doing them a favor by saving up for them. But those who are more money savvy would rather have the money. Because this is taking away the employer match, and the money actually stays with IBM. So if you leave, you don't get the money. But if you stay, it would be nice to get a pension.

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Nikki Haley is wrong.  Without the ability to speak anonymously, critical ideas may never be expressed, as the dominant power will go after whoever steps out of line. What is she afraid of? Russian bots? Chinese bots? All those scary boogeymen?

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Akio Toyoda is really big on hybrids as the way to go. Not on pure EVs. So from 2025, Toyota Camry will only be available as a hybrid. Right on!

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Some A.I. predictions for 2024.  I could see some of them happening and being good. Others, meh. Smart mirrors? In your dreams.

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Vertigo attack. Blow this up full screen. Enjoy the ride.

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It's for the children. Congress wants to impose parental controls for the Internet.  The Internet was never for kids. It's for adults. Congress should BTFO.

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The head of Portland's Central City Concern reveals that the state of social services in the city is worse than you think.  Those last two paragraphs tell it all. This would have been a tractable problem had it been addressed early on when the problem was small. It's now far too late.

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Ten Lessons, by Gian-Carlo Rota, retired MIT professor.  Good to know for aspiring academics.

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Great site for Firefox users.  Finally, I tweaked my browser so that videos don't stutter anymore.  And I thought it was my Internet connection being too slow. 

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Strike Nation! Starbucks employees to walk out on Red Cup day.  Fire them. Replace them with people with integrity.

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It's their fault! Portland city officials criticize Multnomah County officials for the sorry state of the homelessness crisis.

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Portland's ambulance service is already struggling with staffing shortages. So what does Multnomah County do? It fines them.

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Gasoline for your car will cost less this winter. But your electricity bill will increase by 17%. The left hand gives, but the right hand takes away.

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It's looking to be that way.  Was St. Malachy right?  That's the Prophecy of the Popes guy.

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Seattle may see some school closures, as there aren't enough kids to justify some of the school staying open. 

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Legacy's got more problems. Now ten Women's Health Clinics want to unionize. Everyone wants more pay. You're looking less attractive as an acquisition item every day.

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Could this be Bigfoot? Man claims to have seen a giant on a hillside that disappeared into a rock formation. Well, this is Oregon, you know.

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