13 November 2023

Portland teachers strike continues Monday, gives new meaning to ‘No School November’. We now enter into the third week of the strike. Just unbelievable. Portland students already have low school attendance due to COVID-19 and getting time off to attend all kinds of protests. They get days off for teacher preparation days. And every single holiday. Now this. Students don't seem to care that their academic lives are being frittered away. Even the lefty Oregonian is saying "enough already". This is why we were concerned about Tina Kotek's support by the unions. And the teachers demand racial equity training during the strike. How about math, reading, writing?

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Narrator voice: "The insanity was to go on much longer."

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Be ungovernable. Kudos to the Lakeridge HS boys. I suspect Lake Oswego is probably more conservatives than Portland.

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Can't believe the Oregonian let Steve Duin run this column. But he's right.

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As you can see, there are no tent camps. But commenters have said, this is the typical Asian conflict avoidance. Instead of facing the problem head-on, they just go the passive-aggressive route. Instead of attacking the root problem and not spending money on a "workaround". Some have decried that there is no compassion for the homeless. Yeah, but is THIS compassion?

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Joining the combined powers of CRISPR-Cas9 technology and CAR-T cells. Researchers have found that disrupting SUV39H1-mediatied H3K9 methylation status facilitates early expansion, long-term persistence, and overall anti-tumor efficacy of human CAR T cells in leukemia and prostate cancer models. Amazing!

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Drink coffee. The trigonelline in coffee improved memory. At least in aged mice. Could work in humans, too. 

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In the A.I. developer world, people are so accustomed to importing libraries and trying out someone's new A.I. model, or GPT wrapper app.  Now some evil hacker in the Philippines has abused this trust to hide malware. Everything goes to sh!t eventually, when you open it up to the world.

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And speaking of Google, they are no longer hiding their political leanings. Try this search – it's really true.

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Unintended consequences. Ensuring adequate staffing in hospitals can be challenging. Finding doctors to work can be expensive. Congress' "No Medical Surprises Act" sounded good on paper. Who likes a surprise expensive bill? But now companies that provide the staffing to hospitals, such as TeamHealth, Envision Healthcare, American Physician Partners, Air Methods Corp, Global Medical Response, Radiology Partners have either gone bankrupt or are in serious financial difficulty.  So it may end up that your local hospital will not have enough doctors to treat you. So no surprise bill, but maybe "we'll just have to do the best we can" medical care instead.

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12 November 2023

Oregon in the News.  Oregon Decriminalized Hard Drugs. It Isn’t Working. Everyone can see it, except our state legislators.

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American Medical Response now has the Washington County contract for ambulance services, and is providing the same substandard care as Multnomah County. Not entirely their fault, though. Few to move to Oregon to work.

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We can't have nice things. The Holiday Ale Fest Is Canceled for 2023.

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Pope Francis fires popular Bishop Strickland.

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San Francisco cleaned up ahead of visit by Xi Jinping.  Now we know that the Dem government could have done this earlier. They only clean up the squalor if it suits them. After Xi leaves, SF will go back to being a sh!thole again.

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Well just as predicted, Portland's Ritz-Carlton has been vandalized.

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Physicists simulated a black hole in the lab.  Here's the actual paper.  I was imagining scientists with safety goggles on peering through the window of a lab containing a swirling mass of plasma surrounding a black blob, but this was all a computer simulation, so just graphs and equations. Nothing to see here.

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11 November 2023

Fascinating. Astronomy wonders like this always brighten my mood. So here's a 3-year analemma.

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A study in contrasts. Here's "the happiest man in the world" who doesn't care what you think about him. And here's Elon Musk, who almost had to have a "wellness check" done because he was depressed after being booed at during a Dave Chapelle show.  He actually was stunned at what people thought about him.

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That's the message. Don't use your car to make calls or send text messages.

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At the interface of the healthcare system.  People get caught because they don't know how to navigate the system.  I still can't believe that insurers don't feel that they have to disclose why they denied coverage for your illness. What are they afraid of? Thank goodness for ProPublica's insurance claim app.

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Apple is pays a relatively small penalty for hiring practices favoring H1-B visa holders over hiring American workers. Cringely had been calling out this practice years ago. From what I see, Apple is flooded with foreigners, and it shows in their website and advertising. Could this be why it's products are so lame these days? Like the M3 chip? And why we're seeing other companies come up with the cool stuff now? Lilke hu.ma.ne, from ex-Apple employees?

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Here's Instagram, making their app more addictive to vulnerable, lonely youth. The Internet can be sweet poison, sometimes.

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Okinawans aren't living as long as before.  Diet's changing. Lifestyle is become more stressful. I guess it was too good to last.

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A.I. is taking the easier white-collar jobs. All those sinecure positions are going away. Now, you really have to provide value, else you aren't worth the trouble.

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Why is this only on a German site?  The new Outlook allows your emails to be sent to Microsoft servers. Also your calendar and contact information will be sent there, too. You can opt out, but only if you are aware of this, and you know how to do it.

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You mean you're still willing to endure it? "Patience wearing thin."  Shoreline, WA business owners getting tired of increasing crime.  Well, you are in Seattle, you know. What do you expect? Did you guys vote Democrat? Did you vote to defund the police? Consequences of your own actions, I'd say. 

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Buyer's remorse. Oregon lawmakers now want Kotek to reverse Measure 110.

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But we need to revive Cuckoo's Nest mental hospitals. Oregon State Hospital struggles for resources now and is imploding with lawsuits. What a mess. Who would want to work there?

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Total search privacy?  Seems straightforward to me.  Let's say you want the librarian to retrieve a book for you, but you don't want the librarian to know what book you want.  The answer is to encrypt the library (preprocessing) and have the librarian bring you encrypted chunks at a time, such that the librarian doesn't know what is being retrived. But you can decrypt the chunk and read what you need and if this can be done without leaving a trace, then your secret is safe. 

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Americans don't want to fight for their country anymore. The author thinks its because of apathy. There might be some of that, but I think a major reason is that no one wants to die because of Biden's blunders. No one wants to die because of our incompetent leadership. There was a time when the cause was just and we felt it was right, but having seen that there is a world where we can live without major wars, dying in a pointless war seems even more...pointless.

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10 November 2023

Hu.ma.ne looks cool. And I'm not just talking about the URL. It's like a Star Trek comm badge, basically. Except they didn't have laser projectors. This may really cut into sales of cell phones, especially as they add more features. Apple should be doing this, but they've lost the edge. Whether or not you like this device, you need to be aware that it's out there.
Edit: Uh, maybe not.

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I never really liked leaf blowers, so I'm not unhappy that they may go away. The noise, the stink, the airborne particulates. But the mess will be harder to clear, so we'll have to see.

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My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.
And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours.
And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit.

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Portland can't win for losing.  Judge throws monkey wrench in plans to get rid of the homeless. Down the toilet we'll continue to go. Southwest Washington is more serious about cleaning things up, although the effort is rather mild.

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Question asked and answered.  Dog care workers question why Seattle PD never showed up after 911 calls about intruder who wouldn't leave.

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The consequences of being poor. Portland has a shortage in the Bureau of Development Services, so no new construction in the city.

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9 November 2023

Two kinds of GenZ attitudes out there.  There's this one:

and then there's this one:


Remarkable the difference between the whiners and the doers
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There should be name for this phenomenon. Where a system works great when it's just starting out, and everyone behaves and uses the system properly, but when you introduce it into the world at large, there are the inevitable assholes that spoil it and make people want to go back to how it was before.  So many examples of this. It's happening to Uber in Seattle.

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Why do young people think that everyone wants to "track" everything they do?  Yeah, there's the tech for it, but come up with something really useful.

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8 November 2023

Now I know why I am not hungry after a strenuous hike. It's lactoyl-phenylalanine, an appetite suppressant which can be found in soy sauce, among other foods. Could this be why asian Asians are so thin, but gain weight when they come to America? As this ronin gets older, it does indeed become harder to maintain his weight.

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El Niño is disrupting the supply chain in unpredicted ways. We're going to be in for a rough winter season.

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Seems like there are shortages of everything - now strike mediators. Not to worry. There was a reason why the public school teachers union donated all that money to Gov. Kotek's gubernatorial campaign. Now they expect to collect. But when there's no money, there's only so much you can do. I'm sure Tina will come up with something. Take money from something else to fund the teachers, who no longer have to make sure that students meet academic standards.

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"I’d love to know how Apple, which famously doesn’t take kindly to iOS apps housing their own app stores, feels about that…" OpenAI wants to be the app store for AI. Too early to tell what will happen. I think that Apple is experiencing what happened when Google was ascendant, and Microsoft could only watch its decline helplessly. Apple doesn't generate the kind of excitement it used to, when Steve Jobs was alive. In fact, during the DevDay talk, I wondered what Jobs would have said/done if he were alive. He'd either try to buy the company or be on the phone with Altman trying to develop an idea. I don't think Tim Cook is doing that. The latest M3 debacle is a clear sign that he's run out of ideas. Nobody cares about new emojis or more pixels or slimmer devices anymore. Tim is a process man, not an idea man.

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A quarter of US medical students consider quitting school and most may not treat patients. The new workforce is not as robust as before, willing to do the hard work, especially considering that conditions have greatly improved since the Libby Zion case. I saw this new A.I. healthcare app that's out. Built by engineers to make medicine work like how engineers would envision it. They have one medical advisor - a primary care professor who works at Harvard. Hardly an example of how things are out in the battlefront. Doctors are taught a certain workflow in medical school, and practice it during internship and residency. Imaging being told that you have to do things a different way, to integrate some company's app in your workflow. Suddenly, instead of just dealing with chart notes and phone calls, you're having to read what all your patients and support staff are writing in the app, too.  While there probably needs to be a revamping of medical care workflow in the age of A.I., it would be ideal to having this introduced during medical school.  And tested in a small implementation before large-scale deployment. Amazon's OneMedical is probably trying to do something like this, but I don't know a physician working there to get feedback. Can someone put something in the comments? Even from a patient's standpoint?

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It never gets easier. No, it doesn't, but where would be the fun if it did?

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Cognitive decline, already a problem in the over 50s crowd, declined even more significantly after the COVID-19 pandemic. Lack of exercise and more alcohol. That'll do it.

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ProPublica has a tool that will help you find out why your medical insurer denied your claim.  Turnaround time is 30 days. Wish it were a bit sooner. Time is of the essence in situations like this.

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Why Has Stoicism Gained Popularity in Modern Times? Stoicism is like Buddhism, but for the Western person. With none of the Eastern mythology and pantheon attached. The ideas are basically the same, though. And it works. And there is an active Stoic community.

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7 November 2023

Newsom signs $25 minimum wage law for all hospital workers, finds out afterward it will cost California $4 billion. This will give Oregonian union workers a higher bar to aim for. Society loses yet again. I have no idea why business continue to operate in California. Or any blue state for that matter.

And Oregon's United Food and Commercial Workers Local 555 wants a 42% raise. Why not an even 50%. Ask for the moon! Then, others will demand the same. Soon, we'll have no business and the government will have to run everything. And then when it is unclear that it won't work out financially, everyone's wages will plummet.

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Asian-Americans are becoming less liberal. What took you guys so long? I never understood why Japanese-Americans embraced the Democrat party. Especially in Hawaii.

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Cannabis consumption raises risk of heart attack and stroke by 20%. The next questions are: what component is it?  Is it THC? Something else? What about edibles?
And ketamine is being prescribed more often now. Expect to see more "sedation, dissociation, psychiatric events or worsening of psychiatric disorders", as well as "increases in blood pressure, and lower urinary tract and bladder symptoms". Oh joy. And probably more road accidents, too.

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They're ugly, but they perform. New "super shoes" make for better performance. Next, get some designers.

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Tai chi chuan boosts memory. It's the physical activity. That's already been shown. Moderate coffee and tea consumption helps, too.

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All the ways you can think wrongly. There are names to all the logical fallacies and biased and flawed ways that people think.
I especially like the Woozle Effect. 

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Science still has a problem with fakery.  Fortunately, ChatGPT detector can detect fakery created with ChatGPT, but the results were poor when the fakery was generated by GPT-4.

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Millions of Retired Americans Aren't Coming Back to Work as Predicted. The article cites atrophy of skills, fading work connections, and ageism.  But another reason is that retirement has been good. It's so nice not to be able to be part of the rat race now. I wouldn't become an employee again. I love being able to read, learn, create, doing what I love best.

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6 November 2023

"If you want less of something, tax it."  Jeff Bezos’ move to Miami will cost Washington state millions in tax revenue. 
Jared Walczak, vice president of state projects at the Tax Foundation, stated in a Thursday blog post that Bezos would have been on the hook for about $1.44 billion a year under the proposed wealth tax. That would have made up about 45% of the projected $3.2 billion a year the tax was projected to bring in.
Nice move, Bezos. Sometimes Dems need to be taught a hard lesson.

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Doctors have no power. Medicare cuts doctor and hospital payments.  Since many physicians became employees of hospitals or private equity firms, they are no longer masters of their destiny. Although there is inflation and everyone else is getting pay raises, doctors will see a 1.2% pay cut. Some docs will still make out OK, but others will struggle. It's a slap in the face for the docs. I know that many people will get out the tiny violins, but they will have to deal with the doctor shortages.
Mercury News is recommending that people get second opinions. Good luck with that, when you have to wait a several months just to get an appointment. 
Meanwhile, Medicaid enrollees are decreasing as several states are dropping Medicaid now that the government rules prohibiting this have dropped. Hospitals hate Medicaid because it pays poorly, but it's better than no money at all. But the greater the proportion of Medicaid patients, the lower the hospital revenue. 
In Hillsboro, things have gotten so bad that OHSU/Tuality has set up a food pantry for hospital employees. Because they just can't raise their pay? Really sad.
But if you worked for a California hospital with unionized workers, you'd get a minimum $25/hour wage. If hospitals had to pay this much, they'd have to make deep cuts. But this gives union members a new benchmark for their next strike.

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Health misinformation and lack of confidence in vaccines continue to grow, years after the Covid-19 pandemic, survey shows. No one wants the vax products now.  In fact a quarter of Americans say they know someone personally killed by COVID jab.  It's over folks.

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Seattle's trying to lure people back to Seattle Center by having a European-style Christmas Market.  This would have been nice in days gone by, but I still wouldn't venture downtown.

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5 November 2023

Super-melanin cream developed to protect against skin damage and lower cancer risk? This is a nanoscale Synthetic Melanin Particle (SMP), and yes, from the pictures, it looks like it will make the applied area more darkley pigmented. But it's non-toxic, so it may be better than those orange fake tans.

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Marvel/Disney is really desperate.  No one wants to see their superhero movies anymore.

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Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hisen Loong just released a C++ coded Sudoku solver.  He's also a former Senior Wrangler and a former Brigadier General. A real badass!  Since he has IQ points to spare, could he donate some to our president? 

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The site 12ft.io, which promised to bypass paywalls, was taken down.  Now a replacement site, 1ft.io, has taken its place. I don't see anything suspicious in its source code. Might give it a try.

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Bruce Reed is the guy who is behind the Administrations A.I. Executive Order. So it's probably a good idea to find out how he thinks. The article is pretty bland and nothing stands out, but it's good to see a face connected to the policy.

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ODOT is going to remove parking spaces and convert them to charging stations which hardly anyone will use. Bad idea.  Let those EV owners go to charging stations and let us park.

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Here we go again.  There's talk again about having a permanent DST.  Twice every year.  And nothing happens.  There should be permanent standard time, by the way.  Makes more sense. People didn't like permanent DST when it was passed in the past.

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Strike Nation! Now Providence Everett nurses are striking. Will more hospitals close?

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A.I. is being weaponized by the military. Mainly computer vision applications, but this will allow the military to make sense of what they are seeing. 

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4 November 2023

Another one bites the dust. 4th Wall Café closes. Seemed like a fantastic idea, but this isn't the time to introduce a new business in Portland, especially designed to cater to the young crowd with disposable income.

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So 14% of Americans have LongCOVID? Seems rather high, but the study was survey-based, so people were taken at their word. Still, it would explain the large number of those on disability, right?

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The Supreme Court will decide whether it will be legal to tax unrealized gains.  Seems like it should be obvious, but for desperate Democrats who need money, legality be damned.

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This is Sam Bankman-Fried's greatest fear about being in prison. No it's not dropping the soap bar in the shower, getting his preferred selection of vegan meals, which is what I thought it would be.

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The District Judge confirmation hearings reveal a lot about why Oregon is the hotbed of lunacy it is. Heaven help the unfortunate white defendant going before Eugene judge Mustafa Kasubhai.  Listen as Ted Cruz gets to the bottom of this:



And John Kennedy:

And in Oregon, OPB and the NEA want this judge appointed. THIS is why Oregon is in such deep sh#t that it is. And why no one wants to live in this state.
Oregon can't find enough public defenders, so they have to set jailed defendants free after 7 days. This is now a matter of public safety.  And the Oregon Health Authority struggles to find competent leadership, with three  leaving the job in a year. 

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Hate crime related to illegal immigration? Hate the influx of fentanyl? Hate having to spend increasing amounts of your tax money having to be the social support system of Central America? Then watch Tom Homan's recent speech.