24 September 2023

Statue honoring Sacagawea's son, Charbonneau, is unveiled in Charbonneau, OR.  Appropriate, of course, but too bad the Oregonian misspelled Sacagawea's name.  But using a "j" instead of a "g", they perpetuate the wrong pronounciation.  It should be <Sack-a-gah- weh-a>, with a hard-g.  There is no j-sound in the Hidatsa language, where her name translates to "Bird-Woman", and not the Shoshoni word for "boat launcher".

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No, the answer is NOT universal healthcare.  Insulin is not "free" in Europe. It's just paid for in a different way – with super-high taxes.  Duh.  The price of insulin is just what the market will bear, because employers pay for costly insurance with this kind of pricing.  That sets the price, and is what you pay when you don't have insurance. If people owned their own policies, insurance companies would have to price things differently, because the market would no longer bear higher prices.

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Now Rite-Aid is facing potential bankruptcy and must unload some stores to get back into the black.  Who thought this economy was doing well.  Besides Paul Krugman?

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PSADon't put plastic in the microwave even though it says "microwave safe".  Unless you want to eat microplastics.

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Oh now, the media recommends you wait on that COVID booster. Is it because they discovered that it doesn't work?  And that the switch to IgG4 really does happen after getting the mRNA product, which confirms an earlier study?
I notice that they still trot out this 2021 paper which they claim justifies that vax immunity is superior to natural immunity.  First of all, this was published only in the MMWR, which is a CDC organ, and I don't trust anything from the CDC now.  They also quote a paper that contradicts them.  Even Bozio herself, author of the MMWR paper, later admitted that natural immunity is sufficiently protective. But there are others, like this 2022 article.  Bottom line, in 2023, when the available vax products don't even work against the variants out there, and have toxicity risks, I see no valid reason to get the jab. 

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Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates. Behind Every Self-Made Millionaire is a Father with Money. Sadly, this is true, much like the UK study I cited recently.  Have a rich dad who can fund you and guide you. 

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Another reason I don't use iCloud Drive.  Security is another.

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Why is gas more expensive on the West Coast, especially Oregon? Meanwhile, the state is taking away parking spaces to reserve them for chargers for EVs that most people don't want (or can't afford).

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Lahaina survivors have to wait two years to rebuild.

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23 September 2023

OopsMicrosoft AI Researchers Accidentally Exposed 38TB of Sensitive Data.  Sometime ago, I was in a discussion about healthcare records.  All the docs were eager to be able to get access to all of a patient's medical records to improve care.  Some suggested that everyone's medical records be housed in some central repository.  But who would host it?  The government? Hell no.  Some private company?  Like Microsoft? 

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Six words that will help you be a better writer.  Even a better public speaker. 

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What can an unfree society teach you about freedom?  This is all happening now.

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Wow. A Mother’s Body Retains Cells From Her Child After Pregnancy.

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  • Infection with Omicron is associated with a lower post-COVID-19 condition risk.
  • Post-COVID-19 condition risk is lower among those who had previous infections.
  • Post-COVID-19 condition risk did not differ by vaccination status.
  • Symptom patterns were similar across variants.
And there was another IgG4 class switch study which confirms the previous one:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-40103-x
"In addition to IgG1 and IgG3 subclasses presented in all groups, a switch towards distal IgG subclasses (spike‑specific IgG4 and IgG2) appeared almost exclusively in individuals who received only mRNA vaccines or were infected after mRNA vaccinations. In these subjects, the magnitude of the spike‑specific IgG4 response was comparable to that of the spike‑specific IgG1 response."
In other words, natural infection is the best vaccination.  Getting the mRNA product afterwards just messes up your immune response.

These two studies alone should be enough to stop the booster campaign.  Why doesn't the public understand this?

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22 September 2023

So simple, yet this is the key to tranquilitySuppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all.  This is essentially what sages teach, but mastering this is difficult.

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Seattle Reverses Course, Makes Public Drug Use Arrestable Crime.  Seattle makes committing a crime a crime again.  Fixed that for you.  Another city run by idiots.  Some people have had enough.

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Marketing agency director says that we should stop badmouthing Portland, because it will hurt the city and its leadership.  Because we're making her job tougher.

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Ken's Artisan Pizza makes the world's 18th best pizza.  I'm going to have to try it out someday.  They're in a lousy part of town and their hours are limited and only in the evening, and they don't take phone orders, so you can't grab and go, to minimize the risk of your car getting broken into.  Too bad.

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21 September 2023

Chan Zuckerberg org to spin up 1,000+ H100 GPU cluster for AI medical research.  I kinda wish it was someone else doing this because I'm not sure if this will come with some kind of privacy backdoor that will benefit Meta, but at least they know what kind of requirements will be necessary.  I'm sure someone will take them up on the offer.

Related:  Steve Jobs revived Apple with internet-connected Macs - the iMac.  Now Intel will sell A.I.-computers, devices with A.I. capabilities built-in.

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That's the realities of society in the UKSocial mobility is a myth in the UK.  Sorry but it is.
A recent report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that where you are born in the UK, and the income and wealth of your family, now matter more than ever in defining life outcomes, with social mobility at its worst in more than 50 years.
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When will it hit them?  Getting vaccinated does not protect you against getting COVID-19 again, nor does it prevent you from getting Long-COVID.  What does the vaccine really do for you?

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Weird to get two articles on consciousness in my newsfeed:
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In the case of scientific knowledge, overconfidence might be particularly significant, as the lack of awareness of one's own ignorance can impact behaviors, pose risks to public policies, and even jeopardize health.
The climate change fanatics need to read this.  Not that it will make them less confident or shut up about the subject.

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Two Neuralink articles.  Was one a hit piece?
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Silicon Valley does value smarts.  So people call it a Cult of IQ.  Interesting that the author of the article calls this "right wing".  So are those with “just intelligent enough to be able to focus their resentment on some limited grievance” somehow "left-wing"?  From what's happening in the news, I could hardly blame you if you thought so.

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Studio Ghibli was sold to Nippon TV for an undisclosed amount.  Interesting that they were looking for a successor, and both Hayao and his son, Goro, declined.  They knew where their strengths were, and probably did not want to get involved with corporate hassles.

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OHSU researcher wins Lasker prize for the development of a novel diagnostic imaging modality for the eye – optical coherence tomography. 

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20 September 2023

The UK passed an online safety bill, which will hold Internet social media companies' feet to the fire.  It seems like a revocation of Section 230, of which efforts to do something similar failed in the U.S.  How will it be enforced, however?  No one has an answer.  Nice empty gesture, though. I've always said that the Internet was not designed to be a family-friendly network.  Act accordingly.

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Meanwhile, Mullvad VPN has now switched to a diskless all-RAM platform.  This will make it harder to trace a Mullvad user's identity.

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Bring back the Mafia?  I don't think so.  There is no accounting or responsibility.  Better solutions exist, but it's interesting that some people are thinking that we need a separate law-enforcement system. 
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Seattle shuts down Partnership for Zero homelessness grift. 

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Nice to know that Sony prizes competence and excellence over progressive sentiment:
Yeah, that flute player is Cornelius Boots,  one of the world's best shakuhachi players.  If Sony wanted to use him, that's fine with me.  It's their story to tell, not yours.  "Cultural appropriation" is one of those progressive clichés we can toss out, like "TERF", "hate speech" or "cisgender".

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The Overton Paradox.  With each generation, something is discarded that has long been with us.  These are basic beliefs or traditions that have long withstood time.  Because they were there for a reason.  But then politicians and other foolhardy individuals think that they know better.  And with each loss, we proceed away from the central tenets and strengths that made our nation and its culture the envy of the world.  Standards are lowered or thrown out.  Teachers teach kids that the pillars that made America great are to be torn down and replaced by ideas that have already been found faulty.  Now the clearly mentally-ill are in the halls of power.  This is why.  It should be called the Overton Degradation.
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19 September 2023

Over 10% of Japan's population is over 80 years, for the first time.  Not good. 

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Jens Haaning, a conceptual artist whose work focuses on power and inequality, was commissioned in 2021 by the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, northern Denmark, to recreate two earlier works that used scores of banknotes to represent average incomes.

Haaning’s 2007 work, An Average Danish Annual Income, displayed krone notes fixed to canvas in a frame, and a second 2011 work about Austrian incomes used euro bills.

The museum provided about 532,000 krone (£61,500) from its reserves to recreate artworks as well as an artist’s fee of about 40,000 krone. But when staff unpacked the newly delivered works, they found two empty frames with the title Take the Money and Run.
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Are nerdy men the best husbands?  Supposedly that's what a lot of millennial women think.  Being a true nerd is more than just liking Star Wars or MMORPGs, though.  The original definition was that you had to be smart and really dedicated to the pursuit of  knowledge.  That's what made you interesting.

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The Lahaina Banyan is still alive.  Fantastic.

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18 September 2023

Sorry, this is a BuzzFeed link, but what the hell.  People over 60 share some of the good things about being older.  It's all good if you are still healthy and have taken steps earlier to avoid the avoidable troubles. 

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A male loneliness epidemic is a thing.  Guys need to connect, too.  No one has made a big deal of it, but it's still a silent problem.

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Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  So doctors are not recommending breast self-exams anymore "because it hasn’t been shown to prevent breast cancer deaths".  Well who's going to do a double-blind controlled trial?  It's free, and it can certainly detect things early, and there is no side-effect from doing it.  Crazy not to do it.  I think this is wrong.

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Peak solar activity is coming sooner than expected.  We're going to see higher global temps now, so don't be surprised. 

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Why do some people get chronic fatigue syndrome after certain viral infections, but others don't?  Scientists have discovered that this may be due to upregulation of the WASF3 gene, interfering with mitochondrial functioning.  Fascinating how this story played out, thanks to a patient who took the initiative.

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Winners of the 2023 IgNobel prize announced.  I notice a preponderance of Asians winning.  I guess Asians like to pursue silly investigations.  Like the guy who won the prize in 2016 with the between legs effect.

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Billionaires get to remote-work from their yachts.  We should be so fortunate.  But I've mentioned that younger people still struggle with mental illness, and this seems to get little attention.  I think these two stories are related.  The coronavirus epidemic is blamed, which launched the remote work effort (WFH) and also the spike in mental illness.  Life still looks bleak, and things aren't going to improve until life looks more appealing again. 

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Once in a while, even California gets it right.  Residents of the state will soon find it easier to have their names deleted from data-brokers' databases.  This is great.

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Here's Elon Musk's Algorithm for improving life.  It's mostly for a work philosophy, but it makes sense when you are a boss or manager or director.  When you are a simple employee, you have little say in implementing these things.  So don't stay an employee long.  Get into a managerial position and look for ways to improve things.

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Dimethyl sulfide has been detected on a planet 120 ly away.  Only living organisms can produce this molecule.  So, draw your own conclusions.

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17 September 2023

'Dr. Google' meets its match in Dr. ChatGPT'.  Not quite, but a doctor who can use a chat model will be a better diagnostician than one what doesn't.

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It’s based solely on what we want in an ideal world and doesn’t appear to address what are the resources we have to accomplish that. I’m very concerned about how Oregon hospitals are going to do this.

It’s not easy. An RN is a highly educated person. It’s not something you can snap your fingers and say, “You’re an RN today.”

Take a regular med-surge floor. Under the bill, there’s a 1:5 ratio. That’s one nurse for every five patients. If you’ve got a med-surge unit of 30 beds, it requires you to have six nurses. If you’ve been doing this long enough, you know that sooner or later one will get sick. Does that mean your 30-bed unit is only a 25-bed unit and what do you tell those patients? The statute is specific in that no nurse can be assigned patients in excess of the ratio, with the exception for critical patients in an ED. That’s not good care management at all. If the patient isn’t critical but you’re one of those five, you’ve got to what, wait in the lobby? Get transferred to a different hospital? You’ve got that kind of real-world issue that isn’t adequately addressed.
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16 September 2023

Two more bite the dustJaCiva bakery and The Pied Cow.  They blame the coronavirus epidemic.  No it wasn't the virus, but government policies that caused the decreased foot traffic.  JaCiva used to make the best pumpkin pie in the city.  No more.

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Oregonians flock to mind-altering substances.  As you would expect, when you live in a state in decline, I suppose.  There is tachyphylaxis with psilocybin, though, so it may disappoint some. 

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Do you want to be cloned?  Delphi will analyze your writings, videos, podcasts, etc, and clone your thought processes for posterity.  "Your Delphi clone doesn't merely represent you; it ensures your wisdom transcends time, impacting generations to come."  What times we live in!

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15 September 2023

This should be required reading for all young poliical aspirants:

The mere imagining of a better tomorrow, in its view, is sufficient to reform the longest-standing democracy on Earth. In effect, it is a party that seeks to attract support by standing for nothing other than disruption — call it the Seinfeld Party.

This is an extraordinarily dangerous approach in a democracy, where stability and slow, methodical and deliberative decision-making is a virtue. Altering democracy should not be approached like building an app where the primary focus is getting clicks and eyeballs and then figuring out how to monetize it later. This is not Uber upending the cab industry, or Airbnb trying to engineer the way we live and travel. This is our republic.

Trump made it look easy.  It's not.

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How I stay reasonably anonymous online.  To this I would add - don't surf the Web on your phone. Despite all your safeguards, you are identifiable by your cell tower triangulation.  Your surfing history on the phone can be tied to your identity.  What do you expect from a device that pings cell towers when you turn the phone on and when you move about.  Also, I would still avoid using Chrome as well as staying away from directly accessing Google or Meta products.  These companies are built on the business model of tracking you and preventing you from being anonymous. 

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Dunning-Kruger just got an updateIntermediate levels of scientific knowledge are associated with overconfidence and negative attitudes towards science.  This explains the climate change and pro-vaccine crowd perfectly.

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This explains a lot of our problems.  Cannabis Use Disorder and Subsequent Risk of Psychotic and Nonpsychotic Unipolar Depression and Bipolar Disorder
"CUD was associated with an increased risk of psychotic and nonpsychotic bipolar disorder and unipolar depression."
It's bad news when your state legalizes it.  That's the start of the decline.

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The Seattle Freeze is real, especially for techies trying to make friends, especially as many are introverts to begin with. 

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Giant cracks are appearing in the southwestern US.  Drought, they say. 

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Providence changed its mind.  Guess it was afraid of losing more personnel. 

“The health and safety of our patients, caregivers, and community are our highest priority. As such, we ask that all employees receive an updated COVID-19 vaccine or booster,” said Michael Connors, Providence Public Relations.

However, Providence was quick to point out that this is not a mandate. According to Connors, Providence’s policy diverges from the strict vaccine mandates enforced by state law and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) during the peak of the pandemic.

“This is not the same as the vaccine mandates that we were required to implement by state law and CMS during the pandemic. Caregivers can choose to decline the vaccine. Those who do not wish to receive it simply need to submit a declination form by Nov. 30. They no longer need to request approval for a medical or religious exemption as many of our states and CMS required at the height of COVID,” said Connors.

All declinations will be automatically accepted. They do not need to be approved. This process is not the same as the medical or religious exemptions that many states and federal regulators required us to review and approve during the pandemic,” he added.


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