Sugoi & Yokunai

Is Amazon no longer what it used to be?  I haven't noticed a lot of change – it's been subtle to me.  But then I haven't shopped for a purple wig. Still, others have complained, and perhaps it's a manifestation of Andy Jassy's leadership.  Amazon needs to listen to this and get back on track. 

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Don’t Blame AI. Plagiarism Is Turning Digital News into Hot Garbage.  Can't blame the computer.  Can only blame the editors.  This technology is still in it's infancy.  Hard to believe that it's only been 10 months since people started using ChatGPT. But a lot of companies are adding chat into their product lineup – who will take responsibility?

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Everybody's striking, it seems.  Strike culture!  It's the new wave of 2023.  Everyone wants more for less.  Hard work and putting in the effort is so passé.  Makes you look like a chump. Strike!  With the Dems in charge, you'll probably win.

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Living to 120 now seems to be a real possibility. Maybe the last thing Japan wants to hear though.

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Neat idea.  Get more from hydroelectric power - by using something else besides water.  This proprietary ultra-cheap liquid promises to generate the same power with less of a height differential.  Could it really be all that easy?

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COVID-19 vax products can cause unexpected vaginal bleeding, even in post-menopausal females. And the response of the European Medicines Agency is just – to list it as a side-effect.  Problem addressed?  Is anyone looking into this? What's going on?

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5 tests to Oregon's economy this fall.  Deposits are already decreasing at Oregon banks. Most people are poorer than before, for sure.  Four factors are coming together to make Q4 really bad.

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Doctors outperform A.I.  Details – we need details.  What A.I. platform was used?  How was it trained?  Without these, articles such as this are meaningless.  I could build an A.I. model that performs poorly. So what? 

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Longevity research continues apace.  The question will be, who will have access to it? Progressives will want everyone to have it. They'll declare it a human right.  Should be an interesting debate.

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I’m an ER doctor: Here’s what AI startups get wrong about “ChatGPT for telehealth.  I've always thought that telehealth should be a stopgap, not a paradigm shift. So much potential for errors. The world that a techie imagines is not the same as reality.

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Being a doctor is hard. Being a surgeon can be especially grueling. Doctors need to figure out how to deal with this before it's too late.  There needs to be more physicians willing to do the work, for one thing.  And doctors need to be back in control, instead of being at the mercy of hospitals or other employers.

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"Learn to code," they said. Now with the advent of A.I., that may not be enough. It should be learn to code machine learning models.

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Why aren’t more people being sacked? the Economist asks. Controlling inflation with decreased spending, increased interest rates and  a cooling of the labor market is supposed to lead to more unemployment.  But there are already staffing shortages, even though businesses are hurting and can't pay their workers enough.  That's why people aren't being sacked.  

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Another Portland loss.  Target to close 3 stores in Portland.  Too much crime. Chalk up another one to Ted Wheeler's legacy.

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California Nursing Homes Are Becoming ‘De Facto Mental Health Centers’.  Soon to come to Portland, if not already.  This is why we have a shortage of nursing facility staff.  This was not the job they signed up for.

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The story behind Microsoft's hiring and firing spree of 2022.  Tech workers are just pawns in a large chess game.

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

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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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Oops.  Microsoft 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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So simple, yet this is the key to tranquility.  Suppressing 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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