29 August 2023

Forever chemicalsResearchers found that PFAS ("forever chemicals") are linked to obesity, maybe more so than dietary factors. Well, Koreans were found to have high levels of PFAS.  And now Korean Airlines has decided that it needs to start weighing Korean passengers.  Where's that stuff coming from? 

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Could it be this easy?  Recent research with tetrataenite, such as found in certain meteorites, it may be possible to mass-produce this iron-nickel-phosphorus alloy with magnetic properties similar to that of rare earth magnets. 

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Yikes, not a good time to be in the tech sector market.

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28 August 2023

We just need a little optimismPortland Central City Task Force says that the key to bringing Portland back is to have more optimism
“By nearly every measure, compared to 2020, things are better,” McMillan said. And I think one of the opening messages in our kickoff was our intent is to come alongside the good work that’s already happening at the city, at the county and elsewhere and to help. And this is very much a collaborative partnership in the work that we’re doing, and we think that theme in terms of the work itself is going to be very important.”  He also says there needs to be optimism for the future of Portland.
Optimism won't cut it.  I think everyone would rather turn time back to 2019, before COVID-19 and George Floyd. 

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27 August 2023

Trump was right.  This video needs to go viral.


An article in JAMA decries doctors that "spread misinformation".  Even criticizing physicians who said that the virus originated from Wuhan because they didn't accept the narrative at the time that it didn't.  Imagine – doctors who think for themselves!  Criticized!  And more blame for doctors who pointed out that the ones getting sick are the vaccinated, not the unvaccinated.  Just because there are more vaccinated folks.  Not realizing that the vaccine is supposed to prevent this.  Or that doctors expressed "reliance on natural immunity".  Horrors!  

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Fat regulates cognition.  It seem there is a connection.  Yup, obesity is associated with cognitive decline.

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Lee Cataluna is not enamoured by Honolulu's Skyline monorail.  Yeah, it looks ugly.  Democrats really love their mass transit, don't they.  Wherever they are in power.  You can bet there will be a proposal for something.

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26 August 2023

Biden's NLRB is making it easier for workers' unions to run the show.  No need for pesky elections if there is a belief that a majority supports unionizing. 

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Peace Health Hospital in Eugene is the city's only hospital, and it's shutting down.  Financial reasons.  People will have to go to the hospital of neighboring city, Springfield, but it's more inconvenient.  Nursing jobs will be lost, and maybe some hospitalist positions.  This may be the first of the dominoes to fall.  Legacy Systems is trying to merge with OHSU to avoid the same fate.

Youngman said nurses would be responsible, under OHSU’s proposal, for patting down and disarming patients, while ONA wants those tasks to be handled by trained security staff only.
OHSU denies that they said this, but who knows?  And once the merger takes place, I suspect the nurses will have much less leverage in making demands.

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Lahaina, two weeks later.  Not much has changed. 

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Huh? You get a diagnosis of cancer, and now your choices might be to take a severe financial hit, or die soon.  Liz Weston suggests a honest discussion with the doctor about how much treatment will extend life.  The truth is, the doctor can't really know with the desired accuracy.  There are too many variables, and all the doctor can do is look at the literature and see what was reported, and make a best guess.  But there may be other treatments that the doctor is not aware of, including clinical trials.  Sometimes people do better than you would expect.  But sometimes, just looking at numbers and deciding to forego therapy is deeply unsettling.  And when you see insurance companies (and their executive) make obscene amounts of money, it is easy to wonder why money is going towards their mansions and expensive cars instead of giving you a shot at a longer life.  While pooling risk can be a way to defray the cost of treatment to an individual facing huge expenses, one must recognize that it is a middle-man entity, which controls the physician-patient interaction.  We need consumer-owned policies, not employer-owned policies, and more competition.

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Some thoughts about Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki.  Most of Miyazaki's films are about capturing the essence of life in Japan, a land steeped in mysticism, and how it interacts with the issues of more modern life. 

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25 August 2023

CoolFirefox browsers can import Chrome extensions now.

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Nailed itPortland's Predictable Doom Loop.
The people elected and selected to run Portland, Oregon, are like kids who get their first car and never think to change the oil. The city is led by a cadre of ardent leftists who thought they could just rev the engine, ignore maintenance, and see the city magically run itself.

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Paper and bamboo straws might be good for the environment, but they are not good for you.  Unless you like PFAS in your system.

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Canada is turning into Terry Gilliam's Brazil.  What a dystopian nightmare it's becoming.  What a mistake it was to vote for Trudeau.  But like voting for Biden, I doubt they will be given a chance to vote for the alternative ever again.

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“Despite our best efforts, we have been faced with some unique complexities on the Kleenex business,” Fisher said.

“This decision is one that will allow us to shift our resources to better focus on other brands in Canada and meet the needs of our consumers with continued innovation and value,” he added.

What a fine specimen of corporate B.S.

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The College Board Tells TikTok and Facebook Your SAT Scores.  That's because the U.S. has no modern privacy law.  Things like this are still legal.  And your data is available for sale.

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Semaglutide not only promotes weight loss, but can reverse heart failure in those with HFpEF.  (That's jargon for heart failure with preserved ejection fraction.)  Wish it didn't have that troublesome gastroparesis side-effect, which can be lingering and distressing.  Tirzepatide might be a better option.

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Speaking of drugs, people are noticing that the FDA is getting to be more relaxed about the drug approval process.  Fewer clinical trials are being conducted prior to approval - 65% are approved one the basis of just one study.  Less information is provided to the public - the FDA can access the study results, but the public cannot.  Only 72% post results within 9 months from approval.  Even your doctor may not have access to the study data for scrutiny.

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23 August 2023

Maui is getting front row seats at how incompetent their Democrat governance isMaui community expresses collective rageThey need tourism to survive, but people are cancelling.  Lahaina is off-limits, of course, and you have to pass through Lahaina to get to Ka'anapali Resort.  Biden's visit was a political disasterHow tone-deaf and stupid. Worse than Bush and Katrina.  Where are Hawaii's senators and congressmen?  Why aren't they trying to get help?  Now they admit that the death count could be over 1000.  And it's revealed that those who went around the police blockades are the ones who survivedWhy were there police blockades anyway

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Grants Pass petitions SCOTUS to hear their case regarding illegal homeless camping.  Hope this will overturn Martin vs Boise.  The Brown vs City of Phoenix case seems to be in their favor. 

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Portland college students - more liberal, less religious, smoke more weed.  Tomorrow's leaders, huh?  Most will go into academics or politics, I predict.

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Tina Kotek wants Portlanders to help revive the city.  The problem is that the only ones who care to venture into the city seem to be the ones doing the destroying.  And fentanyl continues to score up wins against Oregon's efforts.

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The greenies really don't want nuclear.  This article says nuclear is too expensive and dangerous, but relies a lot on data from France's nuclear experience, which is old technology, instead of discussing some of the new developments with small reactors.  Wind energy yields are too low and not reliable.  Solar output is also relegated to certain parts of the world where sunlight is steady and strong enough.  But the energy density is low compared with nuclear (and petroleum).  One hailstorm can take out a lot of solar panels, and hydroelectric power is expensive and can impact local economies.  These are not discussed in the paper.

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Seattle police will no longer respond to mental health crisis calls.  Only social workers.  Hope no one gets shot.

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22 August 2023

There's a school for tyrants.  In Tanzania, Beijing is running a training school for authoritarianism.  Just what the world needs, eh?

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Andy Ngo wins $300,000 damages from Antifa.  Justice, finally.

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SickUsing Generative AI to Resurrect the Dead Will Create a Burden for the Living.  Some people will do anything to get other people's money.

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Multnomah County warns it may not have enough jail beds if Oregon doesn’t increase funding.  I think Multnomah County just needs to die, already.  They haven't learned their lesson and never will. 

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The Secret Weapon Hackers Can Use to Dox Nearly Anyone in America for $15.  TransUnion needs to clean up their act.  And if you're not using a service like DeleteMe, you should.

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Why are conservatives happier than liberals?  Daily Signal thinks that conservatives tend to be married.  Also that conservatives “expressed greater personal agency, more positive outlook, more transcendent moral beliefs, and a generalized belief in fairness” compared with liberals.  I don't think that this is the answer.  Some even doubt the premise, claiming that "liberals tend to display more signs of happiness, as evidenced by uploading more smiling photographs on Linkedin and posting more positive tweets on Twitter".  That also sounds specious.  I think it's because conservatives express gratitude way more than liberals.  This often comes from a grounding in religious belief, as liberals tend to be atheists or agnostics, and the concept of gratitude comes only when they get unexpected free stuff, usually sent by some anonymous stranger on the Internet.  Other than that, it's back to complaining about things.  But feeling gratitude is one of the benefits of meditation and it makes you less of an angry person.

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More on the Lahaina fire, from Axios.  850 deaths suspected now. 

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IBM thinks that 40% of workers will need to re-tool their skills.  And it looks like STEM will not be needed as much because the interface will be human language.  They project less need for programmers now. 
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20 August 2023

Maui death toll is a lot higher than official numbers, residents believe. If you watch the videos where the local government talks to reports, it's so clear that the mayor is an thug, and seems to be making excuses for all the blunders. 

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Electricity map.  Very nice infographic about where the world gets its electricity.

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Shit-life syndromeThere's a name for this:
"The phrase seemed to denote a level of long-standing poverty, family breakdown, lack of stability, unemployment and potential risk factors common to many of the predominately young, working class patients referred to the [psychotherapeutic] service" for shit is "something that we continually reject, get rid of or hide. At the same time it is something we cannot completely repudiate, it is part of us, something we need" and that the individuals with SLS have problems so "terrible, so untouchable" that they "quite literally cannot be thought about, cannot be handled by the service", yet a therapeutic organisation is "obliged to do so"
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Kelowna, B.C. is in flames.  Even worse than Lahaina, it looks like the Eagle Creek fire of 2017. There are so many fires, Wikipedia already has a page about this.

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ChatGPT is left-wing.  No surprise, since Silicon Valley is mostly left-wing.

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X/Twitter has deleted all images and link posted between 2011 and 2014.  It's still not clear if this was intentional.  (Hmm, what was Hunter Biden doing during this time?)

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There's a clinic in France serving 5000 patients, with only nurses and no doctors.  An interesting real-life experiment.  In the Pacific NW, all we hear about are nursing shortages, not doctor shortages, and clearly there are both.  But a doctor shortage just means you can't grow local healthcare, as long as you maintain your current pool of doctors.  You can't function at all without enough nurses.  Having a bunch of nurse without a doctor is like a headless ant colony.  It can sort of function, but there is no direction, and everything is just on automatic.  There is no longitudinal care, unless a dedicated nurses decides to take your case on.  But nursing work is shift work.  As the physician becomes more of a commodity in today's medicine, either the doctor will need to re-invent the discipline, or be resigned to be content with just being a cog in the healthcare wheel.
Edit:  Lines are indeed blurring between nurse and doctor.  As nurses are developing skills to do patient care on their own, it's going to take more for physicians to distinguish themselves as being worth their extra pay. 

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