18 August 2024

Nice summary of why price controls hurt innovation and ultimately reduce the number of nice things we have.

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We're having the biggest COVID-19 summer wave so far.  Vaccines are working, huh?

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Seattle's Aurora Avenue can't climb out of its cut-rate economy. Neither can much of Seattle.

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United Health Care may drop Legacy. Who will blink? My suspicion is that Legacy will cave, hoping that when they merge with OHSU, things will be different and they will be shielded by the larger entity. So much is riding on that merger.

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17 August 2024

Well, well. San Francisco has been sending their homeless to Oregon. Awfully nice of them, eh. We ought to return the favor.

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Another reason why home sales are slow. If you're looking to buy a house, you have to have extra cash to pay your buyer's agent, because it's no longer coming out of the home sale proceedings. You now need to have extra cash in addition to that 20%.

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Organic Maps was recently removed from the Android play store. This is one of the best map system for one's mobile device. Fortunately, they give a work-around, but still...

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The brain stores three copies of every memory. I thought it was remarkable that it could store every memory even once.  And here's a paper that discusses how to retain stuff you try to learn, without increasing study time.  Study smarter, not harder.

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You can hack PDF documents. Who knew?

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When you are interviewing for a company, here are some questions you should ask to get a sense of the company's culture. This could be very important.

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NSA tracks Tor users by tracking their Google Ads.  Anyone who uses Google directly is basically asking to be tracked.

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You learn something new all the time. Those sudden sharp cracks that you sometimes here in a cold snowy forest. They're not coming from the trees. They're comiing from the sky.

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OK this is not supposed to happen. Fence this in, now!  SakanaAI was caught modifying its own source code so it could extend its runtime. You never let an AI modify its own source code. Today, it's runtime, tomorrow, it's the safety guardrails. Someone else agrees with me.

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This is disgusting. Plume markets a mesh network to speed up your WiFi.  But it collects data on your surfing habits and sells it to third parties.
To ISPs, Plume promises marketing insights based on deep analysis of your online behaviors. What that means is Plume harvests and hoards a tremendous amount of sensitive data about its users — even tracking when they are present in their homes(new window).
Screw that.

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16 August 2024

Some detailed info about the large security breach that disclosed billions of SSN details. Two statements were reassuring to me:

  • The database DOES NOT contain information from individuals who use data opt-out services. Every person who used some sort of data opt-out service was not present.
  • There were no email addresses in the social security number files. If you find yourself in this data breach via HIBP, there's no evidence your SSN was leaked, and if you're in the same boat as me, the data next to your record may not even be correct.

I use a data opt-out service, so I guess I'm clean. Maybe.

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Google might be split up after all. I disagree with the findings of Kashmir Hill. It's possible to avoid Google's tentacles with the proper blockers, and it doesn't impair ones ability to use the Internet. You just have to install the right browser extensions, but it's not that hard to do. I use uMatrix, uBlock Origin, and Privacy Badger (more for redundancy – it's not essential).  And I don't use Chrome.

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What if Alzheimer's Disease was not really caused by a buildup of amyloid plaques, and that these were epiphenomenon instead. The real culprits may be midkine and pleiotrophin.

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AT&T and Verizon don't want competition from Starlink to take away from their business. Starlink could provide mobile service more efficiently, as they have the satellites.

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CSF lymphatic drainage not only eliminates brain waste during sleep, but drainage flow also slows down as we age. But there is a way to restore the flow – in mice.  With prostaglandin F2α. 

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Ranked Choice Voting can be gamed, and it leads to new chicanery strategies. They asked experts about this. (Experts, Bob, experts!) Why can't we just keep things simple?

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Sublethal Remote Guns.  Interesting concept, but if it just pisses of the crook, then you will just get yourself into more hot water. What you really need is remote device that captures the perpetrator and keeps him/her restrained while the cops arrive. Kinda like Spiderman webbing them up against the wall. But giving them bruises and letting them get away is not the right solution, in my opinion.

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Oregon's bridges are in need of repair. But the state probably doesn't have enough money now. Money is being directed to supporting our ever growing homeless population, and now illegal migrants (not to mention the growing number of other migrants, who also need financial support). Plus crime, and the need to deal with criminals. And the growing number of unemployed who need benefits. And those wanting their free childcare. And Oregon Labor Bureau which will dismiss hundreds of workers if they don't get more money.

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I missed this but there is a drug that lets you grow teeth again.  The drug deactivates uterine sensitization-associated gene-1 (USAG-1) protein that suppresses tooth growth. 

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If this passes, inflation won't end anytime soon.  Kamala Harris wants to give selected groups $25,000 towards their first home. So this will make prices go up. Homes are money sinks, so she's facilitating people obtaining something that will drain more money out of their finances. If you can't afford to buy a home, you probably can't afford to maintain a home.

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Crime stats are down, but crime is actually up. Here's why.

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Nice summary why rent control doesn't work.  Not that politicians won't try it anyway, but they love to try to legislate wealth.

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Parts of Los Alamos, NM has lots of plutonium.  This is really bad stuff. And it's going to be very difficult to clean up.

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15 August 2024

What do you do when you're a small emergency department, and suddenly there's been a large mass shooting? This is what you do. Hats off to these guys.

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Urban birds, not rural birds, spread multi-drug resistant bacteria around.
Urban-dwelling species such as ducks, crows, gulls and geese had up to three times as many genetic markers associated with drug resistance as their avian counterparts from more remote places, researchers said.
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The law contains 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups, including one creating a Chief Diversity Officer at the National Science Foundation, and several prioritizing scientific cooperation with what it calls “minority-serving institutions.” A section called “Opportunity and Inclusion” instructs the Department of Commerce to work with minority-owned businesses and make sure chipmakers “increase the participation of economically disadvantaged individuals in the semiconductor workforce.”

requirements that chipmakers submit detailed plans to educate, employ, and train lots of women and people of color, as well as “justice-involved individuals,” more commonly known as ex-cons.
WTF? Democrats screw up everything, don't they?

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MIT prepared a list of ways AI could cause harm. There are already too many ways.

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Interesting that of all the stones in Stonehenge, the altar stone is uniquely different. It was brought to Salisbury plains from northeast Scotland. Why from there? What was so special?

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Nice article on how focused ultrasound is changing neurosurgery. It may be the way to treat bad essential tremor, instead of masking the symptom with benzodiazepines, which themselves may cause long-term harm.

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As incentives to further mine bitcoin decrease, people may stop holding it, abandoning it for something else. And when that happens, its value will plummet, as with all other fiat currency. It's only worth something if people believe that there is value to it.

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Microsoft AI can be an automatic phishing machine.  Many use Microsoft's CoPilot as a coding assistant tool. But hackers can use it gain access to your files and code.  Microsoft seems to be frequently having problems with security issues.  Yet so many companies trust them with mission critical operations. 

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The complicated history of how the next Dalai Lama is chosen.  Tenzin Gyatso, the current and 14th Dalai Lama is 89 years old. Time to make plans, and that's what's happening.

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Nerve fibres in the brain could generate quantum entanglement. Hey, maybe Roger Penrose was right. Maybe the origin of conscioueness involves processes at the quantum level.

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14 August 2024

Some timezones have really weird offsets.  Makes life difficult for programmers who have to take into account users in these areas.

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Just look at how the U.S. is doing compared with other OECD countries:

Shameful. This is Build Back Better? It's three years out now. Can't blame the COVID economy for this. If you couldn't solve it, you should have stepped aside and let someone more capable do it.

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Well that's good.  Dems and GOP agree that Measure 118 is bad. Even Kotek agrees with this, bless her heart.

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Beer sales are tanking, so 20% less hops are being planted this year. Everything economy-wise in Oregon seems to be tanking.

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DOJ may want to break up Google.  Maybe this is why Google is enabling "glitches" that favor Kamala Harris. Corruption everywhere.

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As expected, Portland city camping ordinance violators will go unpunished. Those citations will end up in the trash.  And the more that crime goes unpunished, more crime is encouraged.

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Seattle continues its steady decline. South Lake Union streetcars shut down. 
An electrical breakdown will force Seattle’s South Lake Union streetcars to stay in the maintenance yard indefinitely, because mechanics can’t get the right parts yet from overseas.
Another reason to avoid the city.

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Two-tiered justice. And remember those protestors who blocked Sea-Tac Airport road? Charges will be dropped.
Rogers also confirmed prosecutors would not refile charges against protesters who already had their cases dismissed because they couldn’t get a public defender. Freije said nine people couldn’t get public defenders and had their cases tossed as a result.
The city is falling apart.

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Lots of places on Earth are named entrances or gateways to some kind of hell. Of course Oregon has a few. There's also Hell's Canyon.

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13 August 2024

Plans are to create an interactive hologram of Alan Turing. Should be interesting, especially if we can't tell if it's a computer or a human.

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Portland is finally paying the piper. Who wants to invest in downtown Portland? Not many, it seems.

Portland’s apartment-construction slump is deepening to a level the city hasn’t experienced since the global financial crisis, according to new ECONorthwest projections.

The economics firm forecast Portland will field permits for 500 new multifamily units this year, the lowest tally since 2009, as so-called institutional investors such as insurance companies and pension funds balk at funding new construction.

Letting crime go unpunished, letting illegal drug use fester, higher taxes with nothing to show for it, more graffiti, stores, restaurants and nice shops closing. All that eventually has an impact. Why bother? Detroit, here we come.

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Sad trombone. Even San Francisco is paying the piper. The city is sinking in bad hotel debt.

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Lack of money and lack of planning.  Oregon Health Authority can't fix mental health crisis.

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So why should we? Nike CEO, like other CEOs, celebrities, pollute the skies with their carbon, and don't really care about it. I'll treat climate change like an urgent issue when those who say it is, really act like it is.  Until then....

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Barton said the county’s extradition requests for these foreign nationals have yet to be approved by the DOJ Office of International Affairs because the feds want Barton and the local sheriff to sign an “assurance letter” committing to share certain information with federal immigration authorities if/when these alleged criminals are released. The federal government has since said it would not extradite these suspects without the signed letter, but according to Barton, sharing this information would violate Oregon’s recently updated sanctuary law, which prohibits the sharing of information that could identify a person’s immigration status. 
Remind me again what Oregon is really "sanctuaring".

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Wallet Hub rates Oregon as the 9th worse state in the nation overall.  When it comes to personal safety, Oregon is the 2rd worst state.

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12 August 2024

Scientists discover that gluten enteropathy (celiac disease) occurs as at an earlier stage than previously thought. Even at the surface of the epithelial cell, CD4-positive T-cells are activated, and pre-digestion of gluten protein by bacterial enzymes enhances the process. The only way to avoid this reaction is not to eat gluten – easier said than done.

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Quanta Magazine talks about tensors. I hoped I'd finally learn what the physics tensors are, but they only discuss the simple high-dimensional matrix explanation that you hear about so often, and of which physicists always say "Well, that's close to what it is, but...." 
Then you read things like:
"Tensors are not generalizations or formalizations of vectors or matrices" (usually with exclamation points and raising of voice).
"A tensor is any multilinear map from a vector space to a scalar field."
"A tensor is a vector field that obeys the rules of tensor calculus."
Yeah, real helpful.

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Nutrition science can be so inexact. Here's an article that addresses how much cheese should be in your diet. The short answer is, they don't know, and reasonable amounts are probably OK.

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Now young people have to worry about accelerated aging along with their turbo cancers. And why do so many people seem to have autoimmune diseases now? Gee, what could it be? Climate change?

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I saw this article about American IQs dropping over the past couple of decades. Here's the study.  What's remarkable to me is that over time, the IQ score of college women has decreased to the level of high school women back in 2006.  By now, it's probably even lower.

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Do people really think like this?  The media has been upset about a comment made about "single childless cat ladies". Ouch. But then read this article. I wonder if this thinking is common, or considered normal.

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What's going on at Seattle Childrens Hospital? Holy cow, the east coast Lefty woke mind virus has invaded Seattle. Really sad for those docs.

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Lenacapavir has been successful.  Kudos to those women in Africa who agreed to be subjects for the HIV vaccine. Hope they truly enjoy the benefits of being immunized.

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I saw this article in Financial Times – Kamala Harris is more trusted than Donald Trump on the US economy. I thought, Really? Let's see where that came from, because it goes against all intuition.  Nope, no data. Here's the AI summary of this article:

So it's really just editorial, not a real analysis. And then they published an editorial about why the writer is no longer interested in a Tesla. Here's the AI summary:

What the hell is going on at FInancial Times? Or with quality media in general?

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Take a look at what Measure 118 is all about? What a sad waste of money.  And what a sure way to drive away whatever business Oregon has left.

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Here's some promising news on voter registrations, although Oregon needs work.

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11 August 2024

Well well.  Tina Kotek is the least popular governor in the nation.  Just like her predecessor. No surprise there. So why does she and her party keep winning? Uninformed voters in the state's biggest cities? Cheating? Both? Does she represent all of Oregon? Or just some of it?

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Coding with AI. "I'm never going back."  Yup, I feel the same way. You may hesitate, thinking that it's cheating, but you learn a whole lot of things that you never knew. It's like having a smart colleague advising you and giving you helpful tips and tricks. I'm never going back either.

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A speech prosthesis in the hippocampus and frontal lobe. What?? I gotta see how this works, but I can't get access to this article. It converts impulses from the anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortices, and hippocampus, and converts them into vocalizations. I suspect that machine learning was used and wonder which ones.  Pretty cool tech.
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Chinese drones are being used to remove trash from Mt. Everest.  That'll help clean things up a bit.

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This is why so many people think that everyone agrees with them. Tiktok makes you think that, and feeds your ego. But Facebook has been doing that as well for years, so it's not something new.  This sure explains the stark political divide we see.

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Another one bites the dust. Dosha is closing after two decades. Yeah, in the place where they're located, there probably aren't many who want to risk getting the latest cosmetics and getting pampered. Those were for the better days. The article doesn't say where they're going. Where would they go? I don't see the Pearl District as being any better. Lake Oswego has wealthy residents, but they were probably looking for urbanites looking to give themselves a treat. I don't see L.O. ladies being the NYC East Central Park types. Not even West Linn. Downtown Beaverton isn't there yet, and with the shelters that are being built downtown, I would be careful about relocating there, too.

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Chronic anxiety increases dementia risk, but chronic benzodiazepines usage really increases dementia risk. So if you have chronic anxiety, look for other solutions for relief.

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10 August 2024

Today is supposedly Chinese Valentine's Day. Because it's the 7th day of the 7th month in the lunar calendar. First time in my life I'm hearing this. Oh well. Is it really a thing? Do Chinese women really care?

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The "Oregon Rebate" (more truthfully known as stealing something that doesn't belong to you) is now $1600 instead of the original $750.  Because they miscalculated what raising taxes by 3% would be. They're even happier about the larger amount, but theft is theft. Taxes should be collected just for security and infrastructure maintenance and improvement. Not to direct behavior. Not to give people more disposable income to spend. Oregon lawmakers would do well to read Davy Crockett's letter Not Yours to Give.

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Classical music can synch the depressed brain. Currently I'm reading the series of music and its ancient meaning by Ted Gioia, the Honest Broker. Being able to affect the brain is not limited to classical music. I am impressed by what music can do to affect thinking.

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Hawaiian Electric is now admitting that the $4 billion Lahaina settlement is going to be hard on them to pay, but they don't expect that they'll raise rates to get the money for it. They're hoping that their investments will do well to earn them the money to pay it off. Boy, that's risky. And I would bet those investment were earmarked for other things. I think rates will have to increase.

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Boy, I'd hate to lose a job in Oregon with the state this incompetent. Is it because they don't have enough competent workers? Or is it because they just don't have money available to give away, so they stall? 

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Speaking of the economy, Peter Schiff thinks we're going to see a great downturn again. Schiff has said this a lot, so in a sense, this is not news. Marketwatch.com posted two articles:
I think Powell should hold off on lowering interest rates, because inflation is still present, and lowering interest rates makes sense when a hot economy cools off, not when a struggling economy starts to enter stagflation. Yes, higher interest rates made people poorer and so there is less demand, and therefore, less demand-pull inflation. But that's not a sign of health.  The cure is to fix the underlying cause, which is release restrictions on oil and natural gas, for starters.

Here's one of Biden's economic advisors: Jared Bernstein. Listen to his grasp of what the Fed does.
Now listen to this video by El Salvador's Tayib Bukele, who clearly knows a lot more than Jared.
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Climate science is inexact and cannot make accurate predictions. Certainly not ready to get billions in support, when we don't even know how much it would cause the changes they want to see.
And now, there are reports that we have seen the coldest nights on record.  Yet one has to read news from outside the mainstream media to learn about this. Because one-sided reporting is the norm now.

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How has Seattle changed since 2020?  Redditors asked themselves this question, and everyone reports that they have to pay a lot more, and that the city has gone to shit and there is more crime because of lack of enforcement of the law. But anyone want to bet that these "smart people" are still going to vote Democrat?  What will it take to make them see clearly?

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CalTech scientists find a way to monitor blood pressure continuously in a non-invasive way.  It's 2024, but well, better late than never.

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9 August 2024

The cancer-predicting blood test Grail got a lot of hype several years ago.  Now, there's concern that maybe it's not as good as initially thought.  

Grail is facing a class action lawsuit in the US. Embittered investors, faced with steep losses, claim the company exaggerated Galleri's effectiveness in order to increase share price.

Oh-oh.

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Sugar-substitute erythritol may enhance platelet aggregation, leading to strokes. All the sugar substitutes are flawed. Except maybe monkfruit sweetener, which actually tastes pretty close to sugar. That's the only one I'll use.

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A substance, compound DDL-920, was shown (in mice) to "restore cognition, memory in Alzheimer’s disease".  Sounds promising, but many a drug has failed phase III clinical trials. Don't get too excited yet.

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Sounds like Gilligan's Island. These two were supposed to be in space for only 8 days. Now they can't return until 2025, earliest.  Jeez.

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Nice review of Universal Basic Income, and why it fails. The people that need to read it, probably won't.

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