27 September 2025

How to spot a genius. Yeah, it's true that some geniuses are born in areas where they can't realize their full potential, but you can't get too caught up with that. It's really up to teachers, who are exposed to these children, that bear the responsibility of recognizing talent and nurturing it. This is why I'm upset at Oregon and Washington canceling programs for gifted kids. Just so that there is "equity".

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Ex–Google CEO Eric Schmidt warns U.S. tech workers: Competing with China’s grueling 12-hour workdays means sacrificing work-life balanc.  Yeah, but the problem is, the workers are not necessarily interested in helping Google beat China. They're interested in getting rich. If Google doesn't enrich its workforce, they won't care. They'll just figure it's Google's problem.

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Great!  Oregon lottery winners can remain anonymous. Well, now I'll play.

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Here's a list of all the places Starbucks is closing. There's a lot in the West Coast states. Now the rioters will have to find some other business to trash that represents "The Man". Starbucks was always the choice for the "Destroy Capitalism!" crowd.

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Well it finally happened.  The AI world is no longer sweet and innocent.  Someone hijacked an MCP email server, and was found to have all emails coming through send out a copy to a secret email address.

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DEI is dead. White men now fill majority of new S&P 500 board seats for first time since 2017.  Merit matters once again.

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Make Portland Great Again. Trump has ordered the military to come to the aid of Portland. We’ve been off Trump's radar for so long. No longer. And it's interesting that Hegseth is in charge, not Pam Bondi. He means business. It worked for D.C. Hopefully it will work for Portland.

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26 September 2025

Well now the makers of Tylenol are worried about its effects on autism. Turns out they had concerns for years but did not make it known, so that a lot of people were taken by surprise and were skeptical at first. I'm still not convinced that this is the main cause of ASD, but the impact of acetaminophen shouldn't be discounted as was initially done by the uninformed. Now that I learned that acetaminophen acts directly on the brain to relieve pain, I am more hesitant to use it. I don't think we really know everything there is to know about this drug. 

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The bad actors from Russia, Pakistan, and Eastern Europe used the American health care system like their "personal piggy bank," the Department of Justice's Acting Criminal Division leader, Matthew Galeotti, said. He said that "this was a staggering breach of trust" and they "will prosecute these criminals as aggressively as we would any drug dealer because that's exactly what they are."
DOGE uncovered this. And to think that many people think that converting our entire healthcare system into one run by the federal government is going to solve all its problems. The federal government should not be running healthcare insurance – I stand by that. There is no incentive to lower cost, save on expenses, or to provide quality service. All these people see it as is an unlimited source of money to lower insurance premiums. There are better ways to do this, but the public is so uninformed on so many things.

Relevant to this is that the Dems want more money allocated to keep Obamacare running. Obamacare is a clear example that government-run healthcare will be doomed to bankruptcy. It's a money-sink. Let it die, like all the other Obama policies. 

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This would be cool. Shoplifters might be pursued by drones. This would help in getting them identified and apprehended. Make it so!

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Simon Willison posted a discussion about how AI agents, coupled with the potential for prompt injection, connections to untrusted content and access to people's confidential information could lead to a disaster. Because LLMs obey commands, and can't always tell who is issuing them, and whether it's forbidden by guardrails or not. It's too easy for a malcontent or rogue government to prompt-inject surreptitiously and cause an AI agent to disclose something it shouldn't have. Even The Economist picked up on it, good for them.

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I'm confused. I read this yesterday about the 2026 Porsche Cayenne EV SUV having wireless charging. Now I read the Porsche is giving up EVs for gas-powered vehicles again. The news cycle – it's so fast.

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All those jobs! Seattle and Portland are going to see a major reduction in Starbucks stores. Yes, Starbucks has had enough of their cafés always being the target whenever there's a street protest. Yep, Portland and Seattle cannot have nice things anymore. CEO Niccol wants to bring back the French café atmosphere that Howard Schulz loved. 
Niccol said a review of the company’s North American coffee shop portfolio identified stores that were “unable to create the physical environment our customers and partners expect, or where we don’t see a path to financial performance.”
Yeah, you can't do that in downtown Portland or Seattle. It's a sad fact that modern Blue cities don't deserve Parisian cafés or other fruits of civilized life.

Brian Dahlgren finds that 40% of the homeless are transplants from somewhere else. And Keith Wilson is going to force the City to pay for their homes. Portland is providing social services for other states' homeless, basically. No wonder they are out of money. 

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Here's a revealing map of Oregon's historic wave of job cuts and layoffs. And all the city and state leaders are steadfast in maintaining their policies which will drive the state into economic and social ruin. This isn't leadership.

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Kotek freezes all state travel … except her $200K Asia trip.  What's the purpose of this trip? Why bring your spouse?

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Portlanders are finding that rents are increasing faster than wage growth. Is it time for another labor union strike?

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But they said it was safe now. Ice Cube’s tour bus catches fire in downtown Portland.  It just "caught fire". All by itself? Welcome to Portland, Ice Cube.

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I, too, could be worth several trillion dollars if someone gave me a trillion dollars first.

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How do you live long?. Good genes and good bacteria. Here's the multiomics profile of a 117 year old woman.  She had a lot of Bifidobacteria in her gut.

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25 September 2025

Happy Triple Square Day.  Today is 32/52/452  = 9/25/2025.  We don't be alive for the next one.

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The 2026 Porsche Cayenne EV will have wireless charging. I am still waiting for someone to offer better batteries rather than the standard lithium-based batteries that take hours to charge. Then we wouldn't have to have charging mats, etc.

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Google is now admitting that it was censoring COVID-19 information at the behest of the Biden administration.  But it's too late. It's 2025 now, and Google is just doing this because it's now safe to say this, because Trump is in power. We were right to be afraid of Big Tech's control over information, especially Google.

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A warning to those who depend on Tor for illicit activity. Determining the identity of a Tor user is possible if the government really wants to know.

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Why did psilocybe mushrooms evolve to produce psychedelic toxins twice? I didn't know that the presence of bluish bruising is a sign of the presence of psilocybin, due to the breakdown products.

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Dan Brown has a new book out, Secret of Secrets. This one doesn't deal with ancient mysteries. The most favorable review I found is the one from LA Times, which I linked to. I read books like this to learn new things, and I might check it out, not so much for the plot, but to discover things and links I wasn't aware of.

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Another one bites the dust.  A woke bookstore in New York City's lower east side closes after trying to offer a concentrated version of Portland, like harm reduction, Narcan, and other neo-hippie offerings. Turns out it just lured gronks and criddlers, and paying customers stopped showing up. It wasn't able to stay afloat longer with NGO money or taxes, so it crashed a lot sooner. Just look at it – a Portlander would feel right at home.

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TriMet wants to know why you aren't riding their buses anymore. They can't keep those mostly empty buses riding around anymore. 
Portland business continue to struggle.  They're going to implement some sort of "storefront support". Because people still don't want to go into the City. Yeah, wonder why?


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Math fraud is out of control. 
For example, based on its database, the market leader for metrics, Clarivate Inc., calculated in 2019 that the university with the most world-class researchers in mathematics is a university in Taiwan -- where mathematics is not even offered as a subject. Megajournals, which print anything as long as the authors pay for it, now publish more articles per year than all reputable mathematics journals (which do not require payment) combined. Fraudsters anonymously offer everything that influences key figures for sale, from articles to citations, in exchange for payment.
It's not just math. It's science in general. Only reputable journals matter.

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Another large Oregon business closing: Roseburg Forest Products. 100 to be laid off. Really too bad. 
And Washington state realizes that it will bring in $903 million less than expected over the next four years.  Yup, so it's "cutting services and approving a sweeping package of additional taxes" to make up for the deficit.

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24 September 2025

nVIDIA, OpenAI, Oracle all stand to benefit from the Stargate datacenter project. (I wish they picked a different name. I keep getting it confused with Elon Musk's Starbase.). But some think that it's all just a big circle-jerk. Five datacenters – none in Oregon or Washington. Probably just as well. Did you see how ugly those things are. Plus, it'll suck electricity and water and provide very few jobs.  Yeah, America's top companies keep talking about AI but can't provide any upsides.

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Even light alcohol increases dementia risk. Protect your brain. It's the only one you have.

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Chinese workers are starting to abandon Silicon Valley and return to China. These Chinese "pioneers" will eventually make it difficult for anyone to trust Chinese workers. Why hire them, teach them, put them in positions of responsibility? When at the first sign of adversity, they will leave and take their training and knowledge with them? "Thanks for the experience, you dumb Americans!" Didn't the Japanese get put in internment camps for fear of this happening? So what should be done?

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Rules of Thumb for every occasion.

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This is ridiculous.  About 18% of U.S. medical residency positions in 2025 were filled by non-residents, which typically includes H-1B and J-1 visa holders.  How crazy is that?  This broken system needs to be fixed ASAP.

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A new study provides evidence that caffeine can increase how long people persist in trying to complete difficult or unsolvable tasks, and this effect is especially pronounced in people who have recently experienced stress.  I can vouch for this. 

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It looks like the vast majority of Oregonians aren't in favor of Tina Kotek's transportation tax.  60% find it hard to cover $400 (how they gonna pay Kotek’s $300 gas tax?)

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Hawaii Governor Josh Green issues emergency proclamation to protect COVID vaccine access.  What is with Democrat governors that they think the COVID mRNA vax is so sacrosanct that access is to be secured at all costs? You would think that RFK Jr was going to take antibiotics off the market, or something.  C'mon, it's estimated that 20% of the U.S. population (~ 66 million) have never been vaccinated against SARS-CoV2 (myself included), and we're doing just fine.

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The Bee nails it.

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23 September 2025

nVIDIA and OpenAI want the smartest people for their companies. Who wouldn't? I keep hearing about how the H-1B visas are preventing American graduates from getting jobs, but since I'm never in the hiring departments, I wouldn't really know what the field looks like.  Then I see this article: American students are getting dumber.

Come on, kids. Trump can only do so much to help you guys get jobs. It's up to you all to be smarter. Then you read misinformation on Reddit like this. The guy came on a student visa, not an H-1B visa. Trump isn't touching those, nor is he touching genius visas. 

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So many professors in the South are leaving, because they can't get their way on DEI, gender and race-based education. Wow, the education system has been festering for such a long time. The South is already perceived as being the place to go to avoid woke indoctrination. Certainly to avoid activist protests. The cleansing will be good.

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It happened to Geoffrey Hinton, and it appears to be happening to other couples as well. People are using ChatGPT to attack their spouses, leading to divorces. It's probably easy to get an agreeable chatbot to take your side that your anger is justified and that the other person is unreasonable. It shouldn't be something that leads to breaking apart human relationships, though. We have enough of that already.

And AI use increased unethical behavior.

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Here's another medical startup using AI.  I love this quote:
“Our focus is really on what we can do to pull the doctor out of the visit,” says Jared Goodner, Akido’s CTO."
Yeah, sounds like a winner.  /sarc.

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The rise of conspiracy physics. I was wondering when others would take notice. I used to think the YouTube videos popularizing physics was beneficial, but lately it's been bizarre, and mainly rants. And I don't know enough about advanced physics to know who is telling the truth.

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Interesting idea. Roger Penrose is supporting an effort to archive recordings of the world's geniuses as they describe the discovery process that led to their math and scientific breakthroughs.

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Lars Larson asks: Is the City of Portland permanently broke?  I don't know about permanently, but it will be for a long time. 

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22 September 2025

Happy Autumnal Equinox!

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Yikes. Michigan is seeking to ban VPN usage. Something about "Anticorruption of Public Morals Act".  They say it's the Republicans that want this, but true Republicans don't want to take away your freedom. These are likely the same RINOs that supports vaccine papers, etc. This won't work – give it up.

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Here's map of many different musical genres that you can explore and sample. It's called Every Noise at Once.

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This is why legislators aren't good at passing laws legalizing marijuana for recreational use. They don't take care of loopholes. It just made stuff like this proliferate. Now people are using delta-8 THC in places where delta-9 THC is still illegal, because that's all the law covered.

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Acesulfame-K is one of the safer non-caloric sweeteners. It's funny how just about all these sweeteners were discovered by accident.

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Here's another story of how using AI helped a patient to a diagnosis.  This guy had six feet of small intestine removed, and I call bluff that he was never told about short-bowel syndrome. I am sure he got a flyer telling him about foods to avoid or watch for after he had surgery. He probably didn't read it. And I can't believe he saw nutritionists and gastroenterologists who ALL missed the cause of his ailments. This is not some rare syndrome – it's short bowel syndrome. Who could have missed it??? But still, the point is about doctors not using AI tools, and that's another discussion.

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Oh-oh.  A Mysterious Jupiter-Sized Planet Is Heading Toward Our Solar Neighborhood. Quick, before the Democrats start giving the inhabitants benefits and free housing.

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Disturbing. Oregon doesn't want people know how many genital mutilating surgeries they've been doing. They're afraid it might be used for political purposes. Really? What would make us think that?

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Heh.

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21 September 2025

There are three AI bubbles. I'm not sure that they are bubbles. This is the direction we need to go. The question is only whether it can be achieved. This is why I'm invested in nuclear as well.  Did you see how these two stocks shot up recently (NuScale (SMR) or NANO Nuclear Energy (NNE))? Wow!

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Scientists Say a Newly Discovered Immune Cell May Drive Inflammation as We Age.  Wow, when I took immunology way back when, there were just a handful of known immune cells. Now there over a dozen! The immune system is complex, as it should be.

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The Metaculus Cup is an award to forecasters, and an AI model won eighth place, even beating humans. I can see that. But will it keep winning? Who's going to feed it the right data?  And how often?  Until I see repeated success, I'm going to call this a one-off.

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Here's a list of imminent layoffs: Washington and Oregon.  Since the law says you have to give people a lot of advance notice, it's public knowledge now. There's a lot of people slated to be jobless. It's going to hurt both states, and the new H-1B visa laws are going to trigger a new batch of layoffs, too. Just in time for the holidays.

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What? Google is pinching pennies? What happened? They were supposed to be rich. What does this say about the tech sector? Or is it just Google?

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Join the club. Well, well, now the Kaiser healthcare workers are striking. I guess they were jealous that OHSU, Providence and Legacy workers were getting all the strike action. So why not? Let's all raise hospital expenses and put Oregon's healthcare industry and the region's largest employers out of business.  Or make them suitable takeover targets.

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The West Coast Vaccine Alliance announced that anyone can get the vax if they want it.  But why would anyone want more mRNA gene therapy injected into them, increasing their risk for myocarditis and sudden death, without any real meaningful benefit from infection with COVID-19? Are the pharmacists going to risk their licenses, because they may not have liability protection. It's not like Oregon has extra money lying around to cover this. It's amazing that some doctors still remain sold on the benefits of the mRNA vax. Get the Novavax vaccine if you must. It's not completely free of side-effects, but at least it's not gene therapy. 

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In 2024, Oregon’s Medicaid Insurers Got a 3.4% Rate Bump. Their Costs Jumped 10%. Yeah, who didn't see that coming. More people are going on Medicaid because that's all they can afford. Of course, expenses will increase.

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Gordon’s Fireplace Building is Again Headed for Auction. I'm going to miss that symbol of Portland when it comes down. It so represented what the city has become better than the Elk Statue or Big Pink. The anarchy. The filth. The impotence of law enforcement. The ineptitude of city leadership. All in one ugly building.

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Is it true that ~30% of medical residency slots are filled by international graduates on H-1B visas? That's insane. Why can't we fill those slots with American medical school graduates? This needs to change, and should have been done sooner. Also side note, don't use Grok to fact-check. It wasn't designed for that purpose.

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Yes, I'm all for making Standard Time permanent. Let's do it finally.

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For computer science, if you just graduate with a degree and nothing else, you’re going to be working at McDonald’s....That’s just a reality; this isn’t an overstatement.
Unbelievable. CS schools really need to change, but I bet the professors don't know how to teach the new stuff.

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LLMs are bad at some simple tasks. Like list comparison.  This could be a tokenization problem. Needs further study.

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Your earwax could be the basis for a new class of diagnostic tests. It's a way to get body cells sampled for analysis. Kinda messy, though. Why not stick with blood tests?

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Portland relies on Urban Alchemy for a lot of homeless services, but the company seems to be mismanaged.  
San Francisco officials accused the company of having “knowingly overspent” hundreds of thousands on pay bumps last fiscal year, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. 
Of course, it's the Homeless Industrial Complex. They don't want homelessness to end. It would mean the end of their business model. Mayor Keith Wilson loves them, though. Thinks they're doing a great job.

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Portland ranks 22nd in U.S. for income growth, outpacing national average. It seems to be good news, until you realize that it's because all the hospital employees go on strike for higher wages, and they win. Won't be forever, though.

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20 September 2025

Alcohol can damage the liver so that it is unable to repair, even after one stops drinking.  RNA splicing capability is permanently impaired, making repair impossible. Explains why some people seems to develop bad cirrhosis while others seems to do OK for a while longer before it hits. 

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How accurate is your calculator?

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Taking ergocalciferol (vitamin D2) will lower your levels of cholecalciferol (vitamin D3), which is what you really want elevated. Another reason to take cholecalciferol.

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I’ve spoken to dozens of employees over the past few months, and they all told me that morale inside Microsoft is at an all-time low. If there’s fear at the top of Microsoft, then employees will undoubtedly feel that through the constant rounds of layoffs and change. It’s why I said in July that Microsoft risks creating a culture of fear.
Microsoft CEO Concerned AI Will Destroy the Entire Company.  Yeah, someone was talking about this. 
It takes several millions to train each model, and it takes months to train. So to avoid being left behind, you train multiple models at once.
Then when you're done, people can use it for free or for very low cost. I never understood how that made sense.
Of course you can't stop, because OpenAI or Anthropic or China will beat you.
It's a new rollercoaster of expenses that didn't exist before. And companies can't get off.  
So I can understand why Microsoft is scared. It's a new money sink. But they don't dare stop. 

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Holy crap! Doctors almost harvested the organs of a man who was not dead. Someone needs to revise their organ donor protocols, that's for sure.

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Apparently in Washington state, they don't hide it anymore.  If you are conservative, you don't get hired. They don't attempt to hide it.

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Here it is! They got the video of the guy who jumped the open ramp of the University bridge in Seattle. I was expecting Dukes of Hazzard, but was kinda disappointed. They left the cops throwing their caps on the ground, though. Legend.

And here's more proof that Seattle is a city in decline. The thieves are taking the city apart, copper wire by copper wire. 

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iPhone 17 buyers are noticing that the paint scratches easily, especially the deep blue color. Could it be because all the production moved to India?

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Bad AI.  HMSA in Hawaii will use AI to make insurance coverage determinations. They're calling it the Experience Cube.
An intelligent data hub that brings together disparate sources of information into a single source of truth.
Yeah, right. Good luck with your new system. The folks in Hawaii should read this article.

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Why we don't trust doctors and scientists anymore.
The medical profession has lost its mind and is so fixating on deviant sex. I can't believe that so much time and effort has gone into promoting sex change and genital mutilation, and basically everything that the transgender coalition wants. Who would have thought this would be the state of "mainstream" medicine, say twenty years ago. What nonsense and craziness.

And here's a study that supposedly links the ability to critically identify health misinformation with political ideology.  Paper here. Supposedly conservatives are less likely to be able to spot bad health information when they see it. The study, of course, is heavily weighted to COVID matters specific to ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. There are no questions regarding transgender nonsense or with regard to the mRNA vaccines. Those are examples of medical misinformation. I would consider this study heavily biased, and am surprised it passed peer review. 

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Well, much to the dismay of certain people, "just by telling somebody that their intelligence can grow if they work hard, it does not actually grow". Isn't this obvious?

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North Portlanders are finding that having a homeless shelter in their neighborhood increased vandalism and drug use.  Really? We were told this wouldn't happen.

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19 September 2025

Wow, nobody wants today's college grads.  

They told us that giving scholarships to kids for college was an "investment in our country's future" or something like that. And now the want us to pay off their student loans? 

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Canary in the coal mine: With just days of cash left, remote California hospital nears crisis point. Sure, Bernie can say that healthcare is a human right, but that doesn't match reality. This may come to pass for some Oregon hospitals.

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18 September 2025

Isaac is a multimodal AI that specializes in interpreting features on images and performing inference on them. I gave it a picture of a meal, and it calculated the caloric content and glycemic index. It's a 2 billion parameter model – quite small, and could fit in a mobile phone. This could be a game changer for people with diabetes.

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The editor who allowed this article to be published was fired. It's called Carbon dioxide and a warming climate are not problems. Is that science, when you disallow viewpoints countering the narrative?

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John Cook posted a set of mental math tricks to help you look like Feynman. Just the thing to impress the girls at parties.

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Some scientists are working to bring back the dodo bird.  Proof of concept?  This is going to be done by a company that specialized in this sort of thing: Colossal Biosciences. They already brought back the dire wolf, but they'll use CRISPR technology to add adaptive diversity so that the resurrected animals don't die so easily. 

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Trump promised No Tax on Tips. Oregon Democrats are scheming to take it away. Oregonians will finally get to know how well the Dem party cares about them.

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Seattle Childrens Hospital is going to lay off 150 staffers. They'll be mostly administrators. Seattle is facing the same headwinds as Oregon hospitals. Providence lost $260 million in the last quarter.  Gone are the Obamacare heydays. 
It's like the City of Portland, facing their own cash crunch. It's all due to the same underlying problem, really. Think about it.

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Ugh, Dean Sidelinger is back, telling the Oregon Health Authority to be pro-vax again. Just when I thought I didn't have to worry about that guy again. It's still unclear to me if pharmacies are going to participate in this charade. 

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Anxiety Grows at Knight Cancer Institute as Leaders Float Big Budget Cuts. Apparently the Knight gift money is going to restricted expenses, and not to fund and support existing programs.

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