6 August 2025

Apple is finally changing the hard drive icon after 20 years. Now it will look like an SSD drive, which some people won't recognize. So much for skeuomorphism.

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It's kind of on brand that Gen X is overlooked.  Another article describing how GenX is being overlooked. They were the generation that said "whatever" with the eye-roll. Now, it appears people are saying that about them.

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The rollback on renewable energy is going to be hard on Oregon's economy, since Oregon went heavily in that direction. But renewable energy never made sense, and only made people feel good. The blight on the landscape was terrible. And no one talked about how much carbon was consumed in producing solar panels and windmill blades and wind turbines. If carbon is the concern, we should focus on making emissions cleaner. Oh, we did. And carbon emissions in the United States went down. We're not the problem, are we?

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Someone posted Lewis Thomas' thoughts on hearing Mahler's Ninth Symphony as he got older. How the evocations of death became harder to listen to. For me, it's the ending of Mahler's Tragic Symphony (the 6th). When the threat of doom seems to fade away, into the calming trombones, which are not quite sweet and reassuring, but they seem to signal that the danger has passed. You begin to relax, and then just when you think all is OK, the Hammer of Doom strikes again. Somehow, I can't forget that.

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5 August 2025

I missed this back in March, but gepotidacin, a triazaacenaphthylene, was approved for uncomplicated UTI in women. It's a topo IV inhibitor and DNA gyrase inhibitor, which is interesting. Here's a nice review. Seems to be similar to ciprofloxacin in it's dosing and side-effect profile.

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Even Disney was thinking about using AI-actors instead of real ones. But they chickened out at the last minute.

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The cancer centers, QIMR Berghofer Institute and even the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Australia suspected they had a fake cancer researcher, but did nothing to stop him because he was raking in a lot of money. PNAS just put out a report stating that scientific research fraud is escalating. 

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Semaglutide can reverse aging by about 3 years. The test was done on subjects with HIV-associated lipohypertrophy, so one has to be careful. But it probably pertains to others as well. So it's like metformin.

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Of course. The UK is going to go after VPN users. Good luck with that. And how will they defeat those who use Tor? Dissidents have been eluding authorities for years.

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the subsidized group worked somewhat less, devoted a bit more time to leisure activities, and spent more money on health care without seeing significantly improved health outcomes. 
It just gives people more unearned leisure time and spending money.

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Joining the open source world. OpenAI released two open-source models, gpt-oss-20b and -120b. Fun!
And speaking of which, one of the few things Tina Kotek did right: get some of Jensen Huang's money to introduce AI into schools. Don't screw it up, Tina, and mandate DEI programs that exclude Asians. But why did it have to be built in Corvallis? Not the right place. Shoulda built it in Hillsboro.

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Why are physicians getting paid less while more is demanded of them? Blame it on Baumol's Cost Disease. Doctors have little control over their destiny these days.

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Cool. AI can pick out a subtle brain tumor in an MRI scan. It can also spot a hiker's helmet in mountainous terrain.

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WTF??? In Oregon, Medicaid won't cover tummy-tuck sugery, unless it's for trangenders. What does transgender have to do with the need to have this done? Unlike Medicare, Medicaid is a joint federal-state run insurance plan. So idiotic restrictions like this get put into place. And since the Medicaid money isn't coming in, Oregon is spending $1.9 million to get as many as they can onto private insurance.

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Trump's tax bill will cut Oregon's revenue by $1 billion in the next two years.  Oregon calculates your taxable income based on what the federal taxable income is, so having a lower federal taxable income hurts Oregon revenue. Can you guess what will happen next?

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4 August 2025

Southern Oregon University is in dire financial straits. Reminds me of Marylhurst University. I think we are going to see a general decline in the university business model. There were way too many of these, and all they seem to do in entrap people into debt situations.  And things are going to get tough for folks that still have student loans that they "forgot" to pay off during the Biden administration.

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7 dire economic warnings facing Oregon. In 2004, the region was so hot. Still coming off the dotcom boom, Portland was a popular destination for smart people, who made people think the city could be another Seattle or an outpost of Bay Area glory. Now, it's a dumpster, full of homeless and druggies, run by a city government that is clueless, but doesn't realize it. They went easy on crime, encouraged mind-destroying drugs, shackled the police, let protestors ruin the city, and taxed everyone to their limit. There's increasingly less of the city to enjoy, despite the high taxes. The mayor wants to uglify the city with shelters popping up everywhere. Nobody is stopping him. And Portland shit isn't staying in Portland, unfortunately. Beaverton and Gresham are experiencing it as well.

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Here's some of the bills passed in Salem recently. The one that caught my eye was SB 426, which 
...hold(s) homeowners financially liable if they are cheated by a contractor who doesn’t properly pay his workers. That means when you pay a contractor $200,000 to build a house, if the contractor doesn’t pay his workers and leaves town, the property owner is responsible, in part, for paying the entire $200,000 again.
I wonder if you could demand a clause be inserted protecting you from this sort of thing.

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Anthropic's CEO is upset about the way Mark Zuckerberg is changing corporate culture, making certain AI engineers and researchers super wealthy while others can only watch. He's pleased that Zuck was unable to poach any of Anthropic's engineers, but expectations are changed. People will demand more.

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Academia unmasked. Even in academics, there is bias and corruption. And it is not the place to be if you are prone to mental illness and have a weak mental constitution.

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Boy I missed this when it came out last year: Noncanonical inheritance of phenotypic information by protein amyloids. Such a nondescript title of a major discovery. Here is a more approachable summary of what this paper means. Certain amyloid proteins can effectively pass on traits to offspring in a manner that does not require DNA or RNA. Just protein. People continue to discover new stuff.

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3 August 2025

Physicians are removing themselves from Medicare. I'm glad they're doing this. There also needs to be an alternative to Obamacare, too, but there's nothing yet out there except concierge medicine.

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Coursera is no longer going to let you access their courses without paying for it. One used to be able to access the course material for free, and just not get a certificate for it, but now you can't even do that.

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This is why I don't trust cloud storage for mission-critical stuff. I use pCloud for convenience, but I'd never put my life's work on the cloud. Or irreplaceable items. All this guy can do is issue negative publicity for how ill he was treated.

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2 August 2025

Tim Cook talks to Apple employees. About AI woes. Not sure what the plans are, and it seems like most of the talk was just "we did it before, we'll do it again".  Hope so.

But maybe he's not the only one out of ideas. Maybe Zuck is out of ideas, too. He's been poaching various people from different companies, probably hoping that a good idea will come up. Could be. Maybe.

And Anthropic revoked OpenAI's access to Claude. Probably a safe move, but it proves Andrew Ng's thoughts that closed silos will hamper American AI research, and allow China to dominate. We didn't fight amongst ourselves in AI's early days. Everyone shared their work. But now, there's money to be made. 

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Yikes. ChatGPT users sharing private and sensitive information unintentionally sent their chat sessions to the Internet to be indexed by Google. Use Big tech at your risk. They don't care about your privacy. I feel sorry for the people affected, but sheesh. C'mon people. 

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This is wild. It might be possible to detect when videos are manipulated or AI fakes. It uses encrypted lighting as a watermark.  Watch the video in the link – the video makes it all clear.

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Edge case. Britain's most tattooed man can't use age verification apps because his tattoos make it look like he's wearing a mask. Live on the edge, fail on the edge. Use a VPN, guy. At least you don't live in Russia. Yet. 

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Intel worker went nuts and threatened others. This is really sad, and I wouldn't be surprised if others experience the same thing. Intel's failure isn't Oregon's fault, but losing your job in Oregon is especially painful. Here's an editorial detailing Oregon's doom loop. 

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Portland Mayor Keith Wilson looks at this situation very differently. “In the shelters that we’ve opened, we’ve seen a reduction in crime, we’ve seen an increase in business.

Sure, Keith. Less crime near a homeless shelter. Let's put one near your home. So tone deaf.

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1 August 2025

Happy Lammas Day.

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The UK's General Medical Council is blocking doctors from speaking freely about COVID-19. This was also a dangerous phenomenon in the U.S.   Doctors have lost a lot of clout in the past two decades, and I fear that this will affect quality of care, as doctors prefer to stick with safe narratives when recommending treatment, instead of going with what their training tells them. It's unclear how AI will affect this. 

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Et tu, Nordstrom?. The CEO of Nordstrom hints that he might pull out of downtown Portland, as it's harder to function there. When, oh when, will the City get the hint?

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Andrew Yang and Yann Le Cun think that China will surpass the U.S. in AI tech leadership. Because China is open source and the U.S. is closed source. Being closed-source hasn't stopped the pharmaceutical industry, though. I think the root of the issue lies elsewhere.

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Why is South Korean and Japanese sunscreen better than U.S. sunscreen? You can still get South Korean sunscreen on Amazon, but the brands I used to buy are no longer listed. 

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Encore anxiety. Something else to be anxious about. As if you didn't have enough already.

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Facebook offered a VPN, called Onavo. But it wasn't meant to protect your privacy. It was a surveillance tool, allowing Facebook to see what competing apps you were using. Why do people trust Zuckerberg and Meta apps? 

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31 July 2025

If you're interested in longevity research (or rejuvenation research), this site has been updated recently.  Also VC-backed longevity startups are dying. 

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St. Paul, Minnesota got hacked really bad. So bad they had to call in the National Guard. I've not heard of the NG being called in before. What are those soldiers going to do?

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I'll admit, I've not heard of broetry before.  Seems like I read this stuff on Substack or Twitter, too, especially when showcasing someone's experience with AI.

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Whatever happened to Robert X. Cringely? I used to read him all the time. Then he started to drift into things that didn't interest me. Then his house burned. Then he stopped posting.

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Today, Trump launched his AI Action Plan as part of the Digitial Health Tech Ecosystem. Not a single practicing doctor seems to be involved (I don't count Mehmet Oz). It's all the tech companies, like OpenAI, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Microsoft AI, and Google. There's a reason why the healthcare sector has been slow to adopt AI. Doctors aren't lazy. They just don't want technology inserted for its own sake. Even the Brookings Institute has some concerns. This is like Obama's HITECH Act, which forced doctors to purchase EHR systems. This led to a lot of frustration and burnout.

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CRISPR technology can be combined with GPT to direct gene editing. It can design the guide RNAs used for splicing. Sugoi, I guess.

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The Internet is changing (duh) but it's nice to read a summary of exactly how it's changing. This is from a SEO standpoint, of course. If you want to get seen, these are some of the things to consider.

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ChatGPT is able to get around "I am not a robot" tests.  This could be a business model, designing ways to prove you are human. Sam Altman is trying to do this with his world

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Record low US fertility rate reported in 2024. Gee, I wonder why.

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30 July 2025

Not satisfied with artificial intelligence, Johns Hopkins scientists grow a whole brain organoid. What will they find?

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Poor Gen-Xers – they are getting passed over for CEO positions. They're too young in some ways, and too old in other ways. What bad luck, huh?

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Sam Altman says he's scared of GPT-5. But he's going to build it anyway. Because of Moloch. Whatever, Sam. Nice publicity stunt.

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8 babies are going to have genetic components of 3 individuals. That's supposedly to lessen the risk of inherited disease. Such an expensive way to do this, though. 

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Yes!  iOS 26 will give you the ability to do some SPAM filtering on text messaging. Oh man, no more political SPAM. Yeah, baby.

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Intel is in serious trouble. How could Pat Gelsinger have been so wrong about the company? Or it Lip Bu Tan just a chop-chop man? Can't believe this formerly great company has been humbled so deeply.  And Oregon will suffer, too. Intel is one of the largest employers in the state. All that tax income. All those jobs. Gone. To be replaced by unemployment insurance payments. 

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Well well – Vinay Prasad is out at the FDA.  His past social media commentary has come back to bite him. Laura Loomer claims another scalp. Stay off X, Vinay. 

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Affordability in Portland is Death by a Thousand Cuts. The city council (especially the mayor) needs to read this. No one wants to live in the Doom Loop city, except for those who will be getting free housing or shelter, free food, and free substance abuse supplies.

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Microsoft admits that its products don't provide corporate security.  Is this the end of their Office suite? Who would want to use it now?

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Waste of taxpayer money.  AG Dan Rayfield has sued Trump 33 times.  Do the people's work, Dan.  Trump is trying to fix the nation's dependent economy, and instead you demand the right for the state to remain dependent on federal subsidies. That's the Blue state path to failure. Work on stopping crime and fixing the rotten business climate of this state. Stop rampant drug abuse, protests, and homeless that the state is famous for.  Then the state will thrive and you won't need all those federal handouts.

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Another one bites the dust.  Seattle's Ravenna Varsity diner forced to close after 62 years. That's what living in a Blue city will do. But fighting crime and not being taxed to death are apparently far-right ideas. Thanks for the good times.

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29 July 2025

Wyoming is going to allow construction of a datacenter that will use more energy than every home in the entire state combined. Had to read that twice. Is that reasonable? Maybe they can use that as a heat source? Crazy.

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After four years of payments, children whose parents received $333 a month from the experiment fared no better than similar children without that help, the study found. They were no more likely to develop language skills, avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays, demonstrate executive function or exhibit brain activity associated with cognitive development. 
Raising better children isn't a problem that is solved just by throwing more money at it. The rest of us shouldn't be paying for this either.

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This is why people really need to know about the tools they use. All the questions about ask ChatGPT for legal advice about a crime you committed is legally discoverable. What did people think ChatGPT was? Everything you type in when you sign in with account username and password can be associated to you. Google works that way, too, for those who have an account.
A research paper sounds a similar warning. 
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Interesting. Chase may take over for Goldman Sachs on issuing Apple's credit card.  Goldman had reported losing a billion dollars on this card in 2023, and has been looking for someone to take if off their hands.

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Now, researchers are creating "virtual scientists".  Well, AI can output something. Doesn't mean that it's good. It's a new working paradigm. Let's see how well it does. Let 'er cook.

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Microsoft reveals a list of 40 jobs that they predict will be lost to AI. In actuality, the list is of those who use AI in their work. It's not clear to me that some of those jobs will actually be lost to AI. Such as mathematician. Or radio DJs. Even fashion models – sure AI can generate some good-looking specimens, but they all give the same AI-generated vibe.

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MIT just proved Einstein wrong. Well, you don't see that statement too often. It was just a wager that Einstein made with Bohr about wave interference.

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Norway has a problem in that it is too rich. Nice problem to have. But they like to tax heavily and spend heavily and give out lavish welfare payments, giving rise to "creeping concerns that Norway is becoming bloated, unproductive and unhealthy". They created a sovereign wealth fund, which had really paid off. Trump is trying to do the same thing. 

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Amazon let the public modify some of their production code. One idiot put a "delete everything" directive into a pull request, which got accepted. Now people have seen their data wiped out. Never trust the public. There's just too many assholes out there.

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Greatest ad for an optometry clinic. What is the longest line of sight on earth?

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In the Bay Area, any dumb idea can be a start up. Investors put in $650 million into this company. Now it's bankrupt. Who would have guessed?

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South Korean scientists make quantum tunneling occur on demand.  Now it's no longer a thing of wonder. Well, it still is, but now less so. 
"There is nothing that God hath established in a constant course of nature, and which therefore is done every day, but would seem a Miracle, and exercise our admiration, if it were done but once."  -- John Donne, LXXX Sermons
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Hertz's new AI-powered damage scanner is turning out to be fiasco. People are upset. It is for this reason that I'm using Avis in a few weeks. I don't want to be hassled by this.

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Middle schools in Portland's school district don't have to worry about being graded anymore. I guess the district didn't like seeing all those low scores. Problem solved now!

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Kevin Dahlgren shows that people living on sidewalks and parks just prefer to live there. But they like taking your money anyway. What a racket this homeless industrial complex has been. Problems are NOT solved. Just allowed to continue.

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In 2022, Oregon used to be the #2 destination for outsiders. People were bragging about it.  In 2025, Oregon is 7th from the bottom. Way to go, Tina Kotek.
Multnomah County lags the state in job growth. Way to go, Jessica Vega-Pederson.

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Oregon blocks Feds from finding out who is getting food stamps. Can you guess why?

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28 July 2025

Saw this video "How Being Smart Can Ruin Your Life".  It's more How Being A Nerd Can Ruin Your Life. There can be comfort in being a nerd, and you get a kind of personal satisfaction learning a lot about something. But you can't expect others to share in that joy, and that's what you have to realize early enough. I realize that the REALLY smart people were Johnny von Neumann, Richard Feynman, Stanislaw Ulam, Albert Einstein, etc. who were not only intellectual giants, but also people who were personable. Being like Langan, in the video, gets you nowhere.

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Are universities becoming more stupid?  Looks like the collective IQ of college students has been declining for a long time, even before the coronavirus epidemic. Check out the two references given. Apparently, university officials didn't want this published. I think the problem is that universities now take just about anyone who had been able to get financial aid, which, since the Obama era, is now managed by the federal government, and is given to just about anyone who can fill out a form. If you look at figure 1, scores were stable until 2012 when they started the steady decline.

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When I saw the title of this article, I was intrigued that perhaps Lloyd Center was the location of business startups in Portland that I wasn't aware of. I was imagining AI startups setting up in that district, and had hopes that Portland was turning around and going to be the start of a tech renaissance. Not a chance. It's just an indoor Saturday Market, where kids hang out to play arcade games, or shop for quirky vintage clothes.

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Another reason to get rid of the Department of Education. This is exactly what we don't need: an education agenda set by the WEF.

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Amazing that the entire country of Tuvalu will be moved to Australia due to rising ocean levels. But what's going on? Climate change skeptics have said that sea levels have not been rising. What I was unaware is that sea level changes are not uniform: in some places the sea level has been sinking or staying the same, but in the area where Tuvalu is, due to some local factors, no doubt, the seal level has been increasing. The country is just in the wrong location. So it's not really global warming melting the glaciers. There's something peculiar to that area of the world.

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Now, Sam Altman is worried about massive fraud that he predicts will undoubtedly occur when the ability of AI to mimic humans achieves near-perfection. But he won't stop doing what he's doing, because of the Moloch effect, of course.
And some subscribers to Vogue are upset because the magazine is using AI-generated women, because today's real-life women are not quite up to their beauty standards. Yeah, well it's 2025, you know. 

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Lenacapavir, the first HIV prevention drug, is FDA-approved. Supposedly it's 100% effective.  There's an interesting article I read (which I can't find now) that stated that women in Africa would use HIV-positivity as a defense against getting raped. That excuse will no longer work when men know that they can get the drug and not get AIDS.  We don't all live in the same world.

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Speaking of which: who funds WHO? Turns out that they're little transparency. Most of the donations are anonymous, and it's thought that many are from entities such as the Bill Gates Foundation, who may be influencing WHO to direct policy that favors Gates' efforts, such as vaccines. I wasn't aware of the Emergencies Powers Treaty that the Biden administration favored, that would give the WHO power to direct American medical policy during "emergencies".  Forget that!

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Scientists at University of Washington were working with people in California to perform actions that would block the sun, in the name of climate change. The climate change wackos aren't satisfied with banning straws or natural gas stoves or cows farting. They want to seed clouds to block sunlight significantly. And they wanted to keep it a secret.

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Oregonians are out of work longer than before.  Nothing surprising there. There aren't enough business to provide them with jobs.

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