Sugoi & Yokunai

It's only been 20 years since Thomas Friedman's globalism celebrating books, and now it's clear that Trump was right.  We should have tried to keep critical manufacturing at home.  Now the number of new drug shortages has increased 30% because they are made overseas (China and India), and for various reasons, can't get to the shelves. 

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I think Apple is making a mistake taking down the fencing surrounding its downtown store.  Downtown's problems are worse than before, not better.  We're just a news item away from more rioting.  But hey, it's not my company.

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Well that's not good:  US Banking “Turmoil” Can’t Be Contained – Moody’s Alerts.  So what now?

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Yay:  The Fifth Circuit blocked the Biden administrations attempt to overturn the ruling that they can't mandate the jab (not really a vaccine) on federal workers.

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The ongoing decline of Portland continues:

• Homeless encampment has Portland residents begging for help, scared to go outside
  
• Gov. Kotek wants to uglify Portland will tiny box houses.
• Crime is destroying the Parkrose neighborhood.
• Portland is a lawless hellscape. 'You can't run a business when people are pooping on your front porch,' she told DailyMail.com. 'Nor when they're doing drugs in your doorway. 'You can't do business when patrons feel unsafe coming onto your property. It's not possible.'
• Left-wing DA refuses to prosecute assaults against public transit drivers.
• WTF?  Mass transit delays because buses need to have time to air out fentanyl smoke. 
• Downtown Crowne Plaza hotel may turn into a homeless shelter. 
  

––– 良くない –––Once again, the Democrat solution to a vexing problem, is to let government take over.  Universal healthcare for all.  Looking forward to more expensive care with government determination as to what services are covered.  /sarc––– 良くない –––––– 凄い –––
OHSU has an outpatient remdesivir clinic to treat people with moderate COVID-19 infection.  This is probably the best we can do at this point.  Paxlovid (nirmaltrevir/ritonavir) has many drug interactions that make it unsuitable, and molnupiravir did not seem to convey benefit in terms of death or hospitalizations in vaccinated individuals.  That said, a Cochrane meta-analysis showed the limitations of benefit with remdesivir.  It is likely to be of most benefit if someone is ill enough to require oxygen, but no benefit was seen in another meta-analysis of those who needed mechanical ventilation, or those who had mild enough disease not to require supplemental oxygen.  Interestingly, the benefits were best seen in studies where there was a low concomitant usage of systemic corticosteroids (ACTT-1 and Spinner et al).  Perhaps this is an antagonistic factor? 

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Very interesting video of a woman who pays no income tax because she never got a SSN when she was born, so she is not in the system.  She was able to get a passport and that's all she needs to get a bank account and a driver's license, because the system has been relaxed due to the Democrats making it easy for illegal immigrants to enter into American society.  No necesito SSN.
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I agree.  It would be better to stay with PST than PDT.

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Boy, being an emergency room doctor used to be a cool job.  Pay was pretty good, and you worked intensely and got the adrenaline rush, but there was no longitudinal care to worry about.  Your work obligations didn't spill over into your off-duty time, and the hours were usually not too demanding, and you had decent free time in between shifts.  Now, thanks to COVID-19, no one wants to be an emergency room doc anymore.  The patients are demanding, irritable for having waited so long, and more often violent.  The pay is less and you see nurse practioners doing your job, which can't be too good for the ego. 

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The HustleGPT experiment has so far turned $100 into $7812, but so far it hasn't made any money.  It's all investor money so far, but who knows.  Someone will probably buy the company.  Profit!

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"Putting an addict behind four walls in an apartment and isolating them is not solving anything. Instead of OD'ing on the street, they're OD'ing on a hardwood floor."

Yep, I coulda told you that.

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Elliott wondered where the new tent came from and found out an organization called People’s Housing Project was handing them out and setting them up, in this case, in her neighborhood.

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Oh-oh.  Thailand may be experiencing a miniature Chernobyl-type situation.  A cesium-137 cylinder has been smelted resulting in the emission of radioactive red dust.  Officials think that it's contained, but reading the article, it doesn't seem that they are certain.

The “red dust” was sent to a metal factory in Rayong province. Office of Atoms for Peace officials travelled to the factory in Rayong and found 24 tonnes of “red dust” contaminated with caesium-137.

That's a lot of dust.

Several Thai media outlets reported earlier that the cylinder was found crushed into a block with other metals in preparation to be smelted but “tragedy was avoided” as it hadn’t yet been put into the furnace. It turns out this was not true and the cylinder had been smelted.

National Power Plant 5A Co., Ltd., and the Office of Atoms for Peace set up a team of 50 people to search for the missing radioactive isotope but couldn’t find it anywhere on the plant grounds. They believe it has been taken away.

Yikes.

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If you've been paying attention, people are realizing suddenly that AI will upend the world.  When those closely involved with AI say things like:

"But what we're looking at now is intelligence itself... This is the first time we're able to create intelligence itself and increase its amount in the universe,"

They aren't kidding.  Google will soon release an AI model that can answer health questions with a passable degree of accuracy.  Whereas IBM's Watson failed spectacularly, such that even MD Anderson Cancer Center couldn't make it work, the power of GPT-4 has been used to create MedPaLM-2, which has been able to pass medical board exams at a level which equates it to an expert physician.

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How did I not know this before?  Sets of letters that I used to call alphabets, are not really that.  True alphabets are where symbols representing vowels and consonants are treated equally.  But some character sets, like the Japanese hiragana and katakana are representation of syllables, and are called syllabaries.  When character sets are consonant-vowel pairs, like Javanese or Ethiopian, they are called abugidas.  And if they are just consonant sounds, and you are expected to fill in vowel sounds that aren't provided (like Hebrew and Arabic), those are called abjads.   Here's a very pretty and unusual abugida, the Ditema, used by the Xhosa and Zulu.

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I guess many wealthy people decided not to pay the Metro tax.  Wealthy people generally tend to know when something is a good investment.  I don't think they "forgot".  I think they're sending a message.  And of course, here's Salem, trying to figure out how to keep Oregonian's kicker refund.  Because they have a whole slew of give-aways that need funding.  They don't even have enough money to fund solutions for the problems they create!

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The secret dealings behind the COVID-19 agitprop are finally coming to light.  This guy wasn't fooled.

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Fifty-seven percent of Gen Zers and Millenials say they do not feel like they have adulting figured out. In the survey, 63% of Gen Zers and Millennials said they did not feel like they were prepared for the responsibility of being an adult, and admitted they feel burned out by adulthood.

The biggest struggle for both generations seems to revolve around cars with 63% of the younger generations having no idea how to change the oil in a car, 48% not knowing how to change a tire and 42% not knowing how to jumpstart a car.

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Congratulations to Daniel Stenberg, on the 25th anniversary of cURL.  He's one of the unsung heroes of the Internet that most people have never heard of.

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Chat AI models are developing a sense of the world.  It is truly interesting to see how much improvement in object understanding has developed from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4.

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I was wondering when someone would do this.  Ask GPT-4 how to become rich.  And it recommends setting up a business.  Bravo!  That shows real-life understanding.

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High-school graduates are increasingly turning away from college, and going to apprenticeships.  This might allow them an easier track to starting a business - and getting rich!

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This ronin used Emacs in college, a very long time ago.  This was because there were few available text editors for the mainframes that were used.  I think this is the only way something with as high a learning curve could gain traction.  Many geeks who grew up on this still use Emacs, and if you are proficient, and customize to how you like, it feels very powerful.  But there are now editors with lower learning curves, and I would only take the time to master it if I were coding for a living.  This is another "Learn Emacs in a year" posting.  Interesting that the author, who was born and raised in Asia, takes the "learn from the master" approach.  I notice that some in the comments section of western geek boards are "meh". 

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Modern-day Portland problems: dealing with secondhand hard-drug smoke in public.  You'll not be able to avoid it anymore.––– 良くない –––
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Little by little, people are waking up to the dangers of the mRNA "vaccine" products.  Good on the German health minister to admit he was wrong, and enact changes.

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"Far right"?  More like "proven right again".

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Sanity!  $1000/month giveaway idea seems doomed.

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––– 良くない ––– ––– 凄い ––– Makes sense.  As the city empties, criminals will seek targets in residential neighborhoods.
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The OHA doesn't approve of Legacy Mt Hood Medical Center closing their birthing center, even though it just has to happen because there is no staffing.  Hospitals are finding it hard to recruit nurses because Portland has a reputation for crime and homelessness, and no one wants to get the vax anymore.  So it's personnel shortages for the foreseeable future.Clever.  Africans are using Bitcoin without internet access.––– 凄い –––
ODOT is officially doing away with the permit system to see the waterfalls on the Old Columbia River Highway.  Finally.

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The Biden administration had to take pains to explain that no taxpayer dollars would be spent to guarantee SVB’s deposits and that the money would instead come from the FDIC’s insurance fund. While true in a technical sense, that fund is replenished by fees from banks all over the country, which in turn come from the fees that Americans pay to their banks all the time. In an indirect way, we all just bailed out Silicon Valley this weekend.

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According to the WSJ, people are already nostalgic for times just a few years ago when things were more affordable.  I noticed that they don't mention Trump.  No, they pine for the time period when Biden had just taken over, before he started doing any damage.  What media bias?

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PORTLAND IN THE NEWS:  HotAir describes life in today's Portland.  If you live in a house or apartment, better make sure that living units all around you are not abandoned by their owners.  Or your life will be hell.

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A key COVID-19 vaccine case is moving to the discovery phase after a U.S. judge rejected a bid by Moderna to dismiss some of the patent infringement claims against it.

Moderna and the government had argued that under 28 U.S.C. 1498, the claims should be dismissed and moved to the Court of Federal Claims. That would mean the government was inserted as the defendant, replacing Moderna, and leave the government responsible for paying any damages awarded.

Arbutus and Genevant sued Moderna in March 2022, asserting the company used technology Arbutus had already patented.  
That included a lipid nanoparticle system used by the COVID-19 vaccine to deliver spike protein into the body.

Moderna was aware of the patents and even tried to license them for other products, according to the lawsuit. Moderna didn’t try to license the technology for its COVID-19 vaccine, instead attempting to invalidate the patents and, when those efforts failed, using the patented technology anyway.

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The Japanese are also discovering the high death rate after vaccination was introduced, and that the government is strangely incurious about investigating it.

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