Sugoi & Yokunai

Nearly 1 in 10 U.S. homes are worth at least $1 million, close to all-time high. In Portland, it's more like 6.7% (Man, even Tacoma is higher). Inventory is low, and there's still enough demand for homes that prices can be this high and people will still buy them. This is the Fed's doing.

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Crime Rate by State. Oregon is 9th in the nation, and I bet that if you removed the City of Portland, it would drop down dramatically. And Oregon is 3rd poorest in the nation when it comes to income left over after taxes. Is there ANY good news about Oregon these days?

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The Crypto Con. This situation in Texas is crazy. So far, there hasn't been any plans to develop a crypto mining company in Oregon (that I know of). These mines consume so much energy, and the greenies aren't even aware. It's off their radar.

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Universities are not on the level. There has been an insidious decay into the lofty standards of academia. Many institutions are resting on their reputations. Trust, once lost, is difficult to regain. And they don't realize it, because of the effort to replace meritocracy with diversity.

––– 良くない –––Scum human beings. Cyber criminals hacked into the records of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and are demanding money. In order to light the fire, they are swatting the cancer patients to make their lives miserable.

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Today is January 7.  Time to burn (or salt) the Kadomatsu.

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The Lancet published a curious article stating that not using hearing aids when you're hard of hearing leads to dementia. Now they've retracted the article, saying that it was phony research. But that was only after other experts called them on it.

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a quick search of the internet shows that Prevnar 20 is cheaper elsewhere, though how much cheaper varies. GoodRX.com lists it for $270 at various pharmacies. A list maintained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows Prevnar 20 has a private sector cost of $253.21. And the Walgreens on Northeast 33rd Avenue in Portland offers it for $307.99, with no charge for the jab.

Davis’s shot is just one of thousands given at OHSU, but her bill raises questions about a health care provider that will become the largest in the state—and the biggest employer in the Portland metro area—if regulators allow it to buy crosstown rival Legacy Health.

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NYT filed a complaint against Microsoft and OpenAI. This will be interesting to watch. If the NYT wins, then it's basically saying that A.I. can't be trained on anything, because you never know when someone will claim that they need compensation. Copyrighting intellectual property is getting to be really difficult to defend now, with so much being derivative on something else. Only the lawyers win. Japan's approach makes more sense.

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Another article describing amyloid deposition in the muscles of those with LongCOVID.  And this article from a few days ago reports other findings of LongCOVID but focuses on blood abnormalities, and does not mention amyloid. Nice that there are more publications on this condition lately.

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Veterans have to face endless delays for their cancer treatment due to delayed pre-approvals. With all the billions going overseas to support other countries, can't we give the veterans' doctors the benefit of the doubt and automatically approve diagnostics and treatment?

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More patients are losing trust in their primary care physician. Not only did this stem from the coronavirus epidemic debacle, but doctors are increasingly employees of hospitals and business-owned clinics. Freestanding clinics, owned by physicians, are getting to be rare now. So every doc must spew the party line. The narrative. Or be disciplined or let go. Physicians are acting like employees now. And they have no control over employees, who are often unionized. They don't have anything to do with billing problems or scheduling delays. The changes started with Obamacare.

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Wrong Axios, it's not because prices are too low. It's because drug companies want to maximize profit. Low supply costs from overseas sources allow them to maximize what they get from sales. It can be done in the U.S., and prices don't have to rise if the middlemen would just take lower profits.

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Holographic camera turns any window into an invisible camera. Could this tech be abused? I could see some disadvantages to being able to turn any glass plate into a camera. Yes, it could streamline some things, especially in the automotive world, but there are definite potential privacy issues.

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Zosurabalpin: a new macrocyclic antibiotic. Highly specifric for carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii, so there is still a need for other resistance-overcoming antibiotics. Mechanism is novel: works by inhibiting a bacterial protein complex called LptB2FGC, which prevents the bacteria from synthesizing its outer membrane.  FDA-approved.

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Brain tissue on a chip achieves voice recognition. Now we're getting into sci-fi territory. Specialized stem cells were grown into neurons that formed a ball called an "organoid". Electrodes were hooked up, and responses were decoded using machine learning algorithms. They call it "Brainoware". And it recognized the voices of eight subjects with an accuracy of 78%.  This may be the start of real artificial intelligence.

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600+ nurse practitioners at OHSU want to unionize. NPs were brought on as a cost-savings over paying doctors. Now since doctors have been hesitant to unionize, I wonder if the pay of NPs will be higher than that of the research doctors, who typically don't have as much clinical obligations, and get pay off their research grants.

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Yeah we already knew this. Number of people moving to Oregon plummets, U-Haul data shows. So the rest of the poor slobs who can't leave will have to pay more taxes to keep the government in business.

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Now there's data. When hospitals are taken over by private equity, hospital-acquired adverse events increase.

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A survey of 2700 A.I. researchers found that there is a 5% change of humans becoming extinct because of A.I.  But don't worry. The folks at Google DeepMind have written a robot constitution that should prevent this from happening. Whew! I was worried.

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HKDC1 signaling prevents senescence in mitochondria and lysosomes, which may help attenuate the aging process. I wouldn't read too much more into that right now. The article's headline is a bit sensational.

––– 凄い –––ChatGPT fared poorly in making a correct diagnosis of 100 pediatric cases.  Still not ready for general usage. The article does not provide information about retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which is a necessity now. This technology is still in development, and requires knowledge of optimal segmentation, and the selection and configuation of vector databases. Maybe the good doctors didn't do any of this.

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All those monoclonal antibodies (aducaumab, lecanemab, and donanemab) against amyloid-β are not very effective. But with ultrasound treatment to break down the blood-brain barrier, they might be. More details here.

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The reality of Danish healthcare and economy. Everything comes at a price. I doubt this system would work in America. This article is good to bookmark to show people who think that socialized medicine will solve our healthcare delivery problems.

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Free bulk photo compressor. I use Optimzilla, which works well.

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FDA authorizes Floridians to purchase drugs through Canadian pharmacies. This is great for now. Hope other states do the same.

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Ohio Gov Mike DeWine Signs ‘Emergency’ Executive Order Banning Transgender Surgeries for Minors After Vetoing Similar Bill.  He saw the light, I guess. Bravo for him for seeing the light at last.

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What a waste of time and money. Federal judge in Oregon denies efforts to dismiss climate lawsuit filed by young people. If they're really serious about this, they should sue China and India. This makes about as much sense as banning plastic straws – another child-initiated policy. The kids are victims of shoddy science reporting, which is getting to be so common these days. 

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23 and Me says that it's the customer's fault for the security breach, since they didn't change their passwords. What crap.

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OHSU's Dr. John Hunter is stepping down. He's a great guy, and it's too bad that he's leaving the leadership circle. Boy, they really need someone like him. Big loss for them.

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Oregon Measure 114 is confirmed to be unconstitutional.

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The Year the Millennial Internet Died. 

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The rise of Long Flu.  I suspect this is another sequela of the mRNA vaccine. People's immune systems are not responding to infection as before, and complete recovery is impaired. This may be another consequence of WASF3 overexpression in susceptible individuals. My theory anyway. But why are we seeing this now?

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The cause of the Big Bloop has been identified. Disappointed – not aliens.

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40% of student loan borrowers haven't paid their required payment. They're apparently hoping that Biden will come through for them. As Robert Kiyosaki said: "Poor people do things that keep them poor." Great example of that, and another example of the downward spiral our country is heading.

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Comets, eclipses and more auroras to be seen next year.  No great comets, though, which is a disappointment.

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Andrew Ng teaches you how to read research papers. This does take time, and the more background you have, the easier it becomes. The best way I learned was to write one myself.

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Japan says copyright doesn't apply to A.I. training. This is big and may help Japanese chat bots have better training and be more useful. But what will creatives do when their work can be absorbed by training? It'll be interesting to see what happens, especially if any output from generative A.I. can't be copyrighted.

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Happy New Year!

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How not to be stupid with A.I. By Yann LeCun. Yann's a smart guy, especially w/r to A.I., but this is a bit arrogant, no? Especially when there are people on the other side like Geoff Hinton and the late Stephen Hawking. Calling them stupid? Maybe it's WIRED magazine trying out a catchy title.

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The World Bank wants to manage a Climate Reparations fund, to pay poor countries who they claim suffer climate change damage. This is such a dumb idea, and of course, there are a zillion ideas as to who gets the money. Did someone from Portland come up with this idea? Or California? Or Seattle? Geez.

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Portland woman arrested in Chicago for hate crime, such as putting swastikas on Jewish school.

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A.I. and the replication of people. It's already happening, and the law is currently unable to stop it. Attempts can be made to create a replica based on collected online data. Anyone could predict this would be happening. Could be used for good, like the Salvador Dali recreation, but I see a large potential for causing harm.

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An interesting question, one which I've asked myself.  How Many Load-Bearing Walls Have to Come Down Before America Collapses?  We're about to find out soon, probably in 2024.

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California is turning into something that is NOT the United States. The effort to ban guns continues apace. You'll soon not be able to own anything that you could use to defend yourself.

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Is this really true?  Portland police report significant drop in homicides, gun violence in 2023. Maybe people are just not calling the police anymore, because they know nothing will happen. But it's good, I guess.

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Heh. The new Blue Screen of Death.  Is Microsoft in charge of their software? This is not so funny when it's your car that doesn't work.

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Gotta be careful about where your chocolate is sourced. Those South American chocolates can be dangerous, especially the dark varieties.

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Looks like Google itself is a victim of its own A.I. Those with low-skilled jobs are doomed.

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I remember seeing Quintiles everywhere, and then they were suddenly gone. I hadn't realized they merged to form IQVIA. Now IQVIA wants to absorb Lasso and DeepIntent to get even bigger.  And the FTC is stepping in. This company is getting to be quite powerful and it's falling under almost everyone's radar.

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But be aware of this when you share photos online. A.I. can geolocate you pretty well. 

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Yup, there are folks who want to deprive the rest of us of our election rights to vote for whom we want. Dems are desperate because they fear that Trump will do to them what they've been doing to him. Like Steve Duin, who recognizes that Multnomah County leadership is paralyzed, and he nails all the reasons, but then at the end he has to ruin it with a snipe at Trump. I guess Steve likes his solutions well lubed, and Trump is not the kind of person to go along. Right, Steve?

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It's the Asian Hornet Principle. Problems are much easier and cheaply solved when addressed early. Now Portland can't control graffiti. Or the tweaker problem. Yup, Portland has crossed the Roche limit. The event horizon. It's a downward trajectory from here, and only extraordinary forces will reverse the decline to total destruction.

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If you bought Adderal in Mexico, you might be getting meth, too. Problems upon problems. Life in the Biden administration.

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