Sugoi & Yokunai

Multnomah County can't get their act together on fixing the paramedic shortage problem. They should all resign and let more capable people fix this problem.

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Strike!  OHSU researchers are going to strike after all. They see everyone else doing it and scoring victories. Why not them? This may be the factor that drives researchers to leave OHSU. 

And guess who OHSU hired to replace the dysfunctional previous HR person. Yup. Couldn't they at least have found someone internal to do the job? Did they have to bring someone out of retirement to take the position? Just because?

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The City of Portland doesn't care about climate change when hard reality sets in.  The Olympics also is willing to look the other way. Don't want to hear anything about being forced to buy EVs that don't make sense. Or take away gas stoves. Or build ugly windmill farms.

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Waste of money. Multnomah County spent $250,000 for a new mission statement. This is why taxes need to be increased, folks.

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And it looks like our postal system won't be able to handle mail-in ballots.  But we'll have to have it because it facilitates cheating and delayed election results.

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Reed College is one of a remaining 22 that still require COVID-19 vax shots. Get with the program, Reed.

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Funny. The DOJ wants SCOTUS to cut an exception deal so that boys will still be allowed to use girls' facilities, compete in girls' sports, etc. That was the whole point of the ruling, guys! The Left is so used to two-tier justice, they forget how it was before. 

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Love it! A small Seattle restaurant had so much vandalism and theft that it lost its insurance. So now it won't pay taxes. Seems reasonable to me.

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A Pacific Northwest Energy Summit was held to discuss rising energy demands and how it will be met. They're still hoping that wind and solar will be the answer. While they delay having to do what's right (invest in nuclear), prices for energy will increase.

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WWeek interviews the guy behind the initiative to tax businesses and give their money away to everyone else.  Yesterday I posted about the study that shows that free money actually has a negative long-term impact on peoples' financial outlook. This is just governmental theft.  Wish the reporters were bold enough to pin him on this. Alaska gets its money from oil, so it's not the same. The vast majority of states have no such resource to tap.

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Cool. Minnesota follows New Hampshire as paving the way for flying cars. They can have tail numbers instead of license plates.

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Apple launches its Maps app for use on the web.  Don't be stopped by warnings that it's only for certain browsers.  It works fine with Firefox.  It's at https://beta.maps.apple.com/abc.  Compared with other maps, it's lacking in a lot details and placenames. Oregon's coast is sparsely labeled, but the app version is like that, too.  Apple Maps is good for Bay Area locales, and major cities like NYC and Seattle, but for other places, only urban locales get the love. It's not great for geographic or rural navigation, and it's what you'd expect for something to satisfy tech geeks.

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AI models trained on AI-generated data churn out garbage. At least for images. Might be for textual stuff, too. If this keeps up, LLMs will lose their usefulness.

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Universal Basic Income doesn't work. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that "recipients and their partners work and earn less, with the negative effect on wages and earnings getting worse over time". "Participants’ individual incomes declined $1,500 per year relative to the control group" – yup, they got poorer, despite being given money.  "...participants exhibited more entrepreneurial orientation and intentions” but that “this did not translate into significantly more entrepreneurial activity”.  "Participants spent their extra time on leisure, did not improve their quality of employment, and did not improve human capital investments such as training." So all that money just went to giving them time to be lazy. 

Easy street, I'd love to live on easy street
Nobody works on easy street
Just lie around all day, just sit and play the horses

When opportunity comes knockin'
You just keep on with your rockin'
'Cause you know your fortune's made

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Portland is thinking they might change the standalone "arts tax" to a combined "parks and arts tax".  You can't enjoy the park anymore, and all the art has been defaced and/or sawed off and put into storage. So they want you to pay more taxes to spiff up the places that the criddlers have destroyed. Because it's their homes now.

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Life in the Biden era. Now there's a shortage on blood culture bottles in hospitals.

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Remember that woman in Washington who had TB and was infecting everyone? She got arrested and forcibly treated and has now been rendered non-infectious. This is a conflict between personal liberty and public good. Ends justify the means, I guess.

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We good now, bro? CrowdStrike is offering a $10 gift card for your problems. Thought this was a joke, but it's real.

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Wow, are Indian men that bad? IndiGo airlines is offering flights where women can request not to have to sit with men. What next? From the comments: "Can I please request not to be seated next to anyone who does not look like me or come from my socio-economic class?"

If you have to ask.  Does ChatGPT have a mind?

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Nice.  Komodo dragons have iron-coated teeth to rip apart their prey.

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Now there are AI boyfriends for women. What a sad world, we're becoming.

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Nice biosketch on Grish Perelman.

Why are all the wacko protesters so heavily comprise young women? The linked article focuses on the pro-Palestinian protests and suggests that this is the opportunity that many women have to protest the hijab. But you see many young women protest elsewhere. For all kinds of things: BLM, gay "pride", transgender rights, climate change, etc. Hmmm. Question asked and answered.

And at Northwestern University, all the charges brought against the campus protesters were just dropped. No punishment, so no lesson learned.

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Saw this on someone's X feed: Multnomah County and Metro officials met at Skamania Lodge to discuss whether people are really fleeing the area due to higher taxes.  

There you have it.  Complete lack of self-awareness, folks. Wasting more tax money to study stupid questions.

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Researchers at the University of Sheffield think they may have stumbled on something that might help male-pattern baldness. It's just a sugar: 2-deoxy-D-ribose (2dDR).  Link to study is here.

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Scary. Chinese researchers invent a 4 gram solar-powered drone that can fly forever. At this point, it's too weak to carry a payload, but that won't take long to fix.

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The billionaire group that was going to build a utopian city in the San Francisco bay area has pulled their plans unexpectedly.  The locals are happy, but what it means for the future isn't clear.

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Good news for those who have allergies to red meat from being bitten by the Lone Star Tick. You can eat this synthetic pork. And also good news, the lab will give it to you free if you're an allergy sufferer.

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There's a dating service for the unvaxxed now. For some purebloods, people, it's really important to only date other purebloods. Dating is hard these days.

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Bummer to be a Democrat now, isn't it? Your betters are out picking the next candidate for you. You just need to cast your vote, not that it means anything these days. But they want to "save democracy" right?  Just as one emperor without clothes is gone, another takes his place, this time, an empress.  This isn't the United States as originally conceived anymore.  They're even going to clap for you.

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Is the Fed itself insolvent?  This is what happens when you aren't secure in being the world's reserve currency. Printing more money comes at a cost. The only real solution is a painful cutback in government spending, but that will take away the illusion of having a higher standard of living than most of the world. Because much of the U.S. wealth is propped up. And now we have all these mouths to feed.

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I didn't want to stray into national politics too much, but so much is going on. Is Biden near death?  Has he had any public appearances since announcing his stepdown?  And now, switching candidates so late in the game is creating havoc with Dem donors. It's all about the money.  There are calls for Joe to resign, but that puts the obvious glaring inadequacy of Kamala front and center.  Cackles is responsible for all the weird gay shit that goes into the White House, so we'll see more of that if she's allowed to be in power. We have about 6 more months to go, and we need a strong leader more than ever. There hasn't been a time when the United States had no one strong at the top, since the end of FDR days, but we just won the war, and no one was going to threaten us then. It's different now. 

Fox Business tries to say that Kamala's ecoonomic policies will be the same as Biden's so calm down folks. The commenters are not having it.
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Democrats will eat their own.  Hospital administrators (and many of their employees) are staunch Democrats. Now Oregon will impose a 3% gross receipts tax starting Septmember.  My response is: You voted for this.

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Mission creep. Is this why we need more "education" money? So we can feed kids all year around?  And despite all the money given to the schools, Oregon has the seventh worst school system in America.

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For your reading pleasure.  Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment.

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They waited 75 years to honor a physicist for her ground-breaking discovery.

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China uses Oakland, CA as an example of extreme poverty in the world in filming documentary. Looks like an enclave of some African nation. 

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Obamacare was passed 14 years ago. It's expansion of the socialism component – never made sense to me. It's letting government take over financial transactions in healthcare, instead of letting market (competitive) forces do the job. Incentives get perverted, you need more administrative overhead, people get compensated for being part of the growing bloat, because there's no reason to trim the fat. Giving the government more of a role in such an important part of civilization was a big mistake.

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Oregon's workforce demographic profile shows a shift to older workers from 1992 to 2022. What could be the cause? Maybe younger workers aren't as employable? Too much mental illness? Too much pot and other drugs, making them unreliable? Chronic illness perhaps, from vax side-effects? No clues given.  What's going on with Oregon's young workers?

Getting ready for war.  Well Biden supporters, you've got your war. Now it's time to send your kids to Ukraine to fight that bad Putin! The Selective Service wants volunteers to help get the process started.

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Marketwatch suggests that Boomer give their money to help their kids today instead of after they pass, so it can help them now. It'll be "life-changing".  Sure, but I think in many cases it will be like how Obamacare went to all those hospitals, who felt very rich when it rolled out, and where are the hospitals today?  After that money has been spent on the kids, and the elderly have no money left, they will have lost whatever cachet they had to these kids. 

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Is DeepL the best online translator out there? They claim to be.

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Who wrote the code for the Blue Screen of Death?  Reminds me of this famous video.

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Seattle can no longer have nice things. First it was the Sadako scupture, now it's Shorelines's Emissary Raven.  Another sign of city decay.

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Rachel Maddow thinks that liking Lord of the Rings is far-right. Not that we care, but I never understood how people like LOTR but still favored Joe Biden.

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Oregonian decries that a member of Trump's inadequate female SS detail is being "body-shamed".  Well, it's not that her body inadequacies are being mocked. It's her fitness for duty that's being called to attention. Maybe she "identifies as a Secret Service agent" but just as with transgender issues, wishing doesn't suddenly turn you into one. This happens when you have a leader like Kim Cheatle, and is part of the reason why Trump was almost killed.

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Yeah, you can't have a hateful Lefty as the director of Oregon Board of Chiropractic Examiners. Surely someone else is more qualified for the job.

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One of Obama's great disservices to America was to put the student loan operations in the federal government. Just like the housing loan industry, which led to a lot of corruption. Now Biden took advantage of that and transferred $1.2 billion of student debt on the rest of Americans. Legal? Maybe. Undeserved? Definitely.

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Weirdest missing finger story you'll read today. 

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Someone created a service that scours expired quality domains.  Could be useful if you were a startup.

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Parisians speak a different kind of French. Lots of foreign words now, because, you know why.

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What's real and what's an AI scam? It's getting much harder to tell. So you have to spend more time investigating something that might be for real. Email needs to be overhauled.

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This is one of the best reads about the Crowdstrike disaster.  This was the culmination of corners being cut here and there, with no consequences until now. Sort of like American culture – things are being taken away bit by bit, and yet America has survived – until it won't.

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This report from WSJ on the security failure at the Trump rally just came out.  Already people on social media are way ahead with evidence and forensic analysis that puts this "journalism" to shame. The MSM has failed us again.

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Even CNN has disbanded their DEI team.  DEI = Dead-End Investment.

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A seventh patient has been cured of HIV.  This was achieved with a stem cell transplant using a donor with the homozygous delta-32 CCR5 mutation. This is such a convergence of technological achievements made.

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Never commit your company to Google technology.  Now the Goo.gl URL shortener is slated for termination, joining a long list of those on the Google graveyard.

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A lot of Windows computers suffered an outage this morning.  Interesting is Microsoft's stopgap solution - reboot each computer 15 times. Well? What are you waiting for? Those computers aren't going to reboot themselves, you know.  (This ronin is happy he has a Mac.)

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It gets worse. CNN has never live-broadcasted a Trump rally – until the July 13 rally. What were they expecting to happen this time? And the shooter had three encrypted overseas accounts.  And the shooter flew a drone over the site beforehand to get an overview – someone must have known about this. And audio-video forensics suggest that the location of at least one shooter was not on the rooftop but inside the building.

We're world famous!  Portland is so lawless drivers are now ignoring roads and speeding their cars through parks, after dystopian city defunded its police department. So reports the DailyMail.

And here you are, Portlanders. You already can't enjoy much of the city you pay taxes for. But you thought that if you just stayed in your own neighborhood, you'd be OK.  Guess what?  Soon you'll have a "deflection center" not far from the neighborhood preschool and elementary school.  These are the criddlers who want to take an easy opt-out so they won't have to go to jail.

It's no wonder that wealth managed in Portland dropped by $14 billion in 2023. I can understand Camas, since Fisher Investments left. What a hit that little municipality took. As Reagan said, "if you want less of something, tax it".

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No regrets. People are apparently upset that conservatives are going after the ghouls that were disappointed that Trump didn't get killed. Like Cass McLeod-Skinner.  This is a good read for conservatives who are hesitant to afuera! the hate-crazed radical Left.

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A Eugene plasma center is being sued because of its HIV safety policy. So maybe it will have to go out of business if it loses, because you never know in Oregon. Then how is that going to help people?

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Some may have reasons to object to building affordable housing for low-income people, but this has got to be one of the dumbest arguments. 

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Disgusting. USPS shared customer postal addresses with Meta, LinkedIn and Snap with tracking pixels.  I discontinued that Informed Delivery "feature" a while back. Felt creepy. That feeling was justified.

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Kotek was a half-billion increase in public school budget.  What for?  They underperform, have less students to worry about, and thanks to Kate Brown, don't even have objectives to meet.  That money might be better spent.

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Rumors about the future iPhone 17. Wishful thinking. We'll probably just get a thinner phone with more emoji options.  And AI being insinuated into something you don't really need.  And something having to do with Vision Pro, which people don't seem to be interested in anymore.

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Yes!  Another graffiti defacer arrested. Can't stop the cleanup effort yet, though.

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Which phones can Cellbrite software unlock? Here's a handy table.  Older models are crackable but with the latest models, they're "in research". 

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A guide to the critters in Miyazaki's movies. Critters like the susuwatari and the kodama.

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More on that mysterious Austin Private Wealth put option deal on DJT. Now they say it was a filing error. Nothing to see. Move along.

More on the attempted assassination, which is looking even more bizarre every day.

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No one is above the law, unless you're a Dem. Guess what, Oregon prosecutors won’t charge state Democratic Party leaders.  The reason? They just "did not find sufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Singh made the contribution in a name other than his own and that he did so knowingly." Yeah, right. Only AG Rosenblum recused herself.  So much conflict of interest.

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Arizona gets election integrity with voter ID requirements.  Significant victory in this swing state.

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It's now 4 days since the attempted ass*ssin*tion of former president Trump. To this day, I haven't heard that the Secret Service is conducting an internal investigation of their goof-up. Only that Wray, Mayorkas and Cheatle are having a closed door discussion today. I haven't heard that were any apologies to the familes of the people who were killed or injured. The New York Times has not published any of their signature spiffy graphics about the bullet trajectory. Spiffy graphics have only come from amateurs who post on X/Twitter. I've only heard that SS Director Kim Cheatle was interviewed on ABC, and dug in her heels as to her performance, planning to stay on as director, despite calls to resign. Now there is evidence that there were agents inside the building with the roof whose slope was too steep for agents to handle. And this information comes from small local outlets. The story is getting stranger and doesn't make sense. Consider: the ladder and the large sniper rifle escaping detection. The inexperienced kid. People who saw the shooter minutes before and sounded a warning, and nothing was done.  The lack of curiosity in the mainstream media about what happened is really bizarre. Theories like this one seem plausible. In the turmoil that would have followed, it would have been easier to sweep things under the rug. But now they stand out.

People are asking questions. And did some people already know something was up?

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Sheesh. In Portland, when a person of color makes art, you are required to like it forever. 

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This is a big deal. Providence recently sold it's lab services to Labcorp (which Legacy uses, too). Tests which used to take 90 minutes to perform, now takes 7 hours. And the medical staff aren't happy.

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Blocking interleukin-11 made mice live up to 25% longer.

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Reason writer fails to understand the difference between cancel culture and having an employee that isn't a decent human being. Cancel culture is when you say that anyone who thinks a man can't be a real woman or a woman can't be a real man deserves to be punished. Or anyone who says that for mission critical positions, merit should have higher priority than diversity issues in hiring for positions of authority. Quite a bit different from letting someone go because they wished someone harm or death. Cancel culture is saying that just purely just because you don't like something, it should be made illegal or unavailable to everyone else. Home Depot (and others) just fired people who thought that they were still safe in expressing the hateful narrative of the Left.  Times are changing. Learn the difference between true hate and just being tired of putting up with someone's bullcrap.

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Astronomers give advice on how to spot deepfakes. Look at the stars in their eyes.

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Academic journals are a lucrative scam. it's true. That's why there are so many of them. Academics need to be published in order to survive. And there are people only too glad to make that happen. You'd think that the Internet would fix that, but no. You still need a system that handles peer-review.

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