14 February 2024

Teachers are sending more kids to psychiatrists. Not sure if they really need it, or if they're doing this to cover their butts. In any event, this was not a problem when I was growing up. Of course, that world no longer exists.

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Generative AI Turns Ordinary Computers into Weapons of Mass Copyright Violation. And the problem is too big now, for any law to prevent. It'll just happen, and when it's out there, who cares? Bad time to be a creative. Your unique work, that you worked so long to perfect – it'll just be trained on and commoditized. With tools like img2dataset, your unique art style will just be an option in someone's dropdown menu.

OpenAI is giving ChatGPT memory, so it will remember stuff from session to session. Could be interesting. Could be scary. But then, you could delete the memory you don't want, but it's not clear how well that works.

And A.I. Girlfriends are a privacy nightmare. A data-harvesting horror. But who uses a hosted girlfriend. If you're that stupid, you don't deserve privacy. It may not quite be free, but you're still the customer.

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Fat finger strikes again. Lyft stock swings up and then down, due to a typo.

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Evil. Tech companies are firing people, then reposting the position at a lower wage to save money. I guess this is revenge, or the reverse of the time when techies would job-hop up the payscale ladder. Now the shoe is on the other foot. It sucks when you are no longer considered hot property.

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Apparently when you have Parkinson's DIsease, you have a certain smell. That's a clue right there.

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Citrix Workspace might be sending your clipboard over the network. It could be going to your employer, who knows? I bet hardly anyone is going to see this. Bad news if they're really doing this. 

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China is in trouble. The streets of formerly busy places like Shenzhen look like East Portland, now. But don't worry, the Chinese seeking a better life, are entering our southern border. 

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Now even Nature recognizes that the world has a Bill Gates problem. Bill's crazy ideas get funded and the world suffers. Look what happened to Common Core Math? A whole generation of math-stupid kids resulted from that. Now it's the vaccine effort, all to enrich himself further.

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Score is a dating service only for those with good credit scores. I suppose it helps weed out some of the losers, but I'm betting that people will figure out how to game the system eventually.

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Slavery is back! Thanks to the Biden Administration, it's OK to own black slaves again. Then they will want reparations. And social services. Remember this guy, fearing that Trump was going to bring back black slavery again? Heck no! It's Biden that's doing that.

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California: Home of politicians with stupid ideas. First they banned plastic straws, then plastic bags. Then they allowed thicker plastic bags. Guess what happened?  Then Rep Barbara Lee thinks $50 /hr minimum wage is a good idea. Because burger flippers just ought to make enough money to support a family of four. Legislate wealth. Legislate clean energy.
Update: Heh, looks like the stupidiy spread to New Jersey, too. Did they go to the same conference?

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The Biden Administration wants to uglify Oregon with offshore windmills. I hope this dies, but it probably won't. Ultimately it will be a climate tragedy and will spoil the natural attraction of the Oregon Coast.

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Everytime Dems see money, they think it belongs to them. Oregon Dem Rep Greg Evans wants kicker refund money to use for more spending. He thinks we need for important stuff, but didn't think such stuff was worthy of putting into the actual budget. But now it's supposed to be important.

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And now, the United States may lose control of the First Island Chain. It may be a good thing that the Chinese are hurting economically such that war with Taiwan is not guaranteed to be affordable, else we'd be in a world of hurt right now. That might be the main thing saving us now. Even Japan is willing to pay for the United States to continue, which shows how important it is, but the problem is that the United States may not have the armed forces personnel to staff this defense.

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13 February 2024

Even though the city is full of vacant office space, Portland can't find space for the 12 extra city council members that were voted in. The reason? They think their offices should have internet fiber, for the fastest connections. They're not doing internet-intensive work, like medical centers do with electronic health records. They're not providing cloud services to edge computing devices. They're just doing routine government work. Why is it necessary to rip up the streets to install fiber to the offices. This is why Portland is dysfunctional, and why they need all that tax money.

And Oregon needs more tax money, too. To fix problems they created.

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NVIDIA is more valuable than Google and Amazon. Incredible. Just came outa nowhere.

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Cats want to kill us. They carry bubonic plague. And Alaskapox.

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California's wealthy are leaving the state because of high taxes. Gee, who saw that coming. Bet the state is going to impose new creative taxes. Look for tolls, levies, fees.

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Caesars will no longer host DEF-CON. Caesar's got tired of getting hacked and losing money. What were those hackers thinking, anyway? Now, nobody will want to host them.

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Sad. Hong Kong is no longer the vibrant city it once was. It took communist China 26 years to bring the great city to its knees. And Hong Kong stocks are back to what they were in 1997, at the time of the takeover.
And the Chinese aren't reproducing as much as before. The efforts to reduce fertility linger, even though the campaign has stopped. Right now, China is #2 in terms of population, but if current trends continue, it will get overtaken by Nigeria by the end of the century.

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Funny. The gays and lesbians had a Mastodon instance called "queer.af".  But that domain comes out of Afghanistan, and the Taliban threw that domain name off the rooftop, I guess.

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Maybe, maybe, maybe.  45% of men are going to use A.I. to help compose something nice on Valentine's Day. 

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Inflation was higher than expected, according to today's report, leading to the stock market crashing. With all of Biden's giveways and free stuff, how could inflation not be higher. Student loans being forgiven. Free stuff for all the migrants entering the country. All this amounts to cash dumps into society, like quantitative easing. Money flowing into business and banks, when the economic production hasn't really changed. Gas prices are predicted to increase above $4/gal again, and when gas prices increase, the price of everything increases, because it affect shipping and deliveries, too.

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Oh, and global warming is a hoax.

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12 February 2024

Senators ask CEOs why their drugs cost so much more in the U.S.  The answer is simple – it's what the market will bear. Lowering the price of a drug is leaving money on the table. And CEOs have to act in the best interest of their shareholders.

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So mifepristone may not be that dangerous, after all. The main paper that scared the FDA about mifepristone has been retracted. So then they should allow it, with misoprostol.

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Emergency rooms are mess. It seems to have started right around the time the COVID-19 vax products were released. Hospitals started to go on divert status so often, because everyone was turning COVID-positive and demanded to be seen. Then they instituted COVID protocols, and everyone had to get vaxxed or quit. So many DID quit. Then the remaining staff were so stressed that many of them left anyway. And hospitals shut down elective procedures and lost money. And they spent money on expensive traveling nurses and lost money. Then the nurses went on strike, and they had boost pay. Then as people got poorer and had to go on Medicaid, hospitals saw loss reimbursement and decreased revenue. And nursing homes lost staff, so that they couldn't accept patients from hospitals as much as before, so hospitals were stuck with patients they couldn't release, and so the EDs couldn't admit as much, and so the EDs became jammed. And hospital EDs became such dismal overcrowded places to go, that people started avoiding them as much as possible, and so money was lost as well. It was a slow process for unnecessarily harsh COVID protocols to be relaxed in the Blue states, which suffered the most.

The solution I would offer: Open up a supplementary ED somewhere and sent all the drug overdoses there. No need to make the rest of the city suffer from the policies of Oregon legislature. Set up a secondary ambulance system just for the drug overdoses, too. Incentivize nursing homes to start taking in those needing their services.

Here's another solution – micro-hospitals. Pennsylvania is doing it. Build it, and send the overdose cases there. Don't let the rest of Portland suffer.

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The Chinese are creating publication farms, as only they can, do juice up the rankings of their mathematicians. Seems like everything that was once nice and reputable is no more. Take newspapers, for example. They used to be essential to stay abreast of what was going on. Then they became editorial centers, spewing out opinionated narratives. CNN used to be great, for example, Yeah, enshittification is coming to everything.  Let the news media die.

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Good idea. Midjourney is going to ban political images for 2024. But people will just use DALL-E, or roll their own.

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Does Brilliant Labs have the best A.R. glasses?

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5 Famous Solopreneurs Who Had Accomplished Nothing By Age 40.  Never too late to try something.

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Magic mushroom seizures are up in Oregon. Oregonians never miss a chance to f*ck their brains up. The United States in general has so many with mental illness.

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Oregon business have finally realized that the state's tax policy is going to hurt them.

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The Internet used to be fun. Why you should start your own blog. Like this ronin.

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Whoa. It's been a while since I set foot in Burien. Man, has it changed. It's become Homeless Central.
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11 February 2024

That $426 million – we don't know what happened to it.  Nearly half a billion emergency rental assistance money – unaccounted for. Oregon Housing and Community Services doesn't know where that money went. They think it went to the right place. They hope so. But there are no records, so who knows? Oregon Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade still thinks they did a good job.

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2023's Billionnaires – how they fared. Lots of Chinese in the losers column. That shows you how brutal 2023 was.

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Seiji Ozawa has passed away. Now, there's only Kent Nagano, and you hardly hear of him these days.

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Oregon's Truffle Festival is coming up. They'll even train your dog to hunt. Would love to go, but man, those prices.

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There's a new opioid that's 25 times more potent than fentanyl, and it's already on the streets in Quebec City. It's called protonitazepyne. Just what Portland needs. The withdrawal from these drugs won't be pretty to watch.

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The American College of Pediatricians finally admits that there is no science behind gender-mutilating surgery for children. Too bad, Rachel Levine. Don't try to convince others to follow your path. Your choice was yours. Leave other people's children alone.

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10 February 2024

Happy Lunar New Year!

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Harvard and 69 other schools will re-institute COVID vaccine mandates. Elon Musk needs to hurry on building his science and tech university.

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Washington backed down on increasing caps on property tax. This time voters met a tax hike they didn't like, probably because it would hit them, too.

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A friar with little tech background is advising the Vatican and the Italian government on artificial intelligence. It's not what you know, but who you know.

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Getting harder to do. How to avoid making other people angry on the internet.

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I was wondering about this the other day. Who were the people that traversed from Asia across the Bering Strait to North America? The so-called Beringians?

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Yikes. The billionaire who wants to live almost forever now has LongCOVID. Who knows if his bizarre self-treatments are really helping. No mention of whether he got the vax product. This reminds me of Nathan Pritikin, who strived to live a long life, only to succumb to complications of having leukemia. Or Ray Walford, another longevity enthusiast, who died of ALS complications.

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This encapsulates Portland voters completely!

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9 February 2024

Today is the first anniversary of when I started this blog. Happy Anniversary!

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The new moon phase starts at 2:59 pm PST today, but Chinese New Years Day is tomorrow. Anyone know why that is?

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Even two Portland City commissioners understand that Portlanders have had enough with new taxes. Good grief, already. Curb your spending.

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SB1583 will diminish the right of parents and the school board to stop the crap that they want to put into the schools. This is why parents are putting their kids into private schools.

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Poll finds Portlanders pessimistic about Portland. Homeless, lack of safety and high taxes were among the top concerns.

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Physics for Mathematicians.

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Boeing workers confirms what we already suspected. If you are worried, you can use apps like Flight View to check what plane you will be flying when you book your flight.

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Hawaii Judge strikes again.  Hawaii court says 'spirit of Aloha' supersedes Constitution, Second Amendment.

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Looks like Legacy has more balls than Providence. If Regence doesn't accept Legacy's offer, then Legacy will drop Regence. Legacy would probably like to throw more support to PacificSource anyway.

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8 February 2024

Seattle broke a record in 2023 for fentanyl overdose deaths. Probably better get more diversity, Seattle.

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I don't get it. We were told that Multnomah County had a surplus of funds to pay for the preschool program. Even when the wealthy folks "forgot" to pay their share. So now, they can't fund the preschools without another 0.8% tax? What gives?

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As Warren Buffet said, "For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit."
They're inefficient, ugly and take up a lot of valuable space. The only winners are the windmill owners, getting that valuable tax credit.

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Biden Hits Worst Approval Rating. Yup, still 37%. These reports are a joke. Wake me up when it's below 30%.

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Portland’s only earthquake preparedness employee on budget chopping block. The only person Portland has on staff to make sure that when disaster hits, there is an organized response, has retired. Now due to budget cuts, they're thinking of eliminating that position. Obviously to give free monetary stipend to the homeless. And free preschool. And teachers unions.

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Portland's tax base is shrinking, but their expenses aren't. In fact they're growing. So they need to increase taxes on the poor slobs that are still stuck in the city.
And then Kotek called for the three-year tax moratorium in December, throwing the district’s plans into chaos.
Of course. What do you do when you're a failing city, and everything is more expensive to fix now, because you ignored it when it was cheaper to solve. Many are leaving, because the leadership is crap and ranked-choice voting makes sure that problem will never be solved.

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Rachel Levine under fire after HHS offers single study to back claims that child sex changes are 'necessary' healthcare.

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A search engine in 80 lines of Python. Wow!

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Watch out when you go through Seattle. The I-90 rock thrower is back again. Ready to dispense more life-altering injuries again.

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The small intestine has five distinct parts. In medicine, the small intestine is usually divided into three parts, the duodenum, jejunum and ileum, but this group has found five distinct parts, both in terms of function (what gets absorbed in each segment) but also distinctions in stem cell derivation. It's amazing that we're still discovering things about the body.

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Tritium-based fusion breakthrough. Five seconds of fusion action, resulting in a ground-breaking record of 69 megajoules using a mere 0.2 milligrams of fuel. Great!

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7 February 2024

COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines: Lessons Learned from the Registrational Trials and Global Vaccination Campaign. I missed this when it came out a few weeks ago. It contains this statement, which is amazing to be seen in an American medical journal, instead of in some foreign journal, or as a Letter to the Editor in the BMJ:
Given the extensive, well-documented SAEs and unacceptably high harm-to-reward ratio, we urge governments to endorse a global moratorium on the modified mRNA products until all relevant questions pertaining to causality, residual DNA, and aberrant protein production are answered.
And this Korean doctor gets it right.

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Five sneaky things the Oregon Legislature always does. But Congress does this, too, not just Oregon.

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Tina Kotek is unhappy with the PSU report that homelessness in Oregon has increased. But then the Legislature proposes this: free pizza and fries for the homeless.

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Ed Diehl looks good on paper. But will he deliver?

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How dare they run a preschool downtown right in front of Portland's favorite drug abuse site? How thoughtless of you, Portland.

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Is this Satoshi Nakamoto?

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The East Coast's Kate Brown (Gov Hochul) wants to fast-track migrants for government jobs: 'Get this moving quickly', she says. Meanwhile, this is what the criminals are now doing. They area stealing phones, using it to empty their bank accounts, then selling the electronics to Europe for scrap. Are they just looking for a better life?

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The A.I. Math Olympiad has some serious brainpower on their advisory board.

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Could excessive dietary folate be the cause of the increase in colon cancer? Wow, folate is regarding as generally safe, and many doctors are not afraid to prescribe more than is probably necessary to pregnant women and those with anemia caused by hemolysis. But apparently excess folate promotes gene methylation, which is important in suppressing gene expression. And when an important gene like MLH1 is suppressed, you get cancer.

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Feeling stressed? Here are two ways to get quickly get back in control. One requires the Internet, one doesn't. 

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Now Regence Blue Cross is wrangling with Legacy Health. The terms of how it settled with Providence were not disclosed to the public, but I bet Providence hospitals patients will know about it soon. I'm beginning to think that the problem is with Regence, and perhaps Providence hospitals and Legacy Health should have negotiated with Regence together, instead of separately.

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6 February 2024

Zoozve lives!  This is a funny story of how a guy saw "ZOOZVE" as a satellite orbiting Venus on his child's solar system poster. He posted his puzzlement on X/Twitter here. (If you can't get Twitter, here's the thread.) Well, thanks to him, ZOOZVE is now for real.

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Yup, Seattle efforts to boost the minimum wage of food delivery drivers ended up destroying their business. As they say, the real minimum wage is ZERO.

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Huggingface is going to make it easy to generate custom chatbots just like OpenAI. Competition is good.

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Metabolized SARS-CoV2 proteins can reassemble and interact with your immune system, causing proinflammatory responses. Tell me again, why we need so many boosters against a virus that is like a common cold now.

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Watch out for "indefinite optimism". It's why so many brilliant people are losers. It may not be a special talent that all that young multi-millionaires have. They may just be blindly naïve. Too optimistic to see the reality of their ideas that almost everyone can see. Once in a while, they succeed, but most of the time, they don't.

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While in the short-term, cannabis might mellow you out, in the long term, it causes increases risk of anxiety. Just what the millennials need – more anxiety. And just what our country needs – more people with mental illness. No wonder Reddit is full of neurotic posters.

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Bluesky is now open to the public. This is where things will start to deteriorate.  But as X/Twitter becomes more difficult to access through Nitter, more people may be compelled to migrate to this. Sorry, but Mastodon, Discord and Lemmy are suitable. Those sites are either too cumbersome to use, and are mostly populated by gamers and "neurodivergents".

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Academics vs the Normals. Excellent essay. I never thought it would be an encomium of Trump, but it sums up well what will be the Trump 2.0 administration, and why the Dems fear this. As one commenter said "we need a game changing asshole like Trump to change the sad dynamic of this country". Yes we do!

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What do you think of Apple's Vision Pro?  Seems like the rich are always one step ahead, huh.

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5 February 2024

China is building six times more new coal plants than other countries. This is why all the efforts by Western countries to fight CO2 production will ultimately be futile. All it takes is one player not to cooperate, and the endeavor just falls apart. Here's why China will not cooperate – an excellent speech by Konstantin Kisin.

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I always wondered why autoimmune disease were so heavily weighted to females. Stanford researchers have uncovered the effect of a special kind of RNA called Xist. It is an lncRNA (long non-coding). Apparently it triggers autoimmune responses by its very presence.

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How to comment on social media. Satire, naturally.

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Sacramento Keeps Throwing Money at Its Housing Crisis. It’s Not Getting Any Better. Lessons for Portland, if they'll listen. So how did places like Reno and Minneapolis succeed in dealing with the problem? Maybe they sent one-way bus tickets to Portland and Seattle. Hey, it's not far-fetched. But here's Portland...

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£12 billion to be spent on yet another nuclear collider - the largest ever. That's a lot of money. The LHC confirmed the presence of the Higgs boson, but admittedly it didn't change your life. This one hopes to discover the nature of dark matter and dark energy. It's still a LOT of money.

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ImageFX is one-upping StableDiffusion and DALL-E. It looks impressive. Generative AI is really taking off.

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Those who have a Google account and use Google Maps can be tracked by others.  It never ceases to amaze my how people have no problem with this and don't care.

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Another one gives up. Lardo is leaving downtown Portland. Yup, too much crime and homelessness. Tax base continues its decline.

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When the tax base in Oregon is shrinking, the rest of Oregonians have to get taxed harder.  Now the Dems in Salem want to establish a statewide property tax.  Yet another reason to want to leave Oregon and join Greater Idaho. Danny De Gracia has some wise words about dependency on the property tax.

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Thank goodness the Oregon GOP are working on eliminating mail-in ballots, making it illegal for teachers to strike, reversing Measure 110, and making it harder to be subject to the CAT tax.

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Oregon is the second highest state in the nation in unepmloyment claims. Only New York was higher. Even states like Mississippi and Alabama did better.

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The numnber of homeless increased 8.5% from 2022 to 2023. Yeah, I think I can tell. And there are more illegal immigrants than previously estimated.

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This is why EVs are still a bad idea.

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Portland parents are continuing to choose private schools over public schools. Who can blame them?

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Generative AI makes it easier to generate realistic fake IDs. And this works, because the government will let to submit a photographed copy of your driver's license as proof of identity.

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An ancient scroll from around Vesuvius was burned to a crisp. Opening it up would cause it to disintegrate. Now using A.I. and advanced scanning techniques, we can read the Herculaneum Papyri. That's just magical.

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Stating the obvious. SAT and ACT score predict academic success in college. Water predicts wetness. This is why diversity advocates want to eliminate standardized testing, so that minorities can enter college. Where they would be set up to fail, if not for special diversity programs. Where they would fail after graduation, if not for diversity hiring programs, such as at United Airlines.

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