Sugoi & Yokunai

It's their fault! Portland city officials criticize Multnomah County officials for the sorry state of the homelessness crisis.

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Portland's ambulance service is already struggling with staffing shortages. So what does Multnomah County do? It fines them.

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Gasoline for your car will cost less this winter. But your electricity bill will increase by 17%. The left hand gives, but the right hand takes away.

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It's looking to be that way.  Was St. Malachy right?  That's the Prophecy of the Popes guy.

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Seattle may see some school closures, as there aren't enough kids to justify some of the school staying open. 

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Legacy's got more problems. Now ten Women's Health Clinics want to unionize. Everyone wants more pay. You're looking less attractive as an acquisition item every day.

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Could this be Bigfoot? Man claims to have seen a giant on a hillside that disappeared into a rock formation. Well, this is Oregon, you know.

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Portland teachers strike continues Monday, gives new meaning to ‘No School November’. We now enter into the third week of the strike. Just unbelievable. Portland students already have low school attendance due to COVID-19 and getting time off to attend all kinds of protests. They get days off for teacher preparation days. And every single holiday. Now this. Students don't seem to care that their academic lives are being frittered away. Even the lefty Oregonian is saying "enough already". This is why we were concerned about Tina Kotek's support by the unions. And the teachers demand racial equity training during the strike. How about math, reading, writing?

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Can't believe the Oregonian let Steve Duin run this column. But he's right.

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Joining the combined powers of CRISPR-Cas9 technology and CAR-T cells. Researchers have found that disrupting SUV39H1-mediatied H3K9 methylation status facilitates early expansion, long-term persistence, and overall anti-tumor efficacy of human CAR T cells in leukemia and prostate cancer models. Amazing!

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Drink coffee. The trigonelline in coffee improved memory. At least in aged mice. Could work in humans, too. 

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In the A.I. developer world, people are so accustomed to importing libraries and trying out someone's new A.I. model, or GPT wrapper app.  Now some evil hacker in the Philippines has abused this trust to hide malware. Everything goes to sh!t eventually, when you open it up to the world.

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Unintended consequences. Ensuring adequate staffing in hospitals can be challenging. Finding doctors to work can be expensive. Congress' "No Medical Surprises Act" sounded good on paper. Who likes a surprise expensive bill? But now companies that provide the staffing to hospitals, such as TeamHealth, Envision Healthcare, American Physician Partners, Air Methods Corp, Global Medical Response, Radiology Partners have either gone bankrupt or are in serious financial difficulty.  So it may end up that your local hospital will not have enough doctors to treat you. So no surprise bill, but maybe "we'll just have to do the best we can" medical care instead.

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Oregon in the News.  Oregon Decriminalized Hard Drugs. It Isn’t Working. Everyone can see it, except our state legislators.

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American Medical Response now has the Washington County contract for ambulance services, and is providing the same substandard care as Multnomah County. Not entirely their fault, though. Few to move to Oregon to work.

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We can't have nice things. The Holiday Ale Fest Is Canceled for 2023.

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Pope Francis fires popular Bishop Strickland.

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A study in contrasts. Here's "the happiest man in the world" who doesn't care what you think about him. And here's Elon Musk, who almost had to have a "wellness check" done because he was depressed after being booed at during a Dave Chapelle show.  He actually was stunned at what people thought about him.

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That's the message. Don't use your car to make calls or send text messages.

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At the interface of the healthcare system.  People get caught because they don't know how to navigate the system.  I still can't believe that insurers don't feel that they have to disclose why they denied coverage for your illness. What are they afraid of? Thank goodness for ProPublica's insurance claim app.

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Apple is pays a relatively small penalty for hiring practices favoring H1-B visa holders over hiring American workers. Cringely had been calling out this practice years ago. From what I see, Apple is flooded with foreigners, and it shows in their website and advertising. Could this be why it's products are so lame these days? Like the M3 chip? And why we're seeing other companies come up with the cool stuff now? Lilke hu.ma.ne, from ex-Apple employees?

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Here's Instagram, making their app more addictive to vulnerable, lonely youth. The Internet can be sweet poison, sometimes.

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Okinawans aren't living as long as before.  Diet's changing. Lifestyle is become more stressful. I guess it was too good to last.

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A.I. is taking the easier white-collar jobs. All those sinecure positions are going away. Now, you really have to provide value, else you aren't worth the trouble.

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Why is this only on a German site?  The new Outlook allows your emails to be sent to Microsoft servers. Also your calendar and contact information will be sent there, too. You can opt out, but only if you are aware of this, and you know how to do it.

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You mean you're still willing to endure it? "Patience wearing thin."  Shoreline, WA business owners getting tired of increasing crime.  Well, you are in Seattle, you know. What do you expect? Did you guys vote Democrat? Did you vote to defund the police? Consequences of your own actions, I'd say. 

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Buyer's remorse. Oregon lawmakers now want Kotek to reverse Measure 110.

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But we need to revive Cuckoo's Nest mental hospitals. Oregon State Hospital struggles for resources now and is imploding with lawsuits. What a mess. Who would want to work there?

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Total search privacy?  Seems straightforward to me.  Let's say you want the librarian to retrieve a book for you, but you don't want the librarian to know what book you want.  The answer is to encrypt the library (preprocessing) and have the librarian bring you encrypted chunks at a time, such that the librarian doesn't know what is being retrived. But you can decrypt the chunk and read what you need and if this can be done without leaving a trace, then your secret is safe. 

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Americans don't want to fight for their country anymore. The author thinks its because of apathy. There might be some of that, but I think a major reason is that no one wants to die because of Biden's blunders. No one wants to die because of our incompetent leadership. There was a time when the cause was just and we felt it was right, but having seen that there is a world where we can live without major wars, dying in a pointless war seems even more...pointless.

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I never really liked leaf blowers, so I'm not unhappy that they may go away. The noise, the stink, the airborne particulates. But the mess will be harder to clear, so we'll have to see.

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My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.

And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours.

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit.

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Portland can't win for losing.  Judge throws monkey wrench in plans to get rid of the homeless. Down the toilet we'll continue to go. Southwest Washington is more serious about cleaning things up, although the effort is rather mild.

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Question asked and answered.  Dog care workers question why Seattle PD never showed up after 911 calls about intruder who wouldn't leave.

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The consequences of being poor. Portland has a shortage in the Bureau of Development Services, so no new construction in the city.

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Two kinds of GenZ attitudes out there.  There's this one:

Download Lazy.mp4

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There should be name for this phenomenon. Where a system works great when it's just starting out, and everyone behaves and uses the system properly, but when you introduce it into the world at large, there are the inevitable assholes that spoil it and make people want to go back to how it was before.  So many examples of this. It's happening to Uber in Seattle.

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Why do young people think that everyone wants to "track" everything they do?  Yeah, there's the tech for it, but come up with something really useful.

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Now I know why I am not hungry after a strenuous hike. It's lactoyl-phenylalanine, an appetite suppressant which can be found in soy sauce, among other foods. Could this be why asian Asians are so thin, but gain weight when they come to America? As this ronin gets older, it does indeed become harder to maintain his weight.

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El Niño is disrupting the supply chain in unpredicted ways. We're going to be in for a rough winter season.

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"I’d love to know how Apple, which famously doesn’t take kindly to iOS apps housing their own app stores, feels about that…" OpenAI wants to be the app store for AI. Too early to tell what will happen. I think that Apple is experiencing what happened when Google was ascendant, and Microsoft could only watch its decline helplessly. Apple doesn't generate the kind of excitement it used to, when Steve Jobs was alive. In fact, during the DevDay talk, I wondered what Jobs would have said/done if he were alive. He'd either try to buy the company or be on the phone with Altman trying to develop an idea. I don't think Tim Cook is doing that. The latest M3 debacle is a clear sign that he's run out of ideas. Nobody cares about new emojis or more pixels or slimmer devices anymore. Tim is a process man, not an idea man.

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A quarter of US medical students consider quitting school and most may not treat patients. The new workforce is not as robust as before, willing to do the hard work, especially considering that conditions have greatly improved since the Libby Zion case. I saw this new A.I. healthcare app that's out. Built by engineers to make medicine work like how engineers would envision it. They have one medical advisor - a primary care professor who works at Harvard. Hardly an example of how things are out in the battlefront. Doctors are taught a certain workflow in medical school, and practice it during internship and residency. Imaging being told that you have to do things a different way, to integrate some company's app in your workflow. Suddenly, instead of just dealing with chart notes and phone calls, you're having to read what all your patients and support staff are writing in the app, too.  While there probably needs to be a revamping of medical care workflow in the age of A.I., it would be ideal to having this introduced during medical school.  And tested in a small implementation before large-scale deployment. Amazon's OneMedical is probably trying to do something like this, but I don't know a physician working there to get feedback. Can someone put something in the comments? Even from a patient's standpoint?

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It never gets easier. No, it doesn't, but where would be the fun if it did?

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Cognitive decline, already a problem in the over 50s crowd, declined even more significantly after the COVID-19 pandemic. Lack of exercise and more alcohol. That'll do it.

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ProPublica has a tool that will help you find out why your medical insurer denied your claim.  Turnaround time is 30 days. Wish it were a bit sooner. Time is of the essence in situations like this.

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Why Has Stoicism Gained Popularity in Modern Times? Stoicism is like Buddhism, but for the Western person. With none of the Eastern mythology and pantheon attached. The ideas are basically the same, though. And it works. And there is an active Stoic community.

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Asian-Americans are becoming less liberal. What took you guys so long? I never understood why Japanese-Americans embraced the Democrat party. Especially in Hawaii.

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They're ugly, but they perform. New "super shoes" make for better performance. Next, get some designers.

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Tai chi chuan boosts memory. It's the physical activity. That's already been shown. Moderate coffee and tea consumption helps, too.

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All the ways you can think wrongly. There are names to all the logical fallacies and biased and flawed ways that people think.

"If you want less of something, tax it."  Jeff Bezos’ move to Miami will cost Washington state millions in tax revenue. 

Jared Walczak, vice president of state projects at the Tax Foundation, stated in a Thursday blog post that Bezos would have been on the hook for about $1.44 billion a year under the proposed wealth tax. That would have made up about 45% of the projected $3.2 billion a year the tax was projected to bring in.

Nice move, Bezos. Sometimes Dems need to be taught a hard lesson.

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