Sugoi & Yokunai

As if people didn't already need more financial stress. Thousands are told that they owe thousands to Oregon due to overpayment of COVID unemployment money.

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Yikes! Portland’s Burnside Bridge to close for 5 years during seismic rebuild, starting in 2027. Disruptions galore.

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Multnomah County is NOT the place to be.

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What?!?  County’s Downtown Homeless Resource Center Faces $3.3 Million Funding Gap Next Year.  That makes no sense.  They spent less than half their budgeted money. They also got a $25 million tax windfall. How can they be out of money? 

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Yes, it's time to switch to Firefox.  This ronin swears by it.

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Elon Musk is convinced that something was discovered, significant enough to alarm Ilya Sutskever.

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This keeps coming up.  Dunning-Kruger is just autocorrelation. I don't think so, as I see this over and over in daily life. Someone tried to debunk this claim with more statistical arguments.  But what Dunning and Kruger observed was not just a statistical construct. Just because of the way they portrayed their ideas in a graph doesn't mean that it's all statistical hand-waving. Dumb people really do overestimate their abilities and smart people really do second-guess themselves to their detriment.

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Well now Darth Vader is really more machine than human. James Earl Jones agreed to have his voice used by A.I. to be the voice of Darth Vader forever. Fitting, I guess.

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Will there be a crisis next March?  Banks have taken loans from the BTFP to stay afloat. This is why we haven't seen another Silicon Valley Bank catastrophe.  But the loans come due in March 2024. What will happen if they can't pay? Jerome Powell admits that he hasn't thought that far ahead. Yikes! Well, I'm sure he'll extend the due date, or something like that. Construction on the house of cards continues.

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North Koreans are going bald. Kim Jong Un's latest problem. What could be the cause? Can't be nutrition – that's been present for years. Could it be ambient radioactivity?

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No surprise. Richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than poorest 66%, report says. Yeah, but they say that they just purchase carbon credits, so all's good. Of course, who knows if they do or not. And they get to set the price on those credits. Are you awake, yet?

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Another reason to think twice about buyinv a Tesla. Unless your commute is limited and you live in an area set up for EVs, I can't see that buying an expensive EV makes any sense.

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Everyone needs to read this. Reddit has a post on surprise financial hits that can ruin you.  Gotta be prepared, but hardly anyone is.

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Rite Aid isn't done with the store closings. It's bad to lose your job at any time, but especially around the holidays.

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Electric vehicles are quiet.  Sometimes too quiet. So companies like Tesla have to incorporate speakers to output sounds to make you feel like you're still driving a car.  Here are the sounds.

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52% of Americans are gun owners now. Greater than any Army.  This is what the Founding Fathers intended.

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Eat more meat.  Trans-veccenic acid, found in meat from cows and sheep and their associated dairy products, helps boost CD8+ T-cell mediated immunity.  This helps the T-cells penetrate into tumors. Will it actually make a difference? Why risk it, I say.

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Like back in the Dickens era. Oregon is placing foster children in unlicensed short-term rental homes and paying millions to do so. So much money is being doled to the homeless, and so there isn't enough money to help foster children?  And yeah, about that spending $1.3 billion on the homeless.  What did it give us?  More homeless, that's what.

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More bite the dust. Can't believe LaRog Jewelers is closing.  And a couple of Beaverton outlets are closing as well. People who bet on a robust recovery after we recovered from the coronavirus epidemic are losing out.  There's no recovery in Portland, where rampant drug abuse, crime and the homelessness blight have increased. Rioting and arson remain a threat – that didn't go away when Trump left office.

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What's happened to the medical profession? Why are so many medical institutions so political now? And always far-left? Why do doctors still advocate so strongly for vax product that has demonstrable harm against a disease that we now know is no worse than other illness that we've faced in the past?  We do we have to support Palestine and get involved in that mess?  Why can't you just treat disease and make people well?

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SLIT2 and CXCL2 – are these the keys to delaying senescence?  Sounds promising.

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Giving up on Portland. J.K.Gill building is up for sale – no one wants it.  And the Pine Street Market owner gives up – puts property up for sale. Hope he can find a buyer and recoup some of his investment. Truly, a city in decline, while the media continue to pretend everything is rosy.

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Mercer Island synagogue targeted with graffiti. Getting real tired of this.  The lack of law enforcement just encourages more of this crap.

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Remember this? Well, thank goodness for a sane judge who realized that this was all an unconstitutional knee-jerk on the latest mentally ill shooter episode. Banning guns of any kind violates the Second Amendment. It won't make America safer.

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Jeff Bezos sell more Amazon stock and people have a problem with that, since he fled Washington, depriving them of tax money. Even when he donated to help the homeless, the lefties aren't happy. Good on Jeff to leave that hellhole. And why stay in Seattle? Their core taxes increased 4X more than the economy since 2013.  And Washingon is the state most heavily impacted by retail theft.  I mean, if you can leave, why stay in a place where you can't have nice things?

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Attractive men are more likely to achieve socioeconomic success. Is it true? I'm thinking of Rupert Murdoch, George Soros, many politicians, many of the current billionaires. Some of the techies were above average when they were younger, but this "rule" is not hard and fast. Good thing this ronin can focus on living a peaceful life and not having to compete in the rat race.

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"Hey y'all! Wazzup?" is not how to start a cover letter.  Do we really need a course for that?

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Sign of the times. There are Anti-Loneliness Clubs. But only if you're good enough to join the club, however. Sorry, incels.

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Too much of a good thing. The success of Wegovy is destabilizing Denmark's economy.  Too much money, too fast. Enjoy it while it lasts, I say.

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Five big governance mistakes in OpenAI. The existing board has got to go.  No question. They're irresponsible, and don't know how to do things. Especially Sutskever – what a novice.

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Me want. Wow, who would have guessed that little ol' Prineville was a center of aeronautic innovation. The Switchblade looks yummy.

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Seattle has the 9th highest cost of living. No surprise there. And millennials say they need an income of $525,000 to be happy. Guess we're going to have to put up with a lot of unhappy millennials. But what's the best city for techies? Seattle!

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I never thought of this. What if you inventoried the contents of your refrigerator and asked an LLM to suggest a recipe that uses those ingredients? Well, don't bother. It makes lousy suggestions.

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So this is why people want to work from home.  Guess you can't schedule time to do that at the office, can you?

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Take care of your red blood cells.  If they are damaged or grow old, blood vessels in the brain will clog up with them, resulting in your blood vessel lining cells to pass them through to where macrophages can get rid of them, but causing a microbleed in the process.

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Email is like digital currency. Be careful where you give it out. Use throwaway email addresses when you can.

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Today's college grad is more likely to be unemployed. This is a time of flux and what might have been marketable before may not be so today.

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We really have to keep politics out of the classroom.

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Metformin – what can't it do? Adding metformin to chemotherapy makes chemo work better against lung cancer. Just like in breast cancer.

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Very true.

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Guess which city in America has the highest cannabis consumption per capita?  Aw, how'd you know?

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Yeah, say what you will about Trump's style, 2 out of 3 people admit that life was better when Trump was president.

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Download El_Salvador.mp4

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18 reasons why you really should really own an electric car.  All good reasons. Seriously.

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Cancer Stem Cells Induce Senescence in Macrophages.  Interesting strategy – make your opponent grow old instantly, so that he cannot defend himself against you.  Well, the first step in a successful defense is to know your opponent well.

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Three Charts Explain Much of What Is Happening on Portland’s Streets.  Rampant mental illness all around.

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I feel sorry for these students. They put their trust in the public school system, and it has failed them.

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Someone on Seattle's subreddit has noticed that the medical system is in financial decline. Lots of reasons for it. The coronavirus epidemic started it, but people have lost trust in doctors now. Plus the economy is in decline, and more people are unemployed and forced to take the low-reimbursement Medicaid plans, if they bother to get insurance at all. And hospitals laid off perfectly good employees who didn't want to get the untested mRNA product and didn't take into account natural immunity, and so have been short-handed, forcing them to hire expensive traveling nurses. And the people they desire to move to the city to hire don't want to live in Blue Cities with Blue policies and politics. So they have to make do with what they have, and those people have used their unions to raise their pay and cut their workload. All spiraling down, as predicted. I'm sure it's the same with Portland.

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A million dollar net worth isn't what it used to be. Those with $1 million net worth don't think of themselves as rich, just upper middle class.  In today's world, you can't retire with only $1 million invested. Unless you want to really live like a monk.  To have a  "rich" lifestyle, you need to have at least a $10 million net worth, I think.

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Neuroscientists engineer a protein that enhances memory. It's a modified LIMK1 protein, involved in the formation of dendritic spines in neurons.  I don't understand why they chose rapamycin as a switch to turn it on.

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Big Business doesn't want to come to Seattle now.  There's no demand for Seattle office space.  No surprises, eh?

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Nice summary of what's going with the firing of Sam Altman at OpenAI. Now I hear, investors are demanding that he be re-instated and they are in negotiations to bring him back.  I think Ilya Sutskever is too young to have heard of what happened to Fairchild Semiconductor, when Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce left to from their own company – Intel.

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American men are dying more quickly than American women. Why is that?

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California students will now be programmed to recognize and reject any news that goes against whatever the accepted narrative is.

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UK is the first to approve using CRISPR technology for the treatment of sickle cell anemia and thalassemia.

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Lessons learned along the way in trying to create an A.I. girlfriend. Remember, every good idea turns to crap when you release it to the world. Same here.  You knew people would turn it into a porn factory. Or the developer is crazy.

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Payroll taxes are increasing, because of all those disabled and unemployed people. Great way to hurt struggling businesses. And at the same time, they're actually bragging that they can lower taxes that unemployed people pay when getting their unemployed benefits. 

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