Google is in a bad time right now. Some people are calling for Sundar Pichai to step down or be ousted. Matt Stoller has an interesting article on the dilemma that Google faces now. There are laws that say that the government can tell you what you can't do in the name of Jim Crow laws, but there are those who believe that the government can't tell a private company what to do – something Robert Bork supported. It's easy to support the former when it comes to race, but what about political persuasion? There are folks who think it's fine for Google to take away Tucker Carlson's Gmail account, but not OK if her were a black man. You might say that a black person can't change being black, but Tucker could change his political persuasion, but is that the standard? What about religion? What about sexual orientation? Did Bork have a point after all?
So who voted against re-criminalizing fentanyl abuse. These guys. Including, Khanh Pham, not surprisingly. And now we know who the RINOs are. This should have been a no-brainer vote.
They can have nice things. Why do you think? Look at this video and what do you see? Their downtown is alive and thriving, and it is safe, unlike Portland or Seattle and many American cities. Even the females can wear what they want.
Seattle City Council president has had it with protestors. There's no civility anymore in Seattle. Millennials thinks that their opinions are important enough to get in your face. Arrest them all. And thirty years ago, this guy would have been laughed out of town. But in today's world...
Some are saying that the nursing profession isn't fun anymore. Suicide rate is increasing. It starting with COVID-19, but you can't really blame that anymore. It's policy, and the deterioration of American society as a whole. No safety. Lousy economy. Lots of unpleasantness to deal with.
There have been tech layoffs, but the headcount at major tech companies is about the same. This is because they are changing their focus, and weeding out the oldies, to make room for the new. But also, they want more scut workers, like at Amazon, to do manual labor jobs. But white-collar jobs are being pared, and some engineers are being let go. Probably managers, too.
Multnomah County's ambulance service is a sinking ship. Workers are leaving, and the County wants to punish the ambulance service. Soon, we won't have ambulance service. What inept leadership. I suspect the rich will somehow take care of themselves.
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"90% do not pay the tax" Jessica Vega-Pedersen delays increasing the free pre-school tax because they don't need the money right now. It's a tax paid for by the wealthy, but the vast majority aren't paying it! So why the proposed increase? Why do they just assume that an increase is necessary?
This has gotten strangely little media mention. On Tuesday, a federal court ruled that Congress lacked the constitutionally required quorum to pass the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, and therefore the Biden administration cannot enforce the new mandates imposed on
Texas by the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which was part of the
omnibus spending bill. Well what about the other stuff in the bill? Like the $1.7 trillion in appropriations? Well?
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Regarding the strike by South Korean doctors, if they don't go back to work, they'll be arrested. They clearly have a different culture and legal system there. Imagine – strikers being arrested if they don't go back to work. Imagine if they did that to, say, Portland public school teachers. Wow.
NYT discusses Sam Altman. Seems like OpenAI is just Sam Altman's company. He does what he wants to do, but at least he seems to be active and laying the groundwork for ambitious projects. He operates like someone with a vision. Can't say the same for anyone else in the field.
I've noticed that even though it might be cloudy, as a solar eclipse reaches totality, the clouds seem to part. I thought I was just lucky, but it turns out that this often happens. There's science behind that phenomenon.
Measure 110 can't just roll back. Nope, it has to come with $211 million more in spending. Just make drug abuse illegal. That's free. Make it the way it was before. Everything Dems do has to come with more unnecessary spending.
New search engine (PimEyes) checks to see where your picture is online. And supposedly it lets you delete that image, although how it can do that without write permission on someone else's server is unclear. But you can set an alert when your picture appears somewhere. Seems a little sketchy.
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Want to learn something new in a technical field? Plunge into a new field? Try GlobeExplorer.
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Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, is buying up much of Waimea, Hawaii, and locals there are concerned. I feel like Hawaii is just a dish of expensive desserts, which used to be enjoyed by everyone, and now the ultrarich are coming and reserving parts of the dessert for themselves. I think the locals have a point.
First, universities and professors need to realize that students
are no longer extraordinary but merely average, and have to adjust
curricula and academic standards.
Second, employers can no longer rely on applicants with university
degrees to be more capable or smarter than those without degrees.
Third, students need to realize that acceptance into university is
no longer an invitation to join an elite group.
Fourth, the myth of brilliant undergraduate students in scientific
and popular literature needs to be dispelled.
Fifth, estimating premorbid IQ based on educational attainment is
vastly inaccurate, obsolete, not evidence based, and mere
speculations.
Sixth, obsolete IQ data or tests ought not to be used to make
high-stakes decisions about individuals, for example, by clinical
psychologists to opine about intelligence and cognitive abilities
of their clients
Yowza.
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Why does Washington state wants to know which political party you are on the outside of their mail-in ballot? Do they have a special place to put the ballot with the "wrong" party marked on it? Mail-in ballots just have to be scrapped. In-person is the only way.
Like sheep. Survey shows that Oregonians are dissatisfied with the current election system (why?) and are intrigued by Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). Don't they know that RCV is just going to get them more Democrats and maybe a few extra crazies, too? That's how RCV works, if you do some thinking about it. It's insidious. Sounds like it might be more fair, but it's a trap.
Read this opposition to a Right to Repair bill. "...an independent iPhone repair shop is less invested in ensuring that repairs meet Apple’s high standards than Apple itself is". "Hunter Biden’s water-damaged Apple laptop likely would not be in the
headlines if he had taken it to the Apple Store for service, instead of
an independent repair shop." "If companies are forced to redesign products to comply with mandates,
prices will likely rise to cover the additional expenses. Complicated
new design requirements could also make devices less intuitive and
user-friendly over time."
What blather. I had to chuckle, esp. about the Hunter Biden part.
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Why time seems to pass faster as we age. I agree with the notion that the familiar makes things pass faster. When you hike on an unfamiliar trail, the hike out always seems to go faster than the hike in. Unfamiliarity makes each moment pass longer.
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Shin Jedi. This video makes a nice start of a potential storyline. What if Star Wars tech was inserted into ancient Japanese swordsplay? Watch.
Does math get in the way of physics being able to explain things?This guy think so. Nah, don't blame math. It's just a matter of figuring out how to define the right context to apply the math.
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Jensen Huang thinks that kids should not learn to code. Let A.I. do it. I strongly disagree, but that's just me. But I do think that the kind of code that kids should be working on needs to accelerate. The world is different now, and A.I. can help kids learn faster. At least in theory.
Remember Kozmo.com? The Bay Area delivery service started during the dotcom era? It tried to get bigger, but the business wouldn't scale. Well, this guy Tony Illes is doing the same thing. As long as he doesn't try to over-expand, he might do OK. Better than just sitting around and letting Seattle City Council's liberal ladies ruin your dreams.
I saw this article about the Albedo satellite that will launch in 2025, that can spy on individuals, and there was concern worked up over privacy and face recognition. But that's the Daily Mail. I wanted to see more detail, and if the pictures shown in the NYT are any indication, then it will be more like what you see from the top of the Burj Khalifa. Making out individual faces will still be difficult though, but who knows what the tech will be like in a few years. But yeah, when you see contrails overhead, be wary.
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Don't rely on Generative AI for medical advice. Up to 30% of what LLMs say is unsupported. There's no substitute for a human physician. (Although during COVID-19, what some human doctors said about things like the vax product was also unsupported as well.)
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Great! A referendum to repeal rank-choice voting will be on the next ballot.
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Man is cured of acute myelogenous leukemia and HIV at the same time. He needed an allogeneic bone marrow transplantation for his leukemia, but luckily, his bone marrow donor carried a CCR5 delta-3 mutation, which made his T-lymphocytes, monocytes and dendritic cells resistant to HIV entry. So when his bone marrow was replaced, he became resistant to HIV, too. Lucky guy.
Strike! American resident physicians may have qualms about striking. Not so the South Korean resident physicians. The majority of them are striking and they don't care about patient health. The government's response to stressful conditions due to overwork is to just increased enrollment in medical schools, but that's not going to help the resident physicians today. It will be years before they experience any relief. I wish there were a way to solve this problem without hurting patients, but sometimes there is no other way.
Scientists have discovered a factor in LongCOVID - a leaky blood-brain barrier. Here's the lay version. Not sure what it signifies, but it's a piece of the puzzle.
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Recriminalization of hard drugs like fentanyl should be a no-brainer, right? Hard to believe that there are people opposed to it, but there are. Why do we need to compromise on something like this?
And Seattle is finding out the hard way that just providing homes is not the answer to the homelessness problem:
About time. The Chinook Indian Nation used to dominate the Pacific Northwest. They pretty much owned the land of Washington state. The Chinook Wawa is still alive. But over the years, the tribe's dominance has greatly waned. Now, they may get tribal recognition back.
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Hospital workers will now be a protected class. Assaulting them will now be a felony. I can't believe that there are people who oppose this. Of course, it's the defenders of those with "disabilities". Sorry, but allowing this loophole weakens the law, because so many people can claim to have "disabilities". Heck, living in Portland is probably a disability.
NVIDIA is on a tear. Can Jensen Huang manage this and continue the company's dominance? Obvious other players want a piece of the action. But CUDA is dominant, and it will be hard to get around it. However, in the tech world, we've seen leaders get toppled by more capable competitors. But they're GPUs are incredibly expensive, and a lower cost but still capable competitor could take away business. We shall see.
So chronic stress promotes cancer metastasis. One of the things I've noticed is that those who constantly worried about their cancer and stressed out about it, were the ones who did worse. Those were more relaxed and accepting often did better. This may be why. The mechanism is that neutrophils in stressed individuals tended to spill their DNA, inducing the formation of fibronectin and causing a "sticky" web to form. Introducing an enzyme to destroy DNA (DNase 1) reversed this. So it's important to get those stress levels down, as this will lower inappropriate glucocorticoid release. But I worry about drugs like pegfilgrastim which increases neutrophil levels. Could those be causing harm?
Somehow I don't believe it.Clackamas Co. records 65% decline in homelessness from 2019 to 2023. Really? With the proximity of Johnson Creek and the Springwater Corridor? Maybe that proximity made is easier to shove things over onto Multnomah County. Let's keep Portland shit in Portland.
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Could be big. Oregon lawmakers could limit corporate ownership of medical practices. When Obamacare disincentivized independent medical practices, because you couldn't compete with hospitals for hospital pricing, many doctors dissolved their clinics and became hospital employees, or their practices were bought out by private equity. This law could force the latter to try to make it independent docs again, or become hospital employees. That would be unfortunate. No longer could your physician recommend what he/she thought was best, but rather had to conform to hospital policy. What they're after seems to be Amazon buying practices. But while I understand where they're coming from (where were they all these years?) it limits the options doctors will have. Since independent clinics are financially tricky, many docs will have no choice but to work for one of the hospitals. How does that help the public?
Student loan holders might like the thought of "debt cancellation" but it's really insidiously evil and unfair for all these reasons. It's really debt transfer, and why should I have to pay off someone else's loans? Plus it adds to inflation and the national debt, and taxes will have to go up to support it. Biden needs to go.
