Ah, the homeless are getting more brazen. You'll never know what you'll find during cleanup.
The NY Fed is puzzled as to why young borrowers struggle to pay their credit card and auto loans. I agree with the author - the only thing that's puzzling is that the Fed is puzzled.
––– 良くない –––
Yes it is indeed good to have f*ck you money. It allowed me to leave the Daimyo. To maintain my own integrity. Just enough, and not too much.
––– 凄い –––
As feared, the street drug Tranq (fentanyl mixed with xylazine) has arrived in the PNW, showing up in Seattle. Won't be long before it arrives in Portland, though I wouldn't be surprised if it were already here. Look for people's limbs to start festering and rotting open.
The Oregon legislature is considering a bill that would ban therapists from trying to change a person's sexual orientation. The sponsor of the bill is gay, and doesn't want therapists to discuss this issue. I really think government should stay out of the medical profession when it comes to determining what a doctor should say or recommend. It's a slippery slope to regulating a physician's ability to speak objectively in other matters.
People don't trust the CDC anymore, and this is why. When asked about vaccine-related myocarditis, CDC director Rochelle Walensky stated "We have not seen a
signal, and we’ve actually looked intentionally for the signal in
the over 200 million doses we’ve given." Thanks to the release of a tranche of emails from an FOIA, we can see that the CDC was darned well aware of myocarditis. What a liar!
Interesting post about Google. Has the giant corporation lost its mojo? Looks like the search company is at a crossroads, where AI threatens its business model, and they haven't yet formulated how they will make as much money once this new technology takes hold. Plus, all the employees' tasks and mission are so fragmented and siloed. It's a "peacetime" company, apparently with no sense of urgency or cohesion. (Kinda like the U.S. now, where we're losing our collective identity.) Is Google's search quality as good as before? Some think it peaked around 2016.
According to the Oregon Statewide Strategic Plan report, the substance abuse problem in Oregon consumes a whopping 17% of the state budget. Yet the state legalizes harmful addicting drugs with Measure 110, and laments that the problem is expensive and consumes resources. What idiots.–– 良くない ––
–– 良くない ––
–– 良くない ––
–– 凄い ––
Thomas Sowell once said:
"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area – crime, education, housing, race relations – the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them."
To this list, we should add the threat of single-payer healthcare. A single-payer system, like ranked-choice voting, sounds like a good thing, but since money controls much in medicine, it basically makes the physician subservient to whatever some third-party decides is best. Most people can't see this, and only predict that things will be less expensive. Making care less expensive will come at a cost, but limiting your choices. Fast food is cheaper, but it is not a dietary option for everyday eating. It's been said that in healthcare, the three goals are quality, affordability, and accessibility. But you can only choose two. While this may be a simplification, it is not far from the reality. Single-payer plans offer the affordability and accessibility, but quality requires that you have quality physicians, and the availability to receive care that is sometimes expensive. It also means that you don't want to get bogged down with paperwork and administrative hassles that so often accompanies government-sponsored services. But the most telling reason for wanting to avoid government-regulated single-payer care was revealed by SCOTUS when they ruled in favor of the vaccine mandate for healthcare providers, saying:
The court said that the vaccine mandate for health care workers was, unlike the OSHA regulation, justified as just the kind of detailed regulations that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has long imposed as a condition for health care providers getting federal funds.
Well, people over 65 have to take Medicare, and most physicians can not avoid taking older patients. So by the nature of the insurance coverage, the government felt it had a right to determine how a doctor should be vaccinated. Private insurance companies have no such ridiculous power.
Rather than pursue single-payer health, we should allow healthcare systems to compete with each other, and use market forces to lower costs and increase accessibility. Allow interstate competition, for example. Make it so that people can own their own policies, rather than have it be tied to employment. Make prices for care more transparent. Why isn't anyone working on this? Magical thinking indeed.
And here's a cynical article about those that go to Harvard Law School.
How do we go from a world where helping people is cliché to a world where swaths of lawyers are fighting to defend those doing just the opposite? The people who write that they want to help people too much on their applications are the same people three years later working for firms actively fighting for those who have hurt people.
Here's an interesting article, which I can vouch for. Beware of judging those who seem standoffish - they may be just trying to protect themselves against the pain of anxiety and social interaction.
Seems like many people voted for Measure 110 without really knowing what it would do. Typical of most voters, I guess. So now we legalized addicting harmful drugs, and nothing to show for it.
The physician of the future - dumber and woker, and more likely to kill you. That's just great.
Over three years since the beginning, Biden is finally willing to end COVID-19 emergency status. Can't believe Biden is actually going to end it at last. We'll
finally go back to being a republic instead of an autocracy. Oregon ended it on 4/01/2022, with executive order 2022-3. But healthcare professional still have to get the jab to be able to work. Even though the evidence suggests that the existing products have minimal efficacy against raising antibodies, and no proven efficacy in reducing transmission, death or hospitalization. (Actually, it suggests the opposite.) But now, we have a new state of emergency due to the homelessness crisis, which is a manmade problem, and solvable if there was a real willingness to do so. But instead, we legalize harmful and mind-altering drugs, and are soft on crime. Even the LA Times thinks Portland is awful.
Suddenly, people are talking about aortic dissections. Death rates are rising. This never used to be in the news as something to be concerned about. Why is it considered newsworthy now? Perhaps it is because SARS-CoV2 infection causes inflammation of the blood vessel lining (endothelialopathy). I'd bet not too many emergency physicians are aware of this.
Hey, good on India. They found a large deposit of lithium. The bad news is that's it's in the Jammu and Kashmir disputed territories. Anyone wanna bet that the country north of India is going to want to claim dibs on that find?
Dr. Matt Might has some productivity suggestions for those in academic, who need some mental discipline. It's great that he's taken the time to post these mind-hacks.
Deep fake scams are getting better, and now we won't be able to trust whether any video is authentic. Given any technology, someone will cause problems just for the fun of it.
Oh boy, some woke scientists are now claiming that wildlife is racist. Not a joke. Well, the rats in Portland seem to be race-blind. They don't care what garbage they infest.-- 良くない --
There's now a dating service for the unvaccinated - Unjected. It also helps you find blood donors who are unvaxxed, and has a community for those who reject the vaccine. Cool.-- 凄い --
-- 凄い --
-- 凄い --
-- 凄い --
-- 良くない --
-- 良くない --
Just saw this from December. It sounds a lot like the much-hated capitated healthcare plans of the Clinton era. Doctor's aren't actuaries. They shouldn't be placed in a position to have to make money-based decisions on what test or treatment is necessary or not. It's the wrong solution to a pervasive problem.
-- 良くない --
How College Admissions Work (so true):
Dr. Matt Might shows you how to avoid temptation and how to control yourself. Interesting.
Self-embetterment is tough. There is no one single solution that works for everyone. It's easy to offer patronizing advice to those who are stuggling.
Cruel optimism...boils down to the folly of suggesting personal solutions to systemic problems. It’s about advice given from a position of privilege to people who will never be able to apply it to their own lives–because the cards are stacked so unfairly against them–but who will nonetheless interpret their failure as a personal one. The real harm comes from the stuff that sounds reasonable and actionable, like most self-help books.
The world has temptations that make you lose focus on achieving your goals, but "you don’t need perfect conditions to grow and to create."
Amazon used to be great. Facebook used to be great. Now some have observed that TikTok is starting to get crappy. Some are even saying this is true of Medium and Substack.
Even The Economist has observed that all the diversity and equity efforts are backfiring.
One result of all this is growing “resistance, anger, grumpiness, and eventually backlash” to the proliferation of diversity officials, says Alexandra Kalev of Tel Aviv University, one of the authors of the study on diversity training at American universities. Many white male professors, she found, now limit campus interaction with minorities and women, lest an unintentional slight get them in trouble. High spending on diversity officials also leads to fewer classes, as well as higher tuition fees, which make it harder for minorities, who are disproportionately poor, to attend college.
Some of my friends in academia confided to me that it's difficult to work with students now. You never know when one of them might sense microaggression and report an encounter to authorities.
Daniel of Mushroaming.com is offering online class on identifying edible mushrooms that grow in the Pacific Northwest. If you'd like to know more about mushroom hunting and identification, sign up for his online classes.
It seems that the Chinese are on a roll, sending more airbone crap into American airspace. The Biden administration doesn't seem to mind.
Yes, I know that this has been going on for a while. The point is that it still is going on in Oregon, and is another reason why I feel that taxpayer money is ill-spent on the homeless. Once again, only foreign media will reveal to Oregonians how much we're losing in the war against drug abuse. The Bend Bulletin seems to agree - it's not that government officials don't have money. It's just misspent.
To anyone that has been paying attention, AI is picking up speed in making advances. SciFi author Ted Chiang seems unimpressed, and thinks that the Large Language Model flavor of AI is just performing searches, stitching the output together, and performing a kind of rephrasing, and then outputting the result. I don't think this describes what LLM is really doing, inasmuch as it is not clear what each neuron in a neural network hidden layer really contributes toward the end result. The ability to retrieve relevant text and package the output appropriately still defies clear elucidation. Stephen Wolfram has some thoughts on the ChatGPT model.
And Google is now linking LLM-AI to robots to perform simple tasks. If Palm-SayCan enters the consumer space, I can see all sorts of mischief that will result. Coupled with deepfakes (both visual and audio) and we're about to enter a crazy world.
ChatGPT has passed a U.S. medical licensing exam. It has also already passed the MBA exam at Wharton's. What are the implications for this? I don't think anyone knows for sure yet. I could see this being a valuable asset to clinicians in getting answers to clinical questions very quickly. But who will check for accuracy? And A.I. models are only as good as their training and validation sets.
NPR thinks that Asians are not the model minority that the stereotype makes them up to be. Well, if your definition of "Asian" includes the whole continent, then yeah, sure, I guess. Asians are not all one monolithic culture. Yokunai!
Why EVs will not see widespread adoption:
Not to mention that charging stations are targeted for their copper cables.
Why aren't smart people happer? Perhaps we should listen to the writer's grandma?
Gen Z doesn't remember when America worked.
It was amazingly exciting in America during the dotcom boom, around 1999. Hard to remember that level of enthusiasm. Since then, it's been one recession after another, especially the Great Recession in 2008, then COVID-19. Now the Biden recession. Those in their twenties have only experienced misery.
Second order thinking - what smart people do to outperform. Boy, wish our politicians did this kind of thinking.
The best anonymity is to be in plain sight
This makes sense. Trying to be super-anonymous is just going to attract attention. Just create a new persona. Someone ought to create a business around this concept. It's probably going to be necessary to achieve any modicum of privacy in the coming brave new world.
"I propose that the main reason that most of us look more boring in
public is that social predators lie in wait there. With friends, family,
and close co-workers, we are around people that mostly want to like us,
and know us rather well. Out in public, in contrast, we face bandits eager for chances to gain
social credit by taking us down, often via accusing us of violating the
sacred. And like townspeople traveling among the bandits, we are in
public pretty vulnerable to the kinds of bandits that afflict us."