21 May 2023

Thanks, Neil, but it's 2023.  Neil Gorsuch decries the erosion of civil liberties during COVID-19

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A lot of people aren't sophisticated enough to manage their retirement plans.  Why is it expected that they can manage their healthcare plans?  Most folks select it through their employer anyway, and then afterwards, Medicare takes care of most of the choice-making.
People can't even manage their student loan debt payments.  So now they hope that somehow Biden will be able to magically change the rules in their favor.  There will be problems coming in the near future, for sure.

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Two GLP-1 receptor antagonists improve overall body composition and end addictive behavior (smoking, drinking, nail-biting).

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It's both amusing and sobering to look back at coronavirus vaccine attitudes.


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20 May 2023

Why aren't we hearing more about this?  Third world countries are going to find out how bad things are going to get, as China calls in their loans.  Dictators are fleeing with suitcases full of cash, as the country deals with chaos. Anger and disbelief to follow.

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Crowd-funded, eh?.  On the one hand, people follow vegan diets and watch their sugar, etc.  Then they're ready to eat edible coffee cups.  Does this smack you of a wrong solution looking for a problem that is low on list of problems we need to solve?

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Rounding error.  Google has to pay Washington state for being dishonest about location tracking practices.  But when people use Google and their products, do they even care?

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To stop suffering.  Psychologist Enrique Echeburúa: ‘People who die by suicide want to stop suffering, not to stop living’.  We should pay attention to this.  The existence and misuse of social media and the nascent development of A.I. is going to give people (especially the young) novel ways to experience public suffering.

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19 May 2023

Portland is shrinking.  The latest U.S. census figures came out recently.  Almost every major city in Oregon lost people.

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Multnomah County DA office is understaffed.  So if people don't have a public attorney assigned, DA Mike Schmidt dismisses charges and people walk free.  So crime basically goes unpunished and so more crime is committed and people leave.  So the tax base shrinks and there is no money to hire public attorneys.  Rinse, repeat.

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18 May 2023

Getting real tired of the legal system only around to target non-Democrats.  Laws broken, but when you're a Democrat, the rules bend.  Fines get reduced and criminal investigations get dropped.  Russian collusion hoax cost America so much in wasted money and time, and no one will be prosecuted for it.  Heck, even New Jersey's Gov Phil Murphy says that he'll ignore the Supreme Court if he wants to.  What does Law and Order mean to Democrats anymore? 

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Has US News and World Report visited Portland lately?  If so, I'd doubt Portland make the list.  What does it really have to offer?  The naked bike ride?  Voodoo Doughnuts and some soccer teams?  But having to deal with trash, drugs, shooting, hideous graffiti and homeless tents everywhere? Also high taxes, from a city governance that is giving away so much money to the homeless problem that it has little to show for it? 

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A.I. is being used to generate a lot of fake medical publicationsKind of like what happened to this author.  Be careful. 

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No, healthcare is not a right.  It's a system we'd like everyone to be able to partake of.  But a wish doesn't make it a true right.  A liberal physician comes to realize this. 

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Yes, it's difficult to identify "fake news".  What is fake today, may eventually become truth tomorrow, as it has with the vaccines and the coronavirus. 

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Cancer patients lose weight (cachexia), even more than can be explained by the calories they consumed.  For years, it has been thought to be due to a substance initially called cachexin, and later found to be tumor necrosis factor-α.  But inhibiting TNF-α didn't fix the problem.  Now, the culprit has been identified as abnormal EDA2R–NIK signaling.  An alternatively spliced mRNA of ectodysplasin A (EDA), called EDA-2R, interacts abnormally with its receptor, NFĸB-inducing kinase (NIK).  This causes muscle wasting.  Now we know the target, and can start working on treatment. 

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Young Americans aren't doing too well these day.  WSJ reports that they are dying at higher rates.  They're also dying of cancer more frequently as well.  I suspect that this is from the obesity epidemic, but definite proof is elusive.  Whatever it is, the population in the U.S. will decline, and this is not a sign of health, is it?

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From Reddit:
Look at those titles - Policy Coordinator, Impact Officer, Director of Special Projects, Advisor to the CPO.  All important positions, right?  Six figure salaries for all!  This is why there is no interest in solving the homeless problem.  If the homeless disappeared, so would these sinecure positions!

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17 May 2023

Oregon’s cannabis industry is important to the state’s economy, and the sales tax it generates is vital to the state’s budget,” said OLCC interim Executive Director Craig Prins.  Really?  How did Oregon get by before?

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Mayor Ted Wheeler is banning daytime camping on Portland property.  Great, now we'll see results. 🙄 I'm sure everyone will follow the law.

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Yes we can.  We must!
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Spot on.  This ronin understands.  And you don't necessarily have to be in the gifted category to appreciate this.
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16 May 2023

Nothing new.  For years, Canada has been relying on U.S. healthcare to help with cases they can't handle

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Why is a church being fined for helping to feed the homeless?  That's what they're supposed do - care for the poor.  The church is only responding to existing conditions.  If there's a problem, Oregon lawmakers should fix the underlying problem.

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Getting really sick of this.  Oregon Department of Human Services mistakenly doled out $1.46 million of emergency Covid EBT aid to 3,700 students who did not qualify to receive the funds

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"We’re not being forced to think anymore."  College student reveals that ChatGPT use is rampant.  As opposed to machines being programmed to simulate intelligence (Artificial Intelligence), humans are using technology to fake knowledge proficiency.  Perhaps we should call this Artifactual Intelligence.  Some are using A.I. to advance their knowledge or create new things, not to invalidate assessments designed to evaluate a human's depth of understanding.  People are worried that we'll indeed see a new generation of incompetents.

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15 May 2023

How do you reconcile this information?  Fewer workers are commuting to Oregon from Clark County — but their tax payments are up.  Probably due to high rates, although the Oregonian think it's because people got wealthier after the pandemic ended.  I would doubt that's the cause.  Wealthier Portlanders have moved to Clark County.  Amazing to read that 2% of Oregon's tax take comes from Clark County folks

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COVID vaccines have been a failure around the world.  The latest data don't look so good.

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14 May 2023

Party pooper.  Security holes posed by prompt injection are going to greatly limit applications of current Chat/GPT technologies.  This is until we truly understand what's going on under the hood.  For now, giving Chat access to all your computer files is very, very risky.  There's always someone out there who's smarter than you.

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All the Exciting Media Outlets Are Dying. What the Hell Comes Next?  I clicked on this wanting to know what "exciting media outlets" this writer was talking about.  To save you a click, it's Vice, Insider and BuzzFeed News.  These outlets are dying because people want news, not activism promoted by the progressive new crop of "journalists". 

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In 2022, about half of Internet traffic was bot traffic.  No wonder we have to deal with reCAPTCHAs and Cloudflare browser checks everywhere.  As with a lot of nice things in life, once everyone has access to it, the experience is going to deteriorate. 

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California's reparations committee advocates to raise minimum wage even more — to that of a "living wage", whatever that is.  And a New Yorker writer wants you to believe that raising the minimum wage is associated with job creation!  Well, turns out that the data supplied by the writer to bolster his argument comes from 2010 and other times before 2022.  Before A.I.  It's looking like this is a bad time to be demanding higher wages if your skillset is limited, as Wendy's employees are learning.  As Thomas Sowell said, "the real minimum wage is always zero". 

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Junk science.  It was really amusing to read these two articles in my newsfeed this morning.  Is It Time to Quit Coffee for Good? and Coffee May Be Good for Your Eyesight: Study.  Don't get your health recommendations from pop sources.

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How safe are autonomously driven cars?  The answer is nuanced — don't just listen to Elon Musk.

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Legacy Health has to decide what to do.  Whether to lose money operating a money-losing birthing center, or lose money by not being able to bill Medicare and Medicaid.  A Hobson's choice.

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This is a major reason why downtown Portland sucks.  Crime goes unpunished.

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No mail service if you live in Seattle's 98118 district.  Everything seems to be going to s#&t under Democrat governance, where the only things that get dealt with are those having to do with gender, abortion, climate change and racism.

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13 May 2023

7 ways Multnomah and Portland are wasting your tax dollars

#1. $18,000 of tax dollars to send Multnomah and Portland politicians to Europe for a meeting (Willamette Week 6/30/22).

#2. Multnomah bought 22,700 brand new tents and 69,514 brand new tarps to lavish on the homeless. That is nearly five free tents/tarps per homeless person. (KGW-TV 12/7/22)

#3. Multnomah County gave out $500 cash loaded debit cards to the homeless. No wonder homeless grew 22% in Oregon while it only grew .3% nationwide (OPB 12/24/23).

#4. Portland ended up with a $62 million projected budget surplus in 2021 and $35 million surplus in 2022. Where did this near $100 million tax surplus go? (Oregonian 10/8/21, Willamette Week 5/6/2022).

#5. Portland unloaded millions of city taxpayer dollars in grants only available to private business marijuana shops. This happened as police were defunded, 911 calls hit record delays, street trash was left to expand into mountain-sized problems and pot holes remained unfixed.

#6. Over $85 million of tax dollars and government help for a private (yes, private) luxury Portland hotel that lasted about one year before facing a financial crisis and being bought out (Willamette Week 4/1/20).

#7. Portland gave out $3 million in cash loaded $364 debit cards to random strangers with the promise that they would use it for personal internet expenses. No record of who used it or how it was spent. One person alone took home 6 debit cards. (KGW 10/21/21)

And of course, there's another capital gains tax on the way.

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This is why I don't use Windows anymore.  How to lose your work using Undo Copy in Windows

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Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea
There are two main reasons why creating artificial consciousness, whether deliberately or inadvertently, is a very bad idea. The first is that it may endow AI systems with new powers and capabilities that could wreak havoc if not properly designed and regulated. Ensuring that AI systems act in ways compatible with well-specified human values is hard enough as things are. With conscious AI, it gets a lot more challenging, since these systems will have their own interests rather than just the interests humans give them.
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What about humans?  Fruits have now become so sweet that they are no longer suitable to give to zoo animals. 

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How to select the seller that will likely provide the best satisfactionThis is old news, but I just found out about it.  How do you square a good Amazon rating with the number of reviews?  It's an easy trick to perform, and I'll have to give it a shot next time.
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"Many of the tasks in white-collar land will look very different in the next five to 10 years"
That's an understatement. But at least tech workers seem to be landing on their feet. 

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Why is American medical care so expensive?  It may be all the administrative costs.  Yet another argument against government-controlled medicine, certainly when American politicians run it.

Speaking of healthcare, Oregon is short on pathologists, so bodies needing autopsies are stacking up.  They're thinking of letting assistants and nurse practitioners do it.  Well, they may not be easy to find either.  Due to government regulations, many people quit healthcare during the pandemic.  To ensure adequate staffing, existing and new personnel demanded to get paid more, which increased expenses for hospitals.  Oregon legislators didn't like that, and threatened to put these hospitals and medical providers on an "improvement plan" and threaten them with penalties.  Well that's not working.  So now they're going to make some exceptions with "front-line workers" who won't count towards that spending cap.  Because adding to the misery isn't going to work

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Is this how telemedicine works in Portland?  Caught on a Tri-Met ride.  It's so disgusting, I'll only post the link.  Too nasty to post the video itself. 

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Top 10 A.I. prompts to finish your work in seconds.

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ChatGPT just killed off Chegg, the homework-helping website service.   Yikes.  Who's next?

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