Well, it turns out someone has noticed and now there is a lawsuit. One can only hope Wata and these sorts of schemes get busted for any criminal wrongdoing they seem very highly likely to have committed.
If you care at all about collectors markets like retro video games, I highly suggest you read up on grading, auction, and fractional sales operations like Wata and their partners.
Nintendo’s VirtualBoy wasn’t exactly a smashing success. It was, however, one of the first forays into mass consumer 3D gaming. Sadly, the hardware was really limited and most people had lots of issues using the devices.
Fast forward, and someone decided to make a VirtualBoy emulator on the Oculus. Meet VirtualBoy Go. You can play your original virtualboy roms using a modern oculus instead of the fiddly and hard to find Virtualboy.
CppCon has a bunch of other great ‘Back to Basics’ videos that cover a whole host of great topics: safe exception handling, move semantics, type erasure, lambdas, and a bunch of other critical but oft misunderstood elements of C++
In this video, you get a refresher on RAII.
“Resource Allocation is Initialization is one of the cornerstones of C++. What is it, why is it important, and how do we use it in our own code?”
Portland’s ballot measures have resulted in the second highest tax rates in the country as of this year – a tax rate only second to New York City:
Starting in 2017, Multnomah County voters passed several tax measures aimed at improving life in their burgeoning city. After Metro and the county levied taxes to combat homelessness and provide preschool for all, Portland now has the second-highest total state and local income tax rate in the nation—14.69%—exceeded only by New York City at 14.78%, according to a report from Ernst & Young commissioned by Oregon Business & Industry. That’s the top marginal tax rate, meaning you pay it only on income above $125,000 for individuals and $250,000 for married couples filing together. By comparison, the only New Yorkers paying the top rate there are those making $25 million or more, single or married. That means plenty of nonplutocrat Oregonians are paying taxes rivaled only by those levied on Gotham millionaires.”
Another option is to get out of Portland, Multnomah county, and the Metro area. Before you move, you need to make sure you’re really out. Portland, Multnomah, and Metro have continually gerrymandered their boundaries to absorb as much of the tax base as possible. This is important because the most recent tactic is to levee taxes against residents of the county and ever-expanding metro area to even further spread the boundaries.
How do you know if you’re in those jurisdictions? There’s a tool for that from the tax notices they sent out:
Go to portlandmaps.com, enter your address, then check the ‘Jurisdiction’ info box on the right. If it says ‘Portland/Multnomah’ or any combination that has either ‘Portland’ or ‘Multnomah’ – you’re still stuck with at least some of the new Portland and Multnomah county taxes.
Go to Metro boundary address lookup. Enter your address. If the Within Metro Boundary column says “Yes” – then you’re still going to have to pay the new Metro taxes.
Double-check your address against the global Metro boundary map – and watch for areas it is likely to expand and absorb you. It’s been growing a lot recently.
Lung Granulomas and Histoplasmosis looks to be rampant in the Midwest
Histoplasma is one of the three main species of soil fungi that cause lung infections in the U.S. Historically, Histoplasma was found in the Midwest and parts of the East, Coccidioides in the Southwest, and Blastomyces in the Midwest and the South. But a growing number of case reports and anecdotes suggest that all three have expanded out of their traditional ranges in recent decades.
“Fungal infections are much more common than people realize, and they’re spreading,” Spec said. “The scientific community has underinvested in studying and developing treatments for fungal infections. I think that’s beginning to change, but slowly. It’s important for the medical community to realize these fungi are essentially everywhere these days and that we need to take them seriously and include them in considering diagnoses.”
The three main species of fungi that cause lung infections in the U.S. — Histoplasma (red), Blastomyces (blue) and Coccidioides (green) — have all expanded their ranges in recent decades. These maps were created based on data from 1955 (top row) and 2007-2016 (bottom row). Reliance on outdated maps may lead to delayed or missed diagnoses.
People develop fungal lung infections after breathing in spores from fungi in the soil. The spores become airborne when the ground is disturbed by farming, landscaping, construction or even just by people walking around in fungi-rich environments such as caves. Most healthy adults and children can fight off a fungal infection handily, but infants, older adults and people with compromised immune systems may develop fever, cough, fatigue and other symptoms. Fungal lung infections easily can be mistaken for bacterial or viral lung infections such as COVID-19, bacterial pneumonia and tuberculosis.
“People with fungal lung infection often spend weeks trying to get the right diagnosis and appropriate treatment, and the whole time they’re feeling terrible,” said lead author Patrick B. Mazi, MD, a clinical fellow in infectious diseases. “They usually have multiple health-care visits with multiple opportunities for testing and diagnosis, but the doctor just doesn’t consider a fungal infection until they’ve exhausted all other possibilities.”
Lung Granulomas and bacterial infections
Granulomas are small lumps of immune cells that form in your body in areas where there is infection or inflammation. They’re most commonly found in your lungs, but they can also be in other areas of your head and body. Doctors believe that they block the spread of organisms such as bacteria and fungi through your body.
Granulomas themselves don’t usually have noticeable symptoms. But the conditions that cause them, such as sarcoidosis, tuberculosis, histoplasmosis, and others, may create symptoms. Some of these include:
Shortness of breath
Wheezing
Chest pain
Fever
Dry cough that won’t go away
In some cases, you may have lung granulomas that show no abnormal signs. They don’t usually need treatment or other testing.
Granulomas are usually accidently found through X-rays or other tests when doctors look for other health issues. At first, they may look dangerous on imaging tests, but they’re usually noncancerous
Histoplasmosis caused granulomas: Granulomas will form to stop the spread of the fungus. If you have histoplasmosis, you may never have symptoms. But for people with weak immune systems, it can be serious. In rare cases, a granuloma doesn’t heal and the lung tissue around it can scar (pulmonary fibrosis). Or the air tubes in your lungs (bronchi) can form pockets and get infected. When this happens, there isn’t a cure, but there are treatments that can ease your symptoms.
Granulomas on your lungs usually heal themselves and go away. The best way to control lung granulomas is to care for the health issues that cause them.
Nothing, Forever is a 24 hour a day Twitch stream with an amazing premise. It runs 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year and delivers new content every minute. Everything you see, hear, or experience (with the exception of the artwork and laugh track) is always brand new content, continually generated via machine learning and AI algorithms. It never repeats (except when the AI generates the same content).
It was launched by Mismatch Media, a media lab focused on creating experimental forms of television shows, video games, and more, using generative and other machine learning technologies.
Give it a watch and be amazed. Sadly, it’s probably better than probably 50% of current TV shows.
Interviewing seems to be changing. Besides the usual technical and behavioral interviews, I’m hearing of more interesting two-hand kind of tests in which recruiters ask you to basically perform some tasks as if you were going to be doing the job.
teamLabs does some amazing work – and this is no exception. I was floored when I went to their exhibition in Tokyo and they don’t seem to be missing a beat even during Covid.
M R James wrote some great old time ghost stories. Robert Powell did some fantastic narrations on his DVD called Classic Ghost Stories – M.R. James, but it appears this is the only video segment left online:
It looks like the Internet Archive still has the audio recordings though – wonderful if you want some good Christmas Ghost Stories:
