I know this may be a slap on the wrist for Robinhood, but honesty the SEC is one of the branches of government that I trust almost as much as the FDA.
I appreciate the work they do and I hope they continue it.
I appreciate the work they do and I hope they continue it.
Hm. I made this comment elsewhere but:
The SEC has big structural problems. Way too close of ties with the people it is supposed to be regulating.
Take the example of this SEC investigator [0] whose boss got a call from one of those Wall Street hedge funds under investigation and suddenly he's fired! Mysteriously, that boss gets a job with the same firm a few months later. Oh, the kicker? The person who made that call from the hedge fund? Appointed to be the SEC chair in 2013.
https://www.federalpay.org/employees/securities-and-exchange...
The general purpose of the SEC is to investigate, fine and in general "stop" financial crimes in the financial market. This, in theory, requires said investigators to be smarter than the perpetrators or at least somewhere on par. While these folks are paid really well on average... this isn't "fuck you money" like on Wolf of Wallstreet. Even "poor fuck you money" is better than what they make. While I won't dismiss the need for a lot of attorneys and accountants in their profession, 333 examiners doesn't seem adequate against a $440k average salary industry with 176k employees 2018 numbers (https://www.osc.state.ny.us/sites/default/files/reports/docu...). Unless there's much more overlap than I'm imagining.
I mean seriously, if you're smart enough for the financial industry, you need to have a much higher moral code to take the less than half rate of average salary compared to the people you're investigating. Which I'm not knocking. I always respect people who take a moral high ground stance and try to do some actionable good, especially if it's at a detriment to their own wallet. It's just, expectations need to tempered with their overall capabilities. On top, agreeing with you on structure, what kind of hell do some of these folks experience working in a government environment? How many get salty real fast and get all pissed off from the shit they deal with bureaucratic wise along with shitty pay compared to the industry's employee?
There was a line from Burn Notice that I've always attributed to this, "Fighting for the little guy is for suckers". So yea, can we all really trust the SEC? Maybe... but can you really blame them by too much regarding "issues" granted that most of any industry, especially tech & finance, is about jumping to the next better paying job? I mean think of this scenario, "You're going to get fined no matter what happens today. But I can reduce it by half if a moving box full of cash magically appears on my back porch."
I don't have strong evidence but I don't regard U.S. food to be particularly safe relative to most first world countries. It's not terrible by any means and you're right in that you won't get any immediate damage from anything you eat, but I suspect most other first world countries have food and safety and health standards that result in better health outcomes over a long period of time compared to U.S. food.
[EDIT] After doing some minimal research it appears my intuition is correct, at least with respect to foodborne illness, the U.S. is certainly good compared to poverty stricken nations, but compared to most of Europe, Canada, Australia it has much higher rates of foodborne illness:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodborne_illness#Comparison_b...
The deaths in the U.S. is the highest, but what's even more interesting are the hospitalizations. U.S. hospitalizations are among the lowest and one has to wonder why that is given that it has the highest death rate. It wouldn't be unreasonable to suspect that because of how expensive the U.S. health care system is, Americans who do get sick avoid going to the hospital altogether. That is admittedly simplified speculation on my part, but it's a starting point for further investigation.
> A report published by the FSA has found it is not possible to compare foodborne disease rates effectively between countries.
> The report concludes that attempting to accurately compare different countries’ foodborne disease rates is an almost impossible task. The only way you could attempt this would be for different countries to have the same type of study with the exact same study specifications, over the same time period. Even then, differences in underlying surveillance data available in each country could cause issues, particularly in terms of determining what proportion of IID cases are due to food.
https://www.food.gov.uk/news-alerts/news/report-into-interna...
The pre-1962 FDA had perhaps the better regulatory framework: back then new drugs had to show safety, now they have to show safety and efficacy.
Off-label prescription show that efficacy requirements are not necessary in practice, and just needlessly delay drugs and make their development more expensive.
I think it's more of a dilemma that off label scrips aren't used more often. Since there's zero monetary incentive to prove efficacy for a second application and doctors generally prefer officially sanctioned uses, lots of patients miss out on helpful treatment.
The suggestion would be to go back to pre-1962 regulations, and put normal and off-label prescriptions on the same footing.
We live in a golden age of fraud. Look up $PEN, $OSTK, pretty much anything published by Muddy Waters.