Scoundreller

The fun part is when you break those numbers down between government and non-government expenditure. You’ll find that US governmental spending on health care per capita is higher than every other country’s entire (gov and non-gov) spending per capita.

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025...

Probably through a “broker” like abebooks (an Amazon subsidiary) or Amazon itself.

> A Canadian buyer was sending multiple book orders to Book Haven in Newtown, sometimes minutes apart, for niche texts on New Zealand specific subjects.

Canada is one of the few “western” countries without annoying customs duty/tariff requirements to ship to by post these days. US is a mess, and UK/Europe are going in the same direction.

> Blood pressure benefits too.

Speak for yourself, if mine goes any lower I’m going to pass out

RIP corporate users that can't install their own browsers but can install extensions

Thanks for the link. In ‘96 I only had text-only/Lynx, so rarely/never got to see what the early versions looked like with a “real” browser.

Maybe in absolute numbers but the situation for the ma and pa operations is worse:

“Independent pharmacies, often excluded from networks by pharmacy benefit managers, were more than twice as likely to face closure compared to chain pharmacies.”

> They need a name they can trademark, and common words can't be trademarked

Iunno, pretty sure a car manufacturer will sue me for trademark infringement if I try to manufacture a Beetle under my brand name.

The bigger answer is regulations in some places against the drug name inferring what it treats.

If you want to do global marketing; you gotta go for lowest common denominator: something meaningless in every language/slang.

Even in the industry… the names are sometimes pronounced in much different ways.

> That wasn't actually true. A new debit card to replace my expiring one ended up being sent to the old address a couple of months ago.

Oh, I’ve had this before. Apparently there was some background “registered address” and I had only updated my “mailing address”. They happily sent monthly statement to the mailing address for years but sent important notices about shutting down their entire small biz account service to my out-of-date “registered address”.

Fun times walking into a branch because you haven’t gotten a statement for a few months and they say “oh, your account has been closed, we sent a $$$ bank draft to $oldaddress”

> I wonder, what changed in America? Why is the mom and pop pharmacy not viable anymore

Deregulation at every level = small/low leverage players get squeeeeezed.

Most likely in Spain (and much of the world), you have controlled pricing of drugs and fixed markups/fees at pharmacies. Quite possibly it’s illegal there for a non-pharmacist to own a pharmacy and they can’t own a bunch as a silent/relatively inactive partner either.

What’s better for a manager/executive wanting insight into “how happy are my customers” other than their accounting numbers?

Store count seems to have peaked in 2018. Yes that data goes to 2021 but I doubt it got better after that.

https://schaeffer.usc.edu/research/pharmacy-closures-united-...

The bigger thing is consolidation and independents being replaced by bigger fish because their leverage is very very low.

I suspect a lot of big orgs don’t care if they lose high-need/low-margin/negative-margin clients that need a couple chains of humans to fix their issue.

If they were otherwise high profit customers, they wouldn’t/shouldn’t have put them into IVR hell in the first place.

Anywho, I’m off to acquiring a DID that suggests I’m from a high-net-worth area. Until then, I’ll forge my caller id.

It’s probably how their payor measures performance.

But I thought the issue with customer surveys was how biased they could be toward negative experiences cuz nobody else is angry enough to respond.

> or driving the the pharmacy JUST TO TALK TO a human

It’s nice that this remains an option. It’s a dying one. So much is better handled and more easily handled in person than over the phone/mail/web/fax/email/blah, even if they’re 1:1 with a human.

It’s why I stick with my credit union instead of moving everything over to an online bank even tho I’ve managed to get 99% of everything done with the CU without going to a branch.

Tbh, this is most industries. Very few have much of a moat and have some wedge/pressure from their suppliers (land/labor/capital), their clients and competition.

Insurance companies and PBMs would probably say the same they have competitors (ie:replaceable) and can’t just pay more for this or that, or reject any cost saving measure available.

tbh, it probably works. I'm vibe-coding a thing and just told it to figure out why it runs so slow: put in some optimizations. It ran some tests and stopped loading an entire-something at opening because there's no value to doing that.

I wish I could upvote this more than once

Hey now, I'm totally incompetent, so my code writes entries in a log file for virtually everything because otherwise I have no idea if it's doing what I expect. Would've caught some critical function not being called at all.

in other words, this attack could link together different wallets created on the same coldcard?

Conceivably, the funds could be sent to an address that they send to before. Very far from perfect... could work if it's a centralized exchange, one could deposit to the same address more than once (or maybe there's a time limit for re-use iunno). And no way (good?) way of knowing you were sending to your own account on that exchange, or somebody else's.

More likely the higher fees forces through the transaction faster. If it sits around waiting for a miner to pick it up, there's a chance the real owner or competitor could replace-by the transaction with a higher fee and redirect it. Instead of writing that logic, just make sure it gets into the next block before anyone catches on.

What makes it easier on 240v systems is that your entire household is on the same “circuit”.

If you’re on a 120v system, there’s a ~50/50 chance that your load is on the wrong side (except for 240v loads where you’ll imbalance things a tad but it should average out).

Unless you’re in an apartment/conso and have 208v instead of 240v… dunno what happens then.

Gamecopyworld continues to exist, which has been a while without any unnecessary interface changes.

rather common amongst (ultra)-long voyages?

At some crossover point, the reduced fuel carrying (and max capacity requirement) makes up for the additional takeoff+landing. When we're talking ultra-long-haul, constantly fighting against more gravity due to incr fuel weight adds up to a lot of cost/burn.

It's basically the business model for some airlines like the Icelandic and middle eastern ones. Hub in the middle so you're not paying (potentially extra) staff to rest on an aircraft and/or hotels at each end. Be at home more rather than an out-station. Fuel up more where its cheaper. Do some "scissor" routing. Fly cheaper/less specialized aircraft. Not as easy for Qantas to get all those advantages. Cargo airlines do the same to carry more cargo.

Assuming you can regularly land with your fuel tanks half-full. You could overbuild everything to support that, but usually airlines don't want to pay for a niche design to support that. I'd bet military aircraft do get that treatment though.

Would make sense to offer packages with lay-flat seats in shifts (possibly formally/informally for people on the same ticket).