Throwawayaerlei

Because Amazon's so bad as everyone is detailing here I have started buying much less expensive stuff on eBay where I'd only buy it on Amazon from a 3rd party seller that ships direct, things like books and CDs. Have had uniformly good experiences without paying as much to pass through to Amazon vs. eBay.

"Goat's milk contains very little folate and its use as a primary calorie source causes megaloblastic anemia."

Cows milk over 32 oz/day will cause iron deficiency, and "In children this is a hypercoagulable state and can cause cerebral venous sinus thrombosis. I have see this."

Substitutes for human milk designed for human consumption turn out not to be trivial.

"Often has a dangerously different osmolality. Infants eat whatever they are given and have dumb kidneys, so are prone to hyponatremia or hypernatremia and every pediatrician has seen a baby die this way. Don’t do it."

See that and other discussions here about the differences between infant (above) and toddler formula.

The big problem is going to be the places that don't have reserves of most anything including money, like the parts of the Middle East and thereabouts that normally get their wheat from Russia and the Ukraine, the latter long called "the breadbasket of the world."

Ummm, can you provide one or more example of this? The "Two or three smaller problems appearing at the right moment can bring a disaster" sounds plausible but just one small one?

Hitler or rather the Nazi party infamously didn't win "with an overwhelming majority" in November 1932. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_1932_German_federal_e... reminds me they "lost 34 seats and again failed to form a coalition government in the Reichstag" (emphasis added). They gained power by non-electoral means after this, starting with a deal where President Hindenburg made Hitler chancellor and they had "a short-lived coalition government formed by the NSDAP and the German National People's Party (DNVP)." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler%27s_rise_to_power...)

The real total loss is in biodiesel made from vegetable fats. I can't remember the numbers now, but I read the German use of them is a substantial fraction of the sunflower oil that's no longer available from the Ukraine.

Why do you think people "turn to fascism" in the first place??

Some of it is for those with metabolic problems. Abbott makes one type which very recently the government has taken action about, but each recipient has be vetted to get it, I believe it's from non-FDA regulated production in Europe.

Going back to farming, the Federal government assumed near total control over a great of it in the New Deal, down to how much you could charge for selling a kosher chicken (A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States "the surname Schechter means "slaughter" in Yiddish, and specifically refers to a ritual slaughterer") and the two have been inextricably linked since then.

And until about now things have been a lot better, for before WWII at the same time food production was limited by diktat and there were newsreels of it being destroyed, the USDA also believed about a quarter of the nation was malnourished which was confirmed in the WWII draft. Which I've read was major factor in establishing the school lunch program.

Regulatory capture is a universal problem as long as a government is involved in an economy, and it has to be if for no other reason than to collect taxes.

As for stores not providing baby formula recipes, I'd imagine they're worried about liability, and there are of course many other sources for them. Really, due to the Federal government's WIC program which is half the market, its import restrictions, and messed up FDA regulation it should be on them.

I say messed up because the FDA demonstrably wasn't serious about dealing with the Abbott Labs plant problem or getting it fixed quickly based on the timeline starting with the whistle blower, while they make it very hard to get into the business. Or the USDA's problem due to their policy of forcing states to grant a WIC monopoly to one formula manufacturer resulted in three companies having almost all the total US market with Abbott having the largest share, at the same time US prices being double those of Europe. Which isn't as strict about food safety but still seems to do OK.

A serious country would have done something to mitigate the shortage after they closed down Abbot's huge factory before there were bare shelves for months and it became a political problem in an election year.

In a couple of reports I read yesterday of ex-Nigeria West African clade cases, which appears to be the same source and variant family for this Western outbreak, three cases started with pustules in the groin area before they gained a lot more coverage. From memory at least two of those cases were associated with handling rodents which are thought to be the animal reservoir for the disease.

Curiously, every other out-of-order chip designer except for AMD also designed CPUs with Meltdown flaws. That's per their own documentation ARM, IBM both Power and mainframe, SPARC, and I think MIPS but they weren't entirely clear about it.

What I was able to find just now says that's a qualitatively different thing, mostly pertaining to Prohibition and its end and taxes, and does not require a proctological safety exam of your supply chain, manufacturing, etc.

As in, get a lawyer and jump through various hoops, as well as maybe some lower level government food safety licencing. It obviously makes a difference when you're selling something that's intrinsically poisonous to microbes by what a chemist once told me was merely the least toxic alcohol. Plus the difference in risks we're willing to have adults vs. babies take.

And of course this is just one of many issues in the market, some of which I outlined, see also the subthread starting with a _Reason_ Volokh Conspiracy column and its links.

In all the ones I've experienced or looked at, not hardly as good as tech companies pre-FAANG, your "cushy job, fully remote, good pay and full autonomy with flexible hours" strikes me as an uncommon situation.

Making Diesel fuel massively more expensive prior to a very expensive transition to electrical trucks is also making pretty much every good more expensive, everything travels by Diesel powered trucks and/or trains. Biden and company have also decided theoretical so far punishment of Russia is more important than all of the above, for example the East Coast has halved its refinery capacity in the last decade and as of late was getting a lot of distillates from Russia.

Those that don't want to should probably reconsider having kids."

How well does that work for their first baby if it's some unanticipated problem the mother has??

Modern civilization starting with agriculture is also a repudiation of the "survival of the fittest" philosophy you're pushing.

And/or make better use of the extra segment and maybe stack segment, compiler technology there. I'd imagine other compiler hacks would be useful, for example compare to today's bigger systems where the premium is on having as much in the most local caches as possible. Cleverness once you're in them is overwhelmed by the penalty of going to a more distant cache, memory, or taking a TLB miss. "Cache is the new RAM, RAM is the new disk, disk is the new tape." and all that.

Although the SII also suffered from supply chain issues like everyone else, such as a world wide shortage of 2,000 L sterile plastic bags in which to culture cells and probably bacteria like the E. Coli used in the first step of making the mRNA vaccines.

I don't think those are very good examples. A large part of the PPE shortage problem was from not restocking the national stockpile after the 2009 swine flu pandemic, in part from a bi-partisan, multiple administrations by both parties capture of that program by Emergent BioSolutions.

Which then abjectly failed when it had to deliver cell culture grown vaccines in its Baltimore plant that was in reserve for pandemics (fortunately that didn't hurt so much because the Janssen and Oxford vaccines are ... subpar, and Protein Sciences approach which works for flu generally failed or were extremity late (Novovax and Sanofi Pasteur)). We had part of a system and failed to use it properly. On the other hand if we as in the US were sharp we'd have bought the equipment Honeywell ended up scrapping when they shut down mask making in France.

3M for example does make masks in countries like the US and even keeps an extra set of equipment to double production in case of emergencies like this. But of course just doubling normal production isn't enough, and they and other companies like some that got crushed after 2009-10 found it hard to compete against very cheap PPE from the PRC, and refused to risk their companies again after COVID started hitting.

For vaccine manufacturing it's a tall order to expect political systems to be ready for once in a century events. This wasn't so bad for us with COVID since we could tool up during the development and testing of vaccines although the Indian national government abjectly failed to do that, but there was always going to be issues here, especially in learning curve issues.

Also how do you prepare for the best vaccines being mostly completely new technology for mass manufacturing? Even for fill and finish BoNTech's vaccine has at least at some point temperature requirements way beyond normal medical freezing, the latter any of us could achieve with a frost free consumer freezer.

In general, though, you're right, but solutions free of their own corruption problems are very hard. Plus tariffs are regressive taxes.

My take on it is that Microsoft was at first enthusiastic enough about OS/2 but IBM doomed it, first and foremost through their "the PC AT is the last personal computer you'll have to buy" message to their customers, something they used to be able to do when they controlled a lot more of the business computer market and "no one ever got fired for buying IBM." Forcing OS/2 to run on the 286 was Not Even Wrong, for example in protected mode a 64KiB segment change incurred a hit of many cycles (40?), Intel did not understand how people used the 808x and only fixed that with the 386.

But did your people "high up in Lotus" mention how the mid-life kicker for 1-2-3 using expanded memory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_memory) was coded by people against orders who'd left the company by the time it was rediscovered and made into a product?

That the Jazz office suite for the Macintosh was developed using assembly "for efficiency" but without a LAN or other means of close collaboration, every week people would hand in floppy disks for a complete build and thus a great deal of duplication made it very much less efficient? And in general how poorly that software development model worked? I see in Wikipedia "in Guy Kawasaki's book The Macintosh Way, Lotus Jazz was described as being so bad, 'even the people who pirated it returned it'."

I was working in the Boston are in the 1980s and knew a lot of people who'd worked for Lotus or coworkers or friends of them, so I got takes from their very beginnings, which was a handful of people writing in close collaboration 1-2-3 in, yes, assembly language.

For extra credit, the leader of the Google+ effort didn't use his True Name.

To extend this to the theme of the topic, while Google obviously displaced a lot of incumbents starting with the AltaVista search engine, do we expect this to happen in the future?

Continues my theme that a lot of these examples start with a failure by a company.

Also see how Friendster failed after the VC types ousted the founder and focused on doing deals with other companies, were not interested in reports from those below them that it was taking tens of minutes to even log onto the site.

The latter had too much pride in their collection of DOS printer drivers, but what really killed them was releasing something that passed the bar of not crashing, but would per a lawyer I worked with regularly drop all your tables and figures to the bottom of the document. Borland was slow to get their stuff working on Windows, was late to bundling an Office equivalent according to a marketing guy from there I once worked with, and had the bad portent of the edifice complex: http://www.krjda.com/Sites/BorlandInfo1.html

To this day, well it's after they started going beyond their start in computer languages, their 808x C compiler for example blew away the competition when it finally launched, we ding Microsoft for their quality problems, but especially in the days Gates ran it one of the "secrets" of their success was writing software that basically worked, didn't crash on you etc. This makes it easy to beat competitors who lose that ability, or aren't as good at it.

Some things are obviously overstated or cited for propaganda value. For example with our ability to detect elements in parts per billion or less, it matters very much how much arsenic etc. is in them, I doubt it makes any sense to reduce those to 1 part per trillion or less.

TL:DR:

Demonstrably the existing big three, Abbott Labs and Mead Johnson produce(d) 80% of the US market share, Nestle another 18% are very weakly regulated by the FDA.

The hurdles for starting up in the US market are astronomical, and there's only one contract manufacturer Perrigo Nutritionals which not surprisingly has a large minimum order size. ByHeart became the 4th brand to have its own factory, first in 15 years.

Half of all formula is bought by the Federal WIC program, and states negotiate a monopoly with one firm.

All of the above results in prices double that in Europe, although I'd add we and the FDA are generally much more paranoid than they are, be it thalidomide long ago or COVID vaccines in the last couple of years.

Intel needs a massive cultural change to become a successful foundry and regain their moving to new nodes mojo. Samsung is too messed up to play this game at TSMC's level.

Nobody else it trying now, but that might change if TSMC is indeed being "greedy" vs. passing on their increasing costs. The article talks about the pressure of making new fabs but I can't help but notice inflation is roaring now.

I'm also given to understand greed is not part of TSMC's DNA, but that can of course change over time.