argonaut

You are right, my comment is only valid in California.

Almost all health insurance companies in the USA are required to fully cover PrEP, including Descovy. This doesn't stop health insurance companies from trying to deny you, of course. You would have to appeal the denial all the way up to your state's department for health insurance, but you would definitely win.

EDIT: I was mistaken, this only applies in California.

HIV drug resistance is a real issue, not sure why other comments are dismissing the risk of resistance. The risk of resistance is why HIV positive individuals take a cocktail of drugs, and why PrEP (Truvada or Descovy) requires regular HIV testing (because if you end up positive you need to upgraded to a cocktail of drugs).

The shot will likely be exorbitant in the USA. Gilead charged almost $2k/month for Truvada (list price, of course) and Descovy is the same. Generic Truvada is like $30/month now, so the price was never about the cost to manufacture. Obviously Gilead is developing these new drugs/shots for when Descovy's patent expires.

They rely on the government mandating that health insurance companies cover the shots. This drives up the price.

Car design is driven more by market analysis / price discrimination than engineering constraints. Engineering constraints explain some aspects of car design but they don't explain the generally conservative designs of a lot of automakers.

Take the new Toyota Prius, for example. The updated model almost looks like a concept car but still has a similar shape to other cars. There's no constraint reason Toyota couldn't have styled the car similarly in previous generations. I'm guessing they made the car look like this because Prius sales were falling and they decided they needed to be aggressive with styling for sales. They may have also decided that consumers that want a car with lots of cargo space are going for SUVs and crossovers anyways, so they could make the new Prius sleeker.

There are also tons of examples of automakers intentionally reserving nicer looking features as more expensive options or for more expensive luxury models. Fabric is not really cheaper than fake leather (both of these materials are just plastic). But automakers always charge more for fake leather.

Credit card debt driving families to suicide is super exaggerated. America makes it relatively easy to get rid of credit card debt through bankruptcy. And even after bankruptcy it's possible to get credit cards again after a few years. And after seven years it's completely off your credit report.

The diet angle is just sugar and carbs.

Yeah, dental insurance is primarily a tool for companies to provide a tax free benefit to employees. It doesn't make much sense to buy dental insurance yourself, unless you're high risk (get lots of cavities, etc.)

Novamin is not really better than fluoride, from when I looked at the studies.

Nano hydroxyapatite combined with fluoride has a little bit better evidence for it being better than fluoride alone.

There are plenty of honest dentists in the Bay Area (and America). If you're well informed, it's easy to tell based on a combination of Yelp reviews and what they recommend when you come in for an exam. Most of them only take higher paying PPO insurance, or don't take insurance at all (well, they're out of network).

I used to drive an old Prius - I believe they also had fuel economy tracking, a CD player, and some models had Bluetooth audio too.

This is a Toyota EV / plug in hybrid problem; Toyota's production numbers for plug in hybrids and EVs are very low (The RAV4 Prime is a plug in hybrid). Toyota still seems reluctant to commit to EVs/PHEVs, so that appears to play a role (they are still trying to push hydrogen fuel cell cars, for example).

An infotainment is practically a legal requirement, since backup cameras are mandated by law in the USA. Since you already need a screen and a computer, you might as well add some more functionality.

This is based on the JD Power Initial Quality Survey which can't really be used to measure "quality" because they mix together "things customers get annoyed by" and "actual defects."

For example, if I'm annoyed by having to use the touchscreen in a Tesla Model 3 to open the glove box, that counts as a problem even if it has nothing to do with the actual build quality. So in this case it makes sense that more tech = more things to get annoyed about, whether or not the tech is reliable.

Because Tesla is pushing the Model Y with their pricing (presumably because margins are better). The Model Y Long Range is $500 cheaper than the Model 3 Long Range after tax credits. The base Model Y is only $3.5k more expensive than the Model 3, after tax credits.

For many months you couldn't even order a Model 3 Long Range, your only option was a Model Y Long Range.

I guarantee you that things like this are being driven by the attitudes / beliefs of the wider student population. Even if this particular initiative does not explicitly involve any specific student groups.

That is, the attitudes of the staff are downstream of the students.

This is also reinforced by the fact that (entry-level) staff at universities are often recent humanities graduates from that university.

My understanding is that income based affirmative action would actually have little effect on racial demographics. Hence why this isn't really discussed by these top colleges.

In other words, top colleges would just be full of poor whites and asians (instead of middle-to-upper class whites and asians, without affirmative action).

WXLCKNO is referring to the BMW M3, specifically the "BMW Traffic Jam Assistant".

I think you have things flipped. Since the fee is a percentage, roboadvisors are perfect for someone with relatively low assets. If you have millions you benefit more from spending the time to manage/rebalance everything yourself and also gain access to different investment opportunities/vehicles/services.

Probably mostly historical reasons. When McD was a small company, franchising was the best way to expand as rapidly as possible.

I'm all for frugality, but with a newer car you're getting vastly improved crash safety. Over the years crash safety ratings have gotten tougher and tougher. You can browse the IIHS crash rating history for the Camry (or any other car) and you can often observe that when the IIHS introduces a new test, cars often perform poorly on it (high likelihood of injury) initially, but get better later on. https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/Toyota/camry-4-door-sed.... This is it's own piece of mind.

There is a generic now. https://www.goodrx.com/insulin-lispro

There's also admelog, which is not a generic but is a "biosimilar" that is much cheaper.

A lot of people seem to be confused about insulin every time it comes up. There are many different forms of insulin. Regular human insulin has been around for decades and is fairly cheap without insurance but difficult/inconvenient to use because it requires planning out your eating schedule.

The extremely expensive insulin that articles are talking about is usually a brand name like Humalog which is an altered form of insulin that is far more convenient to use. It is possible (but rather convoluted) to bring these eye-popping prices down to $99/month without insurance (https://www.admelog.com/savings), or $43-73/vial (https://www.goodrx.com/insulin-lispro or Walmart Novolog). Of course, this is all basically a way for pharma companies to price discriminate to extract as much $$$ from insurance.

I don't know if this applied to your situation, but some automakers don't accept custom orders from dealers. Toyota comes to mind, for example.

You're basically arguing that Ford has a semi-monopoly over the car categories they compete in. Which is pretty laughable.

Again, by your logic Ford can just jack up the price they charge to dealers and the dealers would have no choice but to accept it. But that's not true because Ford has to compete with other automakers.

They compete with other automakers.

By your logic Ford can just jack up the price they charge to dealers and the dealers would have no choice but to accept it. But that's not true because Ford has to compete with other automakers.

The other reference prices are the list prices of competing vehicles.

You also have it backwards. The current system of "MSRP as guideline" and you have to negotiate to find the real price makes it more difficult to compare prices between cars and automakers (unless you relish negotiating the prices of 4 competing cars simultaneously at 4 different dealers). The current system is set up precisely to not be price transparent.

This doesn't make any sense.

You would only feel ripped off because some dealerships say "No Haggle" and some do haggle. If every dealership has the same price for a specific car then literally by definition you cannot get ripped off.

You're also fixating too much on the meaning of MSRP. Before the car shortage MSRP was basically just a marketing number to anchor negotiations at a high number (except for cars in super high demand). Some automakers were notorious for deeply discounting below MSRP and some didn't discount much.

1. Service centers. Others comments have talked about this.

2. Trade-ins. Most new car dealers also sell used cars (in fact many make more profit on used cars than with new cars). Because of this they can usually give you much better trade-in valuations than Tesla, which I believe just sends cars to auction. Obviously you could also just sell to CarMax/Carvana/etc. or sometimes sell a car to a dealership without buying a car. But this is an added bit of hassle.

You didn't see many scientists saying this. But early on in the pandemic many people were saying Covid would be completely over if everyone masked for a month, or if we locked down for a month, etc. I saw this a lot within my own network of very liberal, twenty-something peers. Some people still believe this, albeit probably a small minority now.