127 karma · joined March 16, 2021
Now we have a ton more information, a ton more training, and an issue now that would be game-ending prior is now treatable, but it comes at a cost. We see the same patterns in human medicine too. A lot of it has to do with demographics and cultural shifts in my opinion, as well as the supply/demand factor of trained practitioners.
However, whether or not that's what people want, that's the reality. Next time you get a medical charge, even with insurance, ask for an itemized bill. Compare the bill you receive to the one you receive when you tell them "I'm paying with cash". When I pay cash with a third party provider, they "magically" reduce the amount I owe by orders of magnitude, even for simple bloodwork (United States, major metropolitan area).
Again, in good faith, what am I supposed to expect when I hear regulation in animal medicine? People like my partner are studying and training for years to do this work. People are leasing or buying real estate for these facilities.
They are buying equipment, they are hiring trained surgeons, nurses, and practitioners who have been committing at minimum a decade of their life for this - what am I supposed to expect with "calls for regulation" a la human medicine style (the only comparison we have), especially when prices are ACTUALLY competitive, as I believe the human medicine market should be?
I can be convinced of any position, but it has to make sense. What prices or charges, even with private equity-funded veterinary firms, do you consider egregious and need a non-opt-outable mandatory third party oversight for? Has there been a good or a service you feel was only available at a specific provider that they gouged you on? Again, not being aggressive, just genuinely curious.
Private equity scooping up veterinary practices makes sense - it's a good investment. It's the same way PE firms will pool together a bunch of discrete dentist offices. I see many posters in here talking about how it's "rent-seeking" behavior, but frankly, these services are in demand and consolidating them is an increase in market efficiency. It's still good business to open up new clinics, even if the end goal is getting bought out (the standard practice for 95%+ of companies for which everyone here works for or is the beneficiary of).
If people are willing to spend more, then nothing really changed. If anything, goods and services were mispriced beforehand. If they raise the prices too high, nobody can afford the vet services and they will go out of business. If they make prices too low, we end up in a UK-style NHS situation where your dog's cancer is in line to get treated 8 months after they die, and they go out of business. Prices going up is natural for a restricted supply of extremely skilled labor (yes, you still need surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, drugs, human-tier equipment) and growing demand for the services (people having more pets in lieu of children in western countries). People were getting "better deals" before and are now being priced appropriately.
A big trend here is the increase in desire to spend on pets, particularly in the US, the richest country in the world. Yes, consolidation is one part of it, but we have to look at demographic trends as well. More and more people are spending more and more money on pets (in lieu of children). And yet, the increase in supply of skilled veterinarians has not increased nearly as much. Obviously, investment firms need their cut, but prices go up while owned by an investment firm does not make it evil, nor does it not make sense or outrageous. What might actually be considered outrageous around here is spending $20k on surgery for a domestic pet (common occurence as far as I can tell in a metropolitan area).
Lastly - there's actually a competitive healthcare market here! I have enjoyed being able to peek behind the curtain and look at what procedures of this scale should really cost, e.g. we still need the same training, people, equipment, and time relative to human medicine (arguably with a much lower tolerance of risk), but the prices are...... reasonable. $10-20k for a crazy surgery would be highly affordable for a human, and these PE firms are actually competing with each other for clients for these expensive procedures. It makes me wish for a similar competitive pricing landscape for humans - even if they are PE owned.
The last thing anyone needs when caring for their pet is a government bureaucrat handing out human-medicine style hospital monopolies to a "partnered provider" knighted by the government which will force a 100x billing charge to bill the govt and make it illegal to not have pet insurance while driving your premiums up 100x over the next 30 years.
What I'm trying to say is what sets you guys apart, or why would I as a seller (or buyer) prefer to use Mana Pool over TCG?
Is it commission? I'll say from personal experience that 10% commission (or 10.25% or whatever) is quite expensive as a seller. If the commission is the killer, are you hoping to capture more of the market from TCG for Magic? Is it sustainable to run a price war on commission?
Genuinely asking all of this btw, I do prefer the design here to tcg
https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/eu-emissions-trading-...
Allowances
https://sparkchange.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/SparkChang...
Guide on allowances from a firm that sells a physically backed allowances product
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos
I totally understand the skepticism and want to reiterate that I am not nor do I want to be a "UFO guy". It is also especially hard to prove, because there are so many outs. One could ask for photos, and then if photos are provided, they're photoshopped/doctored/not high quality enough (which is the case 99.99999999% of the time), and then if they're provided from the government then it's not real because it's a one-off situation e.g. lone wolf, and if there's multiple then it's a psyop/disinformation, and then if they provide a witness or a whistleblower then they're crazy and a nutjob, but if they provide multiple it's just part of the conspiracy, etc etc.
People have been claiming to see UFOs for years, ever since the popularization in mass media with the start of "the war of the worlds". In nearly all cases, even (at the time) credible sightings were advanced weapons programs. Additionally, with the proliferation of everyone having access to relatively high quality cameras, the amount of "legitimate" sightings has dropped dramatically.
Now, what has changed? We have several videos, that are public knowledge, that show objects moving in ways that no level of technology we have now can demonstrate.
This video and the other two related are the only official videos we currently have. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWLZgnmRDs4
These objects were recorded as early as 2004. These objects were recorded not by a loony bin boy cried wolf UFO-ologist but by US Navy airmen.
Ok, maybe they are a camera issue? e.g. one can imagine it's a bird or a balloon or an object that shows up as moving much faster than reality, or something to do with parallax/tracking error with the IR (infrared)? That would be believable, especially if it's a single recording, solo pilot, new equipment. The issue with this is that in addition to the declassified IR videos, we saw this happen multiple times, in multiple locations, on different aircraft, with multiple pilots present in the aircraft at the same time making the same visual (with eyeballs) confirmation, radar confirmation, IR.
Ok, maybe it's an advanced hologram program/electronic warfare test/drill or something? Which was my next guess, but the visual confirmation rules out electronic warfare and in addition to visuals, IR, we also have radar bouncing off - not just recorded by the aircraft, but recorded by the entire USS Nimitz carrier group that was in the area at the time - hence real, physical objects. And, again, it wasn't just one signature, in fact the reason they were up there to begin with was because of the unidentified objects in the airspace.
Ok, maybe it's just a balloon or an experimental drone by the US or its rivals. The issue here is that the physics described are not just "next-gen" a la F35 but some sort of groundbreaking physics that would change the way we do anything.
From The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-...
"For two weeks, the operator said, the Princeton had been tracking mysterious aircraft. The objects appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering. Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up."
Fravor reported that he saw an object, white and oval, hovering above an ocean disturbance. He estimated that the object was about 40 feet long. Fravor and another pilot, Alex Dietrich, said in an interview that a total of four people (two pilots and two weapons systems officers in the back seats of the two airplanes) witnessed the object for about 5 minutes. Fravor says that as he spiraled down to get closer to the object, the object ascended, mirroring the trajectory of his airplane, until the object disappeared. Hovering 50 feet above the churn was an aircraft of some kind — whitish — that was around 40 feet long and oval in shape. The craft was jumping around erratically, staying over the wave disturbance but not moving in any specific direction, Commander Fravor said. The disturbance looked like frothy waves and foam, as if the water were boiling.
Fravor began a circular descent to get a closer look, but as he got nearer the object began ascending toward him. It was almost as if it were coming to meet him halfway, he said. Fravor abandoned his slow circular descent and headed straight for the object. But then the object peeled away. “It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he said in the interview. He was, he said, “pretty weirded out.” The two fighter jets then conferred with the operations officer on the Princeton and were told to head to a rendezvous point 60 miles away, called the cap point, in aviation parlance. They were en route and closing in when the Princeton radioed again. Radar had again picked up the strange aircraft. “Sir, you won’t believe it,” the radio operator said, “but that thing is at your cap point.” “We were at least 40 miles away, and in less than a minute this thing was already at our cap point,” Commander Fravor, who has since retired from the Navy, said in the interview.
Thus, they are able to move on their own, not just floating in the wind (balloon, birds, launched radar reflectors), they're quite large, and can move large distances in short amounts of time. Additionally, no exhaust ports, no exhaust fumes, no control surfaces of any kind were observed. If we actually break down and analyze the movement based on the recording, we get results that are beyond physics. From the University of Albany - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7514271/
Even the most conservative and minimum models for acceleration give us ~70g with maneuverability, which is more than double what we have, and only in a rocket-like manner. Not without exhaust, control surfaces, and non-linear movement.
"It is difficult to draw any definitive conclusions at this point regarding the nature and origin of these UAVs other than the fact that we have shown that these objects cannot be of any known aircraft or missiles using current technology. We have characterized the accelerations of several UAVs and have demonstrated that if they are craft then they are indeed anomalous, displaying technical capabilities far exceeding those of our fastest aircraft and spacecraft."
Ok, maybe it's a secret weapons program we don't know about. The issue with this is that we'd see a ton of people "disappearing" from public life and essentially vanishing, similar to what happened during the Manhattan Project. Physicists, mathematicians, materials scientists would seemingly end their career, stop publishing, and go off the grid to live and work at some facility. Currently, we haven't seen an exodus/brain drain of any level in the fields we would expect towards "nothing" - if anything, everyone's going into finance and adtech. Not to mention, this kind of stuff would be "Theory of Relativity" tier, not just cutting edge stealth tech.
The only other thing I can imagine is that it's a coordinated government attempt to spread disinformation regarding our military capabilities to our adversaries. Even then, it doesn't explain what the objects were.
I really really don't want to be a "UFO guy" but maybe even this mindset is part of the problem. Given all of this information, I don't understand why so many are so quick to dismiss any sort of theory, because as far as I see it anything terrestrial is exponentially more likely than aliens, but I can't come up with any ideas for these objects to have originated on Earth.
PS. there's also the the whistleblower which the article references: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/ex-intel-official-go... and a 2017 NYT article describing the program itself: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-prog...
Yes, some things you need to wait for - there is always something else you can do in the meantime.
mouse model
>-vascular calcification: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/eci.13077
review which includes mostly studies on cigarettes
>-arteriosclerosis: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4805015/
cigarettes
>-mutagenesis/various cancers: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363846/
giant systematic review, going through though it seems most of these are mice studies or studies on smokers (cigarette smokers)
>-reduced alveolar function and bronchoconstriction, miscellaneous pulmonary injury: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3097432/; https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajplung.005...
first one is cigarettes, second one is a rat model but they actually did design the aerosolized nicotine pretty well
>-peridontal disease: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/omi.12228
cigarettes
to really get a concise view, we would want to look at studies of people who only use nicotine gum, or studies of people who use vapes. just be careful blindly posting papers you found from googling "nicotine bad paper" and dig more than 2 seconds into a paper, you can spread a lot of misinformation that way. we all know smoking and cigarettes are bad for you, but are the outside effects primarily from nicotine or from everything surrounding the delivery mechanism of it?
If I write "i owe you a billion dollars for your 64 diamonds" on a minecraft sign you shouldn't be surprised if I don't hold up my end of that.
Asking for myself.
Like another poster already mentioned, reminds me of the Harrison Bergeron story by Vonnegut - seems like we are rapidly approaching that point.