jonlucc

These contracts are likely emergency contracts, which pay outrageously but often require a full week of 12-hour shifts or something similar with the expectation the nurse will only do one week then recover. I've seen this for COVID peaks and when a hospital's entire nursing staff is planning to strike. The $5200/wk rate is more likely 3 or 4 12-hour shifts.

I would add that travel nurses are treated better in a lot of ways. Staff nurses must attend certain meetings and training aimed at standardizing care and improving outcomes. The travelers don't have to attend. Travelers can take off pretty much any time they want as long as they know before they sign the contract. Sure, they're considered "outsiders" by some staff and sometimes get the less enticing patient assignments, but for those drawbacks, they get paid 4x (I've seen 3-8x staff rates, but 4x seems common) plus a housing stipend as long as their location is more than some distance (I think 40 miles iirc) from their "home" location. Why would anyone be a staff nurse?

Anecdotally, I know a travel nurse who works in pediatric ICUs (PICUs). One shift a couple months ago, the overnight staff on her unit was >80% travelers. And this is in peds units that aren't as affected by COVID, because ~1/2 of the patients are cardiac babies with congenital heart issues. The only case I can see for not paying staff more to increase retention is that they can respond to a dip in cases over the summer, but that can't possibly be an 80% decrease in patients. Maybe they're waiting until travel rates come down to offer an increase in pay so their 1.2x salary offer is more enticing in comparison to the travel rates, but the current system is ridiculous financially. I did mention that we've seen first-hand that hospitals can afford to pay nurses $4k/week, though, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who noticed.

Or take a friend's jet? Or rent one? There are a lot of ways to travel via plane that don't broadcast your body's location.

Not to discount your friend's experience, but I haven't seen a recent study for which this is true. Selection criteria aren't secret; they're on clinicaltrials.gov and published in the eventual data used for FDA approval and publication.

For what it's worth, I'm an in vivo pharma researcher, and the standard is to not euthanize unless we need tissue. Unfortunately, I'd guess that 99% of the time, we need to collect blood, spleens, livers, etc. and doing so reduces the number of animals needed in that study as well as the number of studies we run with animals. There are already a lot of pressures to keep animal numbers low, not least of which being that each of the cheapest mice is somewhere around $28 (you can see the prices yourself on their website, but I think my company gets some discount on those prices). Also, my time is valuable, and adding mice increases the amount of my time is spent working on that study.

I'm also on the IACUC for my company, and I can assure you that we do care about animal life. We go to great lengths to ensure that research is being done in ways that maximize animal welfare to the extent that is possible. The FDA requires animal studies for safety and efficacy, and we can debate the morality of testing in mice, then NHPs before humans, but the system as it exists prioritizes de-risking first human doses as much as possible. Given that system, it is the job of the IACUC to oversee and approve every procedure done to an animal in the facility or in our company's name at other facilities. It's a big job that, at least at my place, is taken very seriously by researchers and up the chain of management.

The immediate similar product that springs to mind is the speed cameras. They'll tell you your speed along with a speed limit sign as you drive by them, but every single one I've seen in the past decade will just flash and say something like "slow down" if you're more than 10 over (don't ask how I know). It was obvious that people were going to try to get high scores.

I work in a pharma company, and I have been working with the animal model they use for this paper regularly for the past 4 or 5 years. I am not an mRNA therapy expert by any means, so I'll only comment on the results from the MOG35-55 and PLP EAE models.

They have good disease induction in their control groups, their targeted mRNA therapy shows pretty remarkable efficacy, and they show they can diversify a little bit with respect to the target.

These models are a little too "furry test tube" for me for this application. They work by injecting an antigen, either a short version of the myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein (MOG) peptide or the myelin proteolipid protein (PLP). The mouse makes antibodies against that antigen, and those antibodies also attack those antigens in their natural environments, leading to demyelination in the CNS. Well their mRNA for the MOG model makes more MOG peptide, giving the antibodies another target so they don't cause demyelination. In the human condition, there are multiple antibodies against multiple targets, so I'm not sure this is as relevant as they're suggesting, unless I'm missing something. I do want to add that this paper has a ton of work in it, and it looks pretty high quality as far as I can tell.

None of this is to say there's no value here, I'm just not sure what target they would make an mRNA for to treat human MS based on this paper or how they'd identify and test that target to get FDA approval to move into trials.

I don't know, but the way they casually let them in doesn't look like they're retreating from the position. If they were, why open the barriers? Why wouldn't they just back up from the position to their fallback position as one group?

Shooting into a moving car is insanely dangerous. The expected outcome is an uncontrolled moving car.

I haven't heard that about Wirecutter, and I think that would devastate their brand (and maybe hurt NYT's) if true.

I was trying to figure this out before. As I understand it from other discussions (someone please correct me if I'm wrong), the majority of developers bundle Epic's engine with their game, so it is delivered with the game in the app store. Those would not be harmed by and Epic entity being terminated by Apple, EXCEPT that it would hurt Epic's ability to develop new versions and support the already existing Unity engine and their customers. Because this court case might drag on for months but much more likely years, the court didn't think it was ok to allow Apple to terminate the dev account for the part of Epic that makes the engine, Epic International. This news is specifically about Epic Games, the company that makes Epic games, not the engine.

It's possible Apple would then proactively reach out to the largest developers to make similar deals, but the risk is pretty low to Apple if it takes a company willing to launch a multi-year lawsuit costing millions and millions of dollars; many companies, even large ones, don't have that cheddar.

In short, they can right now.

There's an Association of Art Museum Directors. Usually, the consequence for selling art to pay bills would result in that museum being censured by the art museum directors. They announced a couple months ago that they are allowing a 2 year reprieve from those censures due to COVID.

That can be very difficult. Increasingly, physicians employ a staff of PAs and/or nurse practitioners who handle cases. Those staff seem to move around more frequently than physicians, so even if I keep going to the same office, the staff may have almost entirely changed.

It is entirely possible that the national parties will never back these reforms, but that local party candidates for city government could see success backing some or all of them.

Protesting can have a lasting effect. There are small changes happening all over the country already. In my city, the mayor has requested a total overhaul of the police use of force policy within 14 days. In another city, the mayor (who doesn't control the local police for weird reasons) has called an out-of-cycle meeting of the police board to address poor behavior by officers during the protests and to change policies. Over the past couple of nights, lots of cities have changed how they deal with large protests, backing off; its too soon to know if those tactical changes will revert in a week, a year, a month, or at all.

At the federal level, there are a few bills being introduced to deal with qualified immunity or other aspects that need addressing. These may not go anywhere, but more pressure may have an effect on that. Also, hopefully next time there's a massive economic downturn, officials remember that not supporting individuals makes the whole nation a powder keg, ready to spawn riots in all 50 states.

There's also historic precedent that protesting has a lasting change.

Right. And this is the justification given during a press conference the next morning; it's not some on-the-spot question asked to the deputy chief of Indianapolis Police. It's a dumb excuse. Plus, it's literally one block long. If you want police on that block, they can stop around the corner and walk in. The building isn't touching the street; it's a couple hundred feet back.

I can weigh in a bit on what the police claim happened here in Indianapolis. They won't account for all of their CS deployments, which I think is crazy, but they did address why it started the other day (Saturday?). Their claim is that what they saw was some police inside the city/county building and a single person started hitting the glass on the building. Simultaneously, "previously peaceful" protesters started locking arms at one end of the street, blocking emergency vehicle ingress, so they let loose a bunch of (13 year expired)_CS gas.

Is that believable? Sure, but locking arms is also a common thing during protests. The road was already blocked off and cars weren't going through. Also, they fired CS into crowds of protesters blocks away, claiming that they think the protesters are coordinating by secure communications and instantaneously turning violent across the city. Most of it seems like bullshit, and even if it's all true, locking arms on one side of a closed street is not at all unusual. They should have arrested the one guy hitting the glass and let the protest continue.

By the way, they used this event to justify the curfews that haven't been raised since then.

Partially, maybe. But there's also a large role of qualified immunity and poor use of force policies in departments around the country. If an officer isn't required to report every time they threatened lethal force, it doesn't matter what the contract says about what should be done with use of force complaints.

If they don't respond in their reporters' interest, they won't have reporters risking arrest and hazard to report for them.

It's possible, but also, there's precedent from 2014 in Ferguson. Several members of credentialed media were arrested and assaulted to various degrees. Pretty much nothing happened by way of punishment other than a settlement from the DoJ saying they couldn't kettle people anymore, enforced by what is now Barr's department.

Any officer paying attention would know you won't be punished unless you act particularly egregiously like the one officer in Louisville reassigned to desk duty (big whoop). Add on the amount of animosity stoked by the president toward media for the past 4-5 years, and it really doesn't take a simultaneously coordinated effort to have this outcome.

If this is true, then people smashing property is actually the effective way forward. Pressure on property owners should cause them to push elected officials to rein in police forces. I'm not convinced it's true, but it does make me think about the property damage being done in a different light.

There's a difference between the kind of quarantine expected with a positive test vs not knowing. Once you test positive, you're not supposed to leave the house at all for 14 days, and only then with clearance from the local health department (or physician depending where you are). If you don't know for sure that you had COVID, it would be reasonable to go back out after your "cold" symptoms alleviated.

Part of the trouble is that there seems to be a lot of variation in symptoms in people who test positive.

More frequently than every 10 years?

I know this isn't the point you're making, but I find smart lights useful for automatically turning on or off at various times. I don't use Hue, but I think that part should still work if you lost internet connectivity.

I suspect HomeKit integrations like "if the door unlocks, and it is night, turn the light on" will break.

That seems to be a big difference to me. I wonder if this is more like SeedInvest than KickStarter, but more people understand the Kickstarter model. I can't look now, because I'm getting a "site can't be reached" error.

No, that's exceedingly rare. That kind of thing that only happens for super rare diseases, maybe like the ebola vaccine that was quickly developed over the past few years, where the economics are very upside down for companies to do the development.

What is way more common is that scientists from around the world, mostly funded by public money produce research that might implicate a particular pathway or target for a particular disease. Scientists in companies see those publications and try to verify the result, then make a drug for it. The process of making the drug, testing tens of thousands of compounds, making sure efficacy and safety margin are maximized, running clinical trials, and producing the drug with good yields is almost always done by companies.

The government can do stuff like funding studies on new uses for off-patent drugs, fund various parts of that development, and reduce regulatory burden to tilt the economics for companies to make drugs for a disease, but that mostly happens to do stuff that wouldn't happen in the normal system in which companies have to make money making drugs.

Disclaimer: I work in pharma, but in biology, not anywhere near the budget-making

Disclaimer: I work in big pharma as a biologist and nobody asks me anything about pricing or broad strategy

I don't hate the idea of bounties, but someone has to decide what bounties to offer, and the current system for deciding that is whether money can be made in that area. It's not perfect, but at least broadly it means that there is an incentive for treatments for conditions that affect a lot of people and ones with a high cost of disease without treatment.

The thing I could see easily being missed by bounties (or maybe worse, being subject to being lobbied by pharma companies with a drug in the chamber) is drugs that start for one indication, but pivot or expand to another, and drugs that are second or third in class. There is undoubtedly some value to a second in class drug that is more efficacious and safer, and line extensions are also helpful for expanding the use of a drug in market.

I'm not sure I'd notice if it rolled out to a lot of the apps I use, though. I mostly stay logged in for things that don't require login every use (lastpass, banks, etc).

Coronavirus is a class of viruses, of which this is a single "specie".