kongolongo

Sure it might have an impact, but again the culpability of harm isn't on the consumer or advertiser. If people able to shop around for doctors to get any prescription then isn't that the problem, not the advertisement?

It doesn't matter if the adverts have an impact on sales, if it does then doctors are to blame, tv adverts cant prescribe people medication.

>Eventually, doctors that resist the pressure loose in the market, because they end up less liked and more criticized. And that is about it.

Sounds like the incentives for doctors are misaligned. They shouldnt be subject to market demand for improper prescribing, for example that should be offset by fines or license revocation for misprescribing. Consumers cant be expected to know if a treatment is appropriate, so they consult doctors and if doctors are swayed by financial incentives to prescribe thats on the doctors.

>If these ads didn't do much the industry wouldn't be spending billions of dollars on them.

Thats speculative. Companies spend exorbitant amounts of money on things they lose money on all the time. What's not speculative is consumers cant buy the drugs themselves. They might ask doctors about it, but if the doctors are misprescribing that's on them or their training and not the consumer.

Consumers can directly buy alcohol and tobacco, they cannot buy prescription drugs directly. If there is a problem isn't the primary culprit the prescriber?

Why are prescription drug ads bad? Its not like consumers can prescribe or buy it for themselves.

If there is a problem with overconsumption or misuse of prescription drugs isn't the blame on the medical professionals that prescribe them? Ads to the general public seems far down on the list of culprits here.

>Is there some good reason for this approach (need to get config updates into the wild as quickly as possible to combat zero-days or zero-hours?) or was this just a massive oversight?

I'm curious of this too. Has there ever been a scenario where zero-days could have caused so much damage that it'd warrant this speediness in patching? In a cost-benefit analysis would it justify x% of patches like this happening in preventing whatever security issues could occur without this type of infrastructure?

I'd guess that's part of why they get thousands of applications per role?

On Windows 11, task manager has a search function now!

Here's a hypothesis: no positive number is evenly divisible by 3 trillion one. True up to 3 trillion then false at 3 trillion 1.

I don't think that necessarily is a a bad thing. Just because someone can theoretically afford a mortgage payment now its pretty difficult to predict say 5+ years out whether or not that steady job will hold, especially if they're young and have a short credit history. The down payment adds a cushion for that risk. There's less inherent risk to renting, you're looking at a commitment of 6 months to a max of maybe 2 years for most least terms.

Being too risky with handing out mortgages is partly what lead to the housing bubble in 2008 afterall.

If they're really certain their job will be stable long term PMIs shouldn't really be a deterrent, most PMI can be terminated after meeting 20% in equity.

This analogy is interesting do you think there are some lawyers that consider themselves 10xlawyers haha. It make sense that a lot of it would be similar to documentation and meetings and various agile ceremonies and not just 2200 hours of straight legal argumentation and writing.

The Harry Potter game was a little bit more complicated, I think PoGo was probably the simplest, at least at launch, I'm not sure what its like now, and other than being a super well-known IP is partially why it was successful IMO. I guess you could probably point to that also being one reason why the HP game wasn't as successful despite also being a popular IP. I haven't tried Pikmin Bloom.

You haven't shown its extra spending with just that one stat. Does $50 USD buy you the same things in the US as $50 USD in Venezuela?

You can't judge how much of a burden healthcare costs are unless you account for how much of a person's income or some proxy of it healthcare is. Just saying that the US spends more per capita than other OECD countries doesn't say anything without more context. IF you want to show that the healthcare spending isn't efficient in the US you have to at least show that it's not just because everything costs more there or that everyone earns more in the US (gdp/capita is higher than ~85% of OECD in US).

There's a very consistent definition for what that means with plenty of papers and institutions that use use roughly the same definition. Here's one phrasing of it by the OECD[1]. Basically it's just income minus taxes, what part of that is remotely vague?

Discretionary income might be an even better measure but that has more wiggle room on defining what is a necessity and not.

https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm [1]

Let's say the US spent 2x on healthcare as some country, but had 4x the disposable income, would this still be overspending or would it be more efficient given the amount relative to income?

Healthcare spending in $ per capita doesn't capture how much people earn in that country or how much of a burden it is relative to their income so its kinda meaningless without more context. It's like saying the US economy is better than 85% of the OECD because its in the top 5 gdp per capita.

Every time this stat is brought up I always think it doesn't convey the full context. Even though its in terms of per capita, it's still an absolute amount, I think a better data point to illustrate if the US was overspending compared to outcomes would be what % of disposable income is spent on healthcare vs outcomes.

For example, let's say the US spent 2x on healthcare as some country, but had 4x the disposable income, would this still be overspending or would it be more efficient given the amount relative to income? The closest I can find is health spending as % of GDP but that doesn't capture what a person's income, since it includes government spending too, so it obfuscates whether or not the inefficiency (if any) lies in private or public healthcare in the US.

The problem is you can't practically do that for many compounds either because of ethical reasons or because it would take far too long and would in the mean time impede progress significantly.

Take plastics for example, they're as acutely non-toxic as you can get you're not having any readily measurable adverse health outcomes from handling it, touching it, and even consuming foods directly in contact with it. And yet there are still things we would have missed even if we adopted this whitelisting approach. We would have never captured the problem of microplastics that we see today, the mechanical and chemical breakdown of plastics in the environment leading to far higher consumption and presence of it in our bodies could not have realistically been studied or predicted even if we took a whitelisting approach.

Now you have to consider what the effects of whitelisting everything would mean for productivity and progress. Imagine how much more everyday things would cost if plastics had to be whitelisted before being allowed in any products. Even now knowing about the existence of microplastics, it isn't clear that the effects they have decisively outweigh the benefits of plastics.

When those materials were the standard we also didn't have a lot of the medical and technological equipment today that arguably reduced both mortality and morbidity across large swaths of a much, much larger population. Plastics are used widely in electronics and all of the accompanying tech improvements too it isn't just simple as packaging, so it isn't a "solved problem" if you want to go back to those materials and replace everything plastic has become standard for in today's technologies.

Are those the same as ghost kitchens?

It really is not. No where in that article does it even hint at patents being a primary limiting factor for the availability of vaccines in developing countries.

Of course not all companies are going to release their patents, but the fact there are several that already have, means its not the main problem. mRNA vaccines require extreme temperature controls during transportation and that incurs much more of a prohibitive cost in those countries than any amount of patent royalties do, even if there were no waived patents.

There are cases of huge shipments of vaccine donations going to developing countries that then go unused or underutilized because they do not have the resources to transport and distribute them effectively. Look at the COVAX initiative. The countries that failed to get vaccine rates up even with huge donations of vaccines lacked the infrastructure to distribute them whether it was the temperature controls or not having enough syringes.

"in Benin, only 267 shots were being given each day, a pace so slow that 110,000 of the program’s AstraZeneca doses expired...The vaccine pileup illustrates one of the most serious but largely unrecognized problems facing the immunization program as it tries to recover from months of missteps and disappointments: difficulty getting doses from airport tarmacs into people’s arms."[1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/02/world/europe/covax-covid-...

>As far as Covid-19 vaccines, there are actually many companies ready to go right to production if those patents are released to the public at this moment, and that would greatly increase supply, and that would benefit the whole world, instead of a handful of pharma CEOs and affiliated shareholders.

That's just conspiracy. Many companies have not been enforcing any patents related to covid vaccines. The reason why the developing world does not have high vaccine adoption is because of their infrastructure, not because of patent blocking.

>manufacturing platforms (much of this is now outsourced to India, Mexico, etc. for drugs being sold in the USA)

This completely trivializes and misses the fact that the manufacturing process itself can be patented.

>As a practical example, look how the best Covid vaccines (mRNA types) have been monopolized, leading to low rates of vaccination in Africa etc., even though that was technology developed with taxpayer funding at public universities.

That's just patently false, Moderna for example, has been waived patent infringement related to covid vaccines. The reason the developing world does not have high rates of vaccination is not because of patents but primarily because of their infrastructure.

I think this is only a half-truth. There certainly are examples of academic research being translated into lucrative products by industry (there are even prominent examples in software/systems engineering) but I think that many times the translation of academic research into a useable product is also a massive endeavor that deserves recognition in its own right.

I see this scenario described in medical research all the time with people saying that industry just leeches off of academic research and what people leave out conveniently is the vast amounts of money and research that goes into translating research into a real drug (billions spent on clinical trials to meet regulation, millions to billions spent on scaling manufacturing and synthesis of the drug to industrial volumes, drug delivery like pill design or injection methods)

Additionally many industries also do have well-paid research positions that "move the needle" on science and basic research. While they're more targeted at producing and supporting products instead of full liberty to exploring just for the sake of knowledge, it's not like there is a complete black and white poorly compensated academic research vs industry.

I think the author was in a tough position to try and pursue this in the first place because, as they admit, they didn't have a direct background in the topic. That makes it difficult at the onset to look for programs and advisors with the the right type of experience to align with your desired research topic when you yourself do not have enough experience to make a fully informed judgement on how well their work in the field relates to what you want to explore.

The other comment didn't give for why a 10m:250k ratio is wrong either though. The argument that the 10m is only enabled by the rest of the company is a reason why it isn't i 1:1. What should the ratio be? Why would it necessarily approach 1:1?

You're right if we eliminated all non-essential use cases it there would be a lot less microplastics, but even in the cases where it's readily replaceable is the extra expenses in all of those product categories worth it over the highly speculative health concerns? I think cumulatively the expenses can be more drastic than at first glance, for example like think of all the non-essential but extremely common use in items like beauty products, food packaging, electronics, etc.

Yep that shear number of possible confounders is why it is so difficult to draw any sort of clear relationships between any particular pollutant and any particular health outcomes. It's not necessarily always conspiracy by corporations to thwart the research, it's genuinely difficult to study any affect because there's so many confounding pollutant exposures, metabolic pathways, and outcomes.

An interesting question is that would the risk of these outcomes be worth the massive amount of savings and productivity that plastics have had on nearly every industry? Then there's also the use cases where plastics are nearly irreplaceable, or at least not easily replaceable without incurring a huge cost increase for example in medical applications (think packaging for syringes, vaccines, surgical tools, or anything that requires contamination control).

I think it's kind of a reach to say that nuclear weapons saving lives through the deterrence of MAD can also be included in nuclear power saving lives. I think they can be relatively distinct.

For example there have been many instances where countries have specifically stopped at nuclear power, but not begin research or further refinement into creating nuclear weapons (because of possible sanctions, international backlash, etc). IIRC there are roughly 20ish countries that have nuclear power, but no nuclear weapons.

That's just not true. “While 39% of borrowers did not complete a degree, they account for only 23% of debt borrowed” [1]

The stats clearly show the vast majority of student loan debt is held by degree holders and disproportionately by graduate degree holders with extremely high earnings potentials (doctors, lawyers, MBAs)[2]. Remember debt is a financial instrument, not necessarily a bad outcome. Graduate degree pursuers often hold a lot more debt, but will become much better positioned to repay it a few years after graduation.

[1]https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/12/alma-adams...

[2]https://www.brookings.edu/research/student-loan-forgiveness-...