matthewdgreen

It also tells a story about any US robotics company like Tesla now claims to be. How can you possibly hope to compete against manufacturing costs that low.

You need a home backup battery with a transfer switch, specifically one that accepts solar input. There are a bunch of off-the-shelf solutions out there.

Well, US health insurance is insurance. That’s one function. But it’s also managed healthcare. The management is being performed by a series of large corporations with somewhat broken incentives, with the government backstopping and certifying everything and filling in all the gaps. That’s why other countries achieve such better results with government-managed healthcare, because our system genuinely has very little relationship with the free market and already is a kind of planned system; it’s just an exceedingly inefficient planned system.

But the lesson you should take from this is not “we should just deregulate it a bit and hope the free market takes hold.” This is the planned system we designed in one of the most capitalist countries on earth: it got to the state of being a planned system because the truly competitive market systems kept failing. I’m not sure where you can go to find a truly competitive system that isn’t in some way underpinned and supported by the government (and the US government specifically.) People often point to third world countries where they can pay cash, but I think that’s mostly just rich US people buying luxury healthcare at lower prices, not a real working free-market health system that delivers broadly-shared results.

You have to entertain the hypothesis that when the ideal “free market system” exists nowhere, the reason is because the free market system was tried (here in the US, even) and it worked so poorly that it was replaced with one of the systems that survived. Because that’s the pattern we see everywhere with healthcare (and with roads and fire departments, too, outside of a few exceptions.)

The pharma investment problem is a problem, but just to be clear: it’s a question of financial allocation. There are many ways to solve it that aren’t what we have right now.

I think you misunderstand how US drug purchases work. There is very little competitive market whatsoever anywhere in the prescription med system; there are simply "brands" and "patented meds" and "generics" plus various underserved niches where pharma companies can extract high prices from desperate patients (see e.g., Martin Shkreli and Daraprim.)

With respect to generics, there's little incentive to make a better formulation. If patients have insurance, they'll get whatever "bioequivalent" generic is available from the pharmacy if it matches the insurance provider's formulary price requirements. That manufacturer can change any time, since by law they're all deemed equivalent. It's like buying generic store-brand ibuprofen: you have no idea which factory is actually making the stuff, and it can change from package to package.

There's also very little benefit to having a "brand name" generic that has better bioavailability since you really can't charge more for it: insurance companies and pharmacies will just switch to another generic brand with lower costs. Trying to argue better bioavailability could also involve admitting that your existing bioequivalence studies are bunk, which would require an expensive new certification process. Plus, even in a functioning and truly competitive market, trying to experiment with different formulations to figure out which "gets better results" is a dangerous game for individuals; it's not like buying different Kleenex and deciding which holds together better. You have to do a lot of risky trial and error and get frequent blood tests.

So basically we have a system that ensures a completely non-functioning non-competitive market, and then we throw in an exclusive term where new medication can be sold at any price and we expect market forces to somehow constrain manufacturers. But the market forces are very weak and limited here. When we clearly end up paying dozens of times more than other countries (even for unpatented medicine) people raise the R&D issue to justify the costs. But that's sort of like saying "hey, the Mafia spends a lot on churches, so their extractive business model is fine." If you really want churches (or R&D) we should find a more rational way to come up with those funds.

PS this paper is a good (old) study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8026413/

>The second is that nobody is making a generic of the more bioavailable version even though the patent is expired.

I've been taking this drug since 1995 and the brand-name version has been in production (in its current format) since 1938. I don't think there have been any substantial improvements in the formulation in decades (as evidenced by my dosage, at least.) It certainly isn't expensive due to patents.

What's happening here is that in the US generic alternatives are supposed to demonstrate bioequivalence (meaning the same bioavailability), but the standards are lax and not well-enforced. Insurance formularies aren't going to spring for a brand-name drug formulation that costs 10x when the government has certified the cheap generic as bioequivalent. Manufacturers of the unpatented (but more bioavailable) brand-name drugs know that in reality some subset of their patients will need their formulation to keep blood levels stable, which means that in the US they can crank their prices way up and soak a bunch of sick people. In Canada they can't do this. Nothing about this is really defensible.

Which brings me back to the larger issue. High US drug prices can be due to both (1) recouping R&D costs and (2) greed, but the greed is enough to render our current system unworkable. You can't just assign manufacturers a monopoly and the right to charge whatever they want, and expect that they won't abuse this to soak desperate sick people with prices far in excess of their costs (as they are clearly doing.) So yes, you can point to the cost of R&D as one reason we should all (globally) pay more for some drugs, but you can't really use the need for R&D to justify the US system, which is inefficient and dangerous.

Yeah that’s the story people tell. On the other hand, I need to take a brand name version of a medicine that was patented in the early 20th century, and in the US the co-pay alone costs me $200/mo or more (not including what insurance pays) while I can buy it from Canada for $30 without insurance. (The generics cost a similar amount, but don’t work as well due to bioavailability issues.) So while I appreciate the idea that high US prices are all about R&D, I also have pretty visible evidence that US pharma will just charge whatever the market will bear, even for drugs that are long out of patent and inexpensive to manufacture.

When any of that happens I'm happy to have this debate. I will be very sad that we have to live in that world, but I'll take it if the alternative is "we all die." But building a surveillance state today in an environment where violent crime seems to be at historic lows across the first world, that just seems incredibly dumb. Let's not.

>Imagine a future where it becomes easier to commit terrorism because of some technological advancements

Imagine a future where aliens invade, and all of our civil rights have to be suspended in order for society to be re-focused on fighting an existential war against the invaders. I suppose this sci-fi hypothetical could happen and if it did happen then the sacrifice might even be necessary. But it's not happening now, and it's entirely reasonable to classify it as both (1) unlikely, and (2) an incredibly bad outcome we should hope that we never have to face.

But the CSAM regulation under discussion doesn't do any of the things you're claiming. It mandates content scanning for CSAM and other related messages. It does not call for key escrow and decryption of messages involving organized crime. So it's not clear how you would do much against serious organized criminals with this law.

I'm a professor who trains PhDs in cryptography, and I can say that it genuinely does have knowledge equivalent to a PhD student. Unfortunately I've never gotten it to produce a novel result. And occasionally it does frightening stuff, like swapping the + and * in a polynomial evaluation when I ask it to format a LaTeX algorithm.

Thanks! I didn't notice it because it's invisible when you initiate the search, you have to search first and then go back and change the cabin class. I wouldn't say this option is hidden exactly, but it certainly isn't made particularly easy for users to find.

I don’t want basic economy because it means my kids will end up scattered across the airplane instead of sitting with me. So I always have to upgrade to the “normal economy” seats. I’m willing to bet a large chunk of money that a huge fraction of the airlines’ customers do the same “upgrade” because their sites are more or less built around the idea of funneling people into it. Yet on Google Flights there’s no easy option to specify that I want this popular product: the only options are Economy, Premium Economy (a very different product), Business and First.

Price aggregators like Google Flights continue to show the crappy tier by default, which means that airlines have to offer that tier to appear competitive. No idea why Google wants to build its product this way, but there are only a few companies in this business.

The novel information in this article (confirmed by some technical experts on other platforms) is that this kind of SMS scam relay is a well-known sort of enterprise. I wasn’t aware of this, although it doesn’t surprise me. Once you have that context, the rest of the NYT article kind of falls apart by itself.

> I'd also note that Trump, then Biden, then Trump again escalated the use of the shadow docket way beyond historical norms [1]

The President does not choose to use the shadow docket. The use of the shadow docket is controlled by the court justices, who (as you pointed out) have been a conservative majority for a decade.

You are correct that the use of the shadow docket increased under Trump and then Biden, but this is consistent with the (somewhat obvious) explanation that the conservative justices began to use this tool as a partisan weapon for Trump and the GOP and then later against Biden's policies.

So much of this is phrased as “communism bad” and sure, it has been. But this lesson could equally be phrased as “electing personality cult strongman and gutting the mechanisms that prevented personal rule and dominance of the economy are bad.” Just as food for thought.

I think Nate Silver is a pretty famous poll maker/statistician, but as a pundit he’s basically “just some guy with an opinion,” and I think it’s accurate and healthy that the GP poster treats him that way.

I assume this is just garden-variety "being racist on the Internet" commentary, but in case you actually believe this: go ask ChatGPT for a list of the sections that urge murder and violence against women in any given holy text.

I have no idea what your culture is, but the entire notion that domestic violence is something to be monitored and prevented by outsiders was invented very recently in most cultures. So my assumption is that it was pretty damn widespread everywhere, no matter what our ancestors like to tell us.

I see no evidence that we won’t go back there. Our grandparents built an entire world order around curtailing the kind of authoritarian competition that leads to wars between major powers, and we’re already watching it break down. Do you really look at this political world as the harbinger of another 75 years free of major global conflict?

Are you positive about this?

Ok, I know we always say this kind of stuff on HN and then the product is hugely successful anyway... But seriously, why am I even interested in buying a fridge with a display? That seems annoying even without the ads, and the ads are a product-killer.

Does that number include electrolysis? I didn’t realize that kind of round trip efficiency was possible.

It’s a con in the same way a generator is a con. Yes of course utility scale PV is much cheaper, but this way you get control of your own supply and demand.

Hydrogen would be a terrible approach due to the low round-trip efficiency and the need to store huge amounts of compressed/cryogenic gas, but iron air batteries seem like they could actually do this.

There's a hypothesis that some part of the obesity epidemic stems from the widespread use of powerful emulsifiers in factory-produced goods. They attack the lining of the lower intestines (basically mucous) and wipe out chunks of our gut microbiota. I have no idea whether this is true, but once you realize that even "fresh bread from your local bakery" is often made using factory-produced Sodexo dry mixes, you see how easily this could affect everyone.

The proximate goal they're trying to achieve is mostly irrelevant when compared to the broader technical goal. That goal is to force all messaging systems to re-architect so they include a "bump on the wire" that hosts a scanning mechanism sophisticated enough to recognize novel (unknown) image content. This implicitly requires re-architecting these systems to contain neural-network image classifiers that operate over a model that's kept secret (to the user/client.) Everything else is sort of irrelevant compared to the implications of this new architecture.

The "good news" for now is that the systems deployed in this model won't classify text, only images and URLs. The bad news is that the current draft explicitly allows that question to be reviewed in the future. And of course, once you've re-architected every E2EE system to make image scanning possible, most of the damage to cybersecurity is likely already done; a year or two down the road, text scanning will probably be viewed as a modest and common-sense upgrade. I expect that folks who object to text scanning on cybersecurity grounds will be informed that the risks are already "baked in" to the image-scanning model, and so there's no real harm in adding text scanning.

Leaving aside the privacy issues, this is basically an existential national security risk for Europe. It's amazing to me that they're walking right into it.

Clean hydrogen begins with electricity and then loses a vast amount of energy in the conversion process. Also it’s extremely pressurized and/or cryogenic, and one of the most difficult molecules to store. If there was a process for converting electricity to ethanol and burning it that was more efficient than batteries, we’d be using it instead of batteries. Other sources like corn-based ethanol have their own problems that have been pretty extensively covered elsewhere. In fact, all of this stuff has been covered elsewhere and great answers are available with a search.

A device that only makes sense in extraordinarily high-end cars with an expensive adjustable suspension probably isn’t going to move the needle that much. If you’re doing object detection and moving the car, why not go a little farther and move a plug into a physical port on the base of the car, so you don’t need the car to move to the charger.

The real problem is the power loss, which is fine for rich people doing personal installs in their home, but probably rules this out for high-volume charging services. I’m just not sure how big the “rich people personal installs” market is.

Not only that, but this requires object detection and the car suspension has to drop to (nearly) meet it, which seems like it’s enough work that automated contact charging can’t be wildly more difficult.