the_crocodile

Favorite quote that I'm not sure why the author included: “You can’t just put your mouth underneath the nozzle of an ice cream machine and fill your belly,” he says.

This is a natural market progression and will happen. Most automakers built higher cost, lower volume "premium" products for less price sensitive early adopters. As the product and market matures, costs reduce and more mass market products are available at lower costs (Model S->Model 3 -> Model 2 etc). Used cars also become available over time to increase supply and lower costs for a different market segment.

Housing is the key common factor linking cost of living, homelessness and the other issues. With more housing built, the problems diminish.

Love the acerbic humor style as well.

Lots of great lines. Enjoyed the highlight of the cognitive dissonance in citing the benefits of "transparency.

>"The retail experience consumers want and deserve," Cooler Screens says on their website. I would admire this turn of phrase if it was intended as a contemptful one. Cooler Screens promise to bring the experience of shopping online, "ease, relevance, and transparency." "Transparency" seems like a poor choice of language when promoting a product that infamously compares poorly to the transparent door it replaces.

A point of clarification. ASML does lithography, which creates the patterns for the chips. The big players in etch (removing layers of material following the pattern) are Lam Research and Applied Materials, both American companies.

Article agrees with #1.

"As they note, it seems like an easy thing to fix if Congress had the will:

Two reforms would help solve this problem: first, district judges should—by law—be randomly assigned to cases and, second, venue in patent cases should be tied to geographic divisions within a judicial district, not just the district as a whole."

Very helpful. Thank you for sharing!

Have you been able to find data on # of tests carried out?

Tomas Pueyo published an article: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

He wrote a model that roughly estimates infection rates in a population based on either deaths or confirmed cases: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/17YyCmjb2Z2QwMiRR...

The model is oriented around companies, but could be applied to any gathering of people. There may be more sophisticated or accurate models out there, but I found his relatively quick to understand and apply.

author context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmet_Altan

Manufacturing costs are roughly similar between generics and brand name drugs (say ~$1/pill as an example). A large portion of costs for brand name drugs are in the development and qualification. Generics avoid these costs.

For a brand name drugs, manufacturing costs are a relatively low portion of the price and margins are high (example: $20/pill, 95% gross margin). For generics, manufacturing costs are a larger portion of the price and margins are lower (example: $2/pill, 50% gross margin).

For generics, because a substantial portion of the price is driven by manufactured costs, margins can be increased substantially by a reduction of the manufactured cost (example: cost $1->0.50, price: $2, margin ->75%, a 50% increase in profitability!). For the brand name drug, the same reduction (example: cost $1->0.50, price: $20, margin ->97%) yields less increase in margin. As a result, there is less incentive for the brand name drug to push for the manufacturing cost reduction (whether or not quality is affected.) And if there is a risk of reduced quality, then the brand name has much more to lose, both in terms of profitability and in the value of it's brand name.

Rent control insulates current residents from paying market rates for housing. This reduces their incentive to fix the problem (expensive housing) because they have already have cheaper housing... as long as they don't need to change housing (often prompted by new job location/family growth etc). Rent control has the follow on effects then of decreasing mobility and increasing commute traffic.

Agree. This brings increased attention and news to an issue that would have been forgotten. It speaks to Joi's integrity that he wanted to correct his mistake publicly.