warfangle

> “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under Nixon.

http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

And there are many lawyers who work on social issues like tenant advocacy that make a whooole lot less than, say, an M&A lawyer.

And the US is the only developed country where pharmaceutical companies are allowed to advertise specific drugs.

Forbes trots out an interesting figure: $2.6bn to win FDA approval for a new drug. That sounds like a lot!

It also sounds like a number pulled from a hat.

So I went looking.

It's from a Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development study published in 2014 [0]. Which is, incidentally, supported financially by the pharmaceutical industry [1]. Even the published pdf is pretty lacking on actual data [2]. Because it's a PR piece. This other study, from the Office of Health Economics, 2012, reported the cost as $1.5bn [3]. (OHE is funded by research grants and consultancy fees from - you guessed it - the British pharma industry). Did the cost magically increase by $1bn in the two years between the studies, or is there something fishy going on here?

One point in the Harvard study abstract was,

> The most important factor that allows manufacturers to set high drug prices is market exclusivity, protected by monopoly rights awarded upon Food and Drug Administration approval and by patents.

And that's true! But that exclusivity is an artifact of medicine-for-profit, instead of medicine-for-health.

It's interesting that all of their recommendations for lowering prices fail to take into account (at least in the abstract, as I don't have access to the full article) the single biggest difference between the only market where per capital spending is $850 and the 19 markets where per capita spending is, on average, $400: for profit healthcare and medicine.

Keep in mind that even after that astronomic cost for drug approval (the figure for which is iffy in providence), for-profit pharmaceutical companies still spend more on marketing than they do on research.

0. http://csdd.tufts.edu/news/complete_story/pr_tufts_csdd_2014...

1. http://csdd.tufts.edu/about/corporate_sponsorship

2. http://csdd.tufts.edu/files/uploads/Tufts_CSDD_briefing_on_R...

3. https://www.ohe.org/news/overview-ohe-study-cost-drug-develo...

Gamasutra published an in-depth article last year on how the developer of Super Win the Game implemented a shader to emulate the scanline (and phosphor decay) of CRTs. It's eyeopening, and was the first time I realized why my emulated NES classics looked so different from what I remembered from my youth.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KylePittman/20150420/241442/C...

Wonder if they're going to somehow get the FAA to change their opinion on bluetooth/airplane mode.

The flip side of course, is if the small community shuns someone they have no other communities to migrate to without a geographic migration.

(What you are describing did happen to me a long time ago, and it did take a long time to work my way out of it. So It's a completely valid point)

Isn't that what SSL does? And if the SSL between you and the destination is compromised, you don't even know if the hashing algorithm you asked the client to use is actually the one they used.

> Some really odd red-necky types showed up - and don't mean negative - just poor. They were welcome. Old guys in wheelchairs. Young partiers. It was an unbelievably mixed crowd.

And had a trans person showed up, how would that have gone? A Latinx person? A queer couple?

Had the opposite experience moving from a suburb to a major metropolitan area.

There's a level of community here (not all communities are communities that straight white tech workers are involved with or are welcome in) that is unparalleled.

It may cause the hyper privileged to become more individualistic but for everyone else we have thriving communities with true friendships and support networks.

Fair warning: this page will blow up your browser history.

the commute to the middle bay area is a lot better from SJ than from SF.

This is specifically one institution that is at risk for having its accreditation revoked.

On the other hand, curl.exe has been available for five years.

Unless you're in enterprise software.

It's really easy for enterprise companies to get in the trap of making every customer a spacial snowflake, because they need to to get a half mil contract signed. And then the product becomes sorta shapeless, because each customer gets their own product... And you end up a consultancy instead of the platform/SaaS that you originally envisioned.

Better training is exactly the answer.

Most officers get less than six months of training.

In other countries (with much lower rates of officer involved homicides), officers receive years of training.

It is exactly perceived threat.

But they're so untrained that they perceive many things as threats that are not threats (a man with autism rocking back and forth on the ground while holding a toy firetruck, for example).

I've learned coping skills to help me deal with what I take the meds for - coping skills that I could not practice / get good at while I was not being treated. I'm not as good as I am when I'm on them, but I'm a whole lot better than I used to be. (How do I know? I take regular doctor-sanctioned drug holidays. Luckily the meds I take do not need to be tapered.)

But you don't really care about that. Or any valid piece of evidence that disputes your already-formed opinion.

I used to be really against psychiatry too. Had docs in high school that didn't ask the right questions. Got misdiagnosed. Spent my 20s a shambling (semi-functional, but shambling) mess.

I'm privileged that I'm able to afford my mental healthcare team (neither of them take insurance). I wish access to quality mental health professionals was more easy to obtain. It's a double edged sword- the practice has a hard time recruiting, and health insurance is often pretty terrible for it. So many people who would benefit from a mental health provider cannot / will not get it.

You're awesome and your psychiatrist is awesome!

o/ heya.

I've been on psychiatrist-prescribed meds for a little over two years now. I've gotten a better job, my salary has increased by 52%, I live with less stress, I have a (mostly) tidy home, I am no longer dependent on alcohol, I care for a wonderful dog, I am cultivating healthy relationships and friendships, and I am more involved in my community.

I've also been seeing a cognitive-behavioral therapist for about three years to work through anxiety, depression, gender identity, and trauma from several childhood sexual assaults.

But maybe I don't count, because I'm not a 'guy' :) but I'm doing absolutely fucking amazing, thank you very much.

It was a magnet school that had resources (one of the best performing arts departments in the state; one of the only AP comp sci programs in a 45 mi radius) that my locally assigned high school did not.

The primary reasons the school-bus commute was long was a) meandering suburbia with only 1-2 students per stop and b) a 20 mile trek on the highway at 45mph.

If I had been able to drive (or carpooled), my commute would have been less than 35 minutes.

I had a total of 3 hours a day on a bus to/from high school. I wish I could have done homework during that time!

But you know how spine-jarring school busses are. Maybe if I'd been able to complete it on a laptop instead of worksheets.

But nah, with how I was treated by folks on my bus, my laptop would've been tossed out the window the second day.

On the other hand, how many companies stonewall potential new hires that try to perform due diligence on the options package offered?

Facebook did block their IP address.

Why do people still build business process tools when they could point and click in Salesforce?

The weird minicars are not what they've been road testing. The ones they've been road testing for ML look like regular cars.

And they have yet to hit a pedestrian or decapitate a driver with a semi. Be real; Tesla's is basically a smarter cruise control. It can't actually deal with complicated scenarios.

Google's doing a lot better on the whole self driving front.

At least in terms of fatalities per mile.

They also weren't competing against several companies that already had an assembly line.

Why aren't you just using an interpolated string?

The Matrix kind of did this, with the switch in color saturation & tint between "inside" the matrix and "outside." Inside was desaturated and tinted green; outside was desaturated and tinted blue. At the time it was considered a nuanced way of exaggerating the difference between the two.

The average cost of a space shuttle mission was $450m. That's 8 astronauts and 23,000kg of payload. [0]

Soyuz costs $62.7m/seat. [1] Which means that 8 seats to the ISS on soyuz is actually more expensive than a shuttle launch.

I couldn't find how much non-astronaut Soyuz payloads cost.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 Full Thrust can lift almost as much payload as the Shuttle, at 22,800kg.

I'm not sure how much each Falcon 9 launch to the ISS costs. Maybe someone else can chime in?

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program

1. http://www.space.com/20897-nasa-russia-astronaut-launches-20...

Jet turbofans have an efficiency curve related to the velocity of the aircraft. They are least efficient when the aircraft is stationary, and most efficient when the aircraft is moving at the same velocity as the exhaust.

A jet turbine generator can run at near-constant efficiency.