Content? Hardly.

Disinformation. Lies. Etc.

I benefit from an orphan drug, and the R&D was most definitely subsidised by the public purse.

My insurance pays a few grand a month for it.

The mfg coupon covers most of the rest, minus a copay.

This is the second iteration of the original drug. The first hasn’t meaningfully fallen in price and only the original company can manufacture and distribute the generic even under the name of competitors.

There was no breakthrough in the second iteration, and the logic to solve the “problem” they solved was straightforward. So now I pay more, for an anecdotally less effective version that addresses a risk irrelevant to me but present in the original.

There is yet a third iteration on the way.

Shock revelations:

• pharma companies are greedy and will double dip against both government subsidies and patients/insurance at every opportunity.
• XX Pharma didn’t pay for the original R&D, my gov did.
• if one replaces Na with a/several similar elements, one still ends up with a salt, often resulting in a drug variant that “doesn’t affect blood pressure” and offers no other real benefits, nor risks.
• Clinical trials for said alternative salt are broadly leas expensive than for the original. That does not result in lower prices.

Nationalise pharma research, if not the manufacturers.

Also, generics are often manufactured in countries with, shall we say, fewer controls and regulations. Know who makes those pills and where. If you can’t stomach the FDA reports on that manufacturer, find a pharmacy who will sell you something else…

At one time, Reddit (or at least the core server) was open source. Statistically, it’s relatively likely that someone, somewhere forked and is maintaining that code for their own purposes to this day, but I’m not actively aware of any examples.

If someone has been maintaining a fork, I’d love to see the old comment database imported into it and made available, though I don’t know offhand what license either the code or the comments were released under.

A FOSS Reddit, without the chaos that took over America during the presidential administration installed in 2016, and branching from there, would be an interesting point of diversion to say the least.

Edit: quickie DDG search found me one fork archived in 2023 and a further form updated a year or so ago. That’s recent enough the damn thing just might build with a little work.

2023 fork of open source reddit

~2024 fork

I’m sure there are others…

Generally? Well within the executive power / administrative law of any given state as noted by BlueFalcon below.

Practically? I’d expect it to be quite a struggle. For licensed professions in general (doctors, real estate, insurance, hairdressers, etc.) most or all states ask a question to the effect of “Has your license for profession ever been suspended or revoked in any other state?”. It may or may not be an automatic disqualifier, but even if not it’s an uphill battle.

It prevents the real estate agent who stole someone’s earnest money from upping stakes to the next state and getting licensed, but since the standards for suspending/revoking licenses vary widely by state I lean towards believing that perhaps it should be a factor, and perhaps the state board of profession should meet to review the application, but previous disciplinary action in some other state is in no way an absolute statement about someone’s fitness to practice in their chosen field.

Sell them to someone who will test and resell them to the airline or medical industry… Manufacturing is a likely customer as well, plenty of legacy equipment there that’s airgapped and still running decades-old hw/sw.

Youtube warning, some Boeing 747s

Recent BBC article

(This is a wrong answer since you only have a single pack. If you had several cases, you might actually be able to make a buck)

Saw a post on mastodon in the last day or so that someone dug up a network card for the old 486 they had been working on getting back to life. Might be a use case there, as well as in aviation and medicine - fields that move exceptionally slowly and tend to have expensive equipment with long lifetimes.

And here I thought that outsourced “HR” folks were a travesty.

Had a small payroll issue recently having to do with some time off and a misunderstanding by the (outsourced) HR folks, was able to speak with enough people who understood one segment or another of the (rather complex) scenario to get it resolved in a couple of days.

AI would be a hard fail in that application, guaranteed.

At least one giant multi-national corp is actively soliciting examples and use cases from their employees.

“Toy” example submissions is fine, the company is just so eager for something to do with AI - they’re hoping for their actual AI folks to be able to take off of that uncompensated IP, while the employee with the idea gets a pat on the head.

Have I had ideas I might otherwise submit and that are well within my capabilities to implement at “toy” level? Hell, yes.

Do I want to contribute concepts into that sort of pipeline? Absolutely not. Not when they more or less automatically own my work product and whatever I do on company time already.

I use Arch, btw…

Kidding, of course - but there are some of those folks out there. TBF, they’re the vocal minority, but they are vocal nonetheless.

I should have marked mine more clearly as a “first pass” from the start.

Worked with too many hotshot folks to trust future/past humans quite that much.

Once in a while, I’ve even been that hotshot guy. Definitely not excluding my own “oh that was prod…” adventures when I worry about humans, didn’t mean to come off like I think I might have.

But interesting, and certainly worth kicking around.

In green fields projects, this makes a fair bit of sense at initial reading, tentatively.

But new code becomes old code, and then builds on the quality / discipline / cowboy status of the last person to touch the code, in a complex and interlocking way.

I can’t say I’d be excited to find a partially converted existing codebase of this. But in fairness, I’m on my couch on a Sunday and haven’t actually worked through your examples (or read the original paper). I see the benefit to having both types of extensibility, obviously. Just not sure it outweighs the real world risk once actual humans start getting involved.

I don’t know a single person who can’t say they’ve never taken a single “good enough” shortcut at work, ever, and it seems this only works (efficiently) if it’s properly and fully implemented.

The value of my labor, daily.

The nominal “cost” of my healthcare, at every encounter.

Etc.

Dead on, and applicable to nearly everyone.

• If you need medical care, get fucking medical care. Seriously. It will get worse if you ignore it, whatever “it” happens to be.
• Following the above, have at least one trusted advocate (partner, family member, friend, doesn’t matter) who can explain any chronic issues, typical medications, etc., and who can and will advocate on your behalf with medical professionals in e.g., a hospital setting as and when necessary.

I don’t know offhand, but thanks for the reminder. I would have remembered COVID this year, but could well have forgotten flu!

Elsewhere, someone suggested that it would be necessary to take the rebuild down to the dirt to handle plumbing and the like for individual units, but I’m not sure I agree.

Generally there is significant excess ceiling height in these commercial spaces, no reason the floor couldn’t be raised throughout the space to accommodate plumbing and the like in a way that’s easily accessible for future maintenance. You still end up with 8’ ceilings (or probably rather more) throughout.

Over the years, I’ve watched a number of retail chains and malls die, sometimes suddenly and sometimes slowly. It’s continuously seemed like a huge waste to me, when conversion to residential space would be relatively easy, relatively affordable, could be funded by local gov or nonprofit, and would make a significant difference in net housing costs in a given area.

When ‘traditional’ residential developers are competing with that, and with the ability to slap down standard-sized (AKA easy) risers/walls/etc. within commercial spaces of defined sizes, a further reduction in local housing costs is likely.

I walked away from reddit after Alien Blue had to get pulled, and haven’t looked back.

There are a few niche areas Lemmy hasn’t had a chance to build a community yet - AskHistorians comes to mind - that I miss, but time will hopefully solve that.

Woah, that’s absolutely insane. Subway has always struck me as a little pricey for what they offer, but they’re also dead consistent which counts for something.

JJs, no way I’d spent $26 for a sandwich of any size.

At those prices (or McDonald’s prices these days, TBH), I’d just as soon sit down and also tip for basically the same amount of money with better quality food.

Self-checkout tipping has never made sense to me. I haven’t done the deep dive research, but I suspect that since the tips are not directed at an employee, it’s an easy way for the business itself to get tips w/o being in violation of tip theft laws. No intended employee recipient == free-for-all and business can grab the cash.

More that they’ve had a number of food safety issues over the years, and seem not to have taken any definitive steps to resolve that - as opposed to e.g., JJ’s who got rid of the sprouts, since they were entirely unable to be cooked/sanitized/etc.

Yep. I spend more time delivering the local place than eating it, but even the significant local population of college students largely seems to avoid Chipotle when they order in.