I found this very wholesome, it’s sound advice that everyone kind of knows (work out, eat well, sleep etc) but a nice reminder to get up from my desk and take a walk sometimes.
I get unemployment being high for office-based jobs right now, companies think they can slap AI onto everything and get rid of employees, but what’s the reason for min wage jobs? Are they suddenly overflowing with applicants?
I believe the changes have more to do with US tax laws which have made it harder for companies to write off R&D. Companies might say it’s due to AI to put an investor-friendly spin on it.
I’m biased and it worries me that the above is also what I’d like to believe, rather it being than a permanent tightening of the screws on SWEs. We could test the hypothesis to see if the same trends happened in other countries (like Canada) who didn’t change their tax policies.
It doesn't make it harder to "write off R&D"; it stops bullshit accounting practices by tech firms and forces them to capitalise and depreciate rather than expense stuff that is obviously capital in nature (unless you think code is ephemeral and needs to be rewritten daily).
The problem is code is a lot more context sensitive than most capital expenditures. If I pay for a machine that makes really good chalk, then when my company eventually folds that machine is still probably worth a fair amount to my competitors. In contrast, the code I wrote today which probably is going to save my company ~200 man/hours a year is almost certainly completely and utterly worthless to literally anyone else, because it automates a hyperspecific piece of a company-specific workflow.
Min wage jobs are in the service industry which will take a hit from people pulling back on discretionary spending. Is it one of those "because people think there might be a recession, they manifest one" things?
Seems like it isn't. The last few years have been really good for the bottom of the income/wealth distribution.
Tbh with the federal deficit at 6-7% of GDP I think it'll be somewhat hard to produce a recession. Eventually companies will figure out the shoe isn't going to drop and start hiring again.
this is so disturbing. beyond not installing one of these in the first place, is there anything we can do to stop companies from going down the dystopian route?
Spread FUD. I'm being serious. There's a subset of the population that avoids computer, Internet, or app usage due to data breaches and privacy violations. If this snowball of people mistrusting tech gets big enough companies will adapt by proudly labeling their products "No AI" like how food is labeled "non-GMO" or "gluten free."
Tough to handle though!8-)) It gets all over the place: stains skin, clothes, most everything else unless you handle it as if you were in a laboratory.
Never thought about it before but handling MB in a chem lab might be a very good way to show beginning students how difficult it is to do good lab work and how easily traces of material (and organisms) may pass from one place to another (contact).
this is the first time I’m hearing taurine had been linked in any way to aging (while also finding out that’s no longer supported by evidence). all I knew was that it’s something energy drinks have. but I’m curious, did this take off as a popular supplement?
a lot of basic research is very risky and most of the time it’s not stuff that leads to immediate development of a new drug. it’s basically acquiring knowledge with the hope that some of it might turn out to be practically useful in the future, but in the short term, it just allows us to understand stuff. but it’s not directly profitable, so private companies aren’t motivated to invest so much money in that
this sounds like it's a really bad idea for the government to fund. What's to stop someone who happens to have made it in the ivory tower go crazy, spin up some kooky ideas that are highly risky and just blow taxpayer money on something not really accountable?
Most research is funded through grants. Many different federal agencies provide grants, as well as private organizations. When applying for a grant, you have to indicate what you're going to spend the money on. And your grant may be rejected if the organization funding the grant thinks you're not going to spend the money well. And if you can't find someone to give you a grant, you probably can't do the research, even if you have tenure.
There are problems with this system. Researchers often have to spend a lot of time writing grant applications, and grants can be rejected for any number of bad reasons. And there are cases where research was funded that probably shouldn't have been funded. But research funding isn't given willy-nilly to whoever asks, and taxpayers wasting money on kooky ideas isn't a particularly big problem.
I understand your reasoning, but our efforts to prevent this is part of why professors spend so much time writing grants and filling out other paperwork these days. It’s better in my opinion to just accept reasonable risk.
I would add that weird ideas can be surprisingly useful; nobody expected research on gila monsters to lead to our most successful weight loss treatment to date.
the fucking gila monster story is pure revisionist history. back in the late aughts after the human genome got sequenced and qpcr started picking up it was pretty obvious from islet alpha cell proteomics that glucagon would be an interesting drug target.
researchers don’t receive unlimited funding for life, even if they made it into a permanent position. they have to regularly apply for grants, and those applications are reviewed by experts and have to be grounded properly in previous work. it’s just that potential for profit is not a criterion for evaluation, as it is in the private sector
That's why when you apply for grants, they are reviewed by the panels of experts and then you have to report the results/progress. Nobody will just give you money for something crazy.
Who should judge scientific quality, if not individuals familiar with the methods used to generate the results? We are living the counterfactual right now, where political opportunists with axes to grind have replaced the pattern matchers you describe.
nobody is saying this is not the least worst way to fund science in general. the point is that use of taxpayer money demands a higher level of accountability that this method cannot satisfy.
And yet the grant writing process continues, as the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good. I'm glad someone at the DoD thought that ARPANET was a good idea to research so that 60 years later we can argue online about whether the govt is just giving out tax payer money to whoever for any reason.
what a tired old argument. you dont know what would have happened if DARPA did not fund ARPANET. we might have had something better. we don't live with access to reasonable counterfactuals.
Au contraire, this is a tired armchair reasoning argument.
We don't know what could've happened, but we do know what did happen. It's like those people that say that the New Deal was bad, actually, and if we did nothing that would be the same or better!
Right... but no. Because the New Deal did pull us out of the depression. It's one of the most potent and effective pieces of policy in American History. We can play armchair economist all day. But we have to face what we know worked and think about why it worked.
it's so surreal to me how this is happening under our eyes and nobody's stopping it. the impact this will have on our health is so staggering. and what's worse, even if these cuts were reversed tomorrow, it would still take quite some time to reverse the negative effects
There will be follow-on effects, too. Like "wellness" ending up on the same tier as "medicine". Without the research, who's to say? This will also compound the Qanon fascination with "medical freedom", where the patient gets to dictate to the doctor what to do (i.e. use ivermectin against COVID, or whatever other superstition rises to the top of the Qanon imagination cauldron).
yep. I don't wanna be in the shoes of the doctors who'll have to deal with this. although I suspect a part of them will resign, leading to even more "fun" downstream effects
> This will also compound the Qanon fascination with "medical freedom", where the patient gets to dictate to the doctor what to do (i.e. use ivermectin against COVID, or whatever other superstition rises to the top of the Qanon imagination cauldron).
That's very double-edged.
The open question is should humans have the right to take substances individually?
Sure, you get Ivermectin/covid deniers. But you also get homemade Solvaldi (cure for Hepatitis C). I can make it for $300 for the 12 week course, and it retail costs $84000
Of course, even making and taking this drug you manufacture is illegal, even aside patent bullshit.
But why shouldn't I be able to treat myself? Why do we accept really shitty gatekeepers (medical establishment, doctors) gatekeep treatments and cures from us?
And more currently, now that der fuhrer quit the emergency use allocation for Covid shots, now you need a doctors scrip for 'allowing to get a vaccine'. I should be able to get this if I pay for it. But nope, now need to pay for needless doctor payment and more barriers.
So at least in that side, I'm on Qanon's view that I should be able to personally treat myself with whatever substance I deem. Of course, I'll definitely heed a doctor's suggestion as an expert. But fuck.. My body, my choice.
>I can make it for $300 for the 12 week course, and it retail costs $84000
A problem that only exist in USA, you could follow literally any other country and you wouldn't get the same problem, and no other country avoided that issue but letting dumb people take dumb things that they heard in the internet
> Of course, even making and taking this drug you manufacture is illegal
This is not true.
In the United States GENERALLY SPEAKING you can manufacture any substance that is not on the list of controlled substances on the CSA Schedule.
You cannot sell it or administer it to others.
Also IN GENERAL you can consume any substance that is not illegal to possess or manufacture.
In the non-pharmaceutical realm there are a few additional restrictions, like ethanol (which you can manufacture for industrial use but not human consumption) and various nuclear, biological, and chemical munition components. (Don't know how many people are ingesting those)
If you have the ability, you can manufacture your own sofosbuvir and ingest it.
Consider this analogy: you should be allowed to put a gun to your own head and pull the trigger. You should not be allowed to put on a suicide vest and blow yourself up in a group of people.
To the first, yes, I do believe that we humans SHOULD have a right to commit suicide. It should be a right to end your own life.
We have a 'right' drink a handle of whiskey a day, up to the point we get liver disease. Same with smoking 3 packs a day of cigarettes. Same with horrendous diet. But those ways of killing yourself are "acceptable" and also legal. But they're slower.
The second, you're harming other people. That example is blatantly ridiculous, and appears just to gain an emotional response by invoking terrorism.
> "you're harming other people", yes as in the case where you are contagious.
Have you watched a movie lately? Talk about contagious violence. I can tell you this, your fate is just a blip on the back side of other people's large screen TV where the movies are shown.
I go further and say that you should be able to buy any drug from the pharmacy without a prescription*. As well as testing kits. Having to have an ongoing relationship with a doctor just to refill your medication or get antibiotics when you get strep is a huge waste of everyone's time and money. And there are countries where you can already do this and they haven't collapsed. It makes the job of pharmacist actually matter as someone other than a pill counter.
It ends so many stupid discussions we have in the US. Can this medication be prescribed for an off-label use? Who cares because you can just buy it. Do you meet some arbitrary federal weight guideline for Ozempic? Who cares you can just buy it.
* every rule has exceptions, don't get bogged down with them.
Two words that explain why it hurts everyone else when you can go buy antibiotics whenever you want (you think you have strep):
Antibiotic Resistance.
Longer explanation: how do you know exactly which bacteria you’re infected with, and which antibiotics will work well against them, and which ones they’ll throw a middle finger at? Even if you have the exact same symptoms as the last time, how do you know that taking the same antibiotic will work just as well, and won’t just further select for bacteria it has no effect on?
My apologies, I'm using strep in the layman's terms meaning any bacterial sinusitis.
This is great and all but it ignores that getting an antibiotic prescription is not difficult at all. I literally just get in a video call, describe the symptoms of strep, and they write me a prescription. It's less expensive to treat than to test. In 15 years I've never had a doctor actually test me for what bacteria I actually have. They sometimes do the bare minimum of looking at it to be pretty confident it's bacterial but that's about it.
However stupid you think the general populace is, doctors count themselves among their numbers. Your average urgent care or primary care doc is just going to give the same broad spectrum antibiotics without any real thought. Except for the one bona-fide MD who looked at my very obvious case of strep, knowing from my chart that I have chronic bacterial sinusitis, and me telling them as much, looking at my puss filled tonsils and concluding that it's allergies and that I should take Claritin. Never go to urgent care man.
I believe all recreational drugs should either be legal or else available by prescription with the explicit statement in the law that addiction management is a valid reason for a prescription. None of the controlled substances hoops. And I think *renewing* maintenance meds should be within the realm of the pharmacist.
But I think all agents for which resistance is a factor should be doctor only.
If use of a drug had no, or very little externalities, id agree. Overuse of antibiotics creates resistant bacteria, endangering everyone. I am forced to disagree civilly, sir.
A large portion of antibiotic resistance comes from patients taking a partial prescription, feeling better, and discontinuing the rest of the pills.
In that situation (the only one at this time), is the majority of resistances are made.
Controlling the supply, especially if you know you have a bacterial disease, can be solved readily.
In fact, on a camping trip, I was bit by 15 ticks. Was bad. When I got back to civilization, I started getting spots all over my body. Surprise, it was rocky mountain spotted fever. But if I could determine the 2 drugs for curing spotted fever and Lyme, I absolutely would have did both. But the shitty gatekeeper (doctor) wouldn't do Lyme course. Again, logically made a lot of sense, especially that Lyme tests are 60% accurate. And, 15 ticks.
You're not really saying that the populous would finish more courses of over-the-counter antibiotics, are you? Prescriptionless antibiotics would almost axiomatically make that worse.
So then what's the fear? If they take antibiotics for a bacterial infection and don't finish it's same as the current state of the world. If they take antibiotics for a viral infection and don't finish them then no harm no foul if you believe the theory that this is how resistance occurs.
Hard to create a strain of antibiotic resistant bacteria when you didn't have any in your system to begin with. Turns out you can't #gatekeep #girlboss your way out of this and have to educate your way out regardless if antibiotics are behind-the-counter non-prescription or not.
What happens when your benign dictator (FDA), turns not so benign?
Like, covid shots. Now you need to beg a doctor to get them. Hope you pass their gatekeeping test.
Or now women are being arrested and charged with murder for miscarriages and missing periods.
And there's another round of "get rid of ACA, which includes banning non-coverage of preexisting conditions. Treating yourself is a strong protection of not being covered.
RFK is going through medical records across the country for anybody with autism, ADD, and ADHD. What and how are these lists being used for? (I know how the German nazies used them...)
We as a society spent the last 3-4 years kneecapping public health laws and authorities. There have been numerous state level rollbacks of authority, did that public health officials don't have the authority to impose mask mandates, or advise social distancing.
The Project 2025 document makes a lot of accusations about this or that department being politicized and left-aligned. But that's not exactly a good standard to go by.
Science in the US became political in like the 50s, when Vannevar Bush decided we should spend federal funds on advancing research since it was so fruitful during WW2, and things like peer review, which did not exist as a formal process in most research, could improve dissemination and the scientific process.
It also became political when we were trying to introduce evolution, a well understood and supported scientific discovery, into science curriculums, and that made religious people extremely angry
It also became political in like 2000 when Bush jr. banned stem cell research because it made religious people mad.
It also became political in like 1980 when Exxon understood unequivocally that they were directly causing the destruction of the Earth's climate and that they could probably just spend money on PR campaigns to make it a culture war issue so they wouldn't have to fix it.
It also became political when geology proved the earth was more than 6000 years old.
It also became political when Eugenics. This also made religious people angry when scientific racism was demonstrably wrong.
It also became political when scientists knew there was a clear connection between cigarettes and lung cancer but it took like thirty years to produce the kind of scientific studies that were required to convince the general public because of immense counter-narrative campaigns by cigarette companies that insisted that cigarettes were healthy.
They also became political when the Christian Scientists parlayed their insane cult beliefs into laws to allow them to send their unvaccinated kids to school at everyone else's expense.
It also became political in the 90s when the sugar industry funded an immense anti-narrative campaign to trick the majority of the US into believing that fat was more harmful than other forms of the same amount of calories.
It is currently political to understand even basic highschool biology like "mRNA won't change your DNA"
It was political when a Utah politician and two chemists tried to turn the result of a single extremely poorly run fusion experiment that no physicist was able to replicate and had clear methodological problems (and math problems) that any physicist would have wanted to fix into federal funding to the tune of $25 million after claiming in the Press Release that the intial experiment was funded with $100k of their own money and they wanted maybe a couple million to scale up and confirm their results.
It was political when Nazis burned an institute setup to research gender and sexuality.
Knowledge has always been political to people who confuse their ignorant beliefs for reality, and rely on public ignorance for their support. You should notice that these events were not politicized by scientists.
If I talked to the board of directors of my employer this way do you think I would remain employed? Why do you think public research institutions would or even should be able to attack the majority population of the country and not suffer the same fate?
I don't think you'll be able to manage the combination of self reflection and empathy required to understand this. Most people on your side are behaving in a similar way. It's why this stuff is going away and very unlikely to come back.
to be completely fair, journals of negative results have popped up in some fields, but I've never really heard anyone mentioning any paper published in such a journal
same. there's something about it that I can't put my finger on, but that makes it so lifeless and gives me the impression I'm looking at the same boring image over and over and over again
