There most certainly is, this entire blog post illustrates a second order problem with ads!
It's also another example of advertisers compromising ad-supported media. Free without ads, or subscription without ads, every other media gets compromised.
If, as is seems inevitable, Section 230 goes away, blogging might make a comeback. Once platforms are held responsible for user content, the platforms will rigorously enforce standards. Anybody with ideas that aren't standard will have to go elsewhere, and that will be a blog without a comment section.
That's a good question, one I thought of, but have put off grappling with.
Based on what LLMs have given me for answers so far, I'd look harder for the human-written source of the nroff code. I have written what I believe to be the only quine in the GPP macro processing language, LLMs only refer me to my code if I ask for a GPP quine. Google, Meta, OpenAI really have strip mined the entire web.
If I genuinely thought anything creative or new appeared, I'd probably be at a loss as well.
It should be possible. nroff macro language has looping, string interpolation, functions and if/then/else. That macro language should be turing complete. People have written file-infecting virus malware with it, I believe, which indicate that a quine should be possible. I personally have made several attempts at an nroff quine over the years with no success.
If it's not possible, I'd love to see an explanation, so that task can quite weighing on me.
But of a paywall there, can't tell if raw materials and precursors are costing more, or R&D spend is up, or employee wages and salaries have risen. Those are usually the "pressures" on prices. I can't understand what or who might be applying "pressure" to lower prices on oligopolistic pharmaceutical makers.
big Pharma has properties unlike many other business. The R&D is very, very expensive and, income is not directly related to expenses each year. The natural "moat" is such that only a relatively few, giant and wealthy, companies exist over time.
Why does the US consumer of said medications subsidize many other countries who have access to the same medications for a fraction of the US sticker price?
Lots of reasons. One of them is that other countries negotiate deals country wide and can get bulk discounts. The US does this with the VA and Medicare, and people using those services generally pay less than the rest of Americans. In the end, it is largely a policy choice, as having a single payer could get better negotiated deals on drugs.
Thanks for adding this information and yes this is exactly the point I was trying to make. Nationalized systems have better outcomes when they control the supply, demand, and pricing. If that doesn’t work manufacture it ourselves at a discount.
Bah! Begone with your socialist mumbo jumbo! Fox News Entertainent channel tells me about you communist and your “single payer” sham all the time! We have the best healthcare! Merica!
Do you believe that the deals they make are unprofitable given the discount? Do you think the other countries are keeping guns to their heads or what?
The discounts are there because they can be, not because other countries want to pay below the break-even price.
It is in the US where the drug companies can invest in the government just enough to recoup that with massive premiums in the convoluted medical system.
Nobody's forcing US pharama companies to sell to those countries at those prices, they choose to, because it makes them more money.
Foreigners aren't the reason American healthcare sucks. Stop looking for people to blame abroad, all the sources of your problems are in the presidency, congress, and in the boardroom that directs the former.
This is not like IT where the Americans are completely dominant and clearly superior.
The European pharma companies are doing more than fine, despite their main market being heavily regulated and price-controlled.
The less charitable explanation is that US companies want to charge outrageous prices, and the American system let them to, so they do it.
That's what the USA are: a machine to prioritize profits over people. Sometimes it turns out fine, like for the startup scene. Sometimes it's terrible, like when lives at stake.
There are a lot of bad health outcomes built into our society, yes, but by the time people are confronted with the health impacts of cars, agriculture subsidies, for-profit healthcare, etc. it is likely that drugs will be necessary to treat the very real, immediate problems which any given patient has. Reversing the subsidies for things like car-dependency would positively benefit millions of people but it’s a generational change, not something most individuals can do.
I agree about the significance of those large-scale changes; still ...
> Reversing the subsidies for things like car-dependency would positively benefit millions of people but it’s a generational change, not something most individuals can do.
Individuals frequently can chose to not use a car, of course. Still, it's not realistic for everyone or all the time, especially in a society built for automobile use.
> by the time people are confronted with the health impacts of cars, agriculture subsidies, for-profit healthcare, etc. it is likely that drugs will be necessary
My point is that there are other treatments for illness. I doubt it's a coincidence that this patentable technology is so relied on in a hyper-capitalist society; other countries with better health outcomes use far fewer pills, iirc. Who will fund the large-scale study that says a valuable pill is unnecessary?
> Individuals frequently can chose to not use a car, of course
To some extent, yes, but my point was that it’s not realistic for many people because we treat walkable neighborhoods like luxuries. If you wake up in your 40s with a bad back and cardio problems because you live in a suburb and drive everywhere, you can’t roll back the clock and build sidewalks, legalize density, or run decent transit and on average don’t have the money to move somewhere dramatically better.
I think a growing number of people, especially younger ones, realize this is unsustainable but it took generations to get here and it’ll take a while to change trajectories, too. If gas prices had stayed high in the seventies that might have gone differently but a huge percentage of American neighborhoods are designed to minimize physical activity and that’s often enforced by law.
That's what I meant by, it's not realistic for everyone and everywhere.
> I think a growing number of people, especially younger ones, realize this is unsustainable but it took generations to get here and it’ll take a while to change trajectories, too.
Urbanist movements, including walkable communities, are much older than this younger generation. I think within a certain segment - well-educated upper middle class, maybe - it's long had influence.
I think they need to bring those ideas to other segments of society, which they have a hard time doing.
I definitely don’t think that it’s new to the current young generation but I am optimistic that they might have enough political clout to actually make progress. My neighborhood narrowly avoided becoming a highway in the 60s so we have some older folks who have been fighting car culture since before I was born, but there were a lot of people who didn’t really care because it was more affordable in the past, but their kids are a lot more motivated because it’s so financially non-viable now.
In the United States, the other big factor was recognizing how much it wasn’t just car culture but racism driving things. Despite the current moment, I get the impression that a lot of people are more aware of how much avoiding sidewalks and transit was driven by racism and just hurt everyone.
>Maybe drugs, or these drugs, aren't the most efficient solutions. Shouldn't we direct resources toward more efficient ones?
Turns out all the low hanging fruit have already been picked, so the only "more efficient ones" left are stuff like gene therapy, which are absurdly expensive, but still theoretically cheaper than a lifetime of care. Unsurprisingly the high sticker price draws much backlash from the public and politicians.
> all the low hanging fruit have already been picked
What is that based on?
Also, I'm not talking about 'low hanging fruit' necessarily; only solutons that become cost effective for vendors if drug prices aren't so extreme.
There's reason to think there is low-hanging fruit: Research is incentivized for the most profitable solutions for the vendors, not the most cost-effective solutions for patients.
>Also, I'm not talking about 'low hanging fruit' necessarily; only solutons that become cost effective for vendors if drug prices aren't so extreme.
>There's reason to think there is low-hanging fruit: Research is incentivized for the most profitable solutions for the vendors, not the most cost-effective solutions for patients.
High drug prices also mean you can charge more for one-off cures. See, the gene therapy example above.
US voters have no principles. Even republicans started artistically screaming about nationalizing companies when they didn’t want to play ball with the president.
I'm assuming you're European and just want to make an "America bad" post because this is comically ignorant. There wouldn't be mountains of federal code to adhere to if that was the case.
This is a trope among populists: pass legislation around <thing>, observe consequences of doing so, blame the "free market", repeat.
Sure, but that article literally contradicts your original point about Americans wanting a "free market" as it lists the complicated nature of existing laws, Medicare, PBMs etc. and the incentives those create.
You could just say "Americans need to vote better and cleanup their laws around this" and yes, that would be ideal, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. It's part of why some want the government to not involve themselves at all: no matter how good the politicians you elect, others can come into office and fuck it all up while everyone is forced to deal with it because they have the monopoly on violence. Not to mention the glacial pace at which our legislative bodies move.
> US voters prefer the free market as opposed to government regulation and nationalized healthcare.
Because US voters are dumb. (Just for context, I'm a US citizen).
Free markets don't work when there is inelastic demand for a good or service, and an awful lot of health care (unless you consider 'well, guess I'll just die then' as a reasonable outcome) is inelastic demand.
Rueters doesn't show a paywall for me. The source of the pressure described is in the headline though. I'm not sure why OP editorialized it (as it is against hn guidelines): Exclusive: Drugmakers raise US prices on 350 medicines despite pressure from Trump.
The article is about drug pricing, which is the part I found interesting (and by extension thought we’d find interesting). I thought taking it out both saved space and made the comments less likely to veer into flamebait.
Thanks for filling that in. I, too, am interested in this topic, because the oligopolistic market in the US, and the multinational corporations in the oligopoly, cause unusual, counter-intuitive and counter-doctrinal economic results. We're not in a recession or depression, so I was curious about causes of downward pressure on prices.
There's a character limit on the titles you can submit, probably wasn't intentionally editorializing. I assumed from the HN title that the pressure was from the Trump admin just based on the current state of US politics.
I think its obvious: theres a LOT of love for Trump here in VC circles. So anything speaking ill of his laughable policies, EO's, and other garbage is -1'ed or flagged to oblivion.
Ironically the past 6 months now all the political content is just insta dead flagged and removed, the love isn't lost but nobody wants to be the one responsible for defending it.
I'm sure Trump pressure will soon bring those 1000% savings on pharmaceuticals, just hold on.
The usual suspects: spam, advertising, that guy who had an LLM hallucinate a holy book, $X with "AI", but additionally there are certain sites that I automatically flag posts of. I don't auto-downvote political or economic comments unless they're low effort slogan level.
I think I should also add that I suspect that voting rings exist for HN. The mod(s) do a decent job of eliminating them, but I think there's pro-MAGA and anti-vaxx voting rings that have slipped through the nets.
Why does a desire for a natural explanation for miracles exist? Sure a star of Bethlehem might have existed, or been some aspect of an obscure system of astrology in the eastern roman empire.
So what? You need another explanation for turning water into wine and other for why Lot's wife transformed into a pillar of salt, and another and another.
Is this a folklore form of zero knowledge proof or does each explanation quell just enough suspicion to keep the narrative from collapsing?
This is not a good opinion piece. The author is just repeating cliches, and not even in an interesting fashion. No research, no numbers, no analysis, just cliches.
There most certainly is, this entire blog post illustrates a second order problem with ads!
It's also another example of advertisers compromising ad-supported media. Free without ads, or subscription without ads, every other media gets compromised.
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