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.
The studies of marketing spending are usually just as disingenuous, reporting the "Selling, general and administrative" line item from annual reports as the amount spent on marketing. But that line item includes things like salaries and office space and such, things that the company has to do to sell products which are not advertising.
Marketing spending is huge, but it undermines their message when they do that.
That seems pretty obviously correct. If you spend less on marketing then you, of course, also hire fewer marketers, leading to lower salaries and less required office space.
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.
And if you ask how, the answer is: analog. Every transition was driven by the analog circuits, the phosphor response was analog. Analog all around, but especially to form the pixels one after another: all the transitions, response curves, persitences, dispersions working their own magic.
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.
Yep. And importantly, SSL is securing more than just the password - if you just salt + hash client side, then anyone watching gets to do a replay on that value instead of the original.
> 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.
I believe the term is "communities of choice". In a small community there is only one community and everyone has to be in it, for good or ill. In a city you can make a much better community suited to you - but it requires active effort to maintain that link, so it's much easier to fall off and become invisibly alone.
I agree - except that 'communities of choice' are far more fleeting than otherwise. In 'communities of choice' - nobody cares about old people, for example.
'Communities of choice' work when you're young OR when you're part of a specific ethnic group (say Somalis in Philly or whatever) - which is in many ways like a 'small town' within a city.
Anyone of any ethnicity could have showed up, it would have made no difference. Small town people have less exposure to other cultures, and might have some prejudices, but the prejudices are not hateful, they're more rooted in lack of exposure.
Trans or Queer - that would have been different. You can be gay in the country, but you can't flaunt it. If you were to have introduced 'your boyfriend' that would have made people feel uncomfortable. Trans - well - you'd be treated fine, but like someone with a disability type thing. People would not accept it as your identity, but just consider it weird.
Here's the big thing: When you know people you treat them totally different than what your prejudices might incline you towards. I didn't say 'small town people' were more tolerant in the classical sense - in fact I said 'city people' were more tolerant. BUT - and here's the differentiator: if you're gay - remember that everyone has known you since you were a kid. So it's the difference between someone being 'uncomfortable with gays' to 'my brother/cousin/family friend' is gay. Which is a completely different social context.
"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."
I've lived in San Franciso - in the heart of the Castro - with gay people - and I know the micro-communities well enough. Yes - any grouping of marginalized people tends to be a little closer, and I do agree that there is 'community' in the Castro for example.
BUT - this is definitely not the norm in cities or burbs.
AND - it's not the same. Nobody will care about you when you are old, young kids will not know your name, the young gay kids will laugh at the older gay dudes to their faces and be pretty harsh etc. (although, I think this is a special feature of that community).
When my (small town) Grandfather passed away - his wake was 3 days long. 3 days of people streaming by his casket. He owned a hardware store and was a 'good community member'. He wasn't anyone really special. But you spend 94 years in one place and you literally know thousands of people - most of whom would 'pay their respects' by coming to the wake. The whole community mourned.
If you've ever seen how the Danes have their old age homes, their much smaller, familial and local, they are still in a way, a part of the community. I think that the North/West European countries have a huge social advantage on North Americans when it comes to community culture.
Finally - and more controversially: most European and Asian nations are ethnic groups - so people are surrounded by 'like people' in terms of ethnicity. A lot of culture boils down to ethnicity. When people are surrounded by other people within their ethnic group - there is no 'hatred' for others, it's just that they feel more affinity for 'their own'. If you're from a small town - it's not something you ever really think about. It's just normal. 'Multiculturalism' challenges all sorts of norms and wipes out the things that differentiate us. The burb I grew up in was the most multicultural place in the world: Mississauga, Ontario (burb of Toronto). People were friendly, we got along very well, but ironically - a complete absence of culture. We have a word for it 'living room culture' because outside the home there's nothing. In the city I live in now, almost all the local cab drivers are from Haiti. They feel alienated and often want to go home when they have enough money even though it's much less advanced. Why? Because 'it's home'. I am sympathetic to them, and not upset with them because they 'don't like my culture'. They want to 'be among their people'. Who can blame them? Again - that's another issue or urban cultural dissonance that is too uncomfortable for most people to talk about in North America, so the discussion never happens :)
PowerShell was originally designed so that you would mostly just run CmdLets with it so colliding with an actual program wasn't considered an issue. And these aliases haven been available since 2007.
They even admitted it them self that it was stupid and needs to be fixed though so just wait I guess?
edit: As a separate note I really would like to have versions of curl and wget that actually have all the params working but return the correct PowerShell objects (so the web request result thingie) instead of a String object. Or maybe have it do that with a flag or something.
I get the feeling there are a lot of commands that are going to need to be customized for actual typed output. It would be an interesting project to do a usr-bin for PowerShell.
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.
And then that project half dies because of replacement XY which is sooo much better /s. Now you are stuck on a legacy platform, and if you have great sales people who included this system in the contract worth $10M+ and no replacement exists, you cant get rid off it. So someone has to manage the legacy platform, where all docs where lost and no one has the domain knowledge as everyone has left. Now guess what happens when the company finds out you setup the servers, "Hey, you setup these servers, so you are now responsible for the platform, congratulations!"....
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...