So we CAN afford these drugs to begin with, because employer sponsored health plans with minimal coverage cost around $14000 and have $6500++ copays (I don’t remember today’s limits for copays, but you have to pay those copays out of pocket before an insurance company covers drugs typically.) The actual drugs cost pennies to make but sell for hundreds to thousands to hundreds of thousands. The prices that are listed for these drugs at retail are not actually what the insurance pays for these drugs, we’re never going to see those figures, but they’re aligned to maximize profits from the industry. Pharmacy benefit managers also collude by using a third party service to recommend pricing.

I’m too lazy to find good sources of material, but revenue in the US for pfizer is more in the US than the rest of the world combined. https://www.statista.com/statistics/267877/revenues-of-pfizer-in-submarkets-worldwide/ (I was able to view this without a subscription.)

Last year they had about ~63600 million in revenue. ~38691 million last year was in the US alone.

~16057 for “developed markets” aka europe and wealthy nations ~8879 for “developing nations” e.g. africa, latin america, poor asian countries.

So 38 billion in the us vs 63.6 billion total revenue.

If you have to choose between keeping US revenue or keeping non-us global revenue, you’re gonna choose the US. It’s not even close.

I’m guessing they can license their drug to some other business to sell internationally and get out of first party sales, but it’s possible they may have a legal mechanism to skirt this already since it’s typical for the US business to be a separate company than the holding company, and all the international businesses are separate companies under said holding company, it’s hard to say. I don’t have any inside information for today’s strategy.

Just to tack onto this… it’s possible that we will see different branded drugs, and perhaps even slightly modified drugs to contain effectively a placebo to go through clinical trials concurrently with the primary drug. From there they just release one drug in the US and the other drug exclusively everywhere else.

That’s just one creative way to keep prices exorbitantly high. They can also target medical devices aka the delivery mechanism (think pre-packaged syringes) to try and keep profits high. Just release a US only delivery mechanism and suddenly it’s different than the rest of the world. I’ve worked at companies that slightly altered the injector of their drugs to keep their monopoly going, as doctors preferred the improved injector that had no generic due to being in copyright, even after the drug patent expired.

The pharma lobby is so wealthy and powerful though I sincerely doubt even dumpy can fight them. There’s a reason why biden started with just a handful of drugs, it built a foundation to slowly drain their profits while their current patents run out and they adapt to the new dynamic.

There’s also all those health insurance companies that legally can only profit a % of overall revenue that will face severe profit cuts if treatment costs actually dive, drugs are a key component to building a sizable margin today.___

The gravy train of giant margin drugs is coming to an end.

Medicaid is gonna get gutted and drugs won’t be very profitable in the US overall. I suspect the pharma answer to this may be suspending sales in all other nations so long as the US patents are live, the profits here are so above and beyond all other places in the world that there’s little reason to focus on global markets if the restriction is lowest common denominator pricing in the US.

I worked in pharma for a while at a level that interacted with C level executives and the executive leadership of said companies. I’ve seen where the money is and seen internal numbers. US oncology sales are almost all profits.

The battle of being politcally correct vs appealing to more voters.

I voted kamala but I thought her campaign and policies were total shit. I want a bernie or aoc, but the ones who run on empathy and understanding are going to lose in this nation, for now.

Republicans will make sure the democrats never have a successful platform. They will do absolutely everything in their power to make sure anything positive is never passed unless their name is on it as the driver. If anything maybe we should all just join the republican party and vote for a liberal candidate in their primaries. If just half of the democrat voters did this we’d win their primaries and win the election by default.

AdNauseum here. Might as well poison their ad revenue while we’re at it.

I use some wahl clippers for beard trimming. I have so much hair on my face I still need to shave places to not be a scraggly ogre.

Wahl peanut is great for this, but practically anything nowadays works.

Outcomes matter. Splitting hairs about how someone drafts an email is infantile.

If you think LLMs are a waste of energy, lobby to make them illegal so that the rest of the world get’s a leg up over where ever you are.

Backfiring cars are not so common today, especially in affluent neighborhoods.

If you make it sound as close to a gunshot as you can, which isn’t hard because it’s easy to mix up the two if you’re from an affluent area that isn’t full of gun nuts, their imagination does the rest.

They probably don’t make much money on the “razor” sale, the consumables though are almost all profit. It costs me a dime per blade for my safety razor which performs better anyway and can’t really ever break, plus it’s solid metal so easily recycled some day not that it would ever die in normal use cases.

I use a safety razor. My blades are a dime a piece. The thing will last longer than I will, for sure.

Being able to unscrew the blade to get all the bits of hair out with a quick rinse is way better than any of those multi-blade monstrosities.

I bought it on pre-release on steam and refunded it right before go live.

Love how try before you buy works now. Charge me for early access to play a couple days early? Well shucks… guess I get a free trial period.

By the end of the weekend I was disillusioned. No meaningful exploration in a space game is insane.

it’s 90 days. Nothing is permanent, guaranteed or stable.

Everything he does is 90 days, 4 years or some other thing that can easily be reversed by an individual later.

I can’t see how a starter gun is going to cause a panic leading to crushing/trampling of masses, or anything remotely close to those kinds of consequences.

During daytime hours it’s usually pretty legal to make all kinds of sounds.

If someone wants to nitpick the “gun” here, just rig an internal combustion engine that backfires as loud as a gun, or literally put in a speaker / horn that can produce the same sound.

There’s ways around all the little “but what about” in this scenario.

As long as they don’t lose money on their subscription products (like razor blades) they are glad to make sure your device requiring subscription supplies is functioning and you’re invested in more regular purchases of consumables.

Now, it seems like your point of view is that all the knowledge and experience of a university education is useless anyway.

I think standardized testing is not a good way to measure if someone has achieved the learning objective of a lesson. I’m hardly the only one to think this way. It’s great for testing how good someone is at rote memorization of facts for a single test for topics that are never brought up again so immediately forgotten. If you do it in person with pens and paper the kiddos can just read their neighbors shit, or sneak in a cheat sheet. Did this not happen in every single class you’ve ever taken from K-12 and then 4 years in a uni? Did for me!!! I promise. I never needed to cheat, but there was always someone within eyeshot doing it. I’m not a snitch.

why the fuck arent you filthy rich yet?

Lack of motivation, lack of a million dollar loan from mommy and daddy. You can’t teach motivation really. My upbringing was free room and board until I was 18.

Tell me when you make your first million

Already there man… 300k in 401ks, 350k in non-retirement fund investments, 500k townhouse with 50k mortgage left on it as a rental. 600k condo too.

What would you do if on the way down somebody got the codes to the nukes and happened to hit the big red button?

I mean it’s a dumb question, because the world would be over. We’d all die.

Failing the immediate catastrophe… you never know how many might go missing, or where they would turn up again or exactly how they would be used. Someone could load a few on a boat and build something that is usable without codes. People have been worrying about dirty bombs for so long.

It’s easy to hate others. It’s easy to point the finger. A minority of people benefit from the policies that are used to hurt others. A majority of people are hurt by hatred just like yours. If you’re not better than them, you’re the same or just worse.

I will say a great amount of highly educated liberal people are in coastal cities of the US that would find attacking whatever nation you find yourself in abhorrent, but i’m sure you’d love to get your hands on them for whatever perceived grudge you have against people who have had no say, have taken no negative action towards you or frankly anybody. Hate is what immature, small men use because they can’t figure their way out of the problem they have.

Wishing harm on others is abhorrent behavior. The downfall of any nation causes so much harm and grief to countless innocent humans well beyond the borders of one nation.

Saying “no eligible for rehire” is enough to poison your reference.

HR departments are routinely told not to disclose that information by legal because it can result in a defamation lawsuit.

it’s not illegal for a prospective employer to ask the employee or formal employer that question, sure. A former employer would be putting their neck on the line though, because anybody can call your employment verification line. Very, very often employment verification is outsourced to eliminate any possibility of this liability.

If the policy is to never provide that information and you never provide it, you never have to go to court to prove that they are not re-hirable for a legitimate reason as a defendant in a defamation lawsuit. Background checks are typically not performed until an offer is on the table with a contingency for the former. Again, in massachusetts, the outcome of a background check must be legally provided to the one under scrutiny. If the thing that doesn’t check out is that employer’s statements, the evidence is right there. Lawyers drool over this shit.

Lol, english classes have always been the biggest joke of college for me. All you do is write an outline, pull some bullshit quotes to back up your argument from the source to satisfy MLA, and write enough to satisfy the word requirement. It’s all bullshit. it’s all opinion. Easy A for me, except when i’m forced to write by hand.

If you really want to make people learn how to write professionally without computer assistance like spellcheck or LLMs, give them a fucking typewriter. It’s how I learned to type as a kid in the 90s. At least the typing skill is transferable and you get a great understanding of why applications like Word function the way they function.

I would argue that in person exams with no resources to do research goes against how the world works for most white collar workers.

Few are unable to research on the internet to verify information, or at least look at say a man page for coding or look up past stuff on stackoverflow, if they are working through a problem.

Standardized testing is just not as useful as-is. I do great at it and can typically pass exams without really studying the material, but others are not so lucky.

I’ve met people who can flunk exams but talk about the problems, go into how they would fix it, and work through a problem to implementation and testing in the real world.

Oh, and LLMs are the new typewriter, for better or worse. It’s unlikely we are going to have a future where they are not readily available. We already have models that run locally and do not transmit data anywhere, and AI customized to your own data that is not shared is already a service provided by Microsoft.

Education needs to evolve with technology. It’s always been 5-10 years behind the curve.

Maybe we should be using LLMs to proctor tests and generate interactive testing. Grading can be verified by a professor reading a transcript to verify hallucinations didn’t occur or influence the results. We can even have LLMs monitor the working process of people to help determine what are the most efficient ways to work custom tailored to individuals. This is just one idea of many potential options.