Sometimes you just want to make a phone call. Unfortunately the modern age of shiny shiny has made that prospect much less reliable than back when Ma Bell ruled things.
Sometimes you have to have someone minding the icky productive part of the process.
My Android phones last just fine. This is just another bit of bogus nonsense from the Apple cult.
The real question is how long these phones will be supported and what will happen to them once they are force upgraded to a new OS version. Will they still be useful then?
Apple is very much a mixed bag when it comes to product longevity in real live.
That's not how that works. If you aren't finishing the prescription then you are violating doctor's orders and potentially putting the kid's life in danger as well as helping create the possibility of a drug resistant strain of the infection in question.
There is a vanishingly small portion of patients for which "keep antibiotics on hand" is actually a thing.
The cruise ship example is just silly. They make mad money fleecing cruisers. They can spring for some new drugs every couple of years.
I would NEVER risk my life on an outdated Epipen. People that need these things for real carry their own around on their person all the time. This stuff is no joke.
You're gambling with your life.
This is WHY people carry their own Epipens. The article actually confirms why these people do what they do.
> So, basically, fuck that. Yes it takes a lot of cash to develop drugs and they need to make that money back, but it can be not as much as people are led to believe.
Like any business, the cost of success has to also cover the cost and risk of failure. That risk is considerable in the drug business. Just because the NIH finds a lead on something, it doesn't mean that will turn into a usable marketable drug.
Any industry has to bear the cost of being able to do business.
High risks also require high rewards or people just won't bother.
The "natural price" is probably lower than the current market prices but it's probably also much higher than what cheapskates would try to impose on the industry.
If you screw around with the current economic incentives you are potentially putting a lot of lives at risk. This is especially true for really expensive drugs for obscure conditions.
> Those rules were put in place because it's in Big Pharma's interest to make people re-buy their product
Really? Have you actually thought this through even. What would it take for your "evil Big Pharma" scenario to even occur. What kind of chronic patient do you have to even have an expensive 3 year old pill on hand? Why wouldn't you use them up by then? Why would you stockpile that stuff?
The far more likely scenario is that some consumer has an old bottle of something they bought over the counter and forgot about. It will be something that's dirt cheap. An entire bottle will be the price of one pill of the interesting stuff.
Even some of the older prescription meds are dirt cheap like that.
If you are maintaining some sort of stockpile on your own, you already have the real financial motive to test the stuff yourself. You probably also have the means.
That covers everything. This includes making sure your chicken and flour don't kill you. This budget is for a continent spanning nation of 300M people. It's comparable to budgets of all of the EU for the same thing.
Also, there are a LOT of drugs. That's a lot of testing. Nobody really cares if your Tylenol expires. Fixating on that cheap crap is a waste of time. You might also want to figure out what it is that causes shelf life to suffer. Doing that for a wide range of drugs will be expensive just in terms of raw labor. Forget about the pills themselves.
It's really a much bigger problem than you seem to realize. That's a pretty common problem here really.
You just contradicted yourself there. You seem only capable of repeating campaign slogans and know NOTHING of what you're actually talking about.
We already have a mini-NHS. It's called the VA and it's a disgrace. Medicare isn't that hot either. Medicaid is just horrible. If you've got something really interesting going on, you're SOL under Medicaid.
Your communist nonsense doesn't alter the fact that the US develops most of the new techniques, technologies, and drugs. When people want the best, the come to America. They don't go to some socialist utopia.
My _city_ (and probably yours) has more and better medical treatment facilities than the majority of socialist countries (big or small).
I really would rather that "good intentioned" morons like you destroy what we have and the world class treatment centers that are in your city and mine.
Some of us need more from the medical establishment than treatment for the occasional hang nail.
At least Medicare and Medicaid are proper forms of wealth distribution. They aren't something that look like corporate welfare where the government is telling us that we must (under threat of punishment) buy a particular type of product from a small set of corporations.
Wealth distribution funnelled through corporations is the ultimate form of corruption. It's truly sad that more people don't see this.
At least a new "Obamacare tax" would not have been blatantly unconstitutional.
Pre-existing conditions were already a solved problem. It was called high risk pools and it worked very well in various states. It caught people who fell through the cracks and didn't completely break the private insurance market.
That was only the worst case. States with good regulators never let people who developed a chronic condition get dropped from insurance to begin with. People who contributed their entire lives weren't left out in the cold.
Now the entire private market is effectively just the high risk pool from before with prices to match.
Depending on the drug, that extra 5% is relevant. For non-trivial prescription drugs even the brand matters. Different brands have different potencies that have very relevant effects on the patient. A good pharmacy will even be diligent about giving you the same brand of a generic you're already taking.
I see this being less useful for the more expensive drugs versus the cheap OTC stuff.
At a certain point, the cost from wasting an "expired product" becomes so trivial that there is no point in taking even the slightest risk over it.
So you want to completely remove any accountability from corporations just so we can save a few bucks on drugs. That's pretty retarded.
Much of this whining about wasted money is assinine. You don't directly pay for any of this. While it's a potentially huge social cost, it's really just an externality to you.
You don't pay $1800 for the bottle of expensive pills. You only pay $60.
I wouldn't mind sharing my extras, but that opens up a different can of worms, a different regulatory problem, and another potentially DEADLY liability issue.
As someone that pops a lot of these pills, I am not really interested in lowering standards.
> This is a lot of horse shit. There is very little you can do to alter your BMR.
Not at all. Otherwise the Russians wouldn't have survived Stalingrad. Not everyone can do it. That's why a lot of people died. But quite a few people can down clock to only needing 500 calories a day and not quickly die.
If you try to starve yourself and not exercise, your metabolism WILL slow and sabotage your starvation dieting. Doesn't matter if granny was at Stalingrad.
You can be a vegetarian and still end up eating mostly junk food.
However, in general a weirdo diet will be helpful because it forces you to really think about what you eat (or at least it should).
The Atkins diet is also a starvation diet because it's hard to restrict carbs that much even if you eliminate carb heavy foods. Plus you end up eating too much fat and WAY too much protein.
Tried by who exactly? The failures don't ever try the basic stuff. At best they try fads and quickly tire of them. The entire concept of dieting is bogus. People think they can do something strange for a short time and their underlying issues will suddenly go away.
Long term fitness requires permanent lifestyle changes and a willingness to completely give up some of your bad habits.
Plus, the worse off you are the more work it's going to be to get back into something resembling human shape.
It's all counter-instinctive thus very hard. Knowing what you have to do is the easy part.
> Probably some factories produce brown sugar that way, but that would be pretty retarded.
It actually sounds like a pretty easy way to generate a consistent product, thus a method most likely to be used. You aren't really stupid enough to trust corporations that much are you? The only reasonable assumption is that "it's people" unless there's a specific disclaimer on the product.
Otherwise, it is certain to be the cheapest piece of crap possible possibly flaunting what few real food regulations we actually have.
It's funny you should mention OJ since I stay away from the stuff that's been ripped apart and put back together. I also tend to avoid non whole milk products for the same reason. I don't trust the average executive any farther than I could throw him.
If it's for a recipe, I will make my own juice myself. Generates a far superior result.
Forget "citations". Get a blood sugar meter and test yourself.
Those things are cheap and easy to use. No need to trust anyone else's word on the subject. You can even eliminate your own biological variation as a factor.
Artificial sweeteners are also thought to be hard on your liver regardless of what it does to your blood sugar.
I might have to try this myself just for the lulz sometime. Although I have been trying to be real nice to my liver these days.
Don't eat all the time. Eat 3 sensible meals. Cut out the sweets, snacks, and liquid sugar. My next door neighbor lost a lot of weight by doing nothing more than just giving up soda.
A product targeted at people with poor eating habits is associated with poor outcomes? Imagine that.
It's like people dying during a cancer drug trial.
It's not bullshit. Any creditor has to be able to prove that you owe them money. it doesn't require a "special kit". It just requires standing up for yourself.
Don't trust a bill just because someone sent it to you. It could be a billing error or blatant fraud. Scam artists send out small medical bills betting on the mark being diligent enough to pay their bills but not anal enough to track everything they do.
Hospitals screw up bills more often than not.
A whole batch of mortgages were nullified in Texas because the proper paperwork was never filed with the relevant government body. The Yankee corporation in question thought they didn't have to bother. Didn't go over will with the Texas judge in question.
That wasn't trickle down, that was banking deregulation and mortgage backed securities. Even the mortgage meltdown wasn't that bad. Things didn't get really ugly until everyone found out that subprime junk bonds were being rated AAA.
That crashed the entire credit market including business and government.
I remember the day when the ratings fraud came home to roost like it was 9/11 or the Challenger disaster.
So you want to pay for the money to prepay your electric bill for the next 20 years, then churn the cycle again because that's the stated lifespan of the panels?
Do you actually have a dime to your name or are you just some nimwit with no money spewing bullshit?
Extended loan periods for anything end up raping you on interest. This includes 30 year home loans.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes you just want to make a phone call. Unfortunately the modern age of shiny shiny has made that prospect much less reliable than back when Ma Bell ruled things.
Sometimes you have to have someone minding the icky productive part of the process.
My Android phones last just fine. This is just another bit of bogus nonsense from the Apple cult.
The real question is how long these phones will be supported and what will happen to them once they are force upgraded to a new OS version. Will they still be useful then?
Apple is very much a mixed bag when it comes to product longevity in real live.
Unused medication for an infection?
That's not how that works. If you aren't finishing the prescription then you are violating doctor's orders and potentially putting the kid's life in danger as well as helping create the possibility of a drug resistant strain of the infection in question.
There is a vanishingly small portion of patients for which "keep antibiotics on hand" is actually a thing.
The cruise ship example is just silly. They make mad money fleecing cruisers. They can spring for some new drugs every couple of years.
> 1. have sufficient stock on hand for a run of requests
Except they don't.
I have problems with pharmacies being out of stock or under stock all the time.
NOBODY wants to waste real estate on product that doesn't move. Pharmacies are no exception.
Spoken like someone that's never needed one.
I would NEVER risk my life on an outdated Epipen. People that need these things for real carry their own around on their person all the time. This stuff is no joke.
You're gambling with your life.
This is WHY people carry their own Epipens. The article actually confirms why these people do what they do.
> So, basically, fuck that. Yes it takes a lot of cash to develop drugs and they need to make that money back, but it can be not as much as people are led to believe.
Like any business, the cost of success has to also cover the cost and risk of failure. That risk is considerable in the drug business. Just because the NIH finds a lead on something, it doesn't mean that will turn into a usable marketable drug.
Any industry has to bear the cost of being able to do business.
High risks also require high rewards or people just won't bother.
The "natural price" is probably lower than the current market prices but it's probably also much higher than what cheapskates would try to impose on the industry.
If you screw around with the current economic incentives you are potentially putting a lot of lives at risk. This is especially true for really expensive drugs for obscure conditions.
> Those rules were put in place because it's in Big Pharma's interest to make people re-buy their product
Really? Have you actually thought this through even. What would it take for your "evil Big Pharma" scenario to even occur. What kind of chronic patient do you have to even have an expensive 3 year old pill on hand? Why wouldn't you use them up by then? Why would you stockpile that stuff?
The far more likely scenario is that some consumer has an old bottle of something they bought over the counter and forgot about. It will be something that's dirt cheap. An entire bottle will be the price of one pill of the interesting stuff.
Even some of the older prescription meds are dirt cheap like that.
If you are maintaining some sort of stockpile on your own, you already have the real financial motive to test the stuff yourself. You probably also have the means.
For the rest of us it just doesn't matter.
> The 2014 FDA budget was US$4.7B,
That covers everything. This includes making sure your chicken and flour don't kill you. This budget is for a continent spanning nation of 300M people. It's comparable to budgets of all of the EU for the same thing.
Also, there are a LOT of drugs. That's a lot of testing. Nobody really cares if your Tylenol expires. Fixating on that cheap crap is a waste of time. You might also want to figure out what it is that causes shelf life to suffer. Doing that for a wide range of drugs will be expensive just in terms of raw labor. Forget about the pills themselves.
It's really a much bigger problem than you seem to realize. That's a pretty common problem here really.
If you want it so badly then pay for it yourself.
Why do you need mother government to do it for you? Never mind the Feds.
Drug safety is a far more useful and fundemental government function. It's that whole life and death thing.
> Medicare for everybody. Universal Healthcare.
You just contradicted yourself there. You seem only capable of repeating campaign slogans and know NOTHING of what you're actually talking about.
We already have a mini-NHS. It's called the VA and it's a disgrace. Medicare isn't that hot either. Medicaid is just horrible. If you've got something really interesting going on, you're SOL under Medicaid.
Your communist nonsense doesn't alter the fact that the US develops most of the new techniques, technologies, and drugs. When people want the best, the come to America. They don't go to some socialist utopia.
My _city_ (and probably yours) has more and better medical treatment facilities than the majority of socialist countries (big or small).
I really would rather that "good intentioned" morons like you destroy what we have and the world class treatment centers that are in your city and mine.
Some of us need more from the medical establishment than treatment for the occasional hang nail.
At least Medicare and Medicaid are proper forms of wealth distribution. They aren't something that look like corporate welfare where the government is telling us that we must (under threat of punishment) buy a particular type of product from a small set of corporations.
Wealth distribution funnelled through corporations is the ultimate form of corruption. It's truly sad that more people don't see this.
At least a new "Obamacare tax" would not have been blatantly unconstitutional.
Pre-existing conditions were already a solved problem. It was called high risk pools and it worked very well in various states. It caught people who fell through the cracks and didn't completely break the private insurance market.
That was only the worst case. States with good regulators never let people who developed a chronic condition get dropped from insurance to begin with. People who contributed their entire lives weren't left out in the cold.
Now the entire private market is effectively just the high risk pool from before with prices to match.
Depending on the drug, that extra 5% is relevant. For non-trivial prescription drugs even the brand matters. Different brands have different potencies that have very relevant effects on the patient. A good pharmacy will even be diligent about giving you the same brand of a generic you're already taking.
I see this being less useful for the more expensive drugs versus the cheap OTC stuff.
At a certain point, the cost from wasting an "expired product" becomes so trivial that there is no point in taking even the slightest risk over it.
So you want to completely remove any accountability from corporations just so we can save a few bucks on drugs. That's pretty retarded.
Much of this whining about wasted money is assinine. You don't directly pay for any of this. While it's a potentially huge social cost, it's really just an externality to you.
You don't pay $1800 for the bottle of expensive pills. You only pay $60.
I wouldn't mind sharing my extras, but that opens up a different can of worms, a different regulatory problem, and another potentially DEADLY liability issue.
As someone that pops a lot of these pills, I am not really interested in lowering standards.
> This is a lot of horse shit. There is very little you can do to alter your BMR.
Not at all. Otherwise the Russians wouldn't have survived Stalingrad. Not everyone can do it. That's why a lot of people died. But quite a few people can down clock to only needing 500 calories a day and not quickly die.
If you try to starve yourself and not exercise, your metabolism WILL slow and sabotage your starvation dieting. Doesn't matter if granny was at Stalingrad.
You can be a vegetarian and still end up eating mostly junk food.
However, in general a weirdo diet will be helpful because it forces you to really think about what you eat (or at least it should).
The Atkins diet is also a starvation diet because it's hard to restrict carbs that much even if you eliminate carb heavy foods. Plus you end up eating too much fat and WAY too much protein.
Tried by who exactly? The failures don't ever try the basic stuff. At best they try fads and quickly tire of them. The entire concept of dieting is bogus. People think they can do something strange for a short time and their underlying issues will suddenly go away.
Long term fitness requires permanent lifestyle changes and a willingness to completely give up some of your bad habits.
Plus, the worse off you are the more work it's going to be to get back into something resembling human shape.
It's all counter-instinctive thus very hard. Knowing what you have to do is the easy part.
> Milk is a sugar.
Milk is a large combination of things including sugar. It is not raw refined sugar with nothing else in it.
Whole milk is more problematic for it's FAT content unless you are actually lactose intolerant.
> Probably some factories produce brown sugar that way, but that would be pretty retarded.
It actually sounds like a pretty easy way to generate a consistent product, thus a method most likely to be used. You aren't really stupid enough to trust corporations that much are you? The only reasonable assumption is that "it's people" unless there's a specific disclaimer on the product.
Otherwise, it is certain to be the cheapest piece of crap possible possibly flaunting what few real food regulations we actually have.
It's funny you should mention OJ since I stay away from the stuff that's been ripped apart and put back together. I also tend to avoid non whole milk products for the same reason. I don't trust the average executive any farther than I could throw him.
If it's for a recipe, I will make my own juice myself. Generates a far superior result.
Forget "citations". Get a blood sugar meter and test yourself.
Those things are cheap and easy to use. No need to trust anyone else's word on the subject. You can even eliminate your own biological variation as a factor.
Artificial sweeteners are also thought to be hard on your liver regardless of what it does to your blood sugar.
I might have to try this myself just for the lulz sometime. Although I have been trying to be real nice to my liver these days.
Don't eat all the time. Eat 3 sensible meals. Cut out the sweets, snacks, and liquid sugar. My next door neighbor lost a lot of weight by doing nothing more than just giving up soda.
A product targeted at people with poor eating habits is associated with poor outcomes? Imagine that.
It's like people dying during a cancer drug trial.
It's not bullshit. Any creditor has to be able to prove that you owe them money. it doesn't require a "special kit". It just requires standing up for yourself.
Don't trust a bill just because someone sent it to you. It could be a billing error or blatant fraud. Scam artists send out small medical bills betting on the mark being diligent enough to pay their bills but not anal enough to track everything they do.
Hospitals screw up bills more often than not.
A whole batch of mortgages were nullified in Texas because the proper paperwork was never filed with the relevant government body. The Yankee corporation in question thought they didn't have to bother. Didn't go over will with the Texas judge in question.
That wasn't trickle down, that was banking deregulation and mortgage backed securities. Even the mortgage meltdown wasn't that bad. Things didn't get really ugly until everyone found out that subprime junk bonds were being rated AAA.
That crashed the entire credit market including business and government.
I remember the day when the ratings fraud came home to roost like it was 9/11 or the Challenger disaster.
So you want to pay for the money to prepay your electric bill for the next 20 years, then churn the cycle again because that's the stated lifespan of the panels?
Do you actually have a dime to your name or are you just some nimwit with no money spewing bullshit?
Extended loan periods for anything end up raping you on interest. This includes 30 year home loans.