Let's say we're 97% sure it's wonderful and has no adverse side effects. That's good enough to jump to conclusions, but not good enough to start giving it to millions of people. Does that make sense?
This.
Also, going from small batches in lab reactors to large scale production doesn't happen overnight. Sourcing, production, packaging, shipment, etc.
When developing new meds we also do long(er) term safety data collection that you simply can't do without time. The testing isn't to figure out if it's life saving, the extra time is to make sure that to the best of our ability, reasonably, there isn't some safety item we're missing and to refine dosing and production to optimum levels.
If you'd seen a lot of drug trials, as some of us have, you'd realize that the results shown so far aren't hype and are incredibly promising and worthy of publishing. But they still aren't the end-all-be-all of the drug production process. Hype would be publishing that any one of 1000 anticancer drugs was "GOING TO END CANCER FOREVER" because it kills a cancer cell in a petri dish.
Because sometimes science figures stuff out and sometimes it doesn't. Everything is not a conspiracy.
Rich people die of cancer frequently. Even Steve Jobs. And yet we haven't fixed cancer in 4 years...10...100. Rich people get colds. We have colds. Rich people get HIV. We have drugs to control it but no cure.
Everyone gets urinary tract infections and we can treat those no problem. Everyone gets chicken pox and we can vaccinate against it.
Blah blah blah. Sometimes we find the cure of the vaccine and sometimes we don't. Despite the rhetoric from conspiracy folks like yourself, sometimes there is no conspiracy, just science. Likewise, just because someone in the government says we're going to "moon shot" and fix cancer within a decade, doesn't actually mean it's going to be happening. Science and medicine don't actually care what your rhetoric is and they certainly don't care whether you think something is fair or whether you think something SHOULD be curable.
OK Sure. The "lie" is that journalists aren't scientists and aren't properly trained to read a scientific paper and realize that there's a difference between a 95% confidence interval or P-value and what people think of as "100%."
That doesn't mean the science is lying. That means the science is reporting results accurately and truthfully.
Unfortunately the average reader has no idea how to read a scientific journal and make heads or tails of it.
How long until someone suggests that this is a scheme by Merck to profit or do "some horrible thing" to poor African villagers who would surely prefer to die of disease or malnutrition.
"I can't believe they're selling this instead of giving it away for free!"
"How do they know those villagers wouldn't have gotten better on their own!?"
I can't tell which way you're being unhelpful. Are you maligning the medical establishment for not releasing it right away when it could save lives? Are you genuinely suggesting that we just shove it onto the market? Because surely you know that if it gets released and as soon as there's any hint of an adverse event that the anti-vaccer & Mercola crew will be screaming about how this is just another effort by Big Pharma to experiment on or sterilize poor African villagers who surely would have been better off dying of hemorrhagic fever.
For good or bad, you have to at least look at some efficacy and safety data or you might as well be practicing homeopathy with a tincture of lead.
Or, ya know, you could be aware that we test donated blood by PCR now. The likelihood of contracting HIV/AIDS via blood transfusion is vanishingly small in the US. I would go so far as to say that it approaches zero. Nothing is perfect...but PCR HIV screening of blood products is pretty damn near it.
My quick literature review shows one case of transmission in 2008 since we started more advanced screening in 1999. That's pretty good screening.
Someone feel free to correct me, but when I last did statistics we didn't use "accuracy" we always used sensitivity and specificity to talk about the likelihood of false positives and false negatives in samples.
They do say that there was no false positives, so the test is 100% specific based on their sample to date (though no statistical formula will actually spit out 100%...let's just ignore that for a second)
They don't mention sensitivity, and that's really the question if you're talking about screening blood donors. You don't want false negatives. They say they detected 32 cases but is it known that only 32 people had the disease? If 36 had the disease and the test didn't detect it in 3, it's only 90% sensitive.
TL:DR I'm not sure that the article really knows what it's saying when it talks about "accuracy."
I DO own a Tesla. They charge fast at superchargers...but not that fast. 15-20 minutes won't fill you up. If you pull in empty you might make it to 75% in 20-30 minutes, which is still way better than any other recharging.
Also, if you take 15 minutes to refill a gas tank, you're doing it wrong. I'm driving a rental car with a gas tank right now...3 minutes maybe.
I DO own a Tesla. 20 minutes to full charge from 15-20% is not an accurate representation of charging speed at a supercharger. It's fast, but not that fast. 20-30 minutes will put you back to 70% or so.
Ps. Currently on vacation and driving a rental car. Gas station fills do not take 15-20 minutes, if so, you're doing it wrong.
Um, no. If you donate money of yours in someone else's name, they don't get a tax write off. In order for that to happen, you have to give them a gift, which the IRS defines as money given essentially with no strings attached (you can't technically gift someone money with the instructions that they must donate it to an entity of your choosing).
If Alphabet gives an employee money, that's a wage or a bonus. It is not, nor does the IRS view it as, a gift.
As others have said, part of the reason is that it's considered abusive to risk the life of a patient on an experiment when there are tested therapies that give them a good chance.
There are other reasons though too. In the case of T-Cell therapy, sometimes they need sufficient tumor mass to perform the T-Cell harvest. Also if the disease is small, it can be hard to determine meaningful endpoints (i.e. big tumor gets tiny = significant result whereas tiny tumor gets a bit tinier = fuzzy interpretation of the PET scan). As we learn more about T-Cells, we will start considering them as more first line therapy for less aggressive disease. This is the case, for example, with ipilimumab and nivolumab which were initially experimental and used as salvage but are now moving towards first line therapy in metastatic melanoma.
At the other end of the spectrum you don't want patients that are too sick, because if they're all on death's door you don't know if the treatment failed or if they were just too far along and too sick vis-a-vis end organ damage for anything, even an effective treatment, to save them. Analogy being if a man is in a horrible car wreck and he goes to surgery for an experimental procedure to fix his spine and he dies of blood loss from all his other injuries, what do you say about the success of the spine surgery? Did it work? Would it have worked? Who knows...every major organ had been turned to jelly in the wreck so fixing the spine was sort of irrelevant.
I work in a group treating patients with this specific kind of therapy; chimeric receptor modified T-Cells. As other have said, right now the treatment is highly specialized and requires individual attention to each cell line from harvest through delivery; it cannot be automated. We can treat tens of patients right now with the resources available to us, not hundreds, not thousands, certainly not millions.
That said, the therapy is not presently terribly expensive for the patient because it is experimental and is being funded largely by the pharmaceutical companies that are investing in the process. But if we did commercialize it right now, it would be terribly expensive because of the labor involved with the production and also because right now we are being very careful to monitor for side effects and adverse events. That means tons of lab tests and long hospital stays.
As a side note, T-Cell therapy has a nasty habit of occasionally killing the recipient. Just because it's immune therapy and "uses your body's own cells" doesn't mean that the immune system run amok can't do incredible damage. Just ask someone who is experiencing an anaphylactic reaction how "friendly" and "safe" their immune system is at that moment.
Way to completely construe bonuses with gifts.
Companies that give bonuses are supposed to report them as taxable income to the employee, just like wages. "Gifts" are an entirely separate entity and are what, technically, you received when your Grandma sent you $20 for Christmas. If the gift exceeds $14,000 ($28,000 for couples) then it exceeds the annual limit and, as your link indicates, this typically results in a tax burden for the donor although you can book it against your future estate limits and avoid that if you choose.
TL;DR Google/Alphabet is almost certainly not giving "Gifts" as you describe to their employees. They're giving bonuses. Totally different tax situation. If businesses were able to gift employees, then any business worth a damn would "Gift" each employee $14,000 worth of their wages every year tax free. But they don't because the IRS would slap them down in a heartbeat.
They didn't have to pay tax on the "gift" like I'm SURE every one of them did the last several years. Cough.
My heart bleeds for the Google employees scraping by on their meager salaries without a free computer for X-Mas. Speaking as someone who make a good salary here in Seattle where Google employees seem to be doing quite well...
The level of entitlement that these people deserve, every year without question, a holiday bonus is disgusting. I've gotten bonuses some years, other years I haven't. Roll the dice and deal with it.
The U.S. only has the highest absolute corporate tax rate. It doesn't have remotely the highest effective tax rate because of the numerous deductions afforded to most corporations. Between deductions and variable schedules for depreciation, interest, benefits, investments, etc no one is paying the 39% absolute rate. Depending on the study you look at, the corporate effective tax rate averages around 27% and even lower for many corporations which puts in line with other developed countries.
And that's even ignoring that many US corporations, up to 30% by some estimates, which aren't even organized as corporate entitites: they're S Corps which pay using the individual tax rate, not the corporate one.
Exactly. The government is paying Apple interest, but it's using the money that purchased the bonds to, ya know, do things. Just like regular folks who purchase treasury bonds as investments.
The word "need" and the words "resistance to some diseases" do NEED quantification. Please cite your data.
Scientists have suggested that 500mg daily may reduce complications associated with the Cold, but there is no data it prevents or treats cold viruses.
If you read the material from the manufacturer, they are specifically working on a vaccine for RSV. RSV causes perhaps 20% of colds, depending on your data source. The remainder are caused by the rest...parainfluenza, coronavirus, rhinovirus, and other non-isolates. RSV is also most common in younger populations, so while I'm not discounting the value of reducing pediatric colds and their symptoms, it's less useful for adults.
Perhaps they can expand their work to include other cold viruses, but right now they're specifically limiting the scope of their work.
Um...sarcasm. Did I not lay it on thick enough? You do realize that our population isn't 95% male right? And I don't see Bannon complaining that the lack of women in CEO roles violates a civic society.
That was the point. Yeesh.
Thank heavens that CEO's reflect the demographic of their communities. It's the only way to have a civic society.
I am always relieved when I observe that the 95% of male Fortune 500 CEOs are a representation of our culture where 95% of the population is male.
And even if your master password gets keylogged, 2FA is easy to set up on Lastpass (and maybe on other platforms...I only have experience with Lastpass). Keylog my master password as much as you like.
96% is awful efficacy when you consider that men are fertile 365 days of the year compared to ~95 days of conception possibility for women yearly. For women, if an OCP fails, they still have to have had intercourse on a fertile window in order to conceive. For men, if they have failure and have intercourse with a partner who is fertile, it can result in conception. This would be particularly problematic for non-monogamous men who might have several partners over the course of the month (since there are then multiple fertile windows to be considered). Additionally, the study notes that the injection was effective for most participants within 24 weeks of initiation. 24 weeks from onset of injection to response is atrocious onset time.
As if America / Americans are solely responsible for the development of modern technology...I'll just put down the first paragraph from the "computer chip" wikipedia entry. Definitely "just America" here...
"Early developments of the integrated circuit go back to 1949, when German engineer Werner Jacobi (Siemens AG)[7] filed a patent for an integrated-circuit-like semiconductor amplifying device[8] showing five transistors on a common substrate in a 3-stage amplifier arrangement. Jacobi disclosed small and cheap hearing aids as typical industrial applications of his patent. An immediate commercial use of his patent has not been reported.
The idea of the integrated circuit was conceived by Geoffrey W.A. Dummer (1909–2002), a radar scientist working for the Royal Radar Establishment of the British Ministry of Defence. Dummer presented the idea to the public at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, D.C. on 7 May 1952.[9] He gave many symposia publicly to propagate his ideas, and unsuccessfully attempted to build such a circuit in 1956.
A precursor idea to the IC was to create small ceramic squares (wafers), each containing a single miniaturized component. Components could then be integrated and wired into a bidimensional or tridimensional compact grid. This idea, which seemed very promising in 1957, was proposed to the US Army by Jack Kilby and led to the short-lived Micromodule Program (similar to 1951's Project Tinkertoy).[10] However, as the project was gaining momentum, Kilby came up with a new, revolutionary design: the IC."
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say we're 97% sure it's wonderful and has no adverse side effects. That's good enough to jump to conclusions, but not good enough to start giving it to millions of people. Does that make sense?
This.
Also, going from small batches in lab reactors to large scale production doesn't happen overnight. Sourcing, production, packaging, shipment, etc.
When developing new meds we also do long(er) term safety data collection that you simply can't do without time. The testing isn't to figure out if it's life saving, the extra time is to make sure that to the best of our ability, reasonably, there isn't some safety item we're missing and to refine dosing and production to optimum levels.
If you'd seen a lot of drug trials, as some of us have, you'd realize that the results shown so far aren't hype and are incredibly promising and worthy of publishing. But they still aren't the end-all-be-all of the drug production process. Hype would be publishing that any one of 1000 anticancer drugs was "GOING TO END CANCER FOREVER" because it kills a cancer cell in a petri dish.
Because sometimes science figures stuff out and sometimes it doesn't. Everything is not a conspiracy. Rich people die of cancer frequently. Even Steve Jobs. And yet we haven't fixed cancer in 4 years...10...100. Rich people get colds. We have colds. Rich people get HIV. We have drugs to control it but no cure. Everyone gets urinary tract infections and we can treat those no problem. Everyone gets chicken pox and we can vaccinate against it. Blah blah blah. Sometimes we find the cure of the vaccine and sometimes we don't. Despite the rhetoric from conspiracy folks like yourself, sometimes there is no conspiracy, just science. Likewise, just because someone in the government says we're going to "moon shot" and fix cancer within a decade, doesn't actually mean it's going to be happening. Science and medicine don't actually care what your rhetoric is and they certainly don't care whether you think something is fair or whether you think something SHOULD be curable.
OK Sure. The "lie" is that journalists aren't scientists and aren't properly trained to read a scientific paper and realize that there's a difference between a 95% confidence interval or P-value and what people think of as "100%." That doesn't mean the science is lying. That means the science is reporting results accurately and truthfully. Unfortunately the average reader has no idea how to read a scientific journal and make heads or tails of it.
How long until someone suggests that this is a scheme by Merck to profit or do "some horrible thing" to poor African villagers who would surely prefer to die of disease or malnutrition. "I can't believe they're selling this instead of giving it away for free!" "How do they know those villagers wouldn't have gotten better on their own!?"
I can't tell which way you're being unhelpful. Are you maligning the medical establishment for not releasing it right away when it could save lives? Are you genuinely suggesting that we just shove it onto the market? Because surely you know that if it gets released and as soon as there's any hint of an adverse event that the anti-vaccer & Mercola crew will be screaming about how this is just another effort by Big Pharma to experiment on or sterilize poor African villagers who surely would have been better off dying of hemorrhagic fever. For good or bad, you have to at least look at some efficacy and safety data or you might as well be practicing homeopathy with a tincture of lead.
Or, ya know, you could be aware that we test donated blood by PCR now. The likelihood of contracting HIV/AIDS via blood transfusion is vanishingly small in the US. I would go so far as to say that it approaches zero. Nothing is perfect...but PCR HIV screening of blood products is pretty damn near it. My quick literature review shows one case of transmission in 2008 since we started more advanced screening in 1999. That's pretty good screening.
Someone feel free to correct me, but when I last did statistics we didn't use "accuracy" we always used sensitivity and specificity to talk about the likelihood of false positives and false negatives in samples. They do say that there was no false positives, so the test is 100% specific based on their sample to date (though no statistical formula will actually spit out 100%...let's just ignore that for a second) They don't mention sensitivity, and that's really the question if you're talking about screening blood donors. You don't want false negatives. They say they detected 32 cases but is it known that only 32 people had the disease? If 36 had the disease and the test didn't detect it in 3, it's only 90% sensitive. TL:DR I'm not sure that the article really knows what it's saying when it talks about "accuracy."
Citation please. I don't think you're going to find one though...pretty sure Musk never disabled someone's car.
I DO own a Tesla. They charge fast at superchargers...but not that fast. 15-20 minutes won't fill you up. If you pull in empty you might make it to 75% in 20-30 minutes, which is still way better than any other recharging. Also, if you take 15 minutes to refill a gas tank, you're doing it wrong. I'm driving a rental car with a gas tank right now...3 minutes maybe.
I DO own a Tesla. 20 minutes to full charge from 15-20% is not an accurate representation of charging speed at a supercharger. It's fast, but not that fast. 20-30 minutes will put you back to 70% or so. Ps. Currently on vacation and driving a rental car. Gas station fills do not take 15-20 minutes, if so, you're doing it wrong.
Um, no. If you donate money of yours in someone else's name, they don't get a tax write off. In order for that to happen, you have to give them a gift, which the IRS defines as money given essentially with no strings attached (you can't technically gift someone money with the instructions that they must donate it to an entity of your choosing). If Alphabet gives an employee money, that's a wage or a bonus. It is not, nor does the IRS view it as, a gift.
As others have said, part of the reason is that it's considered abusive to risk the life of a patient on an experiment when there are tested therapies that give them a good chance. There are other reasons though too. In the case of T-Cell therapy, sometimes they need sufficient tumor mass to perform the T-Cell harvest. Also if the disease is small, it can be hard to determine meaningful endpoints (i.e. big tumor gets tiny = significant result whereas tiny tumor gets a bit tinier = fuzzy interpretation of the PET scan). As we learn more about T-Cells, we will start considering them as more first line therapy for less aggressive disease. This is the case, for example, with ipilimumab and nivolumab which were initially experimental and used as salvage but are now moving towards first line therapy in metastatic melanoma. At the other end of the spectrum you don't want patients that are too sick, because if they're all on death's door you don't know if the treatment failed or if they were just too far along and too sick vis-a-vis end organ damage for anything, even an effective treatment, to save them. Analogy being if a man is in a horrible car wreck and he goes to surgery for an experimental procedure to fix his spine and he dies of blood loss from all his other injuries, what do you say about the success of the spine surgery? Did it work? Would it have worked? Who knows...every major organ had been turned to jelly in the wreck so fixing the spine was sort of irrelevant.
I work in a group treating patients with this specific kind of therapy; chimeric receptor modified T-Cells. As other have said, right now the treatment is highly specialized and requires individual attention to each cell line from harvest through delivery; it cannot be automated. We can treat tens of patients right now with the resources available to us, not hundreds, not thousands, certainly not millions. That said, the therapy is not presently terribly expensive for the patient because it is experimental and is being funded largely by the pharmaceutical companies that are investing in the process. But if we did commercialize it right now, it would be terribly expensive because of the labor involved with the production and also because right now we are being very careful to monitor for side effects and adverse events. That means tons of lab tests and long hospital stays. As a side note, T-Cell therapy has a nasty habit of occasionally killing the recipient. Just because it's immune therapy and "uses your body's own cells" doesn't mean that the immune system run amok can't do incredible damage. Just ask someone who is experiencing an anaphylactic reaction how "friendly" and "safe" their immune system is at that moment.
Way to completely construe bonuses with gifts. Companies that give bonuses are supposed to report them as taxable income to the employee, just like wages. "Gifts" are an entirely separate entity and are what, technically, you received when your Grandma sent you $20 for Christmas. If the gift exceeds $14,000 ($28,000 for couples) then it exceeds the annual limit and, as your link indicates, this typically results in a tax burden for the donor although you can book it against your future estate limits and avoid that if you choose. TL;DR Google/Alphabet is almost certainly not giving "Gifts" as you describe to their employees. They're giving bonuses. Totally different tax situation. If businesses were able to gift employees, then any business worth a damn would "Gift" each employee $14,000 worth of their wages every year tax free. But they don't because the IRS would slap them down in a heartbeat.
They didn't have to pay tax on the "gift" like I'm SURE every one of them did the last several years. Cough. My heart bleeds for the Google employees scraping by on their meager salaries without a free computer for X-Mas. Speaking as someone who make a good salary here in Seattle where Google employees seem to be doing quite well... The level of entitlement that these people deserve, every year without question, a holiday bonus is disgusting. I've gotten bonuses some years, other years I haven't. Roll the dice and deal with it.
The U.S. only has the highest absolute corporate tax rate. It doesn't have remotely the highest effective tax rate because of the numerous deductions afforded to most corporations. Between deductions and variable schedules for depreciation, interest, benefits, investments, etc no one is paying the 39% absolute rate. Depending on the study you look at, the corporate effective tax rate averages around 27% and even lower for many corporations which puts in line with other developed countries. And that's even ignoring that many US corporations, up to 30% by some estimates, which aren't even organized as corporate entitites: they're S Corps which pay using the individual tax rate, not the corporate one.
Exactly. The government is paying Apple interest, but it's using the money that purchased the bonds to, ya know, do things. Just like regular folks who purchase treasury bonds as investments.
A dramatic effect on something you don't have. OK. Data please.
The word "need" and the words "resistance to some diseases" do NEED quantification. Please cite your data. Scientists have suggested that 500mg daily may reduce complications associated with the Cold, but there is no data it prevents or treats cold viruses.
If you read the material from the manufacturer, they are specifically working on a vaccine for RSV. RSV causes perhaps 20% of colds, depending on your data source. The remainder are caused by the rest...parainfluenza, coronavirus, rhinovirus, and other non-isolates. RSV is also most common in younger populations, so while I'm not discounting the value of reducing pediatric colds and their symptoms, it's less useful for adults. Perhaps they can expand their work to include other cold viruses, but right now they're specifically limiting the scope of their work.
Um...sarcasm. Did I not lay it on thick enough? You do realize that our population isn't 95% male right? And I don't see Bannon complaining that the lack of women in CEO roles violates a civic society. That was the point. Yeesh.
Thank heavens that CEO's reflect the demographic of their communities. It's the only way to have a civic society. I am always relieved when I observe that the 95% of male Fortune 500 CEOs are a representation of our culture where 95% of the population is male.
And even if your master password gets keylogged, 2FA is easy to set up on Lastpass (and maybe on other platforms...I only have experience with Lastpass). Keylog my master password as much as you like.
96% is awful efficacy when you consider that men are fertile 365 days of the year compared to ~95 days of conception possibility for women yearly. For women, if an OCP fails, they still have to have had intercourse on a fertile window in order to conceive. For men, if they have failure and have intercourse with a partner who is fertile, it can result in conception. This would be particularly problematic for non-monogamous men who might have several partners over the course of the month (since there are then multiple fertile windows to be considered). Additionally, the study notes that the injection was effective for most participants within 24 weeks of initiation. 24 weeks from onset of injection to response is atrocious onset time.
As if America / Americans are solely responsible for the development of modern technology...I'll just put down the first paragraph from the "computer chip" wikipedia entry. Definitely "just America" here... "Early developments of the integrated circuit go back to 1949, when German engineer Werner Jacobi (Siemens AG)[7] filed a patent for an integrated-circuit-like semiconductor amplifying device[8] showing five transistors on a common substrate in a 3-stage amplifier arrangement. Jacobi disclosed small and cheap hearing aids as typical industrial applications of his patent. An immediate commercial use of his patent has not been reported. The idea of the integrated circuit was conceived by Geoffrey W.A. Dummer (1909–2002), a radar scientist working for the Royal Radar Establishment of the British Ministry of Defence. Dummer presented the idea to the public at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, D.C. on 7 May 1952.[9] He gave many symposia publicly to propagate his ideas, and unsuccessfully attempted to build such a circuit in 1956. A precursor idea to the IC was to create small ceramic squares (wafers), each containing a single miniaturized component. Components could then be integrated and wired into a bidimensional or tridimensional compact grid. This idea, which seemed very promising in 1957, was proposed to the US Army by Jack Kilby and led to the short-lived Micromodule Program (similar to 1951's Project Tinkertoy).[10] However, as the project was gaining momentum, Kilby came up with a new, revolutionary design: the IC."