I'm sure you're exactly right. A few things about that particularly irritate me: they're pretty expensive to be made that cheaply, they still won't admit or address the problem, and their claim is that the soles need to be "exercised" because disuse is the main cause of the problem. I'm not entirely clear what mechanism would make wearing them often cause them to last longer. I think the hypothesis is that the motion prevents brittle, long-chain structures from forming by continually breaking them down.
In the mean time, people keep sending me pictures of their rotten shoes so I keep uploading them.:-D
Thanks for the followup and interesting links. As I said, "generics are bioequivalent!" claims aside, it's interesting that we both have first-hand experience with a generic that isn't. And yeah, it makes me wonder about the rest of them.
Interesting that you mention levothyroxine. My wife takes it for hypothyroid and swears there's a big difference between the generic and brand names, and that seems like common knowledge amount doctors and pharmacists. I'll definitely grant you that one and admit it doesn't give me great conference for other formulations.
I very rarely bag grass clippings unless I've let the lawn grow too long and it'll look like a hayfield if i didn't. Leaves, though? I have 11 fully mature trees in my yard, and one year we raked 104 bags of leaves. If I mulched, we'd be 3 inches deep in the stuff.
I got a series of robocalls from someone claiming to be Rachel with "Card Services" wanting to help lower my credit card interest rate. I blogged about it, and 280,000 hits and 972 comments to that page later, I guess I wasn't the only one they were pestering. I removed exactly two comments from that post ever:
The first was when a poster alleged that a certain person was responsible for all the calls. I got a letter from that person's lawyer telling me to take down the site because it contained libelous statements, and attached a 20-page printout of all the comments that were attached to that post at that time. I said, "no. Tell me specifically which comments you're referring to and I'll evaluate them. Also tell your client to quit calling me." The end result is that they asked me to remove one comment with the guy's home information, and I thought that was pretty reasonable so I complied. I also got the lawyer to formally state on record that their client was not a telemarketer. I figured that if they'd pursued further legal action and it turned out that the client really was a telemarketer, it'd be handy to show a judge that they'd previously asked their lawyers to lie in writing.
The second comment was full of racial slurs. I'm a huge proponent of freedom of speech and had a hard time deciding how to handle it, but in the end decided that the poster could find their own soapbox to broadcast racism and that I wanted no part in it.
If you take any of these drugs, look them up on youtube (don't bother with webmd or anything similar as they are useless). The results might scare you.
I'm friends with a cardiologist. He told me about attending a lecture at a meeting of cardiologists. One of them was presenting research on the risk/reward of lowering LDLs, with the unambiguous result that lower LDL = better health, and that statins were a safe way to lower LDL. During the following question-and-answer, someone asked how many cardiologists in the audience were taking statins themselves even if they had acceptably low levels of LDLs, and most raised their hand.
I'm not a doctor and I'm not taking statins because I don't need them, but apparently a huge number of doctors who don't need them are taking them anyway because they've read the reports and think statins are a safe route to better health. I'm a little squeamish about the idea, but the idea of a subject matter expert betting his life on his own advice is pretty compelling evidence to me.
No, I don't have a single reference to any of that. I suppose it's possible that my friend made the whole thing up to entertain us over dinner, but don't think so.
Most nations require generic drug manufacturers to prove their formulation exhibits bioequivalence to the innovator product. In the U.S., the FDA must approve generic drugs just as innovator drugs must be approved. The FDA requires the bioequivalence of the generic product to be between 80% and 125% of that of the innovator product.
This value range is part of a statistical calculation, and does not mean the FDA allows generic drugs to differ from the brand name counterpart by up to 25 percent. FDA recently evaluated 2,070 human studies conducted between 1996 and 2007, which compared the absorption of brand name and generic drugs into a person’s body; they were submitted to the FDA to support approval of generics. The average difference in absorption into the body between the generic and the brand name was 3.5 percent, comparable to differences between two different batches of a brand name drug.
I haven't browsed NEJM recently but it seems at odds with the referenced claims on Wikipedia. If you can find the article, could you update the WP page with the new information?
I'm not asking facetiously. If there's new information, I'd love to read it. I get generics whenever possible and I'd be interested in data showing that I shouldn't be.
There's something missing - a downmod of "you are factually incorrect".
I've wanted one of those before, but even that would be ripe for abuse and subject to opinion. Take the example statement: "WMDs were found in Iraq." Some people would say it's true because they think we found launcher-ready Nukes in Baghdad. Some people would say it's false because we didn't really find much interesting at all. Some people would say it's true because we did find, at the minimum, a small number old, probably non-working Sarin dispensers. In the final case, some moderators would say "that's close enough to 'none' to count as 'none', so the statement is false." Others, probably mostly programmers, would say "'almost none' is the same as 'some', so the statement is true".
For a more common example, consider "iPhones are the most popular smartphones". That's true if you compare all iPhones against particular models of other phones, but false if you compare all iPhones against all Androids. A moderator could justify their vote in either direction, even if it's likely that they voted based on whether they prefer iPhones to Androids.
Apple's MobileMe has been down more this year that RIM has in the last 10.
Asking because I genuinely don't know: how much of that MobileMe downtime has affected customer's messaging? Were the outages in, say, MobileMe's photo gallery website or in their mail system?
in 2008 Apple's MobileMe service was out for 18 days -- and that's a $99/year service!
Forgive me for quoting AT&T, but they were the only carrier who published a rate chart that I could find without digging around longer than I'm willing to. It looks like their cheapest "BlackBerry Personal" data plan is $360/year. That plan pays for more than just BlackBerry messaging, just as MobileMe includes more than just email, so I'm not sure how'd you'd calculate the relative marginal costs of those features.
iCloud and Siri have also already experienced outages
...neither of which caused messaging slowdown or delays. You keep comparing apples to oranges without comparing Apples to BlackBerries. How much have those respective companies' messaging systems - just messaging and not web hosting or cloud music storage! - been down in the last 5 years? How much do their customers pay them for just messaging - not web hosting or cloud music storage! - each year? Without that data, comparisons are meaningless.
Scientific studies indicate that little loss of effectiveness will occur if mamaograms are started at 50 for low risk groups, yet the loss of money to the insurance companies
Just for giggles: what money do you imagine that insurance companies are making from having to pay for "unnecessary" tests and the consequences of false positives? Maybe they're losing money paying for the tests and needless extra biopsies but making up for it in volume? Enlighten us.
I'm a Libertarian and I wholeheartedly support labeling laws to help you make good choices. In a grocery store, go ahead and sell a bottle of HFCS-and-MSG laced trans fats if you want. There better be a warning sign on it to let people know what they're getting into, though.
Not to mention the incredible jingoism required to believe that every country in the world but your own is too stupid to come up with a cure on their own, if such a thing were possible. If you're an American, for example, and you believe that "Big Pharma" is colluding to block a cure for something, then what you're really saying is that no other country has the ability to make that same discovery without our help and that we're single-handedly able to hold the world hostage. How arrogant can you get?
I see the value in that, but I'm not sure I understand the business case for making it easier for your customers to migrate off your system and onto your competitors. At some point, someone in an MDM-using company is likely to notice that all their users have transitioned to iPhones and Droids and will wonder why they're paying for both Exchange and the RIM software which does mostly just the same thing.
Does the FDA and AMA equivalent in every single country in the world have both the greed-driven screw-the-patient mentality and the political power necessary to oppress legitimate cures? Every single one of them, without exception? If there were a million doctors in the world (and there are a lot more than that), and each was 99.99% likely to cooperate in suppressing the cure for a serious illness, then there would only be a 3e-44 chance of that secret being kept. Your ideas are stupid and I recommend that you keep them hidden before exposing yourself as a greater ignorant.
Steve Jobs regretted not having surgery immediately after his diagnosis. He went the alternate route first, and while medical treatment might not have cured him, it almost certainly would have helped more than basically not doing anything at all.
The rate of cancer survival in the medical industry is pretty bad ~ shouldn't the entire industry be criticized more?
When I was a kid not so long ago, Hodgkin's lymphoma was a death sentence. I remember hearing my parents speak in hushed tones about friends and acquaintances who'd been diagnosed and were trying to get their affairs in order.
Today, Wikipedia says that "In one recent European trial, the 5-year survival rate for those patients with a favorable prognosis was 98%, while that for patients with worse outlooks was at least 85%."
What company is going to advertise drinking 8 cups of water a day to prevent cancer?
If $simple_thing cured cancer, there would no longer be cancer. Imagine countries like North Korea with zero tolerance for non-working citizens, at least in theory. If 8 cups of water could prevent you from having to leave your government-mandated job, lighten the load on health care (which is a pure cost center there), and otherwise keep you being productive rather than a drain on society, you'd be drinking a gallon of it daily at gunpoint.
I think GP answered your question. If your company needs 10 people to do a job correctly, and has hired 4 to do it, the fact that those 4 have to work ridiculous hours to get the job done is not a problem with those 4 people.
I don't understand the economics of that, either. Is it really significantly cheaper to pay one person to work 80 hours than two people to work 40 each? Are the fixed expenses like insurance so great that it makes a huge difference, and that difference is large enough to offset the churn from burning out your experienced employees?
Your backend php/asp shuold already be doing browser detection and simply swapping between mobile and big-ass-screen(tm) css leading to ONE site that services all devices.
The problem there is that your backend server might not (and for large websites probably won't) have full access to the client. Suppose your home page is served by a CDN or other web proxy, or is even just a static page so that it doesn't get overwhelmed by heavy traffic. In those situations, there's not a great way to say "serve this page to mobile visitors and this one to everyone else".
If you can pull it off, there are nice benefits from being able to hand out the same content to everyone along with instructions on how to properly display it on their particular device.
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I'm sure you're exactly right. A few things about that particularly irritate me: they're pretty expensive to be made that cheaply, they still won't admit or address the problem, and their claim is that the soles need to be "exercised" because disuse is the main cause of the problem. I'm not entirely clear what mechanism would make wearing them often cause them to last longer. I think the hypothesis is that the motion prevents brittle, long-chain structures from forming by continually breaking them down.
In the mean time, people keep sending me pictures of their rotten shoes so I keep uploading them. :-D
Thanks for the followup and interesting links. As I said, "generics are bioequivalent!" claims aside, it's interesting that we both have first-hand experience with a generic that isn't. And yeah, it makes me wonder about the rest of them.
I see what you did there.
Interesting that you mention levothyroxine. My wife takes it for hypothyroid and swears there's a big difference between the generic and brand names, and that seems like common knowledge amount doctors and pharmacists. I'll definitely grant you that one and admit it doesn't give me great conference for other formulations.
He was by the time he was finished with it.
Not if it's holy.
I very rarely bag grass clippings unless I've let the lawn grow too long and it'll look like a hayfield if i didn't. Leaves, though? I have 11 fully mature trees in my yard, and one year we raked 104 bags of leaves. If I mulched, we'd be 3 inches deep in the stuff.
I got a series of robocalls from someone claiming to be Rachel with "Card Services" wanting to help lower my credit card interest rate. I blogged about it, and 280,000 hits and 972 comments to that page later, I guess I wasn't the only one they were pestering. I removed exactly two comments from that post ever:
The first was when a poster alleged that a certain person was responsible for all the calls. I got a letter from that person's lawyer telling me to take down the site because it contained libelous statements, and attached a 20-page printout of all the comments that were attached to that post at that time. I said, "no. Tell me specifically which comments you're referring to and I'll evaluate them. Also tell your client to quit calling me." The end result is that they asked me to remove one comment with the guy's home information, and I thought that was pretty reasonable so I complied. I also got the lawyer to formally state on record that their client was not a telemarketer. I figured that if they'd pursued further legal action and it turned out that the client really was a telemarketer, it'd be handy to show a judge that they'd previously asked their lawyers to lie in writing.
The second comment was full of racial slurs. I'm a huge proponent of freedom of speech and had a hard time deciding how to handle it, but in the end decided that the poster could find their own soapbox to broadcast racism and that I wanted no part in it.
If you take any of these drugs, look them up on youtube (don't bother with webmd or anything similar as they are useless). The results might scare you.
I'm friends with a cardiologist. He told me about attending a lecture at a meeting of cardiologists. One of them was presenting research on the risk/reward of lowering LDLs, with the unambiguous result that lower LDL = better health, and that statins were a safe way to lower LDL. During the following question-and-answer, someone asked how many cardiologists in the audience were taking statins themselves even if they had acceptably low levels of LDLs, and most raised their hand.
I'm not a doctor and I'm not taking statins because I don't need them, but apparently a huge number of doctors who don't need them are taking them anyway because they've read the reports and think statins are a safe route to better health. I'm a little squeamish about the idea, but the idea of a subject matter expert betting his life on his own advice is pretty compelling evidence to me.
No, I don't have a single reference to any of that. I suppose it's possible that my friend made the whole thing up to entertain us over dinner, but don't think so.
According to Wikipedia on generic bioequivalence:
I haven't browsed NEJM recently but it seems at odds with the referenced claims on Wikipedia. If you can find the article, could you update the WP page with the new information?
I'm not asking facetiously. If there's new information, I'd love to read it. I get generics whenever possible and I'd be interested in data showing that I shouldn't be.
It will be $1.99 on the App Store with some kids giving it bad reviews and whining that it should be free.
There's something missing - a downmod of "you are factually incorrect".
I've wanted one of those before, but even that would be ripe for abuse and subject to opinion. Take the example statement: "WMDs were found in Iraq." Some people would say it's true because they think we found launcher-ready Nukes in Baghdad. Some people would say it's false because we didn't really find much interesting at all. Some people would say it's true because we did find, at the minimum, a small number old, probably non-working Sarin dispensers. In the final case, some moderators would say "that's close enough to 'none' to count as 'none', so the statement is false." Others, probably mostly programmers, would say "'almost none' is the same as 'some', so the statement is true".
For a more common example, consider "iPhones are the most popular smartphones". That's true if you compare all iPhones against particular models of other phones, but false if you compare all iPhones against all Androids. A moderator could justify their vote in either direction, even if it's likely that they voted based on whether they prefer iPhones to Androids.
Apple's MobileMe has been down more this year that RIM has in the last 10.
Asking because I genuinely don't know: how much of that MobileMe downtime has affected customer's messaging? Were the outages in, say, MobileMe's photo gallery website or in their mail system?
in 2008 Apple's MobileMe service was out for 18 days -- and that's a $99/year service!
Forgive me for quoting AT&T, but they were the only carrier who published a rate chart that I could find without digging around longer than I'm willing to. It looks like their cheapest "BlackBerry Personal" data plan is $360/year. That plan pays for more than just BlackBerry messaging, just as MobileMe includes more than just email, so I'm not sure how'd you'd calculate the relative marginal costs of those features.
iCloud and Siri have also already experienced outages
...neither of which caused messaging slowdown or delays. You keep comparing apples to oranges without comparing Apples to BlackBerries. How much have those respective companies' messaging systems - just messaging and not web hosting or cloud music storage! - been down in the last 5 years? How much do their customers pay them for just messaging - not web hosting or cloud music storage! - each year? Without that data, comparisons are meaningless.
Scientific studies indicate that little loss of effectiveness will occur if mamaograms are started at 50 for low risk groups, yet the loss of money to the insurance companies
Just for giggles: what money do you imagine that insurance companies are making from having to pay for "unnecessary" tests and the consequences of false positives? Maybe they're losing money paying for the tests and needless extra biopsies but making up for it in volume? Enlighten us.
I'm a Libertarian and I wholeheartedly support labeling laws to help you make good choices. In a grocery store, go ahead and sell a bottle of HFCS-and-MSG laced trans fats if you want. There better be a warning sign on it to let people know what they're getting into, though.
Not to mention the incredible jingoism required to believe that every country in the world but your own is too stupid to come up with a cure on their own, if such a thing were possible. If you're an American, for example, and you believe that "Big Pharma" is colluding to block a cure for something, then what you're really saying is that no other country has the ability to make that same discovery without our help and that we're single-handedly able to hold the world hostage. How arrogant can you get?
I see the value in that, but I'm not sure I understand the business case for making it easier for your customers to migrate off your system and onto your competitors. At some point, someone in an MDM-using company is likely to notice that all their users have transitioned to iPhones and Droids and will wonder why they're paying for both Exchange and the RIM software which does mostly just the same thing.
The FDA and the AMA have ulterior motives
Does the FDA and AMA equivalent in every single country in the world have both the greed-driven screw-the-patient mentality and the political power necessary to oppress legitimate cures? Every single one of them, without exception? If there were a million doctors in the world (and there are a lot more than that), and each was 99.99% likely to cooperate in suppressing the cure for a serious illness, then there would only be a 3e-44 chance of that secret being kept. Your ideas are stupid and I recommend that you keep them hidden before exposing yourself as a greater ignorant.
Steve Jobs regretted not having surgery immediately after his diagnosis. He went the alternate route first, and while medical treatment might not have cured him, it almost certainly would have helped more than basically not doing anything at all.
The rate of cancer survival in the medical industry is pretty bad ~ shouldn't the entire industry be criticized more?
When I was a kid not so long ago, Hodgkin's lymphoma was a death sentence. I remember hearing my parents speak in hushed tones about friends and acquaintances who'd been diagnosed and were trying to get their affairs in order.
Today, Wikipedia says that "In one recent European trial, the 5-year survival rate for those patients with a favorable prognosis was 98%, while that for patients with worse outlooks was at least 85%."
I'd call that progress.
What company is going to advertise drinking 8 cups of water a day to prevent cancer?
If $simple_thing cured cancer, there would no longer be cancer. Imagine countries like North Korea with zero tolerance for non-working citizens, at least in theory. If 8 cups of water could prevent you from having to leave your government-mandated job, lighten the load on health care (which is a pure cost center there), and otherwise keep you being productive rather than a drain on society, you'd be drinking a gallon of it daily at gunpoint.
That makes sense. Thanks.
This is not the website you're looking for.
I think GP answered your question. If your company needs 10 people to do a job correctly, and has hired 4 to do it, the fact that those 4 have to work ridiculous hours to get the job done is not a problem with those 4 people.
I don't understand the economics of that, either. Is it really significantly cheaper to pay one person to work 80 hours than two people to work 40 each? Are the fixed expenses like insurance so great that it makes a huge difference, and that difference is large enough to offset the churn from burning out your experienced employees?
Your backend php/asp shuold already be doing browser detection and simply swapping between mobile and big-ass-screen(tm) css leading to ONE site that services all devices.
The problem there is that your backend server might not (and for large websites probably won't) have full access to the client. Suppose your home page is served by a CDN or other web proxy, or is even just a static page so that it doesn't get overwhelmed by heavy traffic. In those situations, there's not a great way to say "serve this page to mobile visitors and this one to everyone else".
If you can pull it off, there are nice benefits from being able to hand out the same content to everyone along with instructions on how to properly display it on their particular device.