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User: SNRatio

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Comments · 235

  1. Re:That's not true. Keytones are a thing. on The World's Leading Cause of Death? A Bad Diet (nbc12.com) · · Score: 1

    Blither blather. Sources that compare all cause mortality rates between different diets?

  2. Re:Curious that this is news in /. on The US Just Had the Most Q1 Layoffs in a Decade (axios.com) · · Score: 1

    Certainly looks happier than the labor participation rate, so yeah, stick with that.

  3. Of all the news outlets that covered this story this weekend ... USA Today? Really? https://www.newyorker.com/maga...

  4. Re:Can't innovate on Toyota Is Losing the Electric Car Race, So It Pretends Hybrids Are Better · · Score: 1

    I think you are conflating fun and innovation. They spend ~$10B a year on R&D, but they're more into robotics, AI, autonomous vehicles, and materials chemistry than 0-60.

  5. Oh My God! Your math is impeccable because there is No Way to plug-in at Anyones work!

    this whole argument seems pointless: horses for courses, full stop. But on this point: to a first (>90%) approximation: no, there is no plug in space for your car at work.

  6. Re:Desiderata verus Requirements on DARPA Is Building a $10 Million, Open Source, Secure Voting System (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    You can take a picture of your paper ballot to prove how you voted.

  7. Re:Innocent until proven guilty. on Tufts Expelled a Student For Grade Hacking. She Claims Innocence (techcrunch.com) · · Score: 1

    Colleges are basically corporations: they have an HR department, not a true court system. And HR's job is to defend the company, not the employee.

  8. Re:Inconclusive Alibis on Tufts Expelled a Student For Grade Hacking. She Claims Innocence (techcrunch.com) · · Score: 1

    and adjusted all of their grades in order to create uncertainty about which of them was the hacker.

    The probability of the hacking getting discovered goes up with the number of records hacked, so maybe not the best CYA strategy.

  9. Re:I guess it's too late for their study on Is Bad Customer Service More Profitable Than Good? (hbr.org) · · Score: 1

    Google for anything but heavily overpaid corporate support is a good example of this. Have you ever found a problem with a Google Service and tried to report or have it fixed?

    Are you talking about the services Google gives you for free (search) or services you pay them for (adwords)?

  10. Poor study design on Listening To Music May Be Damaging Your Creativity (newatlas.com) · · Score: 1

    It should have compared the performance of people listening to the music they choose to listen to while working vs other stuff. Why expect that impersonally chosen music would be other than distracting? Another big problem: assuming performance on any single task or group of tasks makes a good proxy for "creativity".

  11. Re:Shouldn't we wait on Elon Musk Should Be Held In Contempt For Tweet, SEC Tells Judge (fastcompany.com) · · Score: 1

    to dot the "i": Musk said in a TV interview that he doesn't always follow the rule.

  12. Re:Lifetime Warranty on Goldman Sachs Asks: 'Is Curing Patients a Sustainable Business Model?' (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Unless the cure is for a chronic disease, F that (says the pharma). If you catch another cold or another cancer you pay for another cure. A cast cures your broken bone; it doesn't keep you from breaking it again.

  13. I think the paper presents an argument that Goldman was shorting Gilead or was otherwise interested in its stock price dropping last year. It doesn't make much of a point when it comes to profit potential of cures vs treatments. Cures win, hands down.

  14. I doubt it's that simple. Pharmas would make much more money from cures than they can from treatments for just about any serious (life threatening or debilitating/chronic) disease. Case in point: Goldman brought up Gilead's Sofosbuvir. Gilead sold $58 billion worth, with a 25 billion dollar profit, over 5 years. That's $5B year profit. Compare that to the average treatment: Each new drug takes on average $6B to bring to market (calculated by taking the number of drugs brought to market and dividing by the total R&D spend of pharmas and biotechs that released at least one of them). But the vast majority of those drugs bring in $1B of revenue or less in their first 5 years. Very few will ever be anywhere near as profitable as Sofosbuvir, even if you project out to 10 years and don't take into account how incredibly valuable it is to make money now rather than later, especially in a highly risky market like Pharma. And Goldman certainly didn't bother to compare the total revenue for Sofosbuvir against the revenue of the treatments it displaced.

    My bet is the Goldman didn't care at all about cure vs treatment. They probably just made a huge bet that Gilead's stock would drop and wanted to make certain it did by pushing this story.

  15. Ah , the My Campaign Needs More Dollars Act on GAO Gives Congress Go-ahead For a GDPR-like Privacy Legislation (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    It'll be a good way to get some of the wealthiest companies on earth to help re-elect everyone who opposes it.

  16. Re:Only removed when "discovered" on The Mystery Tracks Being 'Forced' on Spotify Users (musicbusinessworldwide.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting
    A few years ago if you looked on Amazon you could find 13 Kindle genre fiction books about "stormed linoleum: "Emperor of the Stormed Linoleum", "Lash of the Stormed Linoleum", "Linoleum of the Stormed Runelord", etc.

    The books themselves were full of gibberish. Each of them was by a different author, but each of those authors wrote nothing but nonsense titles full of gibberish like:

    "Everyone else forecast they?d find yourself collectively and partnered by the point they certainly were twenty. Well, they predicted correct; not in how they believed it can result. One-day within their sixteenth seasons, problems get a somewhat dreadful change, and products transform permanently."

    The scam worked because back then kindle Unlimited paid out by how many pages you read ... but it measured this by recording the furthest page visited in the book. The genuinely curious would open the book, see the beginning was gibberish, then check further in to see if it was still gibberish. Plus I'm sure bots with Kindle Unlimited accounts "read" quite a few.

    There is still one of these titles up:

    https://www.amazon.com/Way-Sto...

  17. Gmail saved him as much as 60 hours per year on 'I Stopped Using a Computer Mouse For a Week and It Was Amazing' (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    I spend at least 60 hours a year waiting for Gmail to load. I'm getting close to that now for Google Drive too.

  18. The free market solution will be everyone buying 2.4, 5.4, and 5.8 GHz jammers on Ebay or Alibaba and turning them on as soon as someone annoys them. That should make wifi reception fun.

  19. Re:All the same a good government requirement on Hospital Prices Are About To Go Public in the US (ajc.com) · · Score: 1

    And people older than 65 are already in the government plan, because no private company wants to provide coverage for them.

    I agree with most of what you said, but people over 65 end up with private insurance to help pay for the things Medicare doesn't (Medigap).

  20. How about this as a simple principle: parity.

    Parity in amount: The class receives as much money as the attorneys. Distribution costs are split evenly between the attorneys and the class.

    Parity in time: The attorneys aren't paid until the class is paid. If the settlement for the class is in the form of a trust that pays out over time (say for medical expenses as they are incurred), the attorneys are paid proportionately over time as well. Yes, attorneys would prefer to be paid immediately in a lump sum: after all, they fronted the cost for bringing the suit. They will of course have the right to sell the revenue stream to a third party for a lump sum.

    Parity in kind: If the class receives coupons, the attorneys receive coupons too. If they would prefer cash, they are welcome to sell their coupons to people willing to buy them.

    I think class action lawyers should be paid, and be paid well. But that should come with the understanding that the lawyers are tying their interests extremely tightly to the groups they are serving. I can see an exception for situations where the settlement is largely about preventing future harm to the public, and a judge being allowed to factor that in to attorneys' fees. But in general: if the class gets cut, their lawyers should need stitches too.

  21. Re:Careful wording on UK Cyber Security Agency Backs Apple, Amazon China Hack Denials (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    In the US, can companies be granted immunity from civil suits if they lie to investors under direction of FBI, NSA, MIB, etc.? I know, warrant canaries. But if at some point the government became able to compel falsification of warrant canaries, would we ever know absent discovery in a shareholder lawsuit that was made public?

  22. Supportive care is great - so long as it's available. Keeping excess capacity on hand to treat a significant percentage of the population in a short period of time would be quite expensive and require someone to pay for national stockpiles of items with short shelf lives - so we don't do it.

  23. Re:its in marketing...duh. on Bill Gates Argues 'Supply and Demand' Doesn't Apply To Software (gatesnotes.com) · · Score: 4, Informative
    Sigh. RTFA. He makes the same points you do. Then defines why intangible products are different:

    Haskel and Westlake outline four reasons why intangible investment behaves differently: It’s a sunk cost. If your investment doesn’t pan out, you don’t have physical assets like machinery that you can sell off to recoup some of your money. It tends to create spillovers that can be taken advantage of by rival companies. Uber’s biggest strength is its network of drivers, but it’s not uncommon to meet an Uber driver who also picks up rides for Lyft. It’s more scalable than a physical asset. After the initial expense of the first unit, products can be replicated ad infinitum for next to nothing.

  24. Re: High carb shortens life too on Low-Carb Diets Could Shorten Life, Study Suggests (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Counting calories works for everyone. .

    You're assuming that counting calories leads to a sustained decrease in caloric intake over a long period of time. That simply does not happen for the vast majority of people, even if you are only looking at the people strongly motivated to lose weight.

  25. Re:Doing Exactly What Musk Wanted Them To Do on Short-Sellers Sue Tesla After Musk's 'Going Private' Tweets (bbc.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    In Musk's position, I would want to depose the short-sellers. Especially the ones behind a lot of the artificial bad publicity, and their business partners, etc. And now Musk gets to do that, without actually having to bring any suit against the shorts. At least, not yet. Once he has their depositions, maybe. Watch them attempt to avoid getting on the stand.

    Would that line of inquiry be allowed in this case? If so, why? I think all the short sellers have to do is establish their positions and their losses. Whether or not a particular shortseller tried to mislead/manipulate investors just isn't relevant to a suit about whether Musk misled/manipulated investors. If Musk's lawyers attempt to go in that direction I think they will just get told to pound sand.