Making a note of Samsung; I've had the worst time looking for large, dumb monitors. I've returned about 4 now due to the obnoxious boot times, incompatibility, menu trees, ads(!), etc.
GLP1s have been on the market for at least a decade, they’re pretty well studied at this point. Their sudden popularity is due to the FDA allowing it to be prescribed for obesity (instead of diabetes), not the discovery of a new drug.
> Their sudden popularity is due to the FDA allowing it to be prescribed for obesity (instead of diabetes), not the discovery of a new drug.
That's not true. I started on liraglutide, which is a previous-gen GLP-1 agonist. It was approved for that purpose in early 2010-s. It worked, but it required daily injections due to its short half-life. It also was unpleasant, as you could feel its effects wax and wane throughout the day.
Ozempic was approved for diabetes in 2018, but became available in sufficient quantities for that purpose in 2019. Doctors started prescribing it off-label for weight loss in 2020 (that's when I also got switched to it), and it was approved by the FDA for weight-loss in mid-2021.
So while we could have moved faster, it's not like there were decades of time lost.
Wait a sec. Something which provides such an unambiguous quality of life upgrade by addressing one of the biggest health problems in the country, is only now available because of regulations?
Seems wild right? Would you believe that there’s a male contraceptive that’s been actively used in other countries successfully for over a decade, is easily and painlessly reversible, and non-hormonal?
It took the FDA four years to pull Thalidomide from the market. Hell, it was OTC in the early days and often prescribed for morning sickness.
They're more cautious now when it comes to pregnancy related drugs. As someone who was not born with flippers instead of hands, I'm pretty happy about that.
> It took the FDA four years to pull Thalidomide from the market.
BZZT! Wrong.
Thalidomide had _never_ been approved in the USA for the morning sickness, thanks to the FDA. The only pregnant people receiving it were getting experimental pre-approval samples (now illegal) and during the clinical trials. See, for example: https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/fda-did-not-appro...
You're correct, I was mistaken. Although my mistake may actually help to support my stance.
It was used, and marketed, for morning sickness primarily in other countries (Germany in particular). It's an important distinction, because the US FDA actually stopped it's approval in the US. It seems that "only" about 20,000 American study participants were given the drug at that time. So more than half of the dead/deformed babies came from Germany.
Had the German equivalent of the FDA prevented the drug from going to market many babies might not have been born with deformities.
There are VERY good reasons to be slow in approving drugs that might impact a fetus.
This is just an ad for Signal. There’s nothing really coherent about her take, she just sees the entire world through the lens of surveillance so she’s trying to shoehorn today’s hot topic into that narrative as well.
It doesn't mean she is wrong. Survelliance to AI is what senses are to us. Without the streams of information from our senses our consciousness would turn blank. Similarly, the AI of the future will need connection to the world outside it to create a world inside.
What they’re doing is “sensing” my secrets… which they’ll sell to people who want to east my time so they can maybe sell me things.
Mark Zuckerberg, or his ilk, is actively shirking responsibility for what those ads say. And even when they know they do harm, they still aren’t moved to act. That’s the safety guarantee at the end of sensing.
It’s way worse than surveillance. It just also includes it.
This blows my mind that they're actually pursuing this, the two complaints are that they schemed to decrease competition among landlords and that they monopolized commercial revenue management software. Both are completely bogus.
You could say the entire profession of appraising real estate prices "decreases competition" if the first complaint is valid.
And they certainly haven't monopolized the software space, I'd never even heard of RealPage until the lawsuit, I used Rentometer. There are dozens more, predicting rent prices is hardly a novel idea.
I think that was like one of the toy problems in Andrew Ng's online ML course.
It’s amazing your confidence when it sounds like you don’t even participate in the top N landlord space for a given market.
IIRC it has already been demonstrated that RealPage had the lion shares of the total units in certain markets.
The question is not about rent predictions but having asymmetric information that allows users of the site to effectively participate as a cartel. I am a big proponent of free markets but I think this is a worthy question to answer. When your algorithm controls more than 50% of pricing in a market does that count as collusion and how do you handle it. It seems like it might effectively eliminate the market price as you the dominant player are setting it.
It might get thrown out but I believe it’s naive and brash to just dismiss it so easily.
I'm glad these questions are being raised and bringing more awareness. I always suspected there was something that was going on to artificially raise rent prices. It sounds like collusion to me.
If you think being in the landlord is tough, try getting a job.
I mean seriously, being a landlord is just owning something. At best, you do the work of a handyman, and get paid orders of magnitude more for that work. And if you're the average landlord, a handyman does a lot more work and does a better job because they actually have to compete. Being a landlord isn't hard, it's absurdly easy compared to the income it yields.
If you're the average landlord, you hire people to maintain the building and deal with the tenants. Rich people constantly try to convince everyone that owning things is a job. If buying a business forces you to work operating it, it's because you couldn't afford the business outright, so instead you're paying it off with sweat equity.
Certainly nothing wrong with buying a job, it's positively Jeffersonian, but the reason you're working there is because you couldn't afford anyone else.
Being a landlord is just feudalism. Most of the terminology is still the same.
I think being a landlord is pretty much the easiest business ever. As compared to real businesses, who really produce products and really participate in competitive markets.
Landlord is about luck of the tenants. A bad tenant will destroy your property costing you a lot of money. A bad tenant will not pay thus forcing you to have your property earning nothing for months until you can legally evict them. If you don't have enough tenants you lose money because you still have to pay your costs (the bank for your loan, maintenance...).
You can make a lot of money but it isn't easy money. (particularly in the early years, once you have the property paid for it is much easier)
Easy, you outsource your tenant management to a company that does that sort of thing. There's many highly reliable methods to get good tenants. Outsourcing to a company that specializes in that works because you're already making free money by being a landlord, so now you just make less free money.
None of them are taking on the risk of what the tenant isn't paying or you don't have one. Landlord also isn't free money. You have a lot of bills to pay.
You have negative bills to pay, because you get money purely by virtue of having those bills.
Landlord is not a job, it's a state of ownership. Owning a company is not a job either. Being a CEO is! And you can be both. But simply owning something is not a job.
You can say property management is hard, and maybe it is. That's a separate thing and the VAST majority of landlords actually don't manage their property. So being a landlord is very, very easy.
People don’t refrain from being landlords because it’s hard. I’ve seen people being landlords up close, it’s not. No, people refrain from being landlords because it’s so incredibly expensive to get started. Especially at a time where people are struggling to pay their own damned rent or mortgage, the cost of a second property is completely out of the question.
That first article entirely revolves around some random finance bro’s idle speculation in a YouTube comment. It blows my mind that people are so trusting of obvious guess work given that it’s a privately held company that’s not disclosing their financials.
> That first article entirely revolves around some random finance bro’s idle speculation in a YouTube comment.
I'm not sure that's a wholly accurate description? The article appears to point to sources beyond that singular comment - in particular, ostensible internal financial information:
> Ferguson based his assessment on internal second-quarter figures recently obtained by the New York Times. According to this report, X booked $114 million worth of revenue in the U.S., its largest market by far. This represented a 25% drop over the preceding three months and a 53% drop over the year-ago period.
> That already sounds bad. But it gets worse. The last publicly available figures prior to Musk’s acquisition, from Q2 of 2022, had revenue at $661 million. After you account for inflation, revenue has actually collapsed by 84%, in today’s dollars.
That's a misconception of what the LP are for though (in my opinion). They exist to provide a shared vocabulary that helps with meetings/interviews/reviews. "Deliver results/bias for action" are often at odds with "insist on the highest standards", same with "disagree and commit" and "ownership". The point is to get people to hash out the difference in opinions along 12 (the other 2 are atrocities) axis that give a direction to the discussion.
I've heard "I think this decision is not customer obsessed and we need to do better" in a lot of meetings. Make fun of the LPs all you want (I really get it), but they are definitely a net positive in the day-to-day.
I’m not making fun of them, I really like them. I also appreciate the shared vocabulary; in conversations with good actors they’re very beneficial.
However, I stand by my statement that they’re abused for propagating one’s own agenda.
Like you said there are adversarial LPs, and sometimes there is a clear winner but the opposing side can masquerade behind the opposing LP and make it seem like they’re in good faith.
They’re a net benefit for sure, but it really works best when you don’t have bad actors (I guess that’s probably true for all paradigms though).
Every attempt I’ve made to interact with Lexis Nexis has been a nightmare.
Honestly though, what does a publisher of laws do these days? Couldn’t the government just say “actually we’re gonna take over publishing”, throw the PDF in S3 and call it a day?
