As have the opioids buprenorphine and Suboxone (buprenorphine/naloxone), which are genuinely useful treatments for addiction and have much lower risks of abuse.
213 karma · joined May 25, 2015
This is true of some early opioids like heroin, but with e.g. Oxycontin the problem wasn’t a stronger opioid, it's how it ended up being prescribed.
Purdue's marketing led doctors to prescribe it to more people, in higher doses, and for longer. Oxycontin isn't inherently more dangerous than the dose of immediate release oxycodone or morphine that would have an equivalent effect.
Innovation in opioids shouldn't just be written off. They're still the best (and sometimes the only effective) treatment for a huge number of people, and some new opioids like buprenorphine/combos like Suboxone have real advantages.
The lesson from Oxycontin is more about deceptive marketing and prescribing practices.
They have the same effect in that they reduce what employees take home in a given labour market. Employees are effectively paying them in the same way that people who buy alcohol/cigarettes effectively pay more in states with higher taxes on those items (even though the taxes are technically paid by the stores).
If CA eliminated all income taxes and instead had employers remit the same effective rate for all salaried employees, employers would just reduce salaries accordingly.
As another example, France's income tax rates cap out around/below some high tax US states. But France is still a comparatively high tax jurisdiction largely because they also impose massive payroll taxes on employers which effectively reduce employee wages.
What kind of markets is this referring to?
Polymarket still charges 0 fees. While Kalshi's fees+spread can approach or even exceed traditional sportsbooks on some markets, neither of them have any interest in banning winning players, as they don't take a side on any bet and directly benefit from more betting activity. Kalshi also pays interest on bets, which can add up on longer term positions.
Betfair has operated with a similar model for decades in the UK and elsewhere.
There's lots of evidence that tips vary significantly based on the traits of the customer (like the customer's self-esteem and sense of shame: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/ijchm-02...) and the employee asking for the tip (e.g. attractiveness and simple demographic characteristics: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01674...).
>As a basic if unsophisticated measure of the accuracy of the betting markets, the favorite almost always won, the only exception being in 1916 when betting initially favored the eventual loser (Hughes) but swung to even odds by the time the polls closed. In the 15 elections between 1884 and 1940, the mid-October betting favorite won 11 times (73 percent) and the underdog won only once (when in 1916 Wilson upset Hughes on the West Coast). In the remaining three contests (1884-92), the odds were essentially even throughout and the races very close.
https://users.wfu.edu/strumpks/papers/BettingPaper_final(JEP...
DHT damages the hair follicles that are sensitive to it, causing them to grow back thinner after each growth and shedding cycle (which is typically a few years). As a result most men don't have visible hair loss until years after puberty kicks in.
Androgenetic hair loss (what Johnson has and what the medications he takes are designed to treat) is caused by genetic sensitivity to DHT and DHT levels in the body, not aging. People who don't have the genetic predisposition to AGA or who have very low DHT levels can often make it to 60+ with no visible hair loss. It's not like they're "not aging," they just don't have the combination of genes and DHT levels needed for significant hair loss to occur.
"The full range of incomes exist in every country, therefore differences in average incomes across countries must be negligible."
You've linked a long list of articles talking about race in America and Brazil, none of which I can see claim that there are no differences in genetic height by ethnic group. One is a book from 1944 that rightly rejects racially discriminatory policies and argues "that experience rather than inborn traits determines standards of social conduct." What part of that supports the idea that the 6' Tutsis or Croats are genetically predisposed to the same height as the Taron who average 4'3?
The MedlinePlus article you linked explicitly says "in some cases, ethnicity plays a role in adult height."
"Race" categories as described by all of your links that I saw ("black"/"white") are crude aggregations of hundreds of ethnic groups. Tutsis and Pygmies are both "African," but at the opposite extremes of human height. Framing the genetics of height in terms of American racial politics makes no sense.
>The source of the ideas you're asserting as fact are very dark and extremely thoroughly debunked at this point. Honestly it's kind of shameful to present these 1920s ideas as modern.
The "source of the ideas" are the peer-reviewed journals of PLoS Genet and Nature Genetics based on landmark genetic research published in 2012 and 2020. As in hundreds of other peer reviewed studies that have identified genetic markers responsible for height and how those markers vary across populations, including articles you yourself linked without apparently reading.
>Every single variation in "genetic trends" amongst cultures is negligible and otherwise entirely attributable to environmental factors.
Is the vastly higher rate of sickle cell anemia among people of West African descent is either "negligible and otherwise entirely attributable to environmental factors"? Is it simply Europeans' "environment" that causes them to go bald and get skin cancer at rates dozens of times higher than people of East Asian descent growing up in the same countries?
One group in all of humanity happened to have measurable differences in genes affecting height?
How does that explain the many other distinct "Pygmy" groups entirely separate from those in West Africa, such as those in the Philippines, who have genetic differences in growth hormones that cause them to be shorter (https://doi.org/10.1515/JPEM.2002.15.3.269)? "Pygmy" simply refers to one of these many groups, they are genetically and geographically distinct.
Pygmy groups show how absurd the claim that there are no differences in height is, but the same kind of variation has been shown within European groups on a smaller scale (consistent with the greater genetic diversity in Africa than Europe). We know that similar differences in genes that influence height exist, to a less extreme degree, across all populations. For example, males in both the Tutsi and Dinka ethnic groups average nearly 6' tall, despite living in areas where malnutrition is/was widespread and alongside other groups that are much shorter on average.
I'm genuinely curious where you got the idea that there are no genetic differences affecting height between ethnic groups/countries. Researchers have identified genetic markers responsible for the majority of variation in human height among Europeans (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/588020v1), and shown that those markers vary significantly across European groups just as they do in Africa (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3480734/).
I don't see cultures mentioned anywhere in the article or the comment you replied to.
If mean that there are no differences in the genes that determine height across populations, that is incorrect. For example, the average male height in Pygmy populations is 5 feet, or about 7 inches lower than Cameroon's Bantu populations who live alongside Pygmies. We know there are genetic differences between Pygmy and Bantu populations that are specifically associated with height, and that average Pygmy height increases along with the percentage of Bantu ancestry (https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article/info%3Adoi%2F...). Similarly, differences in height across European populations have been demonstrated to be partly due to differences in the hundreds of genes associated with height (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3480734/).
We know that severe mental (and even physical) symptoms can "spread" in social groups (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness), particularly among young women who are now experiencing the sharpest rises in mental illness. There is also strong evidence that affective states (e.g. happiness or depression) spread socially, with even next-door neighbors of depressed people being significantly more likely to be depressed than those on the same block but not next-door (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3830455/).
While the TikTok Tourette's phenomenon is clearly an extreme example, it seems possible that something similar could be happening to kids constantly hearing about anxiety and depressive disorders as an immutable trait that everyone around them seems to have.
Exercise is important, but walking can only do so much when the average American eats almost seven Big Macs worth of calories daily (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_ener...). You can have a Big Mac meal with fries and evil HFCS soda three times a day and still eat fewer calories than the average American. An extra mile a day of walking burns about 100 calories, or just over 1 Oreo.
Quantitative measures can only give you so much information about a student. GPA is questionably useful past a point, where it starts to have more to do with grade inflation and gaming the system than differences in hard work or ability.
That leaves the SAT, which is far more of a level playing field than things like extracurriculars or "personal statements" that also end up reflecting your social class and ability to play the admissions game more than ability. Yet admitting students based solely on a single standardized test seems to disincentivize working hard at other pursuits that may actually bring more to the classroom than slightly higher test scores.
If 4 companies owned 100% of the property and in a region (as Visa/Mastercard/Discover/Amex do in the credit card industry) and worked together to limit the rights of people they disagree with to protest, you'd have a better point. That's clearly not the case. When you kick someone out of a store, they have the ability to protest anywhere else, and those are very real alternatives. I can grant you that that still limits the protester's speech to a small degree, but the ability to easily protest in many other ways mitigates the harm of that limitation. By contrast, people that are locked out of payments platforms have no alternative.
Similarly, if Walgreen's and CVS had a total oligopoly on pharmacies and colluded to exclude people based on political views, that would be a strong argument to regulate them.
Similarly, I'm not "harmed" as a Stripe user when an OnlyFans model or someone whose politics Stripe's executives disagree with receiving payments through the same platform. If there is a higher objective economic cost, pass that on through fees and stop trying to force the moral views of a few tech executives on everyone in the country.
A more cynical explanation is that where levoamphetamine and dextroamphetamine alone were not patentable, a new combination of the two (as Adderall is) was patentable, making it more profitable to research.
ADHD is a collection of symptoms that differ enough across individuals that it's almost certain some patients genuinely do respond better to different combinations of drugs.
Adderall is still 75% Dextroamphetamine, but I haven't seen much literature on why it would be preferred over drugs like Vyvanse that include no Levoamphetamine.
Not to mention forcing even those who do somehow have massive amounts of cash or go into major debt to lock up all of that in an asset that historically underperforms productive investments (stocks), and putting their entire net worth in a single asset with no diversification whatsoever.
Even with the recent run up in real estate prices, housing is generally a terrible investment compared to stocks or actual productive investment vehicles. Even if there weren't massive transaction costs in buying and selling housing, which your proposal would force people to incur every time they move, it would force everyone to lock up their money in an objectively worse investment because you fetishize home ownership.
Taking your principle at face value, the same would be true of cars. Car rental agencies "add nothing of value to society" by simply renting out something they own that could otherwise be owned by the person using it. Should we force people to buy cars every time they travel somewhere and need one to get around?
Maybe a better analogy given this is HN is renting computing power. Why should companies like AWS be able to profit from "adding nothing of value to society," i.e. simply renting out server space/computing power?
Respectfully, this proposal shows a serious lack of economic understanding that seems important to have before making extreme policy proposals.
As with gender dysphoria, patients flipped from being majority male to overwhelmingly female in just a few years. They also tended to know others with the symptoms either directly, or from social media feeds whose algorithms fed them more and more content around the topic.
As one example of such differences that we know of for certain, the ratio of patients seeking these procedures who are male vs. female has shifted massively from before the past 5 years. Even ignoring all the observed differences, the simple fact that it was once much harder to access treatment would mean those observed in older studies would be more motivated or certain of their condition, on average, than patients undergoing treatment today.
In the same period, hospitals saw an influx of patients of the same age who believed they had symptoms of Tourettes (https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-are-developing-tics-...). Johns Hopkins estimated this included up to 20% of their pediatric patients, compared to 2-3% just 2 years earlier. Much like the rise in transgender minors, this was strongly concentrated in young females with other mental health issues who had been exposed to "Tourettes content" on social media. This is despite Tourettes being about 3x more common in males prior to the recent explosion in cases.
There are clearly people who genuinely benefit from surgical/hormonal treatments for gender dysphoria. In any case, adults without major psychiatric issues have the right to most hormonal and/or cosmetic procedures should they wish to get them.
It's still worrying how vehemently many activists oppose any questioning of such a massive rise in minors seeking life-altering treatments and implicitly or explicitly promising vulnerable kids that such treatments are the solution for their problems.
At least with measurable indicators of mental health crises like suicide rates, groups that are worst off by most socioeconomic measures tend to have lower suicide rates. For example, the black suicide rate in the US is less than half the white suicide rate and have been through Jim Crow laws and generally much lower SES. From what I've seen, the same is true when comparing across countries, with suicide rates being positively correlated with GDP and income.
Is the (US) government pushing this directly through financial incentives?
Regardless, the issue here is less about partisan social media censorship and more to do with journalists, who Wikipedia relies on to provide factual reporting of all significant news, showing how readily they would support censorship and ignoring a story based on its political impact.