boldlybold

I disagree. Not with the facts stated, but your interpretation of them. With defined risk positions, the risks are easy to understand. Of course you can't compete with the institutions, but should that be a reason not to invest at all?

Again, with defined risk positions there is no way you can blow up an account. Options expiring worthless works for you if you're a net seller. Others have written extensively about strategies: https://earlyretirementnow.com/2019/03/27/passive-income-thr...

This is not something someone should do without the prior research. It's not for everyone. But compared to something like opening a small business (which I haven't done, but would consider very risky) at least in this "business" your risk can be defined.

If you enjoy investing and can spend some time learning about trading options, it can provide a nice income stream in a taxable account. Somewhere around 0.5-1.0% income a month is possible and reasonable without taking on extreme risk.

Income from options on indices or futures is subject to 60/40 long/short term capital gains tax and really helps keep the tax costs down.

Is there a reason why overlapping blocks are not extended into a single block? With a few clicks and drags you can create a mess of a schedule.

If you enjoy a paper you read, email the first or corresponding author and say so! It would make my day if this happened to me, a PhD student.

Giving back doesn't have to be monetary. A note like that could give someone the encouragement they need to finish an experiment or a draft.

That's really not outside the realm of possibility for something to change the microbiome. That's a quarter pound of bread, two servings and about 280 kcal on the loaf I have in front of me. That's a reasonable amount for someone to consume as part of a normal diet.

We know small changes in diet can have a large effect on the microbiome. For example, adding seaweed to a mouse diet can select for microbes with the ability to digest particular polysaccharides within seaweed (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0092-4). A company spun out of the Sonnenburg lab at Stanford is using this tech for microbiome therapeutics in humans (Novome). Those mice were given 10% seaweed by weight, so that serving of sourdough is right in the same range.

My point is, the researchers designing these experiments know what they're doing, and they're well thought out. You can't criticize something if you don't know the details of the field.

The argument is that antibiotics are not going to be a attractive target for any pharma, big or small. If you develop a new antibiotic that kills resistant bacteria effectively, it's going to be an antibiotic of last resort, heavily regulated and rarely used. Less profitable. Without government interventions to incentivize development of new antibiotics, I don't believe we'll see pharma take on the challenge alone.

Meanwhile, we've seen that Hep C cures can be (extremely) profitable. See also Luxterna (gene therapy for inherited blindness).

Using phages to treat infections (phage therapy) has traditionally been suppressed in the West, but is making a comeback with a few high-profile case studies in recent years. Tom Patterson had an atb resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infection that was cured with phages [1]. His wife wrote a book about it (The Perfect Predator) that is a good read review of the field. More recently, a patient with cystic fibrosis was cured of a Mycobacterium abscessus infection with phage therapy [2].

These therapies are currently very expensive and time consuming, as they require custom testing of libraries of phage against the specific microbial isolate. There have not been any successful large scale clinical trials yet.

For a good review of the field (but behind academic paywall), see [3]

[1] https://aac.asm.org/content/61/10/e00954-17 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0437-z [3] https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(1...

Point (2) is no longer true as of 2017 (in the US, 2006 in the EU) [1]. I'm happy to see the FDA getting on top of this regulation. Now let's end careless spraying of antibiotics on crops. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#Un...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/health/antibiotics-orange...

Thanks for that link. I'm just starting to explore the biking roads around here and the history is interesting.

Read some of the research on psychedelic medicine, and come back to your post. People's lives have been changed by this, long term. Adults with autism, PTSD, substance abuse, end-of-life cancer patients with terrible anxiety.

It doesn't matter what the culture behind these substances is. They work for the people that need them. The results should speak for themselves.