darpa_escapee

Anti-vaxxers aren't known for their critical thinking skills.

If the CDC was completely transparent, they'd find a way to spin that into evidence of anti-vax claims.

> PWAs make sense today, but back then, they just came too early in the game.

Seemed to work well enough on webOS for the Palm Pre.

This reminds me of, and has me nostalgic about, TinyApps[1].

[1] https://tinyapps.org/

Or buying cheaper phones. A Xaomi phone can suit a user's needs just as well as a $999 Samsung S10+.

I mean, that kind of begets the problem. Addiction wouldn't exist if people could control their drug use in the first place. I'm sure plenty of addictions started with "I'll only do this once" or "this is just a weekend thing".

I know someone who is incontinent because of ketamine, and yet still chooses to do it. Not exactly the least addictive drug out there.

Metrics are "will this push more users to use the mobile app/give us more ad impressions vs ???"

No. It's buggy, slow and looks terrible on a desktop/laptop. Not only does it look awful via mobile, it is practically unusable on a phone.

If they cared about usability or user experience, they wouldn't have 3 different reminders to use the Reddit app or redesign each time you visit the site, each interrupting flow or completely blocking the visible page itself. Certainly the web app wouldn't "forget" that you opted out of the redesign or log you out if they cared about user experience.

It's very clear that the redesign was an effort to more efficiently push ads to users and drive their valuation up.

Context matters.

No. The CCP has literal ownership in Chinese firms in the form of equity.

There are lot of things that should be the government's job, but aren't. In lieu of that, Google is responsible for its own actions, and Google is the one who is deciding to pay some contractors $15/hr.

> Why are so many years of studies/paperwork needed? Why not just produce the drug and let people take it (who know the above risks)? That could happen as soon as this afternoon.

We tried this and got snake-oil and Bayer Heroin. Anyone with questionable scruples who wants to make a buck will have a market of sick and desperate people who are quite literally dying to be told "maybe this will save/elongate your life".

There needs to be a check on perverse incentives, and rigorous research and clinical trials are the solution we've come up with.

Including "natural flavors" in an ingredients list is a way to incorporate any number of undisclosed substances in a product. No substance obscured by the "natural flavors" label needs to go through any safety testing or analysis[1]:

> Even the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, has concluded that the “FDA’s oversight process does not help ensure the safety of all new GRAS determinations” and that the “FDA is not systematically ensuring the continued safety of current GRAS substances.”

You need to ask yourself what a company has to gain by intentionally obscuring ingredients in their product meant to be consumed by humans, and what you have to lose by consuming it.

> Water, Soy Protein Concentrate, Coconut Oil, Sunflower Oil, Natural Flavors, 2% or less of: Potato Protein, Methylcellulose, Yeast Extract...

"Natural flavors" is the 5th ingredient by weight in the new Impossible Burger.

While I understand that this board often has a "but dihydrogen monoxide is a chemical" outlook, being skeptical about undisclosed substances in food is a valid stance.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/what-does-...

Dopamine blockade isn't significantly induced by doses of Seroquel used for sleep. Although it and its metabolites do have action at certain dopamine receptors, lower doses will first occupy other receptors that they have a higher binding affinity for. Its metabolites are partial agonists at 5HT1A autoreceptors that induce downstream release of dopamine, which theoretically reduces the risk of tardive dyskinesia from direct dopamine blockade.

If you're curious about this, Stahl's Essential Psychopharmacology textbook goes into detail about this and is written in a way that some idiot (me) on HN can grok it.

> I don't know if you're allowed to do that, maybe there is no guarantee that every grain contains the same amount of medication?

There are entire fields of material science dedicated to this problem. Generally, if a single pill is metered into smaller doses, resources went into ensuring that each dose is metered accurately. The grain form was probably for absorption or time-release.

> You should definitely get your doctor involved in this process.

Doctors are often ignorant of the need to taper benzos over a long-term period, and not rapidly. Some might see you coming to them with a problem quitting an often abused drug as a sign that you need to be taken off of it as soon as possible. Sometimes instantly.

Of course you should always let your doctor know when you're taking less medication than you're prescribed. I suggest consulting with a specialist before trying to quit with a GP or your run-of-the-mill psychiatrist.

> It was far more the over dependence on one variety and potatoes being such a large part of diet from tiny farms being so common. Presumably from having been divided too many times on inheritance.

Tenant farmers, by virtue of their tenancy, didn't inherit land that could be subdivided. Absentee landlords didn't manage their Irish properties directly, and had middlemen collect rent for them. Middlemen chose to subdivide properties in order to extract more revenue, leaving only small parcels for tenant farmers to feed themselves from.

The Wikipedia article[1] does a surprisingly good job of covering the causes of the famine:

> The middlemen leased large tracts of land from the landlords on long leases with fixed rents, which they sublet as they saw fit. They would split a holding into smaller and smaller parcels so as to increase the amount of rent they could obtain.

>...

> The 1841 census showed a population of just over eight million. Two-thirds of those depended on agriculture for their survival, but they rarely received a working wage. They had to work for their landlords in return for the patch of land they needed to grow enough food for their own families. This was the system which forced Ireland and its peasantry into monoculture, since only the potato could be grown in sufficient quantity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Causes_...

How marketable do prescription drugs need to be to have their R&D funded?

> That said, a lot of homelessness happens as a result of mental illnesses like drug addiction or schizophrenia, or degenerative diseases like Alzheimers

Those with mental illnesses who are also homeless are more visible, but the majority of those who are homeless are homeless because of financial reasons. And often, they're entire families.

For NYC[1]:

> Research shows that the primary cause of homelessness, particularly among families, is lack of affordable housing. Surveys of homeless families have identified the following major immediate, triggering causes of homelessness: eviction; doubled-up or severely overcrowded housing; domestic violence; job loss; and hazardous housing conditions.

[1] https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/basic-facts-about-ho...

The Great Irish Famine is less about potato blight and more about an economic system that saw the majority of crops grown during famine exported for profit, while those who tilled the soil were forced to rely on a single monoculture crop to sustain themselves (the potato).

> I use a Macbook and a Linux (Kubuntu 19.10) desktop, and I vastly prefer the Linux desktop for UX.

How's the battery life? I used to use Linux as my daily driver until about 2015, but grew tired of replacing batteries in laptops that weren't made to have their batteries replaced.

If the user can verify their vote, then they can be coerced to verify their vote by, say, their boss, or be bribed into voting a certain way.

Does this system address that concern?

Which is irrelevant, because session cookies don't need a warning. There is no reason to equivocate session cookies with tracking cookies.

I'm only damning MrTonyD's ignorance of politics, you're preaching to the choir.

I can think of several gas stations, liquor stores and convenience stores that sell neither nicotine gum, patches nor lozenges. They all sell cigarettes, though.

> My concern is not that e-cigs are dangerous (they might be, but they're very probably not more dangerous than actual tobacco), but that e-cigs' perceived safety might eventually get people, a lot of them, to start actually smoking.

If cigarettes are cheaper, some people who use vapes exclusively will smoke cigarettes in order to get their nicotine fix. Addiction doesn't care about price or which delivery method is healthier.

If cigarettes are more accessible, as in if you're out and your vape's battery is dies and/or it breaks and you need your fix, some people who use vapes exclusively will smoke cigarettes in order to get their nicotine fix. Addiction doesn't care about where you are or if getting your fix is inconvenient.

You can draw similarities to the opioid epidemic: if you give 'safer' prescription opioids out like candy, and then take them away, some people who used prescription opioids exclusively will move to cheaper and more accessible heroin.

Dupont, Monsanto et al. have been the target of leftist rhetoric for many decades.

We also pay for it now through taxes: uncollectible medical debt from those who can't afford to pay their medical expenses will be written off at tax time.

> Why do people take their health for granted?

This is a very myopic view, one that I guess makes you lucky to have. Health insurance is expensive. On the individual market, premiums have more than doubled between 2011 and 2018[1]. Employer-provided health insurance costs have followed a similar trend, with employee contributions increasing at a rate that outpaces employee compensation by a long shot[2].

Not only are health costs increasing at rates that far exceed compensation rates, cost of living expenses are increasing far faster than compensation rates. Average hourly compensation rates have been nearly stagnant since the 1970s[3].

[1] https://kaiserfamilyfoundation.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/9...

[2] https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/files/2012/0...

[3] https://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/dam/assets/130305161550-char...

> essentially turning all purchasers into unpaid neural network training practitioners.

Pretty sure customer data isn't uploaded en masse to train networks at Tesla.