Consumers can directly buy alcohol and tobacco, they cannot buy prescription drugs directly. If there is a problem isn't the primary culprit the prescriber?
If consumers can't even buy these drugs, why do the direct marketing at all? Are you trying to suggest the consumer doesn't have much weight in the prescribing decisions of their doctors?
Clearly the pharmaceutical companies think there's a strong reason to directly market these drugs to consumers even if they can't directly purchase these drugs. The ads almost always say "ask your doctor about..." not "think about prescribing x to your patients..." If these ads didn't do much the industry wouldn't be spending billions of dollars on them.
>If these ads didn't do much the industry wouldn't be spending billions of dollars on them.
Thats speculative. Companies spend exorbitant amounts of money on things they lose money on all the time. What's not speculative is consumers cant buy the drugs themselves. They might ask doctors about it, but if the doctors are misprescribing that's on them or their training and not the consumer.
You're acting as if people shopping around for doctors to get whatever pills they want isn't a thing. That consumers will ask their first GP about a drug, get told no, and then drop it to never ask again.
What's not speculative is consumers will find a way to buy the things they want to buy, and advertising has some amount of influence on purchasing decisions of most consumers.
Either way, can you draw this back to allowing or disallowing direct to consumer prescription drug advertising? Are you honestly suggesting the billions spent on drug advertising has no impact on drug sales?
Sure it might have an impact, but again the culpability of harm isn't on the consumer or advertiser. If people able to shop around for doctors to get any prescription then isn't that the problem, not the advertisement?
It doesn't matter if the adverts have an impact on sales, if it does then doctors are to blame, tv adverts cant prescribe people medication.
If we had heroin advertisements on TV showing how great life is while doing heroin, just ask your doctor, would you still say there is no culpability of harm on the company paying for the ads (the same company supplying all the heroin to the market)? And then remember, actually that was reality, they just didn't call it heroin.
If consumers didn't have in your face advertising about how this new magical wonderdrug will solve all your life problems and you'll be happy again just like all these paid actors, you think they'd still be shopping around doctors as hard? You think they'd even know to shop around for that wonderdrug or pressure their doctor to try it?
Do you think people's decisions to shop around for doctors has zero relation to the drug advertisements they see on TV, on billboards, on the side of busses, in magazines, on the radio, on websites, etc?
Do you think people would still buy as much Coca Cola if they stopped advertising?
With your logic we might as well allow marketing of tobacco to minors again. After all, stores aren't legally allowed to sell it to the minors, so it's just a fault of the stores and the kids.
Do you think we as a society are better off or worse off having pharmeceuticals directly advertised to consumers?
Why are prescription drug ads bad? Its not like consumers can prescribe or buy it for themselves.
If there is a problem with overconsumption or misuse of prescription drugs isn't the blame on the medical professionals that prescribe them? Ads to the general public seems far down on the list of culprits here.
The strategy of "making it increasingly hard to resist the pressure, increasing the pressure and then blaming the group of people for failing to resist the predictable pressure" fails.
Eventually, doctors that resist the pressure loose in the market, because they end up less liked and more criticized. And that is about it.
>Eventually, doctors that resist the pressure loose in the market, because they end up less liked and more criticized. And that is about it.
Sounds like the incentives for doctors are misaligned. They shouldnt be subject to market demand for improper prescribing, for example that should be offset by fines or license revocation for misprescribing. Consumers cant be expected to know if a treatment is appropriate, so they consult doctors and if doctors are swayed by financial incentives to prescribe thats on the doctors.
>Is there some good reason for this approach (need to get config updates into the wild as quickly as possible to combat zero-days or zero-hours?) or was this just a massive oversight?
I'm curious of this too. Has there ever been a scenario where zero-days could have caused so much damage that it'd warrant this speediness in patching? In a cost-benefit analysis would it justify x% of patches like this happening in preventing whatever security issues could occur without this type of infrastructure?
I don't think that necessarily is a a bad thing. Just because someone can theoretically afford a mortgage payment now its pretty difficult to predict say 5+ years out whether or not that steady job will hold, especially if they're young and have a short credit history. The down payment adds a cushion for that risk. There's less inherent risk to renting, you're looking at a commitment of 6 months to a max of maybe 2 years for most least terms.
Being too risky with handing out mortgages is partly what lead to the housing bubble in 2008 afterall.
If they're really certain their job will be stable long term PMIs shouldn't really be a deterrent, most PMI can be terminated after meeting 20% in equity.
> Being too risky with handing out mortgages is partly what lead to the housing bubble in 2008 afterall.
Being aggressively risky with little downside was a bigger root.
I worked in a mortgage comp for a bit before the big crash. "You want a 150% loan-to-value loan, no money down, no intention of proving income or ability to repay... sure, that'll be 7% instead of 5%. Sign on the dotted line..."
I was blown away when I learned about 'no down, no doc' loans, which... yes, it's another variation, but... the interest rate was all of ~2% higher, which seemed in no way to cover the risk. But no one cared, because everything was just sold to someone else, and packaged up in to CDOs, and resold again.
Someone who has 'only' 18% of a purchase price down, good credit, and steady income... to be charged extra PMI - possibly for years, because "we need to re-valuate the property 3 more times".... seems to be just more price gouging, not actually addressing real risk.
My rent for a 1 bed, 1 bath apartment is higher than the mortgage on a family member's 4 bed, 3 bath. _That's_ the issue: homeowners are putting less money into an investment vehicle while renters are burning even more money.
If rent actually reflected the value received versus owning a home I'd be less opposed to it.
You don't need 20% down. This is a lie that keeps getting perpetuated.
I put 3.5% down on my first house and even with PMI the mortgage payment is less than rent.
To add insult to injury, the massive housing inflation of the past 2 years got the LTV well above 20% which then allowed me to remove PMI lowering my payments even further.
The real risk with renting to a person is if they refuse to pay and refuse to leave. Most places you still have to let them live there for several months while you go through the eviction process. And in retaliation they can destroy your house.
This analogy is interesting do you think there are some lawyers that consider themselves 10xlawyers haha. It make sense that a lot of it would be similar to documentation and meetings and various agile ceremonies and not just 2200 hours of straight legal argumentation and writing.
Biglaw clients aren’t suckers. They don’t pay $800/hr for agile ceremonies. They go over their bills with a fine tooth comb and have ML systems to detect padding.
The Harry Potter game was a little bit more complicated, I think PoGo was probably the simplest, at least at launch, I'm not sure what its like now, and other than being a super well-known IP is partially why it was successful IMO. I guess you could probably point to that also being one reason why the HP game wasn't as successful despite also being a popular IP. I haven't tried Pikmin Bloom.
Every time this stat is brought up I always think it doesn't convey the full context. Even though its in terms of per capita, it's still an absolute amount, I think a better data point to illustrate if the US was overspending compared to outcomes would be what % of disposable income is spent on healthcare vs outcomes.
For example, let's say the US spent 2x on healthcare as some country, but had 4x the disposable income, would this still be overspending or would it be more efficient given the amount relative to income? The closest I can find is health spending as % of GDP but that doesn't capture what a person's income, since it includes government spending too, so it obfuscates whether or not the inefficiency (if any) lies in private or public healthcare in the US.
Let's say the US spent 2x on healthcare as some country, but had 4x the disposable income, would this still be overspending or would it be more efficient given the amount relative to income?
Healthcare spending in $ per capita doesn't capture how much people earn in that country or how much of a burden it is relative to their income so its kinda meaningless without more context. It's like saying the US economy is better than 85% of the OECD because its in the top 5 gdp per capita.
There's a very consistent definition for what that means with plenty of papers and institutions that use use roughly the same definition. Here's one phrasing of it by the OECD[1]. Basically it's just income minus taxes, what part of that is remotely vague?
Discretionary income might be an even better measure but that has more wiggle room on defining what is a necessity and not.
I still don't see how that's a good metric, in any way, for judging health care costs. "Disposable income" takes nothing else into account such as other costs or predatory behaviors in the healthcare system
Its literally just money after taxes, and most people are living paycheck to paycheck
You can't judge how much of a burden healthcare costs are unless you account for how much of a person's income or some proxy of it healthcare is. Just saying that the US spends more per capita than other OECD countries doesn't say anything without more context. IF you want to show that the healthcare spending isn't efficient in the US you have to at least show that it's not just because everything costs more there or that everyone earns more in the US (gdp/capita is higher than ~85% of OECD in US).
You say this like the profit seeking in the US is some sort of natural phenomenon that we can't avoid. We can adjust costs based in cost of living and local currency, profiteering is what sucks resources out of the system
Physicians in the US are protected, there's only a limited number of slots every year in med schools. This is fake scarcity
