JoshuaSlocum / is on Nostr

Omnivorous

Last Notes

2024-06-13 15:36:41

- reply

jfc how stupid are you
use coordinate transformation across the fiber bundle
if it sticks, apply a little torque perpendicular to the vector, use Rindler coordinates to calculate the hyperbolic trajectory
(you do have plenty of magnetic monopoles, right?)
maybe get your husband to install it

2024-06-12 21:54:09

- reply

FWIW, sterility isn't as much of a thing now. And, interestingly, the modulators have had some effect on this as well.
Unless you've been tested, you don't know if you're carrying the gene. It provided enough value--resistance to cholera and TB being the favored candidates--that it's hung around a long time.
But I see medical research in much the same way as I see funding for space programs. Some of it is sanding off the pointy bits of evolution--reducing the effects of genetic propensity for hypertension, for example. That's the "we went to the Moon so we could get Velcro" version of this. There is a lot of crossover in research that is not immediately apparent.

2024-06-12 21:36:14

- reply

The boutique disease I had in mind in particular is cystic fibrosis. It is a uniquely (more or less) northern European genetic disease, and is usually classified as the most common life-threatening genetic disease.
That said, all of the CF patients worldwide wouldn't fill the University of Texas football stadium. The newly available CFTR modulators have a sticker price of somewhere around $300K/year, and they were developed with the help of some of the same Wall Street shenanigans we were talking about earlier.
The problem with charity in healthcare is that healthcare varies wildly. Getting a free wellness check is way different than a prosthetic limb which is way different than an organ transplant. Charity certainly can fill in cracks here and there, but it scales poorly. A lot of healthcare requires massive vertical integration and the physical plant to keep it operating. GamGam's sewing circle volunteering part-time is not gonna cut it.

2024-06-12 20:36:39

- reply

I disagree with none of that, in spirit if not entirely in every detail.
Pharma and the health insurance industry are more or less in the same generational cohort. And they both took hits off the same Wall Street bongs. This has massively coopted and corrupted the system.
Changing that part of it is critical, along with things like patent reforms and rethinking the testing processes. But chasing the bad money out of the system is also gonna be a long uphill slog.
There are a lot of beak-wetters between the medical professionals and the patients. IMO it comes down to whether you think of healthcare as a consumer product or as fundamental infrastructure.

2024-06-12 20:03:24

- reply

>research new cures and treatments, but thats not healthcare per se
FWIW, this is hugely expensive. For many reasons, but fundamentally it's just hard. Because of this, sticker price on treatments for boutique diseases is hundreds of thousands of dollars. Nobody is paying that. Nobody can. But by any fair definition it certainly is healthcare.
(Pharma has gotten a black eye recently, but there is quite a lot of non-shitty things going on in that sphere. Dismissing our alchemists and sorcerers out of hand is not a good idea.)
Charity can be useful, but it's not a magic wand. Charity is a byproduct of wealth, and we're not in a great place for that now. It's one thing to give excess canned food to a food pantry; it's an entirely other thing to gift an MRI.
Healthcare is insensitive to price signals because it's a different beast than other services. It is highly sensitive to regulation. And it operates on a long timeline, requiring a certain amount of inertia or it falls behind quickly.
IMO, any solution that does not involve the medical schools and teaching hospitals in a prominent role is not going to work. They are the flywheels of this engine, and you risk ruin if you don't keep them spinning. This falls quite clearly in the public sphere.

2024-06-12 00:00:19

push it to production
what could go wrong?
don't be such a gloomy gus

2024-06-11 17:11:59

- reply

>I couldn't answer one single question using the calculator that those guys back then didn't have.
I have my father's old slide rule and the how-to textbook that you used with it. It's 100-odd pages of... playing with math.
Today we struggle to get negroes across the finish line of high school, and they barely know their math facts.
Meanwhile, in the mid 20th century, guys were juggling logarithms and trig by hand using sticks and the fluid language of math.
It's all gone terribly, terribly wrong.