Cheap Apple products is a long term net negative. Apple's justification for their price on high ticket items is not their technical edge, is the "cool people have it so might as well pay a premium for it". Lululemon did something similar to appeal to the masses and it backfired a few years after, opening the door for competitors that had nothing on them a few years back.
Starting with only 200 titles in the survey, for a final list of 100, seems off to me for starters. Every book surveyed has a 50% chance of making “book of the century”
Obviously 50/50 if random. But even if not random, I estimate 50 Shades would be 500-100,000 times more likely to be a book of the century using a list of 200 with it in it, vs an unaided open ended survey.
Don’t forget agility/mobility. Also a polar fleece that sheds water vs a wool sweater that absorbs it will both keep you warm, but one will be heavier with water weight.
We have rear cameras because people DONT move their head. And because regulations have made cars way taller than they need to be, meaning there is a big blind spot close to the ground
I mean, even in low cars you cannot see a small enough kid walking behind your car. That's why you back slowly.
Back when I just got my driver license, there is a big lesson many drivers go through (in Italy) which is you back off a parking and there is an obstacle that's so low that cannot be see through the back window and it's small enough that cannot be seen through the mirror. You hit it and if you followed the "go slow part" you only damaged the paint.
So I'm not opposing the ideas of rear cameras, but I'm totally against tall cars, because you cannot see kids IN FRONT either now.
> it really just requires no "split brain" is possible. For example, "consensus" is achieved by making one server the leader, and giving other servers no say.
Which is funny, because that actually describes political consensus as well, functionally, even if it’s not what people typically think of as the definition.
If you can effect enough of the right censorship or silencing or cancelling, you can achieve consensus (aka no split brain, at least no split with agency)
Check out Eric weinsteins latest theory about how frontier physics has moved “dark” (with a grain of salt, some of the other things he says might tempt you to discount him completely)
Yeah all the names and terminology really do make it seem harder than it is. Took me a long time and I’m still learning. 2d Hilbert space is same as 2d Euclidean space but each dimension has 2 degrees of freedom (real + imaginary). Might even think of it as 4d space, for vector imagining purposes, but that would probably be wrong and someone would call you out
That comic is great I understand qubits a bit better now: it has 4 degrees of freedom but can be mapped onto the 2d surface of a sphere because of normalization (circle rule) and global phase symmetry which each take away one of the four DOF
I need a longer think on the interference/computation connection though
People are waking up and a lot is happening to counteract some of this.
In the FY26 omnibus bill passed by Congress and signed last month by Trump is the most aggressive federal crackdown on PBMs in history. Starting in 2028 it bans PBMs from taking a percentage cut, which is exactly what incentivized them to drive up the sticker price of your meds. It forces PBMs to pass 100% of the rebates and discounts they negotiate directly to employer health plans, stopping them from pocketing the savings. And PBMs are now mandated to provide detailed semiannual reports exposing their "spread pricing" (charging the plan more than they pay the pharmacy) and their shady practices of steering patients only to pharmacies they own
Also to do what Mark Cuban did but on a national scale, the federal govt launched TrumpRx.gov, a direct-to-consumer federal platform that completely cuts out the PBMs and insurance deductibles you're talking about , allowing people to buy dozens of the most popular meds for an average of 50% off.
Finally one benefit from the threats of tariffs has been that companies like Pfizer caved and signed landmark deals with the US to offer their drugs at “most favored nation” prices to Medicaid and directly to consumers
The rebate pass-through rule (effective 2028) is a real step, and worth tracking. But rebate retention is one of six extraction mechanisms the Big 3 PBMs use. The FTC's Interim Reports I and II (2024-2025) documented $7.3B in specialty drug markups alone, separate from rebate games. The Ohio Auditor found PBM spread pricing extracted $224.8M from a single state's $2.5B Medicaid drug budget in one year.
The rebate rule doesn't touch spread pricing, formulary manipulation, or self-preferencing to vertically integrated pharmacies. Issue #4 (scheduled for releases 3/22) of this series covers the full mechanism stack and what each proposed reform actually targets. Repo: https://github.com/rexrodeo/american-healthcare-conundrum
People have been asking for iPhone SE to come back for what feels like decades, maybe they will do that next.
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