Hepatitis C has effectively been cured. Obesity, sickle cell, and cystic fibrosis have all heard their death knell though not a complete cure.
Hep C regimens are getting closer and closer to "take a pill for a couple months" - no more interferon injections or multiple rounds of multiple drugs.
Trikafta is a functional cure for 90% of CF patients, I believe - not easy or cheap but normalizes what you care about bar the administration of the treatment itself.
Sickle cell has CRISPR treatments that are incredibly invasive and awful but do functionally cure the disease more or less permanently for a cool "couple million"
And everyone knows about GLP-1 drugs for obesity. The latest batch are as good or better than bariatric surgery without, you know, the surgery part.
We took a trip to Alaska via RV, and were parked at a roadside. I got up at 11:30pm at "night" (broad daylight) to use the restroom and was so annoyed by the seagulls I went outside to yell at them.
It was eagles fighting over a salmon. They genuinely do sound and act exactly like seagulls.
I love watching them interact. I ended up ditching a show in Alaska to sit in a grocery parking lot and watched eagles quarrel for almost two hours. They're great.
To expand and agree: turnips, beets, hard whole grains, if their baby teeth aren't visibly worn by the time they fall out, it wasn't hard enough.
Jaw and face bone grows by stimulation. It's not just a dental thing - it's sleep apnea, sinus infections, facial structure, voice timbre, and attractiveness.
If it's enough, they won't even need their wisdom teeth pulled - having your wisdom teeth pulled is substantially a standard american diet issue, not a human genetic issue.
It's funny because I mildly disagree with your core premise (orthodontics are unnecessary), they should just be necessary as a disability accommodation, essentially. If we had 10-30% of the population in wheelchairs because we didn't let kids walk I would find the wheelchair industry odious as well.
Right, most of the orthodontics websites say 70% of people need them. I understand wanting to justify a total market size but if people actually believe that, it's getting out of hand.
Usually these relatively low height kinds of top-tank systems lose water for the entire apartment building, because there's one pump to raise the water to the tank, which then passively provides the pressure (usually through pressure regulators at each floor if I remember right).
Larger buildings tend to have multiple independent systems
My hobby pastimes have been gradually describing an interesting arc, starting from essentially the oldest human passtimes and advancing forward through time. I really need to stop and revisit flintknapping though. Wild edibles are a bit of a dice roll, and manual firemaking is actually quite a workout. Weaving is almost infinite in depth, and has a particular attraction to programmers for its historical connections. Woodworking and pottery are big wins, for people who are technical but want to get out of their own head. To quote Gibson:
"If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical,
go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible."
You can get very technical indeed in some of humanity's oldest industries.
I donated $100 to my state's gubernatorial campaign as a part of my annual "make the world a better place" campaign, and was surprised to receive a call from an unknown number the following day. It was the Governor, thanking me for my donation personally, and wondering if there were any issues close to my heart that she could keep in mind. Note that this was from her personal cell phone (for whatever value of personal an executive politician actually has, but still), and she invited me to phone her if I had any issues that the state government could resolve.
That's a wildly low sum of money for a 5 minute personal call, let alone even a modest intervention.
This is my favorite example, from a long time ago. I wish I could record the "Read Aloud" output, it's absolute gibberish, sounds like the language in The Sims, and goes on indefinitely. Note that this is from a very old version of chatgpt.
They're not so silly as to have any personal or professional liability, they probably spin up a special purpose vehicle or llc to hold the bag if it all goes south
It’s analogous to a mortgage in a non-recourse state. If the borrower defaults the bank (or non-bank lender) gets the leveraged company, but can’t usually go upstream.
Ohhhh a live one! Sir do I have a wonderful bridge in Brooklyn to sell you! :)
Fun fact: banks fund this sort of nonsense constantly. I've asked about this before: why they do it. They must be making money I just don't know how. The LBO guys pay themselves massive management fees and dump the debt on the company so they walk away scott free.
My wild guess was the banks offload the eventual IPO onto investors and so make their money on the IPO fees and funneling their own clients the dead-man-walking shares. But I honestly don't know.
> wild guess was the banks offload the eventual IPO onto investors and so make their money on the IPO fees and funneling their own clients the dead-man-walking shares
The banks get paid back their debt when the next PE fund buys the company or the company pays it off. Unless an IPO is being done to pay off debt, which it never is, the mechanism you describe doesn’t occur.
The list of companies imploded by LBO/PE is quite high though. Why do banks keep lining up to fund such deals? They must be making money somehow. These companies aren't worth much in liquidation. Are they able to extract enough value during the dead-man-walking period to make it worthwhile? Especially for retail or similar deals where the bank isn't going to foreclose on a bunch of real estate or assets worth selling.
I was not saying this is how they make money - I was saying I honestly don't know. If you do know please share. I would love to understand why the banks are so keen to fund what looks to my eyes like super shady vulture capitalism. We start with a profitable company and end with a smoking husk. The Wall Street guys are doing it to steal as much value as they can before it all blows up. Someone is eating the eventual loss. Who? Or are you saying the majority of these deals don't end up with the company being eviscerated?
Hep C regimens are getting closer and closer to "take a pill for a couple months" - no more interferon injections or multiple rounds of multiple drugs.
Trikafta is a functional cure for 90% of CF patients, I believe - not easy or cheap but normalizes what you care about bar the administration of the treatment itself.
Sickle cell has CRISPR treatments that are incredibly invasive and awful but do functionally cure the disease more or less permanently for a cool "couple million"
And everyone knows about GLP-1 drugs for obesity. The latest batch are as good or better than bariatric surgery without, you know, the surgery part.
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