That’s a mind-numbingly obvious point which completely ignores the context, which is Pharma justifying their high prices based on the amount they spend on R&D.
The rest of the world gets drugs 2-3x cheaper than the US. Do you imagine they’re selling at a loss to everywhere else?
It doesn’t cost that much because the company are making a hefty profit, of course. And much more profit off it in the US as per usual, the NHS pays considerably less
The deal struck [in 2021] with Novartis Gene Therapies, secures the drug for NHS patients in England at a substantial confidential discount and paves the way for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to publish draft guidance recommending treatment with Zolgensma.
The terms of the deal mean that some young children that currently fall outside the NICE recommendation criteria will also be eligible to be considered for treatment by a national multidisciplinary clinical team (MDT) made up of the country’s leading experts in the treatment of SMA.
This means as many as 80 babies and young children could potentially benefit from the life-changing gene therapy a year.
But profiteering aside, the number in the final paragraph is your answer. Up to 80 kids in the UK per year, so up to ~400 in the US, ~500 for the EU. It’s not a big market but the cost of drug development doesn’t get cheaper just because the number of cases is small, it gets more difficult and more costly. And there’s more than one drug company chasing the market.
None of that is a defence of Pharma. But it is inevitable under capitalism. Eat the rich etc etc.
Good grief. You don’t need to wave your hands so wildly, this is really fucking simple maths. Expenditure which is 21% of the total cannot possibly be the reason why USians pay 2-3 times more than everywhere else for drugs.
I don’t disagree with your overall argument but, if they’re fined 100% of revenue, that’s way less than zero profit (because they’ve still paid to make, distribute, and recall the things).
Fines should, of course, always be more than the profit made. 3x is a good number.
Trying to keep my very picky eater 3yo healthy as we’re (hopefully) expanding his diet. Right now the only foods I can get him to actually eat are McDonald’s, a specific brand of yogurt, banana bread, some crackers and some bars. Refuses any beverage besides water. (He’s likely on the spectrum.)
Advising a parent to torture a child over food is piss poor advice to start with but when the parent has identified possible autism, you realise you know less than nothing and shut the fuck up.
A movie weapons supervisor is facing up to 18 months in prison for the fatal shooting of a cinematographer by Alec Baldwin on the set of the Western film “Rust,” with her sentencing scheduled for Monday in a New Mexico state court....
She was crap at her job but she was also too inexperienced for it and employed to do it by cost-cutting producers who took so many shortcuts on set safety, half the crew walked out before this happened.
Proponents of AI and other optimists are often ready to acknowledge the numerous problems, threats, dangers, and downright murders enabled by these systems to date. But they also dismiss critique and assuage skepticism with the promise that these casualties are themselves outliers — exceptions, flukes — or, if not, they are...
It’s asking why don’t we use it for that purpose, not suggesting that there is anything easy about doing so. I don’t know how you think science works, but it’s not like that.
any kind of bureaucratic or rule-based decision-making
Human-written rules are often flawed, and for similar reasons (the sole human thought process that ‘AI’ is very good at reproducing is system justification). But human-written rules can be written down and they can be interrogated. But Apple landed itself in court because it had no clue how its credit algorithm worked and could not conceive how it could possibly be sexist if the machine didn’t get any gender data to analyse.
The data cannot be understood. These models are too large for that.
Apple says it doesn’t understand why its credit card gives lower credit limits to women that men even if they have the same (or better) credit scores, because they don’t use sex as a datapoint. But it’s freaking obvious why, if you have a basic grasp of the social sciences and humanities. Women were not given the legal right to their own bank accounts until the 1970s. After that, banks could be forced to grant them bank accounts but not to extend the same amount of credit. Women earn and spend in ways that are different, on average, to men. So the algorithm does not need to be told that the applicant is a woman, it just identifies them as the sort of person who earns and spends like the class of people with historically lower credit limits.
Garbage in, garbage out. Society has been garbage for marginalised groups since forever and there’s no way to take that out of the data. Especially not big data. You can try but you just end up playing whackamole with new sources of bias, many of which cannot be measured well, if at all.
London’s police force has been forced to issue two apologies after officers threatened to arrest an “openly Jewish” man if he refused to leave the area around a pro-Palestinian march because his presence risked provoking the demonstrators....
It doesn’t matter? This incident was doubly antisemitic, preventing someone from protesting because they are Jewish, and assuming that pro-Palestinian protesters would attack them simply because they were Jewish (ie equating Jewishness with support for Israel and criticism of Israel with antisemitism).
Yes, he’s a provocateur. So what? If the copper had said it was because they wanted to keep the two groups of protesters apart (as they routinely do, or are supposed to do), that would be fine. But he decided to be racist about it instead.
After the interview aired, Lehrmann was charged with sexual intercourse without consent, but the trial was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct and not revived due to fears about Higgins’ mental health....
The legal system didn’t deal with it, as per fucking usual. He decided that he would use that fact to prove he was innocent, giving the court an opportunity to explain very carefully why he is quite clearly guilty.
This was a huge political scandal. It’s not reasonable to declare that the media should not have reported it.
This is an easy statement to make but context matters. In this case, he was not named by the media but had they not covered the story, he would never have been charged because it suited the political establishment to do nothing at all.
Higgins alleged she was raped by a colleague in an exclusive 2021 television interview with the Network Ten’s “The Project” program, which also raised questions about the official response by ministers and political staffers in the aftermath of the alleged assault.
After the interview aired, Lehrmann was charged with sexual intercourse without consent, but the trial was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct and not revived due to fears about Higgins’ mental health.
Oh, please! Streisand the fuck out of it. Plenty of people have done what he did without ever being forced to acknowledge it was rape. Keep this story going for the sake of everyone, everywhere.
They’ve been working on this for years, an opportunity to schism gracefully was offered in advance. In the UK, they’ve allowed individual congregations to decide what can happen in their church building(s), and individual clergy to opt out of officiating.
National Highways says the radar detects 89% of stopped vehicles - but that means one in 10 are not spotted.
At least 79 people have been killed on smart motorways since they were introduced in 2010. In the past five years, seven coroners have called for them to be made safer.
National Highways’ latest figures suggest that if you break down on a smart motorway without a hard shoulder you are three times more likely to be killed or seriously injured than on one with a hard shoulder.
No brainer. But then they quote this prick without directly challenging the contradiction:
The agency’s operational control director Andrew Page-Dove says action was being taken to “close the gap between how drivers feel and what the safety statistics show”.
The ‘gap’ seems to be a result of drivers having a much more accurate perception than the people paid to defend them.
National Highways says reinstating the hard shoulder would increase congestion and that there are well-rehearsed contingency plans to deal with power outages.
Just add more lanes. That’ll work. It’s never worked but obviously it’ll work. Fuckwits.
It is very easy to have a play with a benefits calculator to find out what reality looks like for yourself.
In-work benefits keep working people who earn less than they need to survive at or slightly above the poverty level. For people who are unable to work, due to sickness, disability or a lack of available jobs, it keeps them stuck below the poverty level with just about enough to survive but not to thrive.
As the article points out, the philosophy this system was built on was not necessarily well thought out at the time. In the post-covid era it is disastrous.
I don’t think we’d ever get real safety statistics about companies in China.
China cares a great deal about its exports, and the testing by ANCAP / NCAP / NHSTA is the same in those export markets. Their safety record is not something they can hide. BYD alone is outselling Tesla, so there will be a large volume of real world data coming along shortly. The NHSTA is too gutless to make Musk share the data but they won’t be so shy with Chinese brands.
When the female tennis players head back to Spain’s capital for the Madrid Open this week, they may be forgiven for letting out a collective groan. A quick glance at the tournament’s history shows a litany of gaffes, accusations of inequality and a full-blown sexism row just last year. Not exactly a highlight of the...
What did you get told as a child that you realised was a lie as you got older?
Two newborn twins need a one-dose treatment that would save their lives: Zolgensma, a $2.1M drug. Insurance (also the mother's employer) cut coverage of the drug the day after they were born. (www.wbtv.com)
america is so fucking based man...
FTC fines Razer for every cent made selling bogus “N95 grade” RGB masks | Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)
[Serious] Do you know of any processed snack foods with some vitamins?
Trying to keep my very picky eater 3yo healthy as we’re (hopefully) expanding his diet. Right now the only foods I can get him to actually eat are McDonald’s, a specific brand of yogurt, banana bread, some crackers and some bars. Refuses any beverage besides water. (He’s likely on the spectrum.)
Gun supervisor for 'Rust' movie to be sentenced for fatal shooting by Alec Baldwin on set (apnews.com)
A movie weapons supervisor is facing up to 18 months in prison for the fatal shooting of a cinematographer by Alec Baldwin on the set of the Western film “Rust,” with her sentencing scheduled for Monday in a New Mexico state court....
On Being an Outlier (www.goethe.de)
Proponents of AI and other optimists are often ready to acknowledge the numerous problems, threats, dangers, and downright murders enabled by these systems to date. But they also dismiss critique and assuage skepticism with the promise that these casualties are themselves outliers — exceptions, flukes — or, if not, they are...
London police apologize after threatening to arrest ‘openly Jewish’ man near pro-Palestinian protest (www.nbcnews.com)
London’s police force has been forced to issue two apologies after officers threatened to arrest an “openly Jewish” man if he refused to leave the area around a pro-Palestinian march because his presence risked provoking the demonstrators....
Accused rapist who tried to clear his name loses blockbuster defamation trial against TV network | CNN (edition.cnn.com)
After the interview aired, Lehrmann was charged with sexual intercourse without consent, but the trial was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct and not revived due to fears about Higgins’ mental health....
‘A better church is possible:’ Methodists celebrate as the church embraces the LGBTQ | CNN (edition.cnn.com)
[BBC News] Claims that smart motorways tech leaves drivers at risk (www.bbc.co.uk)
Thousands of disabled people ‘will get £2,800 a year less under universal credit’ (www.theguardian.com)
Single people with long-term disability that stops them working will be much poorer after rollout, Resolution Foundation says...
BYD unveils luxurious Sea Lion 07 mid-size electric SUV interior poised to rival Tesla's Model Y (electrek.co)
Land of the dinosaurs: baseline of sexism overshadows tennis in Madrid (www.theguardian.com)
When the female tennis players head back to Spain’s capital for the Madrid Open this week, they may be forgiven for letting out a collective groan. A quick glance at the tournament’s history shows a litany of gaffes, accusations of inequality and a full-blown sexism row just last year. Not exactly a highlight of the...