base698

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Posts posted by base698

  1. 16 minutes ago, SkyDekker said:

    I wonder if you have ever jumped a new exit?

    I bought the Raven-M when it came out.  As I was flipping through old Parachutists I noticed a trend.  "Reserve exploded on deployment, operating outside limitations."  I sold it and bought a PD Reserve.  

    In the same time frame I called ParaGear to order a Crossfire.  They said they were worried about it and had stopped selling it for the time.  Turns out it had a defect causing them to collapse.

    If it hasn't been out five years you're a test jumper.  

    It's a similar sentiment, but if I suggest the new exit, I'll gladly go first.  I'm not going to throw a kid off to make sure it's safe.

  2. 4 minutes ago, GeorgiaDon said:

    What you are doing here is an old tactic called "making perfect the enemy of the good".

    You can raise an almost infinite series of "what if" stories to justify never ever approving any drug, vaccine, or whatever.  Is a side effect that impacts literally one in a million people worse than a disease that has killed a minimum of 4 or 5 million in a little over one year, and destroyed the long-term health of several times that number?  For a long time after drugs are approved they continue to be monitored for those infrequent side effects, so that treatments can be developed or people likely to experience the side effect can be identified and excluded from taking the drug.

    If your standard is that not one person, ever, has an adverse reaction then that is the end, no-one will ever develop a new method to treat or prevent any disease. 

    Don

    Not exactly.  I'm saying don't use children as a test bed.  There's obviously a calculation in an emergency with those at risk.  

    The original pushback I was giving was totally in the context of making children vaccinated with something that is by any reasonable measure new.  By all means test it in the obese, the nursing homes.  It is warranted.  Just not on kids.

  3. 34 minutes ago, nwt said:

    All I see here is incoherent rambling.

    Clinical trials have thousands of people.  Even if you had clinical trials for say 2 decades.  The number of people exposed to the vaccine (assuming no large changes) would be very small compared to 160 million people.  People are very different: some abuse tylenol, alcohol, avocado.  Some live in areas with higher air pollutants.  Some have abnormal genetics like missing chromosomes.  Some have skydiving injuries with unusual hardware.  Trials cannot by sheer numbers test all of these things.

    In addition to the ingredients of the medication, a supply line for materials has to be created to supply the product to the nurses and doctors giving it.  Supply lines can have contamination or other quality issues involving the ingredients (there are at least 2 of these issues with the current vaccines).

    You've also got processes around administering the drug.  The mRNA vaccines require cold storage for example which is different.  New processes require training.  Mistakes can be made in the beginning.

    Bugs exist for any product.  Errors in manufacture, transport, and administering are going to happen in higher quantities for something just hitting the market.  

  4. 20 minutes ago, nwt said:

    Decades.

    The moment it hit the bodies of 160 million people it dwarfed any testing done in the previous years, decades or centuries.  Products exposed to the reality of launch with real customers encounter edge cases and issues testing doesn't uncover.  Reformulations occur over time, changes in manufacturing process.  They did not have supply lines, training up for these vaccines longer than maybe a year.  Those count too.  Not just the medical formulation.  Though that has an apparent bug as well.  

    Note the numerous contamination that have happened--one posted above.  

  5. · Edited by base698

    On 11/7/2017 at 4:51 PM, kelpdiver said:

     


    And yet, when this thread died out (March 2013), it had lost over 50% from it's 2013 peak, and it dropped another 50% thru March 2015, bottoming out in the 200s. And then it meandered.

    It finally got back up over $1000 in January this year, in large part to speculation that the US would approve the Winkleloss's trading instrument. The excitement was back, as were the touts. Then lost 30% in a single week. And then came the tear.

    For reasons I cannot fathom, Japanese investors became obsessed in the spring, and represent more than 50% of the trading volume for most of the time since. It's a variation on a class short squeeze - lot of people and low liquidity. It's again not based on any sense of value. It reminds me of the way they bought California real estate in the 80s and 90s, with horrible returns. How can a country of investors collectively be so stupid?

    As the thread died in 2014, Mt Gox was a spectacular debacle with heavy losses for BTC investors. Fast forward to now - Coinbase is one of the most popular vehicles to hold BTCs and wallet theft remains a common event (See recent Fortune article), even for experienced crypto people. By design, these people are SOL.

    I saw a very interesting segment earlier in the year where a person in NYC went a period of time (day or days) only transacting in BTCs. She was able to do a number of commerce events, including eating. However, the spread was atrocious - often paying 30 or 40% more than she would have with dollars.

    It also appears that Coinbase will be cooperating with the IRS on trading records. Every time you perform a transaction (like buy lunch) with BTCs, it's viewed no differently than a sale of stock. You need to report the cost basis, the result, and pay taxes accordingly. Fail to do so...serious consequences.

    It has been proposed that there should be a floor on transaction amount - e.g. events of less than $200 should not require reporting. That seems quite reasonable, but it is not a reality at present. So long as this remains true, commerce in the US is likely to remain limited, and will decline to zero if the IRS does flex their muscle. I guess that depends on what Trump's buddies at Goldman Sach would like. So we're back to speculative holding of coins.

    I think I'd congratulate anyone who bought coins in the hundreds...and encourage you to take (at least most of) those profits (and report them). Maybe time to look at the actual tech and put money there. Ripple in particular seems interesting - built around financial transactions and has been adopted by quite a few banking orgs. Is coin agnostic.

    The entire crypto coin realm is up to a couple hundred billion dollars. Still tiny when Vanguard alone managed nearly 5T, but much more substantial than what we talked about 3 years ago. It can keep churning for a while, just like the Nasdaq did in 2000. But still - has to give people pause when every month someone creates yet another set of coins - how different is it really from printing your own monopoly bucks? How is this not the definition of hyperinflation? Don't bet more than you're willing and able to lose.

     

    The US government printed 40% of all dollars in existence last year.  They are still doing QE to the tune of $120 billion a month. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL

    > Only with accurate prices expressed in a common medium of exchange is it possible for people to identify their comparative advantage and specialize in it. Specialization itself, guided by price signals, will lead to producers further improving their efficiency in the production of these goods

    In response, Bitcoin has rocketed to around $50K going as high as $63K (1000x since start of thread).  In the Ethereum realm DeFi has been all the hype.  Decentralized exchanges like Uniswap and Sushi earn fees for users providing liquidity as well as providing lending and borrowing services.  

    Some interesting anecdata: A local agricultural company that is one of the largest citrus producers in the country holds Bitcoin. They use it to settle payments cross border.  Don't have to get bank approval, can do it on weekends.  Someone that hires lots of migrant workers holds classes for how to send crypto instead of Western Union.

    Hard money appears to be here to stay.

    > It was hard money that financed Bach's Brandenburg Concertos while easy money financed Miley Cyrus's twerks. -- The Bitcoin Standard

  6. 7 hours ago, Westerly said:

    That's one thing I dont really agree with. You cant just go deducting employees' pays for various miscellaneous reasons as you see fit for arbitrary reasons. That's flat out illegal. Denying future promotion opportunities, non-contractual bonuses or future pay raises? Sure, that's all fair game. But at the end of the day an employee was offered a certain pay (which is contractual) at the beginning of their employment and you cannot lower that post-employment. Either you have to fire them or pay them what you promised. So make it all or nothing. Either full pay or you get fired. Lowering pay sounds like some CFO saying 'hey, I have an idea of how we can improve profits AND make it look like we're trying to do good'.

    Seriously.  Maybe we add exceptions for skydiving? Hook it in and your medical bills could be in the millions of dollars. Why should my insurance pay for your irresponsibility?

    Next maybe we can do motorcycles. Anyone having fun outside of Disney approved centers doesn't get health insurance.  

     

     

     

     

     

  7. 6 hours ago, Baksteen said:

    Let me put it this way:
    I agree that Big Pharma companies do not operate from idealism about making the world a better place. They are geared towards making long-term profit.

    But please consider that the best way of generating long-term profit in that field is basically achieved by, you know, not killing your customers and instead providing products that strictly adhere to international regulations and oversight.

    Another good way of keeping your profit is to not make your vaccine available to 3rd world countires, but that's a different can of worms.

    Lastly, as has been previously stated many many times before, a vaccine is tested extensively before it's released (starting long before we ever hear of it). First in test tubes, later in animals, yet again later on healthy volunteers. Each of these steps is subject to extensive oversight and auditing.

    Drug interactions are vastly complicated and realistically you can't test every case.  What people eat or drink could have an effect.  Their genetics.  Other medicines they are on.  Pollutants in the environment.  Age and time.

    Their is a trade off at some point where they feel good enough and release to the public. That first year of release if it's popular is going to dwarf all testing ever done by orders of magnitude.  

    Not just theoretical.  Look at all the drugs that have made it through trial and were later pulled.  The ones I mentioned above.  I'll add Acutane to the list.  There are dozens.

     

     

  8. · Edited by base698

    3 hours ago, ryoder said:

    Someone help me out here: If COVID-19 vaccinations are such a horrible imposition on our freedoms, then why has the anti-vax crowd not raised a big stink about the vaccination requirements to go to public school in the US?

    (Scroll down to the bottom of the page to get the links to each state's requirements.)

    State-by-State: Vaccinations Required for Public School Kindergarten

    Pharma has had some pretty high profile controversies showing they are willing to kill 100s of thousands of people in the name of profit.  My two favorite: Vioxx and the Opioid Epidemic.  Remember safe and effective non addictive Oxycontin?  

    When the Covid mRNA vaccine has been out a few decades like most of the vaccines on that list, maybe.  Assuming they work, which seems to be debatable [1].  Something like 300 kids have died from covid since the start of the pandemic.  About a thousand die of the flu every year--flu vaccines are not on that list.

    Any 1.0 product has bugs.  Bugs in manufacture [2], dosing, environment.  Medicines in particular have populations of people that are more at risk/shouldn't take it.  Maybe you're excited to have children be a profit center and test bed for some Pfizer exec.  I'm not.

    [1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/ultra-vaccinated-israels-debacle-is-a-dire-warning-to-america

    [2] https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/japan-stops-use-of-1-63-million-moderna-doses-over-contamination-2518827

  11. > Hey, I'm living in San Fran, or Seattle, aren't I cool being part of the revolution? having access to 1000s of tech jobs with the best talent and I'm making up to 4 times as much as I would in my home state. Wow, this place is really expensive and I'm tired of having three roommates so I'll move someplace else. Once I'm there, I'll lament about how it's not like 'X' and join the campaign to 'FLIP THIS PLACE BLUE!'

    FTFY

  18. ^ Are those tunnels the 12 ft lower ceiling variety?

    I heard they turned Airbourne on, but that there are lingering issues. I'd personally be surprised if it's open for real prior to iFly Oceanside which is already a hole in the ground.

    https://www.facebook.com/iflyoceanside/