raptitude.com is a great source of articles to remind you of the things that were compelling to you at any point about mindfulness and/or meditation. I also recommend the spin off http://campcalm.com if you're interested in meditation in particular.
If you're after books specifically, "Wherever you go, there you are" by Jon Kabat-Zinn is also good.
I think the guy's doing that one on purpose to be honest. He's cashing in on the popularity of his (unintentionally) hilarious rendition of Big in Japan (or "bikicsunáj"): https://youtu.be/E2GFjXmXEsw
Python for all the reasons people have mentioned here.
Tangential, but does anyone know of a playground environment where you can code (ro)bots in Python? I'm thinking of the old Robocode challenges, which were Java based, where you could write some logic and it would enter your bot in a tournament. Would be fun to do some game AI with Python like that.
The links on the site are usually the "most trending" ones, so it's good for that, but I wish it had as much discussion as HN. For some reason I much prefer HN to reddit for discussion.
Came here to post this. I swapped my daily news reading habit for an Economist subscription (paper only) and have not looked back. The first 1-2 pages will typically summarise the week's news well enough for me not to feel like I've missed out on anything, and the quality of writing and variety of interesting topics is excellent. I also agree with your second point about feeling obligated to read it!
Edit: for some humorous and UK-specific news/investigative journalism/cynicism I can also highly recommend a subscription to the fortnightly Private Eye. It works out at like £1 per copy and is always a fun read.
AntennaPod supports the two ways I want to add a podcast: search and by url. Haven't run into the problem of it not finding anything either (but if I did, I agree that it's not the app's fault).
Mind you I have no qualification on the subject matter so I'm reluctant to share the results of my attempts to parse the situation and I could be completely wrong, but it sounded to me like there was a drug that was cheap but not very profitable, and he hiked the price to make it more profitable.
He argues most patients won't directly experience that hike because of insurance, and that no one who can't directly afford the increased price will be denied access to it because of Turing's assistance programs. He also argues that the real issue is that there's nothing stopping the company from trying to extract that money from insurance companies, and the government in some cases (and from that I infer that it's a case where if you're the company not taking advantage of the system, you won't be a company for long). And that all the vitriol at the price hike should be directed at what's a fundamentally broken system, in his opinion.
It might prove the system fundamentally broken but it does it at the expense of people's health and lives. Not a tradeoff I'd care to make, personally.
Sure, but why should anyone care about what you personally think or what tradeoff you'd make? Are you the CEO of a pharma company? Or a politician who has some power over the healthcare industry? No? Then you don't matter.
The people who DO make these decisions think very differently from you. They're all part of the system, and the system is obviously fundamentally broken. Us sitting around and whining about sociopaths doing sociopathic things is not going to make them stop being sociopathic and making decisions that negatively affect peoples' health and lives.
It demonstrates a problem with the system, I'm not sure it is fundamental. There's lots of more widely used generic drugs that are available for a nominal fee.
We can sit around and whine about some guy exploiting a broken system, but that's not going to fix the problem. Everyone's focusing on one guy who exploited the system, while ignoring both tons of other people who exploited it just as much (and probably a lot more, as he pointed out on his website), as well as the brokenness of the system itself.
That's true, they should all be treated with the same amount of contempt. I think making this website is one of the few good things he's done in a while.
Shkreli is somewhat unique in terms of how much of an attention hog and braggart he is, though. Plus his stock fraud and general asshole persona.
It's a zero sum game though. Raising the price of the drug literally just pulls money out of the system and puts it in his pocket at the expense of everyone else.
It's easy to argue the action is parasitic and adds no value.
To me it seems like a tragedy of the commons, the issue is who will be first to stop extracting value this way. Since no one can be expected to, we need to fix the system that allows it, rather than expecting some altruistic behavior from outfits built to generate profit
There is no tragedy of the commons here. This is not a shared resource being depleted. The proper descriptor here is rent-seeking[1] and the Turing/Daraprim case lines up with Shiller's "river chain" analogy.
Again, this isn't anywhere near my wheelhouse, but I think of money the insurance companies allocate from premiums for drugs as being a shared resource that's being depleted. When the margins that insurance companies have set as targets are brushed up upon, premiums go up and we repeat the process again, except the premiums can't go up forever (right? I wonder if an expert on the subject could confirm) and the system will collapse
What you've described is definitely not a commons but a simple pricing outcome for a financial product. In a competitive market you'd expect that price to find an equilibrium, not to rise without bound.
Notwithstanding which, this case exhibits none of those characteristics. It is rent-seeking, pure and simple.
>Raising the price of the drug literally just pulls money out of the system and puts it in his pocket at the expense of everyone else.
That assumes that he is actually pocketing the money. Shkreli was a hedge fund manager and multimillionaire before starting his pharma companies, and claims he has a $0 salary at Turing.
In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXVQOZDKlRE , he lays out his reasoning for raising the price of Daraprim to prices near those of similar drugs. He intends to use the money Turing makes from Daraprim to produce drugs that are not, in his words, "terrible".
Not quite. Supply and Demand don't quite work that way.
Arguably - if someone 'needs it' then they 'must pay' ergo zero sum ... but in reality demands for most drugs is not quite so inelastic (Ambien, opiods etc.). That said, I'm not sure what the drug in question does.
The drug in question treats a rare degenerative disease of the brain. Precisely the sort of uncompetitive market with inelastic demand that is ripe for exploitation by rent-seeking.
Yes. And to people saying "well, but premiums will increase", the number of people who use Daraprim is so small, it won't affect insurance companies or premiums in any meaningful way whatsoever. And that's not even accounting that anyone who has no insurance can just get the drug for free.
Daraprim is used for the treatment of toxoplasmic encephalitis, which can happen when someone has both AIDS and toxoplasmosis.
There were 39,513 AIDS patients in the United States in 2015. About 23% of Americans have toxoplasmosis, so that would be 9087 people who could get toxoplasmic encephalitis. Around 10% of people with toxoplasmosis develop toxoplasmic encephalitis [0], which would be 909 people who need Daraprim.
A course of Daraprim costs $75,000. For 909 people, that would be a total of $68,175,000. Approximately 100M people in the United States have insurance, so that would raise your insurance cost by about $0.68.
