Most states have laws restricting faithless electors in some way, including voiding such votes (which has happened). Though, some lack enforcement mechanisms. The Supreme Court has upheld penalties for faithless electors within the past five years. As a result, it’s vanishingly rare.
It’s still a dumb system that is unrepresentative and relies too much on people just doing the right thing, but this characterization isn’t totally accurate.
This would be terrible business if any pharma worked this way. The vast majority of potential treatments fail either in the lab or in early phase trials. It is not very likely that’d you’d be able to on-demand develop a novel treatment for symptoms before one of your competitors figured out your already-discovered cure. That would be unless you patented the cure, but by the time you spent years developing a new symptom-only treatment and testing it through each phase, you’d have a few years at best before your exclusivity on the cure patent expires and thus your treatment becomes worthless.
Pharmas are run by the same short-sighted wall streeters as every other corporation. Actually successfully executing this sort of long-term plan would require thinking further ahead than a few quarters, which they are not capable of doing. A new cure is a big stock boost now that they could never resist.
The people in charge of the program are getting fired, and an outside consulting firm is being hired to investigate. So, I imagine there will be a follow up later on with more details on that front.
It doesn’t inspire confidence that there wasn’t the oversight to prevent this however. These are human remains, not widgets.
I know. This is one of my major pet peeves, that even major publications seem to skip copy editing. I’ll forgive it in an independent journalist’s substack, but not much more.
It really depends. One tenant could have an ant problem because another adjacent tenant is attracting them, which the landlord needs to address. If the structure has decaying wood, that can attract carpenter ants which is a landlord issue. Some ants like humid environments, so a poorly ventilated structure (like one with mold) could be the cause–also the landlord’s problem.
The shareholders in question suing are a public employee retirement fund. I wouldn’t exactly consider retired sanitation workers and bureaucrats societal leeches, but to each their own I guess.
I forget the specifics and who came up with it, but: pick an amount you haven’t written before. Then, write that much without looking back. If you can set your word processor to only keep your current line visible, even better. Once you’ve written that many paragraphs or pages, do a fast edit. Use a timer so you can’t linger. Then write that much again with the same strategy. After 3-5 times, do a more thorough edit of the whole thing.
It’s not necessarily how you always want to write, but it can help getting over that initial confidence block as an exercise.
I’m genuinely not certain if you are meaning to reply to my comments because your replies don’t actually reflect what I’ve said. It is possible to have a larger discussion about a topic from a smaller example, and it’s also possible for things to not be all or nothing. I hope you can sort whatever bee is in your bonnet.
I’m not quite sure how you’ve turned “we should have the option” into “we should buy everything foreign.” I think you’re having an argument you want to have rather than addressing the point I was making.
Great, and where local is the best choice they should do that. But nobody can seriously argue that reducing the ability of government to shop around for the best cost/quality balance is a good thing. It’s not like the only options are buy everything American or everything from China. I’d like qualified experts making that decision, not legislators.
You create bad incentives if you artificially reduce competition like this. Not every good or service will have tons of American choices, so you end up with a handful of companies who know the government has no other choice.
I feel like all this is going to do is raise government costs and line the pockets of selected contractors. We aren’t always going to be the relative best producers in cost/quality balance for every product and service.
If we’re going to subsidize any industry, it should be done directly and explicitly. Otherwise, it becomes another example of “inefficient” government that should be privatized.
It has either gotten better or just improved its suggestions for me over time. I basically never get right wing content anymore. There’s plenty of garbage, but it’s stupid garbage rather than dangerous garbage.
This is a notoriously difficult thing to prove out either way in data, and I’m sure it varies situationally.
The Mariel Boatlift natural experiment did not demonstrate a decrease in wages or increase in unemployment. It makes sense: immigrants both work and consume (i.e., create demand). Unless every immigrant happens to work in the same industry/union, the sum total of immigrants may create demand for labor equal to or greater than they fill.
It also may have the impact you’re suggesting. But it doesn’t have to be zero sum. And, understandably, people only remember when they lost a job potentially tied to immigrant labor. Nobody asks if the job they’re applying to was created due to demand immigrants added to the economy (and how could a company know that?).
It’s been 8 years since VI came out. That’s the longest they’ve gone between releases since the original. It’s also difficult to say if it’s necessary without actually seeing what VII has to offer. If it’s VI with a new coat of paint, then I agree. But I hope they bring a novel aspect like districts was for VI that made it worth it.
I really dislike how much he espouses hustle culture. Like, it’s crazy to applaud children who are spending every free minute they have on a business idea as if that has no negative impacts on their childhood if they aren’t failing school. Or that he won’t buy in if the business owner has a day job because entrepreneurs should only be successful if they gamble all of their savings apparently.
Exactly. If it’s a regulated industry, they’re not just paying for Teams. They’re paying for someone else to worry about meeting certain compliance requirements and take the heat if things go wrong. I’m not sure how many companies besides Microsoft can offer that. At most it’s a fraction of the available options.
Two points about R&D costs:
First, they aren’t just trying to make up what they spent on this treatment, but others that failed during research/trials. There’s a lot of them the general public will never hear about, and pharmas generally don’t like to bring attention to their failures. Part of that is many shareholders are morons who don’t understand how science works.
Second, the costs can get fuzzier for larger companies who in-house much of the R&D process, since the costs get shared among many programs. Properly attributing spend in that case can be a serious challenge.
All that said, they’ve clearly seen an opportunity to rake it in with this trendy drug and are charging way more than they need to.
The two Black Panther movies combined have grossed over 2 billion dollars. I wouldn’t say that agrees with him. It’s also odd to assume that movies which didn’t do as well, like The Marvels, were because of a female dominated cast and not because they were just bad movies.
Check out their controversies section on Wikipedia. This doesn’t seem out of character for this publication. It’s more likely incompetence than malice.
Rent seeking is not applicable for any company developing new medicines because that by definition is creating new wealth. I wouldn’t disagree with that characterization for any company milking an out-of-patent treatment by trying to make it unfeasible for any other company to manufacture it. You are correct that does exist.
Cures are difficult to develop due to how variable human physiology is, but we still manage to do so. Vaccines are also a way more effective instrument for disease eradication; it’s better to prevent anyone getting the disease in the first place.