Insulin, like most meds in the US, is expensive because of the free market.

If you have a free market on life-saving medicine, guess what, people will pay however much they can afford and then some - because people are keen to survive.

In most (all?) European countries medicines are regulated. Some medicines have many manufacturers, some have a “government-enforced” monopoly but without free market, and the result is that no matter the country, insulin is free or almost free. The reason is that when you regulate this, and the only possible buyer for a whole country is “the government”, the seller is forced to negotiate with the whole government to be able to sell to X million people. And the government is not in a life or death situation, so it’s less vulnerable to price gouging.

If the governments can negotiate a low enough price, then they can subsidise the last bit via taxes and people get free life-saving drugs. Yet big-pharma still gets profits at these lower prices, as evidenced by the number of pharma companies there are in Europe (including non-eu countries that work similarly in terms of healthcare such as UK, Switzerland).

Free market works, until the seller has a life-threatening reason why the buyer will be forced to pay whatever the price is. The drug situation in the US is not free market, it’s free blackmail.

Well, be it because he is good, or because he got lucky, SpaceX has been doing things right. It’s refreshed the space industry like nobody ever has before.

I struggle giving that clown any credit whatsoever but the end result of Space X is undeniably successful, regardless of how they got there.

I did a masters on composites manufacturing while working at Airbus. One day I was talking to one of the lecturers after the class (a very senior engineer in Airbus Defence and Space), and I asked them what she thought about the SpaceX attempts (back then on their very early stages) at reusing rockets.

She ensured me that reusable rockets could never work. Just the cost of inspecting the rockets to ensure they hadn’t gotten damaged would outweigh any savings from reusing them.

People have a habit of getting their predictions horribly wrong, so I’m not implying that she was a bad or short sighted engineer, even if she hyperfixated on one of the industry challenges at the time. My point here is that that anecdote illustrates pretty well what was the mindset in Airbus (and by extension, the European space programme) back then, and explains perfectly why Europe is behind on this.

Airbus has a history of making good or very good aircraft but they usually happen after Boeing has taken a leap. The A350 is great but it arrived almost a decade after the Dreamliner. Its development was reactionary, not visionary.

Although the A380 was a visionary solution for problem there wasn’t a business case for. Not sure if that’s any better…

But this was expected right? Is there anyone who genuinely thought this wouldn’t happen? I thought all the people calling out “Genocide Joe” were right-wing alts breaking up the left.

1999 is 25 years old.

How old is a person who considers a 25-year-old “old”? 16? (I mean, besides Di Caprio)

Why does a 16 year old want to settle down?

Well, it has 10x more speakers than German, but it still has fewer speakers than English and most of them are localised in a single country.

I feel you’re trying to misconstrue my post by saying something I completely agree with, my post completely agrees with, and then throwing a sarcastic “oh wait”.

Of course I agree with this, which is why I say

This is a clear step back

And

We have to keep pushing

My point is about what we’ve achieved so far, which is worth celebrating, regardless of how we’re under attack. Obviously we have to achieve more - they’ll go for the rest of us after Trans people. Which wouldn’t happen if all of us make sure that trans folk are so obvious in the collective mind that erasing them becomes a ridiculous proposition.

Republicans have accepted LGBTQ people to some extent, otherwise they wouldn’t be pulling off this sort of devious shit and just removing these pages completely. That’s what is an achievement, and obviously we need to make sure we revert this and don’t keep regressing.

It would have been even easier to remove this page altogether, wouldn’t it?

I’m not disagreeing with you at all, but I think my point is being completely missed here. My point is not about what Trump has done which is unequivocally bad.

My point is about what we’ve achieved so far. We’ve made enough progress that to combat the “woke virus” they’re having to target first trans people specifically rather than directly removing mentions to LGBTQ+. I’m hopeful about the fact that we’ve achieved so much so far - obviously not about the fact that we’re being persecuted.

I’m surprised they haven’t.

It’s a weird one, probably this is because I always try to see the bright side but I have mixed feelings. On one hand writing off just trans and queer people feels even more targeted and evil than deleting all letters.

But on the plus side, the fact that LGB haven’t been removed makes me feel slightly hopeful? This is a clear step back obviously. But it makes me feel that finally the idea that gay, lesbian, bisexual people exist and don’t need conversion therapy has actually sunk in and we can’t be erased so easily.

Now we have to keep pushing to get “TQ” similarly unerasable. 💪

I’m talking about running them in GPU, which favours the GPU even when the comparison is between an AMD Epyc and a mediocre GPU.

If you want to run a large version of deepseek R1 locally, with many quantized models being over 50GB, I think the cheapest Nvidia GPU that fits the bill is an A100 which you might find used for 6K.

For well under that price you can get a whole Mac Studio with those 192 GB the first poster in this thread mentioned.

I’m not saying this is for everyone, it’s certainly not for me, but I don’t think we can dismiss that there is a real niche where Apple has a genuine value proposition.

My old flatmate has a PhD in NLP and used to work in research, and he’d have gotten soooo much use out of >100 GB of RAM accessible to the GPU.

If it’s for AI, loading huge models is something you can do with Macs but not easily in any other way.

I’m not saying many people have a use case at all for them, but if you have a use case where you want to run 60 GB models locally, a whole 192GB Mac Studio is cheaper than the GPU alone you need to run that if you were getting it from Nvidia.

So the lack of apple-branded AI Slop is slowing down the sales for iPhones but not for Macs?

Edit for clarity: I’m aware sequoia “has” apple intelligence but in a borderline featureless state, so it’s as good (or as bad) as not having anything.

I recently discovered dupe.com , which works quite well by giving it an Amazon link and finding it on potentially cheaper, definitely non-Bezos websites.

Do a search on yourself - try to find out your real identity based on information online, and do it as thoroughly as if you were searching for your worst enemy.

If you can find who you are yourself, chances are they will.

Make sure you don’t have anything “hairy” tied to an email with an email address you’d use for anything uncompromising. E.g. keep the email you use to login on Lemmy and the email you use to login on netflix separate.

Use 2 factor authentication and a password manager. Treat your password leaks seriously and consider any leaked accounts burnt - assume the details you had in there are now known.

Avoid using your real name on anything you can.

Best wishes. Take care my friend!

Is there pirate software on F-Droid?? (I’m assuming that’s what OP is referring to based on us being on /piracy)

In a car with ABS, two sets of tyres with different grip will have a different point at which tyres lock up, with grippier tires locking up later and ABS letting the brakes bite harder before acting.

Now a harder question is whether a tyre with less rolling resistance will be less grippy. All things equal, yes, it will. Tyres grip by deforming and creating friction in the contact patch, and the point of these tyres is to reduce friction.

To make up for this, manufacturers use clever designs (e.g. where tyres can deform more under certain conditions) so that they can retain characteristics similar to tyres with more rolling resistance. Of course, everything in engineering is a compromise, which means that A) these tyres are more expensive because of the additional complexity and B) the design and materials science can only go so far and they have indeed slightly less grip; otherwise all the tyres would be like this.

As an anecdote, Toyota sold the GR86 with Michelin Energy Saver tyres fitted as standard (in Europe at least) for “grip” reasons: they allowed the car to drift at really low speeds (some car journalists commented that it was remarkably easy to take roundabouts sideways at legal speeds).

Goodbye.

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