> In March 2023, the FDA gave Vertex the greenlight to begin clinical trials of VX-264, an advanced version of the therapy in which the transplanted islets are encapsulated in a device that protects them from the recipient’s immune system, eliminating the need for immunosuppression.
There’s one thing that advertisers agree on: ads work in the aggregate.
You can tell by turning them all off. Ask Kraft Heinz.
Beyond that it gets fuzzy. Is it inefficient? Yes. Does anyone agree on the actual mechanics? No. Is the data wildly inaccurate? Sure. Is there grift? Totally.
People also forget how inexpensive and ephemeral individual ads are. A display banner on a quality site costs less than a tenth of a penny.
And it’s like a room on a cruise ship — the boat is gonna sail one way or another. So it has to be sold.
Advertisers might choose to let Facebook arbitrage those impressions into a cost per click model — at pennies per click instead of hundredths per view. Tradeoffs galore in that model.
When you aggregate these numbers into a $600b industry, you start to see how sweating some of the finer details just doesn’t matter.
>it’s like a room on a cruise ship — the boat is gonna sail one way or another. So it has to be sold.
super shaky reasoning. the less rooms that get sold, the less likely future ships are to sail or even be built. individual decisions matter in aggregate
> you start to see how sweating some of the finer details just doesn’t matter.
I think it’s an opportunity. The original premise of google is that targeted ads would let you benefit from “sweating some of the finer details.”
If 1/3 of a $600B market is wastage or fraud, then that’s an opportunity to give advertisers better response for their spend. Really massive.
I’m sure advertisers would like more sales by being able to remove the waste ads. Currently they can’t do that. But if some new company or tech allows for that, it’s worth trying to figure out.
That is a poor comparison because its not a comparison with a single variable changed. Kraft and Heinz went from two independent companies to a single one controlled by new ownership engaged in organization-wide cost cutting. The world also did not stand still over that time, it probably also changed in many ways.
Its probably impossibly to conclude with any confidence that the results were simply due to cuts to the ad budget, cuts to the budget and cuts to operations, or simply cuts to operations. Ads are also not commodities. An ads effectiveness is also not the result of pure spend, cheap ads can be very effective and expensive ones can also not be effective and vice versa.
Leaving aside whether you want a manufactured social event like this.
I have trouble imagining how it works. The food will invariably arrive very asynchronously. I have limited delivery options where I live and actually end up going and picking up a pizza from one or two different places if I want one. (Or make one at home.) I don't have any interest in some app/third party randomly picking a pizza place and delivering to me.
If you must have a remote team social event, just let people deal with their own food and drink.
Tertill is cool and all, but for a new garden, you still have to weed until the payplants are big enough to trigger "collisions". There's no magic in sensing: It just kills new growth.
Yeah, seems to assume you're going to put protectors around the 'good' plants or something at first. Still, I could see some interesting swarm behavior opportunities for the right types of plants and growth stages...
High quality products. Less frequent shopping. Ethical practices.
Protip: for perishable items like produce, we have a "Costco buddy system" -- a few nearby friends who we can split bags of limes or onions with. Huge savings on produce this way.
They treat their workers well. Or at least they did when I worked there 15 years ago. I was paid like $13/hr, time and a half on Sundays, 401k, health benefits, and regular raises. Which is pretty fantastic for someone making pizzas and slinging hotdogs.
They still do. Trader Joes does too. I love both stores, and do most of my shopping between the two. It's nice to know that 99% of the retail people I interact with are being treated well by their employers.
Juice the limes; mince the onions in a cuisinart. Freeze in 1-4 cup restaurant style containers you can get at any restaurant supply store.
We also bbq 3 racks of ribs, 4 whole chickens, 2 3-pack chicken breasts (about a dozen breasts), 3 packs of chicken legs, and 12 pork chops at once one day every 3-4 months. Use a big spice mix from Costco. Everything is usually organic (pork is often not organic though...butcher told us there simply are not enough organic pork producers in the US.)
We sometimes invite friends and split the finished goods. Drink Costco craft beers and premium wine during prep and bbqing. (It helps to have 2 large grills).
Wrap dinner sized portions for your family size in foil (also sold at Costco of course) label with a sharpie and freeze. Dinners ready for months!
I toured the facility around 2005-6 (iirc). Looks like you still can.
It had a futuristic and lightly post-apocalyptic vibe. The jungle plants were growing out of control, pressing up against the glass panes of one of the habitats. Ants streamed in and out from the desert outside through a crack in a glass panel.
If you check it out (http://biosphere2.org/visit/tour-schedule-hours), you can have a full post-apocalypse vacation by adding a tour of the ICBM museum south of Tucson, the AMARC plane graveyard, Cosanti in Scottsdale and Arcosanti (where you can stay) north of Phoenix.
I highly recommend the ICBM museum in Tuscon. They go through the entire launch process for the tour. It takes less than a minute. It's quite something to imagine that within that short period, the end of civilization would be guaranteed.
I still liked the old launch procedures where people where involved and no hyper sonic missiles. Back then, some guy could step back and say - "Okay, its all fucked, so why should i drop one more rock at some poor town in nowheristan?" and give those after us a living chance by behaving reasonable. Today that wont happen, and the machines are that much more likely to just MCAS kill us via a design failure.
Any post-apocalyptic vacation in that area should also include a tour of the dendrochronology lab at the University of Arizona. Also Kartchner Caverns, if you're willing to drive a bit further than the Titan Missile Museum.
And while you are enjoying a buffet of extinction level mass homicide, I always recommend a stop at Rooster Cogburn’s Ostrich Ranch between Tucson and Phoenix. Check the internet, they aren’t open every day. But you can spend an hour feeding tiny livestock, giant nightmare birds, and end up covered in lorikeets. (Hint: the fallow deer have gross saliva. Feed them before the Sicilian donkeys. The donkeys will clean you up.)
Yeah, there are little plastic chutes in the fence for feeding them. I noticed those after I successfully and painfully retrieved my right coding hand from inside the head of one of those nightmare birds.
