I don't know if most people's work ethic is that high. At least mine isn't as I'm writing this from my home office during working hours while having basically procrastinated all day today.
When slacking in the office, it's essential to find other slackers to slack with. At home, I can slack alone just fine doing all the stuff that I normally do at home.
1) Even if it doesn't improve performance, athletes might still think it does and try to get the asthma medication. It might surprise you how much lore and voodoo surrounds professional sports. People are willing to try almost anything if it has even a small chance to improve performance by 1%. Also, both of the studies you linked are quite new. Athletes have been obtaining (possibly false) asthma diagnoses for decades.
2) Maybe they don't use normal doses. As long as they get the prescription, they can take however much they want, right?
3) A few studies might not be enough to thoroughly prove that there's no effect under all possible circumstances. Again, as long as there is even a small amount of hope of it helping, many athletes are willing to try it.
> Some of that is almost certainly confounded by the fact that many asthma medications - most notably salbutamol - are performance-enhancing drugs; an asthma diagnosis allows an athlete to take drugs under a therapeutic use exemption that would otherwise result in a ban.
I think all of it might be explained by this. At least to me it was always "common knowledge" that many athletes find a doctor willing to diagnose them with asthma so that they can get the medication.
Keeping a factory alive is not free. If you have committed to delivering a certain product for the next 30-50 years, you need to be able to deliver that product even in year 49. Even if it's only three parts and the factory is only profitable when producing thousands a year.
Some costs that will crop up even without investing in R&D and maintenance:
- Factory maintenance. The lights need to stay on, the floors need to be swept and the bearings need to remain greased. Things like ISO and security certifications also need to be kept up to date.
- The longer a product runs, the more likely it is that the original employees on the production line retire or leave for another job. This means you'll need to be able to find and train new people for a job that uses tools and methodologies no longer used anywhere else. It will probably be more expensive to hire for those jobs than for jobs where people learn transferable skills that they could use in the rest of their careers.
- After 40 years, many of the components in the production machinery will be difficult to come by. A CNC machine from that time might use the (then brand new) 286 processor. If it breaks, where would you source extra 286 processors? Alternatively you can redesign the process to use up-to-date components, but that costs a lot of extra money.
- Usually the demand for components drops off over time as the world moves on to something more modern. For example, demand for components of older fighter jets will slowly drop off as new airframes are no longer being built and the existing ones slowly get taken out of service. This means you'll need to spread the fixed costs of the above points over fewer and fewer components over time.
- Finally, the need for R&D and marketing doesn't actually go away. If you only focus on producing (say) targeting processors for the F16, your company will go out of business at the latest when the last F16 leaves service. Your shareholders will probably not be happy about that, so it's still important to invest in gaining new contracts too.
You have to manufacture enough parts for if wwiii breaks out even though odds are it won't and even if it does the military will probable notewant those parts - but they might.
If you are a company facing bankruptcy because your process technology is not competitive with world leaders like TSMC and Samsung, you resort to military work. Intel is like the Boeing of the semiconductor industry except it might be less crucial to the industry.
I think this would seriously tank the smartphone business. The reason why I have to buy a new phone every few years is basically sugarcoated planned obsolescence. If the software running my five year old Android phone was public domained, likely the community would keep my phone running for at least five more years.
Not saying that this shouldn't happen, though. Just saying that people suggesting this sort of stuff should realize that the economic consequences for some businesses would be major.
>I think this would seriously tank the smartphone business
Not so sure in reality. There's a lot to dislike about Apple and I won't go into it, but as an example, I like their support policy. They promise 5y and usually it's 7y. They do disable features on older phones via feature flags where the performance would not be up to it (like on-device AI lately), but this rather long support does not seem to impact their sales negatively. Arguably it works for them b/c people know they can resell their phones after 2y and still get a good price as buyers know they will get support. I am one who switched from Android/Sony precisely because of this.
The same could be true for opening older phones as some Android makers do unlocking the boot loader and leave it to enthusiasts to port newer Android versions. Many phones get recycled to something different this way (controller for home automation) and would never reduce sales.
Lack of software updates is definitely a factor why people have to trash a working smartphone but there are two more: software bloat and battery degradation. Newer apps tend to use more and more RAM an CPU so one have to upgrade or use slower and slower apps. Li-Ion batteries have limited life time. Even if you are ready to spend time and money on a battery replacement, spare batteries are available only for still widely used models.
People talk a lot about how phones are built with "planned obsolescence," but different people mean wildly different things when they say that.
On one end of the spectrum are people who insist that the reason phones only last as long as they do is a 100% deliberate decision on the part of smartphone manufacturers to hamstring their own hardware, often going all the way into full conspiracy-theory-level thinking, with timed kill switches and the like. Frankly, I find this line of thought to be bullshit.
On the other end are the people who are talking about smartphone manufacturers using components that are chosen for being small, light, and/or cheap, rather than being durable and user-repairable, purely for reasons of design, practicality, and cost savings.
Personally, I know which side of this I come down on; Hanlon's Razor[0] applies here, as well as the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, no actual timed kill switches in hardware or software—nor anything in the same general vein—have ever been proven to exist. And if not even the lowest-grade independent Android phone manufacturers are putting those things in their phones, why on earth would the likes of Samsung, Xiaomi, or Apple feel the need to do so?
If you blindly assume malice every time it's theoretically possible with corporations, you're going to be left angry, frustrated, and wrong an awful lot of the time. They're really just not competent enough to be doing most of this stuff deliberately.
As others here have pointed out, Gaia-X successfully funnels money to EU cloud companies and maybe this is what it's supposed to do. The deal is: company agrees to write some bs on how it contributes to this project and they get the money. The point is to get local cloud tech sector to grow here in the EU and maybe it's too difficult politically or otherwise to just give money to the companies directly.
This also blows my mind, instead of adding more berucracy to apply for funding to review funding to give funding.
just give tax credits based on innovation / investment criteria, to both companies and employees, Europe needs digitalization so badly, yet they find more complex ways to enable it.
Tax credits make sense for companies already with a steady profit margin. Cloud in particular is a capex heavy business so for a new company that is not very useful for at least the first few years.
Just give it to the companies. That still incentivises equity investment (it lowers risk and raises the potential upside of profitability). It also make underwriting standard loans easier too.
Yeah, I feel that a lot of EU projects work that way.
I've participated in a bunch of EU projects in the academic space. Most of them were catastrophic failures if you just looked at the direct outcomes (few of the lofty goals were actually achieved). But they did provide much needed funds to participating institutions, and I think they were an overall win.
They come with a lot of overheads (some had 10% or more of the funds go to a lawyer who managed the project). But they are a lot more effective than all the "unbureaucratic" Covid aid payments that mainly went to companies with close ties to political parties...
I've also known people who have participated in some EU funded research programs. The consensus among the researchers who apply for those funds is that you write whatever bs gets you the funding and then you do whatever research you were going to do anyway.
The thing with chronic pain is that often it is garbage data being sent by pain receptors. Or more accurately our muddled processing of the nerve impulses leads to poorly established thresholds that lead to a constant presence of perceived pain. So preventing this pathology based on my experience is a cure. Physical regeneration is a separate target in my opinion.
A cure for much arthritis is possibly a Nutritarian Diet promoted by Dr. Joel Fuhrman which reduces inflammation and helps the body rebuild:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/blog/119/a-progressive-approach-to...
"The traditional treatment of rheumatoid arthritis revolves around medications which typically include steroids and chemotherapeutic agents such as methotrexate, Imuran®, Gold®, Plaquenil®, Arava® and Remicade®. These medications are considerably toxic and can result in serious disability.
My approach to treating rheumatoid arthritis differs in that it incorporates dietary modifications and nutritional supplements, avoiding the use of toxic drugs in the vast majority of cases. The recommendations are customized to the needs and response of each patient to treatment and involve more than just putting them on a special diet. However, in most cases, dramatic improvements and even complete recoveries occur.
In spite of well-conducted scientific investigations and the clinical experience of many physicians, this effective nutritional treatment of autoimmune disease is generally ignored. I have seen scores of patients with rheumatoid arthritis as well as lupus, fibromyalgia and connective tissue disease obtain complete recoveries through these natural interventions. Also, I have many patients who have made complete recoveries from allergies and asthma. Not every patient obtains a complete remission, but the majority is able to avoid the use of medication."
The big problem in our current society is that there is no substantial money to be made by big companies in promoting these sorts of cures.
Methotrexate is the most vile substance (made one day per week about as useful as a full day hangover) It did help but honestly only as much as the effort I put into a diet change. I completely agree with parent comment.
Anyone with an autoimmune disorder or chronic inflammation who has not experienced an elimination diet is doing themselves a huge disservice.
> It sounds like, even in the best case scenario, the drug doesn't really cure arthritis but just blunts the pain.
> I was thinking it would be something that helps the worn ligament grow back. That I would consider a real cure.
As far as I can tell, that is what it does:
> The drug is based on a molecule he discovered while working at Pfizer, and can be delivered via a once-a-month EpiPen-style injection, where it restores protective processes to diseased joints and enables the regeneration of affected tissues. It works by blocking a compound that supports the nerve cells involved in transmitting pain signals to the brain.
This doesn't say it just blocks the pain, it says it directly affects the nerve cells involved in transmitting pain. Those nerve cells could also be responsible for other unpleasant things, like generally complaining and always being inflamed and inhibiting proper healing.
It is hoped the drug — which is not a cure but will make the condition much less painful for sufferers — could also be used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and chemotherapy-induced pain in the future.
As a writer myself who has watched journalism dying, crap articles being written by underpaid freelancers, the enshitification of the internet while everyone objects to any means used to monetize content creation, etc ad nauseum, I don't really feel like trying to figure out just how much this "really does" for patients.
The medical industry in the US tends to be about profit and I think people should, in fact, profit for their work but in medicine sometimes profit motive tosses the baby out with the bathwater. And I'm super burned out on trying to have any kind of meaningful discussion of that issue online.
"not a cure" means that if you stop taking the drug, the condition comes back, at least as far as I can tell. Which checks out given the other information given by the article.
I thought tissue degeneration was part of the issue here? Having regenerated tissue doesn't necessarily help if you stop taking the drug and the tissue just goes away again.
(It sounds weird to me that tissue can just disappear from that area so I think this might be wrong?)
If tissue gets regenerated, it shouldn't "just go away again" once you stop the drug unless perhaps there is an unidentified pathological process involved.
yeah, I too find it weird to imagine that tissue can just disappear from the inside of a joint. where would it even go? does it melt into the bloodstream or something? lmao
My understanding is that exposure therapy is nowadays the recommended way to deal with milder allergies. My daughter was allergic to eggs and the doctors advice was to start to slowly introduce them to her diet. About half a year after starting this, she could eat eggs in food no problem.
I've also personally cured my cat allergy. We adopted a cat that was supposedly of hypoallergic breed ("supposedly" because there's really no science behind it, it's just people reporting less reactions from this breed). I still got a mild allergic reaction to her initially, but after a few months, it stopped. Now, a few years later, we are still happily living with her and it seems that I've ceased being allergic to other cats also.
I'm still waiting for a similar discovery to treat GERD. Having the condition, I've become a bit of a couch expert on GERD literature and it seems that everyone and their dog have a completely different opinion on what, in the end, causes it.
With a little bit of search, it's possible to find lots of papers that claim to solve the issue with some kind of novel treatment. Sometimes it's training the LES or other muscle (like in the article), sometimes it's correcting some sort of dysbiosis of the gut or the esophagus (see e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6469450/), etc.
It's possible that they are all true, though, and GERD can either result from multiple different causes or from a sum of different causes. If that's the case, we would need better diagnostics to figure out what is causing each individuals problems in particular.
There are people with giant hiatal hernias and no GERD and there are people with bad GERD and no hiatal hernia. Hiatal hernia seems to at least make GERD worse, but is not the only factor and the causal link between hiatal hernia and GERD seems to run both ways (i.e. people with GERD also develop hiatal hernia over time instead of just hiatal hernia causing GERD).
Other possible explanations found in the literature are at least: small intestine bacterial overgrowth; dysbiosis of the esophagus; food intolerances; postural problems; incorrectly (for some reason) functioning LES (or other related) muscle etc.
It's possible that all of these contribute a little bit to GERD and whether you get problems depends in all of these factors in some non-trivial way.
