It's also an estimate for capacity for 10 plasmapheresis runs on each person over the course of a year; not 'treatment' being a single extraction. I don't know what you'd expect the number to look like; but it's a factor of ten more reasonable than if you were reading 'treat' as being a single extraction.

I'm not entirely clear why (possibly so you can do it more often/in greater volume without affecting oxygen transport capacity); but the cost estimate paper discussed plasma extraction and apheresis equipment, not whole blood extraction; so presumably leeches wouldn't get the job.

I assume that they'd be at least an adequate option; though, amazingly talented phlebotomists for the price, supply their own anticoagulants at no additional charge, no sharps waste; and they require very little training.

It's arguably the fact that many people are very much not for gun laws that leads to these really stupid ones popping up.

There are some designs out there that are genuinely 3d-printed guns that manage to preserve a reasonably impressive 'hurt the target'/'mangle your fingers' ratio even without needing to step up to $$$$ selective metal sintering printers; but a lot of the popular ones are more a homage to the fact that you can really half-ass the technically-the-gun-for-regulatory-purposes receiver and then just buy all the more performance critical parts legally from competent professionals with real engineers and machinists and real CNC gear because those aren't the serialized and controlled part.

The WWII-era crash programs to design SMGs that could basically be knocked together in a garage if someone passed shop class; or the crazy stuff that some Khyber Pass dude is pulling off with a lot of experience, a beard, and a drill press older than he is are definitely also things; but it sure is a lot easier when building a gun is a lot like 'building a computer' would be if computer cases were legally controlled but you could still just hit newegg for everything else.

It seems really insensitive to bring this bill back so soon after the previously ill-understood role of 3d-printing in US medical cost containment was publicly demonstrated; to bipartisan popular acclaim.

It's a strategy in multiple parts; and one that normally avoids walking directly into unwinnable fights (these guys are evil; but they aren't stupid and are in a position where the margins are good enough to allow for a quite sophisticated apparatus that justifies its costs by preserving and juicing the margins):

What you will see provided openly are fairly vague, high-level, defenses of drug costs being high: lifesaving innovation isn't cheap, look at how far we've come in outcomes for X disease in the last Y years, biologics are so much more complex than traditional small molecule synthesis stuff so you can't treat generics as equivalents, etc. etc. These arguments will rarely be overtly false; though they'll be careful to avoid getting dragged into the weeds on off-message questions like "sure, that's all well and good; but how are all the same things true at less than half the price over in western europe?".

Then there's the class of arguments that they don't exactly buy advertising for, because they don't focus-group very well, but which are made more or less openly, though usually in specialized company like investor calls, and based on actual pricing data: this is where you'll get the "Our gene therapy for Ghastly Y-Linked Genetic Disease X will be $1.5 million; because current standard of care is over $100k/year in esoteric recombinant immunoglobulins delivered in impatient infusions; so really it's a win-win". This sort of argument will studiously ignore any questions of whether esoteric recombinant immunoglobulins actually need to cost so much as out of scope; and will treat the development and production cost of cool new gene therapy as irrelevant; the price is purely a question of what the market will bear based on what alternative therapies currently cost.

Then you get down to things like the PBM markup stuff described here; where you simply don't justify or defend the markups; but you structure the various contractual and ownership arrangements and the publicly visible price signals such that you don't have to. In some cases this is done through sheer complexity: Unless the guy at the pharmacy counter happens to be a sick investigative reporter who does a very specific flavor of story the odds are basically zero that they know anything useful about the web of ownership and contracts between the pharmacy, the PBM, the insurance company, the drug manufacturer and distributor, etc.

Then you've got the other sense of "defend": "gag clauses". You don't have to present a principled justification of something in order to defend it; you can simply conceal or impose it. If the pharmacy can get a drug for $30; but the PBM price is over $2k; it's often cheaper for the patient to just exchange money for goods and services as though they actually lived in a free market economy and pay $30+whatever it costs to keep the lights on at the pharmacy; rather than "the drug cost $2,200; your insurance saved you $1,800; that'll be $400". So you contractually forbid the pharmacist from mentioning that option.

In general, though, it's best not to think of American drug prices as being 'defended' in the sense of a thesis or an argument being 'defended'; but in the sense of a fortified position being 'defended': there will be some deliberately-visible arguments advanced, just as the military force that occupies a defended position will generally have a PR-friendly reason for their presence there; but the actual defense is not an argument; it's a complex and carefully constructed collection of mutually supporting camouflage, entanglements, information asymmetry, and so on.

I also see no possible upside to accepting a job I'm not going to show up for(especially when there's usually at least some inconvenience associated with actual acceptance that goes beyond application: they'll read a resume on the basis of a "Yeah, it's legal for me to work in the US" checkbox; but if they actually plan to hire you HR is going to going to want their I-9, and payroll is going to want enough information to know where the money should go, if they are responsible for doing any garnishments, and so on); but it has not been my experience that you can expect to get an actual "thanks for applying, position has been filled" with any reliability.

Some outfits certainly do that; but it's pretty common to get nothing beyond an automated confirmation that your form submission went through. Sometimes the listing you responded to just stays up, sometimes it eventually disappears, you hear nothing further. I've even had people who were apparently interested enough to have me in for an interview who didn't bother with a "thanks for coming in; good to talk to you; we've chosen otherwise" when they chose otherwise.

It's an especially baffling thing when you compare it to the experience of trying to do a product return or raise a support case. Those experiences are not always pleasant or helpful; outfits making it deliberately difficult to actually get to the point of a ticket being opened or an RMA being issued; then trying to close the ticket with a cryptic bit of insane troll logic or ascribe a cracked LCD to water damage is not a surprise; but it's typically the case that, if there's a ticket open, you'll have some combination of automated messages and tier 1 agents absolutely hounding you until it is closed; with the sort of urgency that suggests that people are getting fired for letting tickets rot for too long.

I am, perhaps to my detriment, both deeply bad at and deeply repulsed by playing weird social signaling and subtext games; so this strikes me as a weird hobby; but it seems striking how it's written up as 'catfishing'(despite that being a different thing, where you misrepresent yourself in order to attract interest, not the one where you attract interest and then silently stop reciprocating it) and "office treachery" when we had a report just a few days ago about a double-digit percentage of job listings being outright fictions with either no intent to fill or an already selected candidate for which they feel the need to pretend that a hiring process was actually done; and where nobody even bothers to write about the fact that job applications disappearing into the void without anything beyond an automated confirmation of receipt is the rule rather than the exception; and even in-person interviews are routinely conducted on a "if we are interested we'll call you back at some point; if we haven't called you back within six months I guess you should guess we aren't interested" basis; because that's just so normal and has been for years.

Why is it just normal when the demand side operates on a basis of deliberate obfuscation and contemptuous silence; but some kind of exotic malfeasance when the supply side just drops threads that are no longer relevant?

It seems like a fairly shit equilibrium position overall: scrambling to respond to surprises is normally a pain in the ass; and petty revenge basically never makes you feel better to the same degree that endless petty contempt makes you feel lousy; but that doesn't make it any less weird and partisan to write up one half of it like it's a juicy moral panic; while treating the other half as either so natural as to not be worth remarking on; or something that only snowflake losers who need to stop expecting to be coddled would be against.

And don't get me started on the uptick of job posting/hiring platforms promising that their hot new AI tools will help employers cut through the chaff and get right to the real people most worth their time. You think that asymmetry is going to last more than 30 seconds or so?

Seems unlikely. Aside from the percentage of x86 stuff where ARM has yet to make much of a move(not 100% by any means; but ARM has been much more active in getting established in areas that didn't previously exist, phones, tablets, the really teeny microcontrollers getting replaced by relatively large ones or small application processors; less eating servers); the military interest covers both things like "we need a part for this purpose that has "NOFORN" stamped on it" and "just hypothetically; how would you handle Taiwan getting set on fire?"

Intel's internally manufactured offerings are presently inferior; but, should TMSC be very on fire, Apple, Qualcomm, and Nvidia would be right back to shipping a mixture of some of their less-loved back catalog that they couldn't be bothered to move off Samsung and not much else; and AMD would be drinking heavily and remembering why they spun off Globalfounderies in the first place; while Intel would have plenty of 10 and 14nm stuff that's totally endurable ready to go.

Intel seems like a somewhat tricky one for acquisition given how the people most interested in owning them(either for architecture and product portfolios or for manufacturing capabilities and R&D) are outfits who any vaguely sensible antitrust regulator would run screaming from(Nvidia, as you noted, got slapped away from ARM; them eating Intel would be the bad outcomes expected for mobile and embedded visited upon client and datacenter, possibly even worse given Nvidia's GPU edge; and Samsung or TSMC are already large scale foundries with foreign ownership which seems like a hard no); and how it seems like basically everyone who wouldn't be immediately forbidden doesn't obviously gain anything from a fairly massive acquisition that they couldn't get just by placing a large order with Intel.

Especially now that Intel has gotten serious about multiple chiplet/multiple tile parts in the relative mainstream(not just the white elephant Xeon Phi stuff that paper launched because they had a DoD contract they had to fill; or some of the low volume tech demo foveros stacking mobile parts) any of the hyperscale 'cloud' guys would presumably find it relatively painless(especially compared to taking over and running things themselves) to request their pet accelerator co-packaged with some Xeon cores or just an Intel DDR5 controller; or their particular semi-custom adjustment of one of Intel's list parts towards their specific needs.

It's hard to escape the unpleasant feeling that a PE chop shop operation will be involved; with the extra-distasteful prospect of one plundering everything that isn't nailed down and eating the seed corn, as usual, then hitting up Uncle Sam for cash to preserve this vital national security asset; playing at responsible management just long enough for regulators to turn away for a moment, then repeating the process.

I'd be a bit surprised if they'd bother in this case: they are already hemmed in by the existing supply of cameras whose hardware cannot be changed and by the demands of professional photographers for usability with things like external preview displays in the field; and, realistically, driver signing requirements in modern OSes mean that they can do something utterly trivial and, so long as it requires a driver, everyone but the nerds will need someone to sign it for them; and this would involve actual engineering effort; but it's hard to be entirely sanguine about driver re-implementation against an adversarial vendor.

The trouble is that the hardware vendor controls the hardware; and that a peripheral is physically plugged into your computer but may be logically plugged in somewhere else, or in more than one place. Sometimes fairly loosely(unverified firmware built for a relatively well known architecture that can be reflashed either by a deliberately provided update interface or some fairly accessible bug that doesn't mean cracking the case); sometimes inconveniently(weak or nonexistent firmware signing; but you need to crack the case for a debug header or to clip onto a flash chip); sometimes more or less unshakably(some contemporary smartphones and consoles where everything is signed to hell and back and no exploits short of ion beam reworking a sub 10nm IC are know). As for the physical/logical distinction; it's relatively simple for the driver to provide some mixture of 'local' features(like a UVC camera or a mass storage class device) and a logically remote one that just uses your computer to set up a tunnel between something running on the hardware and something running on a remote host.

Microcontrollers with some cryptographic capabilities continue to get cheaper; and even ones that will do full mutual TLS with their own unique factory key and all are downright cheap now; so the price of entry to a device that doesn't have its own NIC; but, if provided with an untrusted tunnel over USB, is fully capable of strongly authenticating a remote host(nope, DNS spoofing won't help) and strongly authenticating itself to a remote host is pretty low indeed. If (as with digital cameras, which tend to be built around a fairly punchy DSP/ISP ASIC that's essential to pulling data off the sensor, plus a weedy little general purpose core that does UI and housekeeping) you've got a vital, heavily integrated, component to put the cryptographic chip into you can also frustrate attempts to physically remove it or swap it out: you can pry the DIGIC X off the board of a Canon camera easily enough; but what remains is basically a nice sensor and a lens mount: you aren't just swapping out a commodity PMIC or the like.

Put these two aspects together and you have a recipe for hardware that will substantially resist driver re-implementation: you can still connect high bandwidth or latency critical things directly to fairly basic local drivers(the actual UVC video stream; mass storage access to the memory card, etc); but if you want to lock something down (like the actual image processing parameters being applied to the UVC stream) you can require that to be a cryptographically secure request by the onboard cryptographic element to the vendor's host and then a response, unique to the requesting device, whose vendor signature the device will verify before applying the settings. Adds some latency and an always-online requirement(something you can increasingly get away with); and if you lose interest in the product or go out of business the customer is screwed; but that's a them problem not a you problem. Plus, unlike attempts to keep things closed on the client side, you don't even need to hassle with any bullshit obfuscation: as long as the keys stay secret you can use totally normal, off-the-shelf, approaches to cryptographic authentication; and the format of your configuration requests and configuration files can be as sane and readable as you like; because it doesn't matter if other people can generate their own configuration files when you are the only one who can generate signed configuration files.

Please note, I'm absolutely not in favor of any of this. All super-mega dystopian anti-customer stuff for which I'd hope anyone bold enough to try it would be punished severely: just to note that it would work, so long as the aspects of behavior you wish to control aren't too latency sensitive or incompatible with online requirements; and your hardware includes some core component critical enough to keep it from being swapped out. Fancy digital camera? If you are going to rip out the image processor you might as well just buy the appropriate image sensor from digikey and start from there. Console? Basically nothing but breakout board and power delivery for a SoC that does everything. Laser printer? Rasterizing postscript is not a challenge; not sure exactly how exotic the laser driver reading out of raster memory is. Pen plotter or filament deposition 3d printer? Don't bother; you'll just get brain-swapped.

That seems like a claim at the unfortunate intersection of 'arguably true-ish in certain cases'(in the sense that you can, probably, with some looking around, find someone who is a total propellerhead at shaving the insides of your loops when provided the documentation for the target architecture but who should probably be kept well away from software architecture; and at least one example of a genuinely elegant spec written at roughly the same formality level as a really high level language); but tempting to believe for really stupid and generally destructive reasons(mostly the seemingly widespread belief that software engineering being hard is some kind of con, based on syntax obfuscation, by the nerds against the Big Handwave Idea People, rather than a reflection of the genuinely nasty delta between mostly knowing what you want and how to get it and precisely knowing what you want and how to get it.)

Stopping sale of the static cell modem flavor of 'fixed' broadband, in a market where you are still selling cellular service to cellular subscribers, is basically the lowest commitment show of displeasure you could reasonably imagine.

It makes me curious if they are actually serious; or if they'll quietly show back up within 6 months if they end up not getting what they want. A wireline doing a take-this-market-and-shove-it would show at least some level of actual willingness to sacrifice.

Clearly we just need to introduce a rigorously and formally specified 'spec description language'; in which don't-call-them-programmers will write an internally consistent and sufficiently comprehensive spec, which we will absolutely refrain from describing in any way that might make it sound like source code; and then send that through something that absolutely isn't either a language translation process, interpretation, or compilation because it's not source code....

Then, once that crashes and burns under its own weight; we can adopt the "Pre-formal specification process", for people who don't know what they want or are afraid of syntax; and then we can have the not-programmers convert the informal specification into spec description language; and pat ourselves on the back for having achieved the no-code dream!

I think the problem there is timing attacks: so long as resources get cached across domains itâ(TM)s possible(how practical and how precise would vary according to fiddly details of exactly how common or distinctive various cached assets are) for a site you visit to draw inferences on where you have been previously by referring to a potentially cached resource and seeing whether itâ(TM)s available essentially instantly or whether thereâ(TM)s a delay that suggests your browser needs to grab a copy.

I'm honestly curious(though only idly; his whining is at best incidentally related to his beliefs rather than his interests; and those are what we have to worry about) whether Zuck genuinely overestimates his own level of invention by that much; or whether he fails to understand that, thanks the the illustrious standards of the industry, succumbing more slowly to the temptation to fuck up your own product because it's more profitable that way more slowly than the competition does has basically replaced 'progress' or 'invention' in contemporary consumer tech.

Apple certainly isn't immune to the rot; so long as you need a good 'services revenue story' at every earnings call you aren't going to loosen the screws or raise the standards in the app store; or look too closely at how much of your business is basically payment processing for children's casinos; but they seem to be succumbing to it more slowly than most; certainly more slowly than either their direct competitors or facebook are.

Back when consumer tech was still dominated by big, obvious, refinements and massive reductions in cost; rather than somebody fucking up the UI in new and hostile ways a couple of times a year, it was a lot easier to talk about 'invention' with a straight face.