It's incredibly difficult (and expensive) to get credit card processing for an adult entertainment business, and the cartels (Visa/MC/Discover/Amex) don't want to make it easier. In my three years' work for a site dealing with just this kind of issue, here's what I found:

• You pretty much can't get processing in your own business name if you're up-front about what you do, in the United States.
• You can't get processing in Europe, either, unless you're actually in the EU. Opening a shell corporation won't help, and even then, it's also impossible.
• You might be able to get "high risk" processing outside of the United States, out of somewhere like Vietnam or the Philippines. If you do, you can expect games with your money.
• You can expect to have your bank hold on to your funds a minimum of three months. This is not something like a 5% rolling reserve. It is, instead, a 100% rolling reserve.
• You can expect your contract to say that when you end your contract (even at the end of term in the normal course of business), your processor can hold onto 100% of your money for an additional year, starting as soon as you give your required six months notice.
• You can expect your contract to say that you surrender your domain name to your processor in perpetuity.
• You can expect to pay as much as 25% of revenue for this "service."
• You can expect to find it impossible to open even a normal checking account into which to deposit your funds, because no bank in the universe will want to deal with you, simply because you run an adult business.
• About the only semi-reputable (caveat emptor) business that will do billing for adult websites is CCBill. You can expect to pay CCBill at LEAST 10% of your revenue, and if you want to take Visa, you have to pony up another $750 non-refundable startup fee, and a $500 annual fee, on top. Approximately 40% of adult transactions are Visa, so not accepting Visa isn't a viable option for most businesses.
• CCB's software absolutely sucks. It is bloated, slow, doesn't give good control over affiliates and their production, and doesn't produce usable reports. And, I have never once given an email address to CCBill (yes, I use unique addresses for such transactions) that didn't get sold to a spammer. This includes addresses I gave to them in a business relationship, not just buying a website subscription.
• Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode, which are supposed to eliminate chargebacks, are not available to adult entertainment sites. No explanation has ever been given about why this is so, but if you run porn, you can't use these "enhanced security" services.
• CCBill supports only subscription-based services. They don't support physical good sales. Want to sell DVDs, t-shirts, photographic prints, USB keychains, or other goods along with your site subscriptions? Too bad.
• No well-known payment service aside from CCBill allows porn. This includes PayPal, Google Checkout, Moneybookers, and the rest. Want to sell legal second-hand DVDs on eBay? Good luck figuring out how to get paid. I have a warehouse full of stuff I basically can't sell because I can't get paid.

One of the reasons problems are so rampant in credit card processing in adult entertainment is that the cartels have made it nearly impossible to get legitimate processing, and so businesses that want to take credit cards have to resort to quasi-legal tactics to be able to run them. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One of the things I looked into was the possibility of creating, essentially, a pornographer's bank. The bank would adhere to customary American banking law, but would explicitly accept legal adult entertainment business. The question we could never get an answer to was whether or not Visa and MC would allow such a bank to back merchant accounts and issue credit cards. You can't get an answer to that question unless you already are a bank. Nobody is willing to risk the several million dollars it takes to buy or start a bank without an answer to that question, and no existing bank is willing fly such a balloon for you. Catch-22.

If you pick your jobs right, you could make as much as $3/hr on Mechanical Turk. I know because at one point it was the only income I had.

Texas has had this since 1984. What's the story here?

put together the numbers of what this will cost, and complain to your elected supervisors. suggest terminating the cableco's franchise. god forbid they should lose their right to print money by ... delivering service.

I've incurred overdraft fees based on merchant error a number of times, and every bank I have ever had has done everything they can to screw their customers out of as much money as possible. EA expecting banks to refund overdraft fees is like asking EA to ... I don't know ... behave like a company that cares about its customers.

> That's actually how it worked pre-bill,
> the poorest people qualified for Medicaid

And that depends entirely on where you happen to live.

If you live in a state like Massachusetts, which several years ago enacted many of the same reforms contained in this bill -- coverage mandate, subsidies, and guaranteed issue -- you might indeed qualify for Medicaid.

If you live in Texas, it doesn't matter how poor you are. If you're an adult and you're a) not pregnant and b) not so disabled you eat your food through an abdominal tube, you can't get Medicaid. There isn't a box to tick on the integrated application form where you may apply for it, because average adults -- working or not -- do not qualify, ever, for any reason.

The expansion in states like Texas will be slow in coming and relatively miserly, meaning that even if you qualify under the newly-expanded eligibility, chances are greater than 50/50 that you'll still be left with nothing, depending entirely on where you live.

By the way -- please don't give me that "so move to another state!" crap. There are all kinds of reasons why someone can't simply pack their shit and move, such as, in my case, children who live with an ex-spouse that I'd like to continue seeing on a regular basis.

Cry me a fucking river.

I was in perhaps 6th grade, and the teacher came in and said the "satellite just ... exploded." She wasn't emotional at all.

I thought she was talking about Voyager.

The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution grants equal protection under the law to all Persons born or Naturalized in the United States. Including the Right to petition one's government.

Under the law, a Corporation is a legal Person. /IANAL

The article is pretty good, actually, in that it doesn't try very hard to claim that they're curing the world of its ills. There's a little in there, but mostly it deals with Fragile X.

Randi Hagerman (the researcher quoted extensively in the article) is one of the leading lights in Fragile X research. She and her husband, Paul, described the gene, developed the RFLP that we now use to diagnose the illness, and did much of the fundamental work to explain the genetic-expression behavior of the gene. It is not a simple inheritance model, and the expression of the gene is quite confusing. She's a superstar.

As far as the broader issue of autism (and even more confusingly, autism spectrum), Fragile X has always seemed to me to be a blind alley. People with Fragile X (I've worked in that community as a physician) have a very specific affect and behavior pattern that doesn't look a lot like the behavior of people with autism (a community I know all too well as a physician and a parent of an autistic young man). Most of the early research in autism was tainted by the inclusion of Fragile X patients, and most of the combined research is just confusing.

I hope that the drug proves useful in Fragile X, although pharmacotherapy for these kinds of disorders has frustrated us over and over again. These are simply very hard diseases to affect very much. At the least, though, it'll be another step toward understanding a serious disease. And I'll continue to wait and watch for anything that will help in autism, but I REALLY don't expect much from this specific drug.

The FDA has had a table of valid genetic biomarkers for medications for several years now. While many of these are cancer drugs looking at specific metatabolic or receptor issues, our old friend warfarin (a "blood thinner" with a narrow therapeutic index, a reputation for causing a lot of trouble and a genomic profile that accounts for about half of the known variation in the drug) and the pain drug codeine are on that list as well. There's even a research website devoted to genetic calculation of warfarin dosing.

Carbamazepine (Tegretol) can cause a rare life-threatening reaction called Stevens-Johnson Syndrome (Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis), but it's mostly limited to individuals with a specific Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA-B*1502). Again, known for quite a while and a part of the basic biology of the drug.

It's a fairly well-written article, but it's kind of breathless about stuff that I was really excited about back in the '90's when my medical school teachers were really excited about it too. The best news is that the FDA has really stepped up in the past few years to make this actionable data that a practicing clinician can use.

Okay, so let's give credit - this is a legitimate researcher doing interesting (if highly preliminary) work. From his bio, accessible from TFA, you find that:

We have been assessing CSF and plasma samples from human subjects at the Washington University ADRC and have found that decreased CSF [alpha-beta] and increased tau are harbingers of cognitive decline in cognitively normal elderly.

Which suggests that the increase in CSF beta protein seen in sleep deprivation might actually be a harbinger of protection from Alzheimer Disease (AD). Or not, and it's not possible to know right now. Your speculation is just as valid as mine.

The problem is that we don't know if the protein causes the neuronal damage in AD or is a side effect of the damage, like a clot or a scar. Dr. Holzman's research bio makes that clear, and it also makes it clear that the damage, whatever it is, starts decades before the protein levels become abnormal. So if you want to avoid sleep deprivation, that's cool, and the fact that most people reading this site are hopelessly sleep deprived most of the time is probably cool too. Either way, our other lifestyle issues will likely collect us long before our brains start to rot.

On the plus side, we now know how to make mice demented. It's not much, but it's something.

Amen. The vaccine has showed animal immunogenicity, which is not a bad thing, but since the animals in question don't get AIDS from HIV, their immune systems don't react the same way that human ones do. Which means you need to proceed to human testing, and that takes a long time.

Phase I trials are important, and announcing them is not a bad thing. And nobody particularly expects cures in the HIV-positive population, although circulating HIV may be interesting (if the virus can cause a practical immune response in subjects with HIV but who have fairly normal T4 counts and you can show reduced circulating viral load, you have an interesting data point for efficacy).

My biggest problem with this kind of press release is that they don't include the details. I'd be interested in knowing why this vaccine is likely to work better than the last two hundred that have been tried, what the actual animal studies showed, and so on. Oh well. I'm not going to be waiting up this weekend to hear more. It will be a couple of years before we know whether this one works.