There was a good chance of 23andme being able to make full-genome sequencing (which they weren't yet scaled up to) a commoditized service with the privacy protections that need to be ensured for all customers. However the business model collapsed along the way.

Now we see the most predictable outcome - someone who knows they can profit from the data is buying the remains of the company (with the data).

Only in the USA is the genomic data that valuable, and there is one sector of the economy who can benefit from it more than any other. Regeneron knows which industry that is, and while they aren't a direct part of it themselves they know they need to serve it.

Regeneron bought the data to eventually sell it to the Health Insurance Cartel. The Cartel was granted effective license to print money with the passage of the ACA, but they want more power. They still own an overwhelming majority of congress - on both sides of the aisle - but they want more power. With the genomic data they can start rewriting the rules on pre-existing conditions. As all other plans go up in price they can start offering plans that are less expensive if you consent to DNA testing, which will lead to treatment for some conditions being denied.

We can't win as long as the system is set up this way. We can't change it when the people who benefit from it control the people who set the rules.

The Trump administration has been largely a copy-paste production. When they initially wanted to "replace" the ACA back during his first term, their plan was to replace the ACA with the ACA - made better by putting his signature at the end instead of the signature of President Obama. When they were finally called out on that, they quietly dropped their efforts to repeal the ACA, instead focusing on various things they can do in the name of "border security" (nevermind that no effort has been made this term for the wall that he used to talk nonstop about).

This store reflects a retail model that is simply dead now. You don't go in to a surplus store looking for something specific, as you likely won't find it. You go in with general ideas and you see what you find along the way.

Unfortunately very nearly nobody shops like that any more. We have a chain of surplus stores where I live, and the last several times I've gone in I've walked back out empty handed as they didn't have anything I wanted. They had plenty of things that other people want, but nothing I was looking for at the moment. 500 feet of rope in 12 different diameters? Yep they have it but I'm not looking for it. Cartoon character umbrellas? Yep they have it but I'm not looking for it. Firewire cables? Yep them have them but I'm not looking for them. Strange animated movies I've never heard of? Yep lots of those too. The list goes on and on but if they don't have anything I'm looking for then they won't get any money from me.

The list of 6 speed manual cars sold in the USA is very, very short. If you drop the ones sold by Porsche you cut that list in half. If you then drop the ones from VW (yes I know Porsche is a part of the VW corporate empire but we'll acknowledge them separately here) after that you end up with about 3 vehicles, and you find that even those only offer manual transmissions in very specific configurations.

The bigger news is that this isn't really news, as the manual transmission has been dying a gradual death for decades here. People don't learn it, and they don't want to drive it. On the plus side it makes it a theft deterrent technology for those who do drive it.

The trade imbalance is a political football. One team blames it on the other if they need something different to use to paint their opponents in an unflattering light. Then the next month they won't care about it.

Many employers made a switch years ago to having only a vanishingly small fraction of applications read by humans; instead opting to have applications screened at the first level by algorithms that people don't understand or know how to adjust.

Now we see the next "logical" step in that process, having AI do even more of the process.

We can see where this is going, but we can also see what it is supposed to do. If this actually worked correctly, it would ensure that every applicant was actually given a fair shake, and evaluated without bias. Unfortunately no system that I've seen actually accomplishes that; and generally the most effective way to get from applicant to interviewee is to reach out directly to a human who can help you bypass the automation.

It does make me feel bad for Gen Z as they finish schooling and attempt to enter the labor force; they are being pushed into the fight with one hand tied behind their back.

NIH had originally proposed making this mandatory years ago. The date got pushed back (possibly more than once). The first "open access" mandate was over a decade ago but exceptions were carved out, and there were also some very long grants that were already funded that were exempt from new regulations. This is just the latest - and hopefully last - step.

The foot dragging came more from the journals than anything. It wouldn't be that hard for Nature, Science, Cell, and the rest of the most prestigious journals to just make all the new articles available for all; they still make plenty of money on review charges, page fees, subscription fees, and fees charged to people who don't reside in the USA. They just kept finding excuses and their prestige kept people from fighting back harder.

I have never met a scientist who earned a nickel off of journal paper royalties; I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure no such thing exists. I've worked with people who have published in Nature and Science and they never mentioned ever getting money back for their papers; I was a co-author on a paper in PNAS and neither I nor anyone else on the paper received any money from that either.

The big journals exist primarily because they have existed for so long. As I mentioned elsewhere, the academic journals aren't much different from health insurance companies; nobody likes them but they are so entrenched in our system that it's impossible to exist without them. Similarly both are parasites and neither are that different from many Ponzi schemes.

I will concede the journals do have some costs - just not anywhere near what they take in. They do need to store digital information - in some cases papers can have many gigs of data that needs to be stored for quite some time - and the archives of some of these journals now goes back well over 100 years. Arguably though the real racket to the whole system is in the review process itself; the reviewers are all volunteers and some of the editors are as well. The journals have almost no expense until the final article is accepted, and yet the scientists are paying money to them up front without a guarantee of publication.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic there or not, but publication charges are significant for the most prestigious journals. Even the journals that don't have print editions charge hundred of dollars (or more) for publication fees - and many of the print journals are also supported by advertising.

Academic publishing is similar to health insurance. Nobody likes it - except for the people making money off of it - but there is no other option so we put up with it.

I spent a lot of time in academia. I did undergrad and post-undergrad research. I was a grad student for far too long working on my PhD. I was a post-doc for several years after that, and a research associate after that. I know how the sausage is made.

You'll be hard pressed to find a researcher who favors paywalls. The problem is many of the most prestigious journals use them. This leads to a chicken-and-egg problem for researchers, as they either get their best work in the paywalled journals - where it gets read by more people - or they put it into less prestigious journals that are not paywalled. For years there was no choice; it was paywalled or less read.

The new regulation says that the previously paywalled journals have to make an open access option available for NIH funded research. This is a great thing. The publishers will still get publication fees, but they can't force readers to pay additional fees. Whether journals should be so expensive to publish in - and subscribe to - is another question, but at least readers will have access to more published work at no direct cost.

But make no mistake about it. The paywalls existed to generate revenue for the journals, the scientists themselves never favored them. As someone who spent quite a bit of time at a smaller research university (with fewer journal subscriptions available through our library) I know the frustration of not being able to get some journal articles due to paywalls.

You should look up "basic science", which I presume is not the acronym you were after with "BS". There is a lot of important basic science research that is funded by the NIH that gets spun - intentionally or otherwise - into things that it isn't. There is a lot that we don't know about fundamental molecular biology that we are funding research on that will pay dividends later but might seem obtuse right now.

Another great example is transgenomic - not transgendered - animal models. Whether the Trump Administration made that misstatement intentionally or just ignorantly is open to discussion, but the value of the work is not. We learn a lot by doing genomic work in mice; work that leads to better understanding and treatment for human diseases.

You couldn't be more wrong on that if you tried. If scientists had work they didn't want people to know about why would they publish it at all? To get a publication in anywhere it has to go through peer review, which means more people read it and know about it. If you had awful results that you didn't want to tell anyone about then wouldn't you just not even submit it to a journal at all?

Maybe the ballot was different in your state, but here "Cheaper groceries" were not running for POTUS. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were running for POTUS. There were a few third party candidates on our ballot as well but none were called "Cheaper groceries"; hence nearly everyone who cast a ballot voted for Trump or Harris.

To give credit to the folks who always yell about the need for a third party, I know I certainly don't agree with Trump or Harris 100% of the time. One I agree with far more than the other, but neither I agree with every time. I can say the same about every other office I voted for last November. I had to choose the candidate who was closest to aligning with my values.

You hit the nail on the head, there. Smartphones - and screens in general - are a addiction for millions now. People check their phones before they get out of bed, and they look at their phones in bed before they go to sleep. The phone is with them constantly and some people face crippling anxiety when their phone battery is too low. The phone triggers neurochemical pathways over time that are reinforced by habitual use.

People can't easily just walk away from habitual - or addictive - phone use. Doubly so, young users have an even harder time distancing themselves from it.

Now one can argue whether or not a "dumb" phone is a solution to this or not - it might well be equivalent to methadone for drug addicts that only helps some users - but regardless many screen addicts are facing a difficult challenge.

I'd recommend people to mod your comment up but we don't have enough users left here on slashdot with mod points for that to matter.

One huge problem there is that the same material is not "useful and productive" for everyone. I took three years of Spanish through high school and I can't handle the answers to simple questions in that language - yet I have very nearly no use for it whatsoever in my field of work. By comparison I have a sibling who went to Spanish immersion and does occasionally use the language - though we work in vastly different fields.

Similarly I use calculus on a regular basis, and chemistry and physics every week.