Most of us should be honest and admit we're jealous of this guy.
He basically chose a sector where customers are desperate (weight-loss drugs), slapped a website and an interface for connecting with a drug prescription provider together, did effective marketing, and now his business generates millions a month in profit.
Like, there are a half dozen companies like his running around that essentially offer the same product and prices because they are all customer interfaces stop the same provider.
Just the other day I was downvoted and called out for suggesting that perverse incentives are hard to resist, yet here we are with the Times (apparently) showcasing another such instance.
In this case GLP1's clinical effects are widely understood though, so it is immaterial if an "artist's depiction" (artificial agent's depiction) is of a real person or purely hallucinated.
This is just like when Paypal got started and was basically operating their own bank. Good luck doing that without getting in trouble. This is selling pharmaceutical drugs over the internet. You're playing chicken with going to jail they just happened to get lucky.
Author loses me when he starts pearl clutching about the harms of seeing boarded-up windows, and his wife having to walk past unhoused drug users. (Who, let us be clear, are the ones who are actually experiencing harm.)
This guy isn't a liberal, he's a guy looking to justify his discomfort by dressing it up with a bit of rehydrated bible-school epistemology
The intro paragraph threw me for a while, too. The author says he stopped liking Scott Alexander's posts because of the tenor of Scott's politics. Usually in the past couple decades when someone's said that it's meant "Scott's too Republican-coded for me on things like race and feminism"; but this post's author is actually arguing that Scott is too Democratic-coded for him on social issues like crime (and, by extension, immigration and race: TFA's author doesn't approve of the number of "obviously illegal" food trucks he sees on the street, for example).
What immediately came up for me is MAGA political capital and trust.
The Orange-utan typically requires his newly-onboarded minions to do something odious or seemingly hypocritical, in contradiction to either regular moral sense or their own stated scruples, such that without his sponsorship, they would have no hope of being taken seriously. Their political capital becomes hostage capital.
Sometimes it's something small, like RFKjr's famous cheeseburger shot on AF1. But usually it's election denialism.
The other guy who famously did this to his associates is of course Epstein.
Funny how they seem to be running the same playbook! Almost like they knew each other real well
Unsure, but thinking aloud, if a bunch of formal (ie high signal) documents say that the link in question is to do with the Epstein files, it would presumably have an effect on how search engines and LLM training runs understand the content of the link.
But why one would want to do this is beyond me -- it would, after all, be an unsavoury association.
Looking at the log, it seems like the author gives each release a name. “Epstein files” is just the latest out of a number of questionable names, the previous one being “Maduro”:
Maybe we can come up with an atoms-vs-atoms way of making cheap drone interceptors, but IMO the smart money is on lasers. We finally have the technology we only assumed would shortly materialize when we started the Strategic Defense Initiative. We also finally have an economic (rather than "merely" political) rationale for doing so, which is an important precondition to birthing something new in a society ruled entirely by the market.
I think the smart money is always on "nope" but that has more to do with the laws of thermodynamics :)
Attenuation is going to be wild at any reasonable distance, and you can always just be reflective (or highly and harmlessly absorptive, eg self ablating paint).
Lasers are good for jamming sensors though, which could I suppose, matter, although fibre optic drones or swarmwork could make that less useful as well
I have seen reports of high-powered lasers being used to sweep an area, cutting through the fiber optic cables on drones that have passed by but not yet reached their targets.
But yeah, they do seem to always be future tech that just doesn't materialize as a reliable weapon system.
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