I know. This is one of my major pet peeves, that even major publications seem to skip copy editing. I’ll forgive it in an independent journalist’s substack, but not much more.

I’ve never had a fruit salad with the consistency of salsa, but I see where you’re coming from. They are very close relatives.

The article is using as a source a 4chan post that had a docket number that didn’t check out. I’m pretty sure this is a joke someone took seriously because they needed to publish something today.

This would get almost immediately dismissed by any judge.

The shareholders in question suing are a public employee retirement fund. I wouldn’t exactly consider retired sanitation workers and bureaucrats societal leeches, but to each their own I guess.

Frankly for short haul flights it makes sense. Would it be worth paying double or triple for a three hour flight just to get a full meal? Anyone who truly wants a taste of old time flying can get that with a first class ticket, both in terms of cost and quality.

I forget the specifics and who came up with it, but: pick an amount you haven’t written before. Then, write that much without looking back. If you can set your word processor to only keep your current line visible, even better. Once you’ve written that many paragraphs or pages, do a fast edit. Use a timer so you can’t linger. Then write that much again with the same strategy. After 3-5 times, do a more thorough edit of the whole thing.

It’s not necessarily how you always want to write, but it can help getting over that initial confidence block as an exercise.

I’m genuinely not certain if you are meaning to reply to my comments because your replies don’t actually reflect what I’ve said. It is possible to have a larger discussion about a topic from a smaller example, and it’s also possible for things to not be all or nothing. I hope you can sort whatever bee is in your bonnet.

I’m not quite sure how you’ve turned “we should have the option” into “we should buy everything foreign.” I think you’re having an argument you want to have rather than addressing the point I was making.

Great, and where local is the best choice they should do that. But nobody can seriously argue that reducing the ability of government to shop around for the best cost/quality balance is a good thing. It’s not like the only options are buy everything American or everything from China. I’d like qualified experts making that decision, not legislators.

You create bad incentives if you artificially reduce competition like this. Not every good or service will have tons of American choices, so you end up with a handful of companies who know the government has no other choice.

I feel like all this is going to do is raise government costs and line the pockets of selected contractors. We aren’t always going to be the relative best producers in cost/quality balance for every product and service.

If we’re going to subsidize any industry, it should be done directly and explicitly. Otherwise, it becomes another example of “inefficient” government that should be privatized.

I know someone who has a similar outlook (climate change is real but science will solve it, so we don’t need to change anything). Basically anything science produces toward that end they will move the goalpost and say it’s not worth pursuing because science will fix it.

It is essentially their way of making climate change denialism seem reasonable and open-minded. I think if somebody came up with a miracle device to magically reverse everything, they’d complain it’s too costly at any price.

Even if that were true, I fail to see how that would make it incorrect. And I don’t think it is. I’ve heard gift used that way my entire life, which I wish was only twenty years long so far. Perhaps it was regional until more recently.

About 400 years ago. Is this a really sly way of revealing you’re a vampire?

Gift has been used as a verb for the entire history of Modern English. Unless you are speaking Middle English, gift is equally correct.

It’s been 8 years since VI came out. That’s the longest they’ve gone between releases since the original. It’s also difficult to say if it’s necessary without actually seeing what VII has to offer. If it’s VI with a new coat of paint, then I agree. But I hope they bring a novel aspect like districts was for VI that made it worth it.

I’m pretty sure this is a Demetri Martin joke.

It was the inverse in my family. The uncle who extricated himself from most of the family was actually a huge piece of garbage and did everyone a favor by cutting us off. I don’t think he expected that nobody would make an effort to re-establish contact.

Exactly. If it’s a regulated industry, they’re not just paying for Teams. They’re paying for someone else to worry about meeting certain compliance requirements and take the heat if things go wrong. I’m not sure how many companies besides Microsoft can offer that. At most it’s a fraction of the available options.

Two points about R&D costs:

First, they aren’t just trying to make up what they spent on this treatment, but others that failed during research/trials. There’s a lot of them the general public will never hear about, and pharmas generally don’t like to bring attention to their failures. Part of that is many shareholders are morons who don’t understand how science works.

Second, the costs can get fuzzier for larger companies who in-house much of the R&D process, since the costs get shared among many programs. Properly attributing spend in that case can be a serious challenge.

All that said, they’ve clearly seen an opportunity to rake it in with this trendy drug and are charging way more than they need to.

The two Black Panther movies combined have grossed over 2 billion dollars. I wouldn’t say that agrees with him. It’s also odd to assume that movies which didn’t do as well, like The Marvels, were because of a female dominated cast and not because they were just bad movies.