Fort Huachuca bids farewell to Morse code training - <AUTHOR> http://qrznow.com/fort-huachuca-bids-farewell-to-morse-code-training/ <comment><USER3> better link to original source:

[http://www.army.mil/article/147247/Fort_Huachuca_bids_farewe...](http://www.army.mil/article/147247/Fort_Huachuca_bids_farewell_to_Morse_Code_training_on_National_Morse_Code/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Morse Code is part of what got me into digital electronics design and then programming.

It was in the mid-'60s in Tempe, Arizona. I was into ham radio (was WA7DUB, now WJ6V) and started out - like everyone in those days - with CW (Continuous Wave, i.e. Morse code). I could send OK with a straight key - the kind when you push it down for the right amount of time to make each "dit" or "dah" (aka dot or dash).

That of course got a little tedious, so I bought a "bug" \- a semi-automatic keyer where you push a paddle from side to side. One side has a spring mechanism that makes dots in a row until you let go, and the other side simply completes the circuit as long as you hold it that way. So the dots are automatic and you make the dashes manually.

Then I heard about "iambic" keyers, where the paddle has two independent levers so can push either lever alone or squeeze them together, and it's hooked up to a circuit that makes dots for one lever, dashes for the other, and _alternates_ dots and dashes when you squeeze them both. I bought one of those paddle mechanisms and decided to design my own circuit for it.

My neighbor across the street worked at Motorola's semiconductor division and was able to get me free samples of their RTL (resistor-transistor logic) ICs. These were pretty primitive - each gate or flip-flop was in its own TO-5 "tin can" package. But they were enough to get me started and I got the whole thing working. It was a lot of fun to design that circuit!

Unfortunately, RTL was pretty susceptible to RF interference, and I never shielded the box well enough. This led to some embarrassment when the keyer circuit would start running away with continuous streams of dots or dashes or both, even after I let go of the paddles - and the speed would change on its own too.

I remember being on one traffic net where this happened, and the other operators called me a lid and started laughing at my lousy fist. A "lid" is a bad radio operator, and your "fist" is the quality of your Morse code - <USER2> precisely (or poorly) you time the dots and dashes. Little did they know I was just a bad circuit designer.

You know they are laughing hard when you can tell they are laughing at you _in Morse code!_

Some photos...

Straight keys: [https://www.google.com/search?q=straight+key&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=straight+key&tbm=isch)

Semiautomatic keyers: [https://www.google.com/search?q=semiautomatic+keyer&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=semiautomatic+keyer&tbm=isch) (the paddle mechanism is what I was talking about, not the schematic diagrams)

Iambic keyers: [https://www.google.com/search?q=iambic+keyer&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=iambic+keyer&tbm=isch) (the silver Bencher paddle is the one I have now - haven't used it in years, but it's too pretty to get rid of)

Tin cans: [https://www.google.com/search?q=to5+integrated+circuit&tbm=i...](https://www.google.com/search?q=to5+integrated+circuit&tbm=isch) (the round metal ones)

<comment><USER5> Lots of hams on HN. Several checked in over in the comments here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9445123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9445123)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting... to me at least. I was stationed there for manual Morse school back in 1997.</comment>


Is tech supporting Google? It sure doesn't appear so - <AUTHOR> https://www.oracle.com/corporate/blog/is-tech-supporting-google-021720.html <comment><USER2> Oracle trying to say people don't support the open spec stance Google is fighting for. Calling BS here, f u Oracle, you are a shameful, dying company.</comment>


I'm Skeptical of the Amazon Ebook Ratio - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385683,00.asp <comment><USER2> Dvorak claims: "everyone" who buys an ebook reader quickly buys lots of "trendy" books (say, 50-100 at $10 each) in order to look smart to people who borrow their device.

This seems absolutely barking mad to me, even if we assume he's exaggerating a bit, and take into account the fact that people's status manoeuvrings aren't always conscious. Kindle users: do you have dozens of unread trendy or impressive books on your device? If you have relatively few books on it, do you often lend it to someone else and feel embarrassed? If you were going to put extra books on your device in order to feel better about your bookishness, would you do it by buying lots of books or by getting free ones from Project Gutenberg or whatever? Is John Dvorak completely making things up here, or is there something to what he says?

[EDITED slightly a minute after posting: wording tweakage.]

</comment><comment><USER3> His main data point is that he only knows two people who have Kindles. This is the same as the fallacy of saying "How could that jackass possibly have been elected, I don't know anyone who voted for him!"

Guess what pal, you are part of a sub population that happens to not be interested in the Kindle. That's all.

A metric fuckton of people have Kindles, it has been the or one of the top selling products on Amazon for many months, a _lot_ of people obviously have them in hand now.</comment>


Hillary and Bernie's Quiet Email Battle - <AUTHOR> http://bizzy.io/blog/hillary-and-bernies-quiet-cyber-battle/ <comment> 0x5f3759df-i I don't think looking at their emails between winning and losing as if they are equivalent is a fair comparison. Bernie won New Hampshire by 22%, Hillary won Iowa by 0.2%. Delegates in the primaries are allotted proportionally so winning by 22% gives you more delegates than winning by 0.2%(ignoring the different quirks of comparing a primary to a caucus, and super-delegates). Obviously any candidate would take a more triumphant tone after winning by 22% than by 0.2%.

<comment><USER2> You forgot to say that Clinton has 394 delegates and he has 44. He has 11% of her delegates even after he "won" NH by 22%.

Plus nobody is polling a Sanders win. He will lose in South Carolina by up to 30%, Florida by up to 40%, and just barely scrape by in Nevada (within margin of error).

He will be out after Super Tuesday. He just doesn't have the right demographics (people who actually go out and vote). Even if he is super popular with all of the wrong demographics.

<comment><USER3> I think it is a little misleading to claim that Clinton has the 394 super delegates already. My understanding is that 1) super delegates can change their mind whenever and 2) these super delegate counts tend to even out over time if the race is close.

<comment><USER4> It seems unlikely the super-delegates would decide the nominee, if they did, they'd have a lot of disenfranchised voters on their hands and it'd hurt them in the general.

The electoral college has rarely diverged from public opinion [1], even though individual electors can and have voted "incorrectly". I can't find a similar figure for the democratic nomination.

[1] [http://www.factcheck.org/2008/03/presidents-winning- without-...](http://www.factcheck.org/2008/03/presidents-winning-without- popular-vote/)

<comment><USER5> I think you mean disenchanted[1], not disenfranchised[2].

[1] [http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/disenchanted](http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/disenchanted) [2] [http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/disenfranchise](http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/disenfranchise)

<comment><USER6> Both could apply.

Overruling the result of a popular vote with votes from party insiders would be like denying people the right to vote by allowing the ritual of voting then ignoring the votes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Isn't it interesting that despite a lot of Sander's voters being against the outcome of Citizens United that his very presence as a viable candidate at this point is in a way a demonstration of the point the Supreme Court made in their majority opinion?

I.e. here we have a guy who's not taking donations from big corporations, but is just as visible as Hillary who is. Money's speech apparently, and either lots from a few big donors or small amounts from lots of small donors counts.

Regardless of what happens with this election I think what's happening so far is indicative of a major change. If things keep going in this direction the 2024 election is going to be very interesting indeed.

<comment><USER8> Thousands and thousands of small donors to counterbalance 1 billionaire. That doesn't seem like a one-man-one-vote style democracy.

Also, money is not speech, that's like some kind of 1984 doublespeak. Money is access to popular mass communication channels. Access to popular mass communication channels is not speech and is not addressed in the constitution. Scalia's "originalism" was such a scam.

<comment><USER9> "Money is speech" is doublespeak for sure, but it's doublespeak used by people opposed to _Citizens United_ to make it seem like money is at issue rather than speech. Those people want you to believe that a political movie about a Presidential candidate stops being speech and becomes money just because of where the money to make and air it came from.

<comment><USER8> The ruling in Citizen United was that they had the right to buy ads and pay to have the movie televised. The law that the Supreme Court struck down banned corporations and unions from _paying_ for candidate ads during the last 30 days of a campaign. The ruling found that 1) paying for TV time is equivalent to free speech and 2) a corporation is equivalent to a person for the purpose of the constitution's "We the People".

<comment><USER9> Right. Opponents of _Citizens United_ would have us believe that banning the act of people (acting through a corporation or otherwise) paying to have a political movie aired is not suppression of speech. That's doublespeak--saying that speech is actually money even though the expenditure of money is wholly incidental to the act of political expression. By that reasoning the government can ban spending money to publish a book, or buying a bus ticket to attend a protest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Bait (A.K.A. The Subject Line)

Bizzy's Headline makes it sound like there is both a battle (a head to head competition) and it is one taking place in a cyber context. However, it is neither. It is candidates emailing their donors/supporters for more money and can be fairly decoupled from one another.

The Point (A.K.A. The Body)

The body is actually some cherry picked lines from emails that are not included in the post at all. There is no imagery or context so it is difficult to draw conclusions, they draw these conclusions:

> Hillary's latent message is that of a campaign in need of resuscitation.

> Hillary's subject lines hint at impending doom for her campaign

> Bernie's subject lines send a message of successful impact and building a > future together

Conclusion

Without including the emails, the context of the emails, and the imagery in the emails, and giving limited insight about the recipients, it is pretty difficult to appraise a marketing campaign. This is a super biased appraisal in favor of Bernie sanders. That's fine, he seems like a good guy. It does point out imperative language and future tense present a stronger and more compelling subject line, but other than that this is not how I would have presented the arguments and information and it is not the most useful to the reader. Context is very important and I would like to see screencaps of the actual emails, and get a sense for the target audience. They did a good job of explaining when the emails were sent (macro) but more granularly breaking down the context on the per email basis would also have been helpful(micro) especially by presenting the actual email.

Extras:

Bizzy.io didn't give any credit to Hillaries team for running their own mail server or the overall transparency they have provided about Mrs. Clintons emails. We don't know what Sanders is using, but the world has been well informed about the clinton Email campaign.

not making a joke like this was a missed opportunity.

<comment><USER11> Here here! I'd love to see a side-by-side comparison of each candidate's email server ip address reputations.

<comment><USER12> I understand that Sanders' personal emails are on the official government servers, so there's not a lot he can do to affect those. And I expect they're both using Mailchimp or another email marketing provider for the mass emails, so again not a lot they can do. Perhaps we should use their campaign site PageRank instead, as a measure of popular support?

Also, it's "hear, hear", though I can see how your form could be appropriate for text instead of speech. Etymology: [http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6690/hear-hear- or...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6690/hear-hear-or-here-here)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wouldn't read too much into the fundraising emails as they're designed to attract donations from people already intending to vote for the candidate. The race leader has an incentive to minimize their advantage or even pretend to be on the defensive so that people will feel the need to donate.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think this difference makes sense though. Bernie has to convince his supporters that his campaign is picking up momentum, that he actually has a chance so they should go out and vote. On the other hand, Hilary needs to make her supporters worried enough about the competition that they won't just assume it'll be an automatic win, and so they'll vote.

</comment><comment><USER15> > Hillary and Bernie's campaigns seem to disagree on what motivates Americans.

That statement seems a bit misguided to me. It's not that they "don't agree on what motivates Americans", it's that they recognize the differences (political and otherwise) between their candidates and play to those strengths. The author then goes on to sort of imply that the Clinton campaign is either weak or deceptive in playing some sort of defeatist card, but you could just as easily say that the campaign is about "pluckiness" because Hilary assumes she will be the nominee and is in it for the long haul.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's very likely that the emails are being A/B tested, so as far as we know we're only seeing 1 of N variations from Hillary compared to 1 of N variations from Bernie.

</comment><comment><USER17> I like the tone of Sanders campaign a lot more. We, together, help our campaign, fight for a cause. Instead of I and Me based around a person.

After 2008 im surprised she still goes on the "me too" route and has no visible agenda except for "if you vote for me i will win the 1st female president award"

</comment><comment><USER18> Begging the question: [http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/begging-the- questio...](http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/begging-the- question.html)

Almost _never_ a valid reason to use this phrase. Using it incorrectly signals (a) you're reaching (b) not so cunning a linguist after all.

HA. It's been patched to "raises the question". Good edit!

<comment><USER19> The transitive form "Begs the question _X_ " is in common use and well understood, and clearly distinct from (though it also serves as a rationalization of) the intransitive form "begs the question"; complaining about the former and insisting that only the latter is proper signals that you are a pointlessly pedantic prescriptivist.

Slightly more detailed version: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10659342](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10659342)

<comment><USER20> I'm all for letting language evolve and defining meanings of words and phrases by the intent of their most common usage, but when an incorrect usage is eliminating a useful concept with no ready replacement, the older sense deserves the right to at least go down fighting.

"Begs the question" may be hopeless at this point, but I hold out an unreasonable hope that "literally" might survive its struggle.

<comment><USER11> And I hold out hope that "heretofore" will ensuingly not be considered a fluff word. We can all dream.

<comment><USER19> > And I hold out hope that "heretofore" herefromaft be considered a fluff > word.

The comparable opposite of "heretofore" is "hereafter" (the "tofore" comes from Old English for "before"). And its not a fluff word -- it has clear and specific meaning -- though "previously" is more fashionable now.

<comment><USER11> Sorry for ninja editing underneath you. I've usually heard "heretofore" used in fluffy contexts, often hanging out with words like "insofar" and "wherewithal", occasionally served with mutton chops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hillary plays up being a victim in need of our help. ("...Hillary needs you more than ever.) Definitely sympathy oriented.

Bernie comes across like a "general" prepping for a battle. Words like "revolution and "campaign" are essentially "battle speak"

<comment><USER22> They aren't trying to convince people to vote for them, they are trying to convince people to give them money and actually go to the polls. Bernie is winning at the moment, and Hillary has lost a lot of ground. They will be playing up this situation to their respective supporters.

<comment><USER21> That is interesting. I am presuming that the rhetoric regarding her $250,000 per hour speech fee may have potential donors wondering why they should send money to a rich candidate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm reminded of the old joke about Pravda covering a race between the USSR's fastest car and the USA's fastest car. The results of the race were that the American car won, and the Soviet car came in second, but Pravda reports it as the Soviet car finishes second and the American car finishes next to last.

Political campaigns are always about creating a perception that the candidate believes will get them the most votes. The tools for creating that perception are speeches, direct email, and advertising. Sometimes they take direct action but that seems rare.

But as to the issue that the Pravda joke speaks to, any set of facts can be made to imply any desired perception with the right setup.

</comment><comment><USER24> The idea that ANYONE reads any of these emails is just laughable to me. They are dunning emails sent to drum up support, and they basically get shitcanned instantly even by supporters. They DO have some impact, mainly just keeping the candidate's name at the front of the donor's mind and providing a "donate now" link when they finally get weak and give again. But deep textual analysis is just marketerbation.

<comment><USER25> I think I read roughly half the emails. Some of them contain news that I wouldn't otherwise know to look for because the mainstream media don't (or are late to) cover it.</comment></comment>


Search for your Movement, not your Business Model - <AUTHOR> http://tawheed.tumblr.com/post/7555915859/search-for-your-movement-not-your-business-model <comment><USER2> This is a good one. It reminds me of the "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it" that I blogged about last week or so.

I've also been thinking about it a lot in the context of my own business since launching <http://decalcms.com/mockups> \- the "movement" I'm most fanatical about is letting content precede design.

The more I do it, the more I love it, and I have to say that _finding_ that has really helped crystallise my business goals (and provided bucketloads of motivation).

Great post, TK.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Figuring out what you want is probably the most difficult + most rewarding thing in life.</comment></comment>


Measuring monthly actives on a site, and whether you count the signup visit - <AUTHOR> http://www.richardprice.io/post/8845463442/measuring-monthly-actives-on-a-social-site-and-whether

<comment><USER2> Here at The Agency, we often work collaboratively with partner agencies who are responsible for the analytics & reporting for a client website. Without fail, they pick the most impressive numbers to present, not the most reflective of "business success" (which, admittedly, can't always be directly related to sales figures, but you can usually do better than "overall page views month over month"). This isn't their fault - it's the sort of stuff mid- level brand managers want to take to the CMO to say, "See, it's working! Please increase my budget." And the CMO doesn't mind much, either, because he can go to the board and say, "See, it's working! Please increase my budget." And the board likes to leave their meetings happy, so they generally don't mind good news... except when that good news doesn't match what the CFO is presenting for their revenue.

Measuring the wrong thing is endemic to technologists because we have the opportunity to measure everything! Drucker once said, "what gets measured gets managed." That couldn't be more true. If you optimize (manage) for monthly actives and count the signup visit, you probably don't know if people actually like what you got, or if you're just shouting loudly enough for them to glance at you. I'll repeat my usual mantra: measure as close to the cashflow as possible, then logically back your way out from that to understand your funnel. If you can't put a dollar value on an action (10% of pageviews turn to signups, 25% of signups become active users, 60% of active users become paying members, paying members are worth X, therefore a pageview is worth Y), it might not be worth measuring.

Quasi-apropos: what makes Facebook so impressive to me is not that it reaches 51% of Internet users, but that the average one views over 1,000 pages a month[1].

[1] <http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Obvious when you really think about it, but it's so easy to want those engagement metrics higher and justify counting the first visit.

Signing up isn't cool, you know what's cool? Coming back again.

</comment><comment><USER4> this is one reason my favorite favorite metric is number of customers: the number of people who have spent money on my product/service during some time period. pretty hard to fudge that number

</comment><comment><USER5> Great post. Minor quibble, I would say that "the unique cookie framework overestimates the actual numbers by _33%_ (40% instead of 30%)," rather than the 25% number given in the post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well spotted! Thanks - fixed.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Will I get locked in a single company going into finance? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for a job in finance as a software engineer in high-frequency trading or trading execution in general.
Will accepting a job from one firm make it impossible to work at another in the future?
In other words, will I end up learning "trade secrets" or general secret-sauce type of things that make me non-transferable, locking me into a specific company for something like the next 2 years?
I don't have a very clear idea of what's involved. I'm not sure if I should be going into finance to begin with.
Any tips or hard-earned wisdom would be greatly appreciated. <comment> smc- What time frame are you comfortable with? It sounds to me like you're looking at a 1-2 year span to get your feet wet. There is so much to learn, particularly if you are coming from a non-finance background, I would urge you to consider committing to it for a longer span. Which would mean that you would have greater flexibility and desirability on the other side, should you choose to leave. Otherwise I would urge you to avoid the space..

There are plenty of bankers, traders, and other sell-side guys that move around. But don't use that as a template for what you're looking to get into.

To answer your question, will there be restrictive covenants, yes - <USER2> if you are going into buy-side HFT with proprietary in-house algos.</comment>


Google Is Taking Charge of the RCS Rollout - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/17/18681573/google-rcs-chat-android-texting-carriers-imessage-encryption <comment><USER2> RCS solves _NONE_ of the problems that need solving, and only gives carriers another thing to charge for. Specifically:

* the spec is very very complex, and most parts are optional, so no two phones/carriers/manufacturers/OS versions will ever agree on anything but the basic minimal set of features.

* there is no specification for end-to-end encryption, and even if there were, it would be optional (as noted above)

* RCS is reliant on carriers which is idiotic given that they have time and time again demonstrated that they cannot be trusted (SIM theft, wholesale sale of location data, etc). It is not a simple set of packets moving over the internet. It could have been. But it is not!

* Carriers CAN and likely WILL charge for it, because they can and because sadly (as noted above) RCS is visible to them as something more than an encrypted stream of data

* Phone number-as-identity is so stupid, even apple admitted it by allowing <email>@icloud.com accounts to work with imessage. People move countries, they change numbers. Phone number is a stupid identity! Oh, and SIM theft exists. Repeat after me: phone number is not an identity!

Google fucked this up _MAJORLY_ so many times, it is not even funny. Hangouts could have been this, if not for internal politics at google. Another google- created service could have been it too. Before google released their 50th messaging app (or is Google up to 60 yet?), people might have listened and adopted what they offered. At this point everyone is too burned by Google releasing new messaging apps and then sunsetting them year later.

In reality, RCS is a terrible non-solution to the actual problem of rich secure messaging between people with guaranteed delivery and typing indication. It is instead a money-grab for carriers and a data-grab for the NSA. Nice and easy to spy on a protocol with no encryption.

<comment><AUTHOR> > At this point everyone is too burned by Google releasing new messaging apps > and then sunsetting them year later.

What if they just released an upgrade to their existing Messages app and enrolled everyone by default in a new Google version of iMessage?

That's basically what Apple did. Upgrade to iOS 5 and you're automatically enrolled in iMessage without any extra steps. Suddenly your messaging experience just got a whole lot better without any extra work.

<comment><USER3> The EU would take them to court before the rollout was finished.

<comment><USER4> Not sure. There's strong competition in the market in the form of iMessage (and others - see WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc) so I doubt there would be grounds for an anti-trust lawsuit.

<comment><USER5> There is yes. But Messages would presumably be preinstalled. In that case the EU would have a problem with it most likely.

If it weren't preinstalled. We'll then it's pretty much Signal for example and that doesn't solve the problem. iMessage works because it's preinstalled and default.

It's a miracle and kind of ironic that SMS being non-free drove the whole world (except the US where it was) away from it.

<comment><USER6> >iMessage works because it's preinstalled and default.

Is this country dependent? It is absolutely on-by-default in the United States.

<comment><USER5> True. Now that you mention it. I seem to remember having iMessage (the feature) be opt-in in Europe. So the feature is on by default in the US for sure? I guess that somehow negates my earlier post. But I suppose people would notice the green bubbles everywhere and remember to turn it on.

Hmm is this a defense against antitrust concerns as well?

<comment><USER4> iMessage is not opt-in. It's enabled by default even here in the UK. The good thing about it is that it doesn't even require an account, if you just want to use it with a phone number (you need an account if you want to use it with another identity like an email address).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The whole world has already moved beyond texting. It's called WhatsApp.

I'm from the US but I've lived abroad the last four years. I'm still surprised so many people "back home" continue to use SMS texting. Everyone I know around the world uses WhatsApp. Literally, in every single continent I know and chat with people on WhatsApp.

Only Americans still use SMS from what I've seen. I just don't get it.

<comment><USER8> Why would we want to move from SMS to a situation where Facebook ALSO has a copy of every message we send? Not an improvement.

<comment><USER9> facebook doesn't store your (sent) whatsapp messages, and in contrast to sms they're by default encrypted.

 _" Your Messages. We do not retain your messages in the ordinary course of providing our Services to you. Once your messages (including your chats, photos, videos, voice messages, files, and share location information) are delivered, they are deleted from our servers. Your messages are stored on your own device. If a message cannot be delivered immediately (for example, if you are offline), we may keep it on our servers for up to 30 days as we try to deliver it."_

[https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/?eea=1#privacy-policy- informa...](https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/?eea=1#privacy-policy-information- we-collect)

<comment><USER10> I really don't think the average person cares if their texts are end-to-end encrypted, though. I'm not sure most people even know what that would mean.

<comment><USER9> I didn't assert tha the average person cares, just that the original claim about whatsapp is false.

And also: it doesn't matter whether end users care about encryption or not, it still benefits them, this is exactly why end-to-end encryption is a very good default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The only SMS's I get nowadays are from automated systems (bill pay reminders, shipping, energy usage, etc). I don't talk to a single friend over SMS anymore. It's either iMessage or FB messenger (for Android people). Both of those provide a MUCH better experience and even if Apple ever supports RCS (I kind of hope they don't and it dies off) I won't use it without encryption. RCS is such a clusterfuck and I the carriers have proven time and time again that they are incompetent greedy fools.

<comment><USER12> I think you'll find there's a diverse set of messaging users and requirements.

My 70+ parents for example only know and understand SMS (and they've only recently started using it in the last six months). My brother uses Facebook chat but because I'm not on FB we have to use SMS as a lowest common denominator. He doesn't have friends on Telegram so he sees that as unnecessary bloat to add to his phone.

Unfortunately SMS still has bar none the easiest onboarding experience as it is the default chat mechanism on every phone.

<comment><USER13> This is part of the genius of iMessage. You use ONE APP. Your message is either SMS or iMessage automatically based on if the other person's phone supports it. You never have to think about it. 'Is Billy in this app or that app?' Nope, he's in the one and only app you use for 'texting'.

Such a smart decision by Apple. How in the world am I supposed to know if my contact supports iMessage or not? I can't without coordination. But Apple can and handles it.

Now someone may still use something else (FB, WhatsApp, etc) but SMS/iMessage is practically transparent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A lot of people seem excited by RCS. This escapes me, most messaging platforms have now moved into the "integrations" space.

Meaning they're less defined by delivering a message, and more defined by the "value add" services they offer (like Payments, Notifications from third party services, customer support for third party services, etc).

RCS is more powerful than MMS, but less powerful than the internet-based messaging platforms it is competing against. It is also confined by geography, is confined to cellular devices, and disposes of anonymity/privacy.

Why would I want this? It takes me from the current requirement of "only needs an internet connection" to "need a cellular plan and device." It takes me from any moniker I want to [my phone number]. It takes me from "anyone in the world" to "US only." And on and on.

I don't get it. Why should I or anyone else care about RCS? Why do people? It seems like it solves yesterday's problems next week.

<comment><USER15> Primarily because of interoperability. There is _still_ no messaging format as ubiquitous as SMS, and it's a constant annoyance to me that my friends on Android don't receive my (photo/video/group) messages as easily as my friends with iPhones do. Sure, everyone could switch to one of the third party services out there, but it's been years and they still haven't. So I'm all for establishing a new baseline that doesn't try to do everything and just builds on the foundation already existing in SMS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Implementing RCS 5.1 (while at Amdocs, a telecoms vendor) was one of the main things which drove the creation of Matrix.org, fwiw. We had never seen such a sprawling and incoherent standard, and so did the thought experiment of what the opposite non-telcoy approach might look like.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is embarrassingly bad for Google. Their failure in creating a stable and long-lived messaging platform is well known but I can't believe they are committing so much into something with so much reliance on network operators and handset manufacturers that doesn't meed the needs of a modern, secure platform.

<comment><USER5> Guess what happens when they create a preinstalled default messaging app with SMS fallback all running on their own platform (like iMessage). You guessed it, antitrust. Influential OEMs and Carriers would complain and so would the EU.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Carriers charging for messaging? I feel like I'm in a time machine. Guys, the internet was invented!

Is there no one in charge of strategy at Google? This is an embarrassment.

<comment><USER19> I think we've known for a long time there is nobody in charge of strategy at Google. Look at what they did to Android Wear, Hangouts, Duo, Allo...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm going to be really interested in seeing how this rolls out (that's assuming it ever does) in the United States. All four major carriers have RCS implementations, but as far as I can tell, none of them are interoperable or universal across devices. Would Google step in and offer a solution for all Android devices on a carrier? If so, would that interoperate with other carriers' RCS implementations?

Thinking about that makes me think rolling out to other countries prior to the US was a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER21> If lack of end-to-end encryption is the price to pay to get carriers to implement the features I want - better group messages, read receipts, better quality photo sharing, typing indicators, etc - then sign me up.

And Google taking the lead by implementing this for free seems like it should put a stop to any worry that carriers will charge for it.

</comment><comment><USER22> Mmm — all our RCS traffic going through Google servers by default, sounds like a great way to gather data. Next time you see weirdly specific ads based on a text conversation you'll have to wonder — how much of this is actually encrypted.

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't trust google with this, poor customer service/support and a history of cancelling/abandoning projects after a few years.

</comment><comment><USER24> > I also asked about metadata, which is often a loophole that gets ignored in > privacy discussions. Those should be temporary, too: "We temporarily log > metadata about the device such as IMSI, phone number, RCS client vendor and > version, and timestamps for a limited period of time to provide the > service."

___

NOT, they /will be/ temporary. They /should be/ temporary.

That's a garbage answer. Also, not defining temporary is a loophole. Temporary could mean from 1 second to infinity, depending on how Google wants to sling it.</comment>


Ask HN: Yahoo's stock market cap is $53B, how Verizon bought it just for $4.4B? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Because VZW did not buy YHOO, they bought Yahoo's US business. YHOO still has Yahoo Japan and their investment in Alibaba.

</comment><comment><USER3> yup - Alibaba is the only monetarily worthwhile investment they made.</comment>


VOC: A transpiler that converts Python bytecode into Java bytecode - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pybee/voc <comment><USER2> > _The Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), or Dutch East India Company, > is often considered the be the world 's first multinational corporation. > ..._

Ah, trivia time! The VOC also had the world's first entirely privatized army. The "monopoly" cited in the README basically included a license to kill. Think "Google Armed Forces", but then scarier. The army was mostly used to keep a grumpy unpaid workforce "motivated", to keep the spice coming, and thus to keep that lovely 18% annual dividend payout reality.

Basically, the VOC made current evil multinational corps (e.g. the oil companies, monsanto, blackwater, etc) look like cute cuddly charities.

That said, it's been centuries, not sure getting worked up about the name makes sense now. It's a compiler, not a guidebook about how to traffic humans. I just thought the README section made the VOC seem a "little" awesomer than they were.

<comment><USER3> Britain had an East India Company first:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company_%28disambig...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company_%28disambiguation%29)

[http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2014/04/worlds...](http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2014/04/worlds- first-multinational)

It's up for debate who was the first multinational. No doubt both set the bar very high for those to follow, but I do think blackwater spinoff dyncorp with child sex slaves will take some beating, particularly with respect to the prevailing moral climate of the time:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DynCorp#Bosnia_incidents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DynCorp#Bosnia_incidents)

<comment><USER4> > Britain had an East India Company first:

Actually the Portuguese one was founded in 1549, but I will leave out the usual type of "products" that were traded in those days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So well, one interesting question as to why this is at the top of hackernews is - do people not know about jython? Jython does exactly that - it compiles python into java (I think it emits bytecode and not Java source, but don't call me on that) with a lot of runtime so it can support proper semantics. It has been around for over a decade now too and it supports full python (with usual caveats)

<comment><USER6> Jython is quite outdated and has stagnated for a long time; support for Python 2.7 was only finalised in May this year. Forget about support for v3.5.

Perhaps by compiling from the bytecode of the existing interpreter, instead writing a whole new source code interpreter for the JVM, it will have some benefits in supporting newer versions of the language. Or, maybe it will help to decouple development of the standard library and the interpreter, possibly letting more devs work on it. You can't really be sure what benefits/deficiencies a different approach will bring until you actually try it - see PyPy, a "silly" idea to implement Python in Python, which now yields faster runtime performance than CPython.

<comment><USER7> This is exactly why I spent a few hours trying to work out if I could perform some advanced trickery to plumb the pypy tool chain into something that would end up producing a pypy.jar or other JVM equivalent. Turns out it's not that easy. C to JVM isn't a well trodden path.

Jython is awesome and all but its fighting an uphill war against rapid progress in 3 with far too few resources.

<comment><USER4> > C to JVM isn't a well trodden path.

But it does exist.

[https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/Graal/Publications+and...](https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/Graal/Publications+and+Presentations)

Check "Truffle C: Dynamic Execution of C on the Java Virtual Machine."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How are the differences in the execution model handled? The defining quality of Python execution is that anything can monkey-patch anything at any time, using "setattr()". This means the obvious implementation has dictionaries for everything, and optimizers, as in PyPi have to work very, very hard.

So what did they do here? Is every object a dictionary to the Java runtime? That's easy enough to do, but no gain over CPython. Did they weaken the ability to modify objects so they could map to Java objects? That gets a performance win, as with Shed Skin, but a lot of Python code won't work. They're probably not doing all the stuff PyPi does; that's hard and took a decade of work by many people.

</comment><comment><USER9> Did they really have to drag the Dutch east India company into this by using that logo? It's going to make things... complicated around here.

<comment><USER10> I'm kind of shocked that people here immediately recognize the logo for company that (according to wikipedia) stopped existing in 1799.

<comment><USER11> The VOC is important enough that you will learn about it in history classes in school, at least in some countries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This can be very useful. I wonder what the plans are for supporting C apis, given that a lot of Python core libraries depend on C, in my neck of the woods numpy and scipy being the first contenders. There are long running projects [http://www.jython.org](http://www.jython.org) and [http://www.jyni.org](http://www.jyni.org), which, to the best of my knowledge, have not yet managed to fully support Python C extensions on the JVM.

<comment><USER13> They could run the C extensions on the JVM too, like the experimental jruby truffle backend does.

[http://chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/cext/](http://chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/cext/)

<comment><USER14> A Python and Truffle implementation already exists [https://bitbucket.org/ssllab/zippy](https://bitbucket.org/ssllab/zippy)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> They also have an in-browser bytecode runner: [https://github.com/pybee/batavia](https://github.com/pybee/batavia)

</comment><comment><USER16> That is called a compiler.

<comment><USER17> Transpilers are compilers... The term is usually used for a compiler which compiles between languages at about the same level of abstraction.

<comment><USER18> The term is usually used by people that don't know what compilers are.

Snark aside, I think this is actually the case. I bet there are a LOT of CoffeeScript/Javascript developers who have never worked in a compiled language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can someone give a valid reason for wanting this? I'm kind of confused as to why mixing and matching python and java source with some central compiler would be useful.

<comment><USER11> Just for fun? To take advantage of the Java ecosystem similarly to Jython?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cool does this work on android ?

<comment><USER20> [EDIT] - I should have wrote, can this generate code that will work on Android ? [/EDIT]

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> performance?

<comment><USER22> question?</comment></comment>


Would You Give A Freezing Boy Your Coat? - <AUTHOR> http://quacat.com/video/672 <comment><USER3> This was a pretty successful viral fundraising campaign in Norway - <USER2> over 150k euro in the first 24 hours with 1.3 million youtube views. It's now over 13 million views so I expect has raised quite a bit more.

Source: not the OP, but I work for the UK arm of the same charity (SOS Children's Villages)</comment>


US Healthcare Is So Screwed I Fly to Britain for My Medication - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/02/us-healthcare-screwed-fly-britain-medication/?mbid=social_fb <comment><USER2> I think a better title might be: I Missed the Obamacare Open-Enrollment Deadline, So I Fly to Britain for My Medication.

There are exceptions to the open-enrollment deadline. The author is not completely clear on his situation, but two exceptions may apply: gaining "status" (i.e. permission to work, or permanent residency) or moving to a new area. Either will allow you 30 days to apply through the insurance marketplace. It would be interesting to know if neither of these applied, or if even Obamacare-subsidized insurance wouldn't cover the drug he needs.

The fact that prescription drugs are more expensive in the US than anywhere else is not news to me, at least...

</comment><comment><USER3> You could write the same article in reverse if you had atypical haemolytic uraemic syndrome (aHUS). Soliris, the only drug available to treat aHUS, was launched in the US back in 2011 (and all payers cover it), but only just this year did the NHS decide to fully fund it in the UK.[1]

[1][http://www.pharmaphorum.com/articles/nice-backs-full-nhs- fun...](http://www.pharmaphorum.com/articles/nice-backs-full-nhs-funding-for- alexions-soliris)

<comment><USER4> > but only just this year did the NHS decide to fully fund it in the UK

So that means it is covered by the NHS now?

<comment><USER3> Yup, but for 3+ years it wasn't where it was available in the US.

<comment><USER5> It was available on the NHS. It was available under the "named patient" scheme which is a bit more complex than just a doctor prescribing it but suggesting people couldn't get it on the NHS is false.

The cost to the patient would have been exactly the same - about £8 per item per month with a range of discounts and exemptions.

<comment><USER3> Named patient scheme is different. That allows access to a drug before it receives market authorization, not before the NHS funds it. Patients in the UK that could have benefited from Soliris were not able to receive it (without paying full price).

"Up to 70 patients are in the same position as Dianne Illingworth, 41, who have been forced to put their lives on hold, and risk their condition deteriorating, while ministers and officials argue over whether the NHS can afford the drug, Eculizumab, which costs more than £300,000 per patient per year."[1]

[1][http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and- families/...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and- families/health-news/at-what-cost-lifesaving-drug-withheld-8632371.html)

<comment><USER5> "Named patient" does not mean they have to pay full cost for their meds and I'm not sure where you get that from. It's not in the link you supply. That link talks about the cost to the NHS, not to the patient.

> In the meantime, NHS England has established an interim scheme under which > new patients – around 20 a year – will get the drug and existing patients > already on it will continue to receive it. But patients not currently > receiving Eculizumab, such as Dianne, will have to wait for Nice's decision.

The newspaper distorts what actually happened. New patients got it, and existing patients with critical need got it.

Nothing in the link you supplied suggests that patients had to pay more for the med - the link does say that some people were denied the medication. The reason for that denial was a lack of communication from the manufacturer.

[http://www.nice.org.uk/news/press-and-media/high-cost-of- tre...](http://www.nice.org.uk/news/press-and-media/high-cost-of-treatment- for-rare-blood-disorder-needs-to-be-clarified-says-nice-in-draft-guidance)

""Eculizumab is an effective treatment for aHUS. The NHS has already recognised this by making it available on an interim basis, pending the outcome of NICE's appraisal. However, before we can make a confident recommendation for routine use, which we estimate would cost the NHS about £58 million in the first year, rising to over £80 million in 5-years, we need more information."

"Alexion insisted that its information about the overall cost of eculizumab be kept confidential and so NICE is unable to share these details of the Alexion submission with stakeholders. We're disappointed about this decision, for which we have not had an adequate explanation."

But note that people who were critically ill did get the med, for the £8 NHS prescription charge. From your link

> A spokesperson for NHS England, said: "Patients who are critically ill and > who need Eculizumab urgently will receive it."

So: people who needed it were getting it. At first they were getting it under the named patient scheme and they only had to pay the normal NHS prescription fee; now it's available under an interim commissioning policy from NHS England - so, again, patients only pay normal NHS prescription fees. For a short time some people who were ill but not dying did not get it, but that gap in provision was caused by the manufacturer not communicating with the regulators.

Since you mention the US: how many people were denied this expensive med by their insurance companies?

<comment><USER3> My point about paying more is that is the NHS doesn't cover it, it's still available at full cost.

We'll have to agree to disagree about patients getting it. aHUS is a terrible disease. To say everyone who needs it got it is untrue. The "critically ill" got it, but what about people who weren't critically ill, but were sick?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I studied in the US for a bit, inspite of the university having a decentish setup for medication. I preferred getting treated by local doctors in my home country. Studying about the healthcare system in the US makes me sad. It shouldn't be so painful and expensive

<comment><USER7> It isn't that bad in the vast majority of cases, and in many ways it's better. 5 year cancer survivability rates for instance are top notch, ability to see specialists with little to no wait, etc.

Example: My friend's son was diagnosed with leukemia on Monday. They went to their primary care doctor Monday morning for some gum bleeding that wouldn't stop, were referred to a specialist Monday afternoon, and is already in a children's cancer hospital receiving treatment where he will be for the majority of the next 8-9 months.

<comment><USER8> I'm happy for your friend, but this is anecdotal evidence.

Statistics don't agree with your story:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expec...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy)

<comment><USER9> While I agree that there are great flaws in the US medical system, I don't think that life expectancy statistics is a good proof of them.

It gives you an idea where the health care system stands because life expectancy is low in places where there is no health care system. But life expectancy is greatly increased just by public sanitation - generally, education - and vaccinations, but could be lowered by factors that have little to do with health care.

American life expectancy is surely lowered by how Americans eat (no, I don't blame McDonalds who often gets the blame as an iconic brand). The kind of health insurance or lack of it, or how doctors work, cannot really decide how people eat. They try to impact but they cannot decide. Also, the US has a homicide rate that is substantially higher than in other developed countries. I won't bother myself by calculating how much that alone decreases life expectancy, but it's just an example of these other factors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't know exactly what's going on, but I'm on a mediocre Obamacare plan that costs less than the author's plan. Even though it's in the most expensive drug tier, as far as I can tell Abilify would cost me $70 a month.

> I arrived in America just as Obamacare was rolling out. Since I couldn't > meet the deadline for insurance

Well it's been rolled out for a while now. Can't he switch now?

<comment><USER11> Apparently it varies based on the plan:

[http://www.phrma.org/sites/default/files/pdf/exchanges- menta...](http://www.phrma.org/sites/default/files/pdf/exchanges-mental- health.pdf)

(In some bronze plans, up to $4300 of deductible applies to medications)

The article is not very careful. It goes from saying the drug is cheaper over in Queens to the "$720 a month my medication costs in America".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would like to share my very positive experience with private Mexican health care.

A family member got in a kayaking accident. They were in severe pain (mostly from their chest area).

We had a concierge doctor drive out to our remote hotel. He did a basic checkup, gave us some pain meds, and called ahead to the nearest private hospital. $100

We drove about an hour and a half to the hospital. A doctor was waiting at the door for us. She was with us for the whole two hours we were there. We got 2 x-rays and an ultrasound. We also got more pain meds at the pharmacy. $150

It was the best medical service I've ever experienced in my life. I would be very happy if U.S. medical care was the same as Mexican medical care.

I realize I never checked up on this: how is the Mexican private medical system regulated? I remember we did very little paperwork, and it seemed like there was much less red tape than at US hospitals.

<comment><USER13> "It was the best medical service I've ever experienced in my life. I would be very happy if U.S. medical care was the same as Mexican medical care."

What you are actually saying is you would be very happy if U.S. medical care was the same as Mexican medical care _for tourists carrying US dollars_.

The real question is, what is the standard of care for a 50th percentile Mexican national after their own kayaking accident? What percent of their annual discretionary spending does this incident cost them? And is the existing system improving, stable, or on the verge of collapse?

<comment><USER12> Well, yeah. I said "private", didn't I? And it's not like the good hospitals in Mexico rely on the bad hospitals to exist.

One would expect the average standard of care to be lower because Mexico is much poorer than the U.S.. If you took whatever the good Mexican hospitals are doing and brought it to the U.S., it would presumably be roughly as high- quality and inexpensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is the author actually right to live and work in the US, and only fly back to Britain for getting medication subsidised by British taxpayers? And is the fact that he can do this just an indication of US healthcare being screwed?

The post doesn't tell too much about facts and I don't know the British rules for eligibility to NHS, but I think it's possible he could be committing fraud. If he were doing the same with my country's national system, it certainly would be fraud (though it would probably not be possible in the first place, because we have a Big Brother that knows more than the British one).

<comment><USER14> Well the fact that drugs are twice as expensive (or more) in the US* and the fact that the US accounts for a huge chunk of government funding into the relevant sciences are part of the reason why drugs are so cheap overseas. British taxpayers buying drugs in Britain are effectively getting a subsidy from US taxpayers even though they don't pay into the pot, so this all seems like a stroke of cosmic justice where I'm standing. Of course, I doubt the British tax authorities care much about what I think.

* Why? Remember how bargaining works: the biggest customer gets the best deal. First imagine Kaiser, Wellpoint, and Aetna sitting down at the bargaining table. Now imagine Canada sitting down at the table. Now imagine the European Union sitting down at the table. But at least our insurance companies are more efficient due to competition, right? Spoiler: not even close, and that's _before_ you take into account the costs they offload onto the rest of the system in the form of incompatible claims policies, paperwork, and exploitation of information asymmetry against consumers.

<comment><USER15> I don't know figures, but I imagine Kaiser represents more than 35 million people (the approx population of Canada). Shouldn't they be able to negotiate the same price?

<comment><USER3> Bingo! The largest US private insurer (United) cover 40M lives in the US. They pay higher prices than nearly all European countries (even the ones with smaller populations).

Drugs aren't cheaper in places like the UK because the gov't negotiates lower prices. Drugs are cheaper because the gov't _mandates_ lower prices. People shouldn't confuse the two.

<comment><USER13> So is the UK not concerned about mandating lower prices and squeezing the R&D funnel for new drugs... because Americans are making up the difference?

<comment><USER16> Drug companies spend more on marketing drugs to doctors and consumers than they do on R&D.

In the UK, marketing drugs is illegal and therefore they don't need to go to that expense. All they have to do is convince an NHS board and then it's on the list of approved prescribed drugs.

<comment><USER11> Do you have a favorite citation for that factoid?

Some similar claims I have looked at have used the "Selling, General, Administrative" off of an income statement as the marketing expense, but that category includes salaries and buildings and lots of other things, not just marketing expenses.

<comment><USER16> Just a quick googling:

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/11/b...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/11/big- pharmaceutical-companies-are-spending-far-more-on-marketing-than-research/)

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-28212223](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-28212223)

Reading the BBC article reminded me of all the fines also. People are paying extra because drug companies push off-label uses on consumers and then get fined for it. It's not like the company really pays, they just up their prices a bit and push it onto the consumer. That sort of off-label usage doesn't happen in the UK so much, because doctors don't have any incentive to prescribe anything other than the NHS approved drug for a condition.

<comment><USER9> "Marketing drugs to doctors" is not exactly the same as "total sales and marketing budget". I don't even know if "cost of sales" includes the cost of regulatory approvals in various countries.

Also note that there is not necessarily anything bad about off-label use of medicines.

Medicines could be off-label simply for the reason that the regulator - out of pressure from the public health insurer, or more bluntly just the Department of Treasury in the country - does not approve using a medicine for some purpose, even though it is known to be efficient and without bad side effects.

In fact, in some cases patients are complaining bitterly because they cannot get the medicine that their doctor knows would help them, because their regulators do not approve off-label use.

<comment><USER5> Off-label use is scary because there is often no evidence base. You have doctors prescribing meds because they "know it works".

When we look at popular off-label meds and the eventual evidence we often find that they're not very useful, or even actively harmful.

<comment><USER9> A medicine can also be off-label simply because of its price - there is evidence base, but the regulator says that the health care system shouldn't pay this much for ailing this medical condition.

Of course that keeps the prices lower. That's the purpose. It also keeps some medication unavailable for some patients. I don't think it's a huge problem, but it's there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This article doesn't really make a compelling case. Facts would have been nice.(I would spend x dollars for the drug I need in the US which is more than I would spend flying to the UK and getting 6 months worth at a time. Or something like the drug I need is in short supply in the US so I go to where it's plentiful in the UK) What is so screwed about it in the authors eyes?

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "What is so screwed about it in the authors eyes?"

Maybe I missed something but it seems blantantly obvious. In the US he has to pay for health insurance PLUS $720 a month for drugs he needs. In the UK this is provided at almost no cost to the patient through taxes. No health insurance and no huge drug cost.

<comment><USER3> So maybe a more fair comparison would be to compare total costs in the US (insurance premium and drug cost) to the total costs in the UK (higher taxes and small Rx cost)?

Of course the end result would all depend on your salary level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, if I understand well, people with mental disorders cannot access to medication if they cannot pay for it?

People with mental disorders use to have trouble to find a proper job if they cannot threat their issue with medication. So maybe they just end up in jail or living as homeless?

</comment><comment><USER18> Is there a way to find out how much drugs cost in other countries? I take a biologic that runs me $300/mo after insurance.

<comment><USER5> For England: [http://www.ppa.org.uk/ppa/edt_intro.htm](http://www.ppa.org.uk/ppa/edt_intro.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> why not Mexico? it's a big destination for Health Care tourists, it's cheaper than Canada or Europe and you would only need to go to a doctor once to get a prescription and re-use that prescription. Also you would get to spend a few days in places like the mayan riviera.

<comment><USER10> He mentions both Canada and Mexico in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Otsuka's patent on Abilify will expire in April, costing it an estimated $65 > billion over the next four years.

That statement is false, and demonstrated clearly in the author's source:

> Drug makers face another patent cliff in which _the industry_ will lose > roughly $65 billion in revenue through the end of 2019, according to a > research firm's report.

...

> GlobalData estimates Otsuka will lose $6.2 billion in annual sales due to > competition from generics by 2019.

Edit:

Continuing on this theme, according to Google finance Otsuka's net profit margin is 10%, which I think is on the higher end of reasonable. Now, I'm not saying the price they charge in the US is fair (for some definition of fair), but one does need to consider how much the ridiculous American drug prices are subsidizing the $24/year NHS prescriptions. A government can regulate the price of drugs, but can't force the companies to sell them in the first place. Not directly, anyway.

<comment><USER21> > Now, I'm not saying the price they charge in the US is fair (for some > definition of fair), but one does need to consider how much the ridiculous > American drug prices are subsidizing the $24/year NHS prescriptions. A > government can regulate the price of drugs, but can't force the companies to > sell them in the first place. Not directly, anyway.

Remember that the cost to the NHS is far more than $24 - which refers to the £8 prescription fee paid in the UK, twice per year. It's actually £220.41 per patient per month for the NHS - about $335. So whilst it's still somewhat more expensive in the US, it's not much more expensive - and well within the bounds of shrewd negotiating (which I'd imagine insurers would normally do).

[1] - [http://www.awp.nhs.uk/handlers/downloads.ashx?id=9572](http://www.awp.nhs.uk/handlers/downloads.ashx?id=9572)

<comment><USER20> I figured it was costing the NHS much more than that, but I did not know they were covering so much. Thanks for the information.

The issue of what insurers actually pay versus what the uninsured are expected to pay is a tangential hot button issue for me, especially since I started treatment for my sleep disorders.

<comment><USER21> Any prescription you get on the NHS costs the same amount (and there are many exemptions, for example they're free if you're a child, unemployed, retired, a cancer patient etc). There's always some debate about certain very expensive drugs (generally for cancer) and whether the NHS should pay.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google's $82 million airport  - <AUTHOR> http://skift.com/2013/02/09/googles-own-82-million-airport-may-soon-to-be-a-reality/

<comment><USER2> Anti dog-food I guess.. Google builds services to empower people to collaborate on the web then invest large sums of capital into transportation which voids the point of their services.

Kinda reflects how fragmented Google has become.

<comment><USER3> what are you talking about? Honestly. I have no idea what you are talking about.</comment></comment>