I'm happier to see Microsoft emulate Apple by introducing overpriced hardware than I am seeing Apple emulating Microsoft with an increasingly confusing product assortment and a bloated operating systems.
As someone who was not born in the US, but went to university and works here, the college admissions process is just totally bonkers.
It seems to drive outcomes that are the opposite of the stated objective.
To think that you can admit a more well-rounded student body by getting them to write essays is ludicrous in the age of essay & admissions consultants.
Just eliminate any legacy preference. Use standardized tests that are worthwhile. If that doesn't give you an equitable mixture of students, then add pre-admission programs targeted at prepping underprivileged kids.
Also when earthquake articles make no mention of the magnitude of them. 2000 magnitude 1 quakes is way, way different than just a few magnitude 5 quakes.
Absolutely. Many people don't realize that earthquakes are measured using an exponential scale. A magnitude 8 quake is 10x stronger than a magnitude 7.
I have hunting dogs that will pickup hundreds of ticks if not protected. I use Bravcto (Fluralaner) on them now, which is extremely effective. Hopefully lotilaner is similar with humans.
Most of the older generation of anti-tick meds have pretty substantial side effects and poor efficacy.
I've been using Bravecto and Nexgard for the past 4 years and it really should be emphasized how much of a seismic shift these meds have been.
I've had dogs all my life and live in a very tick-prone area. Nothing ever really worked, to be honest. It was a constant battle of attrition. I had to spray the house with nasty chemicals every few months cause that was pretty much the only thing that kind of tipped the balance against the ticks. I frankly don't know how we didn't get Lyme disease, we were exposed for decades.
Since these new meds appeared, ticks have completely disappeared from our property. They only provide 1-3 months of protection, but they're so effective at eradicating the parasite population that I've only had to use 3 pills in the past 4 years.
There might be external effects happening at the same time here.
I grew up on a island with a lot of ticks. Being a kid and spending time on fields and in forests, we constantly had to remove ticks before heading home.
But now 2 decades later, visiting the island again as an adult and expecting having to do the same after walking around the forest, we didn't find a single tick on ourselves, when it would easily have been a couple of ticks each in the before-days.
So many parameters being different though, so hard to reach any conclusion, maybe my blood is less attractive, maybe we weren't physically intensive enough, maybe the wrong season, but maybe there are other chemicals at play too that wasn't there before.
The consolidated FDA, Project Jake and EMA findings (Table 8) showed notable differences between survey populations regarding the percentage of neurological toxicity and serious AE, and fatal effects. Statistical analysis of these serious AE showed highly significant differences between the findings of the Project Jake survey and those reported by the FDA and EMA. While the number of death and seizure AE reported by the EMA was 7 to 10 times higher than those reported to the FDA, the reported responses for the Project Jake survey for death and seizures fell in between those of the FDA and EMA but aligned more closely with the EMA results. Furthermore, the number of reported death and seizure AE for lotilaner and spinosad were considerably higher than suggested with respect to their product labelling for potential neurological effects (Table 2 and and8).8).
But yes, the drug is "generally" safe for use. It's still worth being aware of the potential risks.
The link you posted has a notice right at the top saying the article has been corrected.
It links to a corrigendum adding a conflict of interest disclosure stating
> A Class Action lawsuit related to the use and safety of isoxazoline parasiticides was filed on December 27, 2019 in New Jersey, while this manuscript was undergoing peer review. One of the article's co‐authors, Valerie Palmieri, is the Plaintiff. [PALMIERI, et al. v. INTERVET INC, Case No. .2:19‐cv‐22024‐JMV‐AME (D. N. J.).]”
#1: Authorship is a big one, and the conflict of interest developing during the review process shows that these are not disinterested researchers.
#2: The type of study is a nearly worthless type, in that it has no real statistical control and is just asking people to report on things on the internet. What ends up happening with these studies is that people self-recruit by word of mouth. Survey respondents may have been asked by other participants to register adverse events, and survey respondents may have never given the medication to a pet or seen an adverse event. There is no controlling for that apparent in the study.
#3: The survey instrument is supposed to be in the appendix and it is not, yet it is not described. Their recruitment process is described only as "distributed electronically by mail throughout the United States to veterinarians, veterinary clients, pet caregivers/owners, kennel club groups and on social media sites between August 1 and 31, 2018." There are lots of complaints about the adverse-event reporting system, the worst is that adverse events are merely enumerated from reports and there is no real way to put them into a statistical study. This is just getting another enumeration of events and putting a different denominator under them.
In my prescribing I have seen only one adverse event worth reporting: a dog was heartworm positive and received ivermectin, doxycycline and afoxolaner at the same time. It had a transient episode of low blood pressure treated with fluids. For a drug that, in their denominator, gives 80+% adverse reactions, that is very surprising. So, the study doesn't really pass the smell test.
There have been other drugs that have caused adverse reactions in significant numbers of patients. We stop using them immediately. The difference is very noticeable.
OMG, I went down the rabbit hole on this paper and it is bonkers. Their methodology is amateur hour. It's just an uncontrolled non-validated survey sent out by an activist group. What is their list of survey recipients based on? What were the demographic differences between responders and nonresponders? It's the science equivalent of a political push-poll (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll)
The first author is a business executive who launched a huge class-action against Merck without disclosing it in this paper, the only veterinarian in the authors has been cited for practicing without a license (https://www.ocregister.com/2021/10/26/founder-of-hemopet-in-...) and the senior author is an orthopedic surgeon with no relation to the field and has maybe one other publication.
If you browse around pet forums, or go wild with Google, you'll find all sorts of anecdotal reports of people who claim their pets died (with all sorts of terrifying symptoms etc) soon after taking these kinds of drugs.
Take from that what you want. It's anecdotal and non-scientific. But it concerns me enough that we keep our dogs on Nexgard only during the peak of tick season and not year round like the vets seem to want to push.
There are also known genetic differences in dogs that cause some to find various anti-parasiticals (esp heartworm) to be toxic to some herding breeds (border collies, aus. sheperds). We had our border collies tested for this before putting them on medications. (https://vcacanada.com/know-your-pet/multidrug-resistance-mut...)
That said, genetic diversity is higher in dogs than it is in humans.
Sorry to hear. Yeah this weird winter is super unusually warm where I am too, though we've fallen back into seasonal normals in the last week. I've been keeping an eye out for ticks, but so far nothing.
I've only ever seen deer ticks here, never black legged, but they're definitely in the area.
They are absolutely not safe at normal doses. They killed my 2 year old dog. There are thousands of dogs out there that experienced seizures from this class of drugs.
She had seizures within hours of giving her the stuff, and was dead within 48 hours.
I'll happily die on this hill of looking like an internet crank ranting about drug companies, but it was a traumatizing experience for my wife and I, and even worse for our dog.
It's weird that regardless of how many different ways you try to tell this to people they're still more than happy to give the benefit of the doubt to $307 billion dollar pharma company.
It’s about risk assessment. It would be awful to have one of the small percent of dogs that have bad reactions to those medicines. It’s also bad to have dogs crawling with ticks.
Where I grew up, having dogs get sick from tick bites was fairly common. Ever seen a collie with its ears packed with swollen ticks? That has to be miserable. The risk of the medicine was less than the risk of the bites in our case.
If I needed to launder money, I would think running crypto through a Kickstater project would be a good way to do it. At least below a certain threshold where you don't create significant scrutiny.
I'm glad our century+ of gross mismanaging our forests is getting more press. But I think we're still fighting deeply entrenched mindsets that fire is always bad. Across the west, our forests are fire-adapted and need to burn to be healthy, but we're still suppressing most fire and not doing nearly enough prescribed burning.
We're also up against a century of planting trees at 2x natural density after logging. Logging can be a useful management tool, but if we plant 2 trees for everyone we cut we're not building healthy forests, and we're just increasing fuel loads.
Meanwhile, climate change gets most of the press. Yes it is a contributing issue, but it's unfortunately being used to absolve the forest managers of accountability.
A good read is "The Big Burn" by Timothy Egan. It details how at its founding, the Forest Service knew the fire suppression regime they were creating was unhealthy. But it was the only politically possible path for them at the time.
Well, once you've allowed hundreds of thousands of people to build houses there, which ones are you going to burn? Seriously, do something and they won't burn today. Do nothing and they burn. All over the pacific northwest there are millions of people who live in forested areas, which will burn without fire control.
You can do burns when things are wetter, but how many $Bs are you going to be liable for? Or you can just make the insurance unattainable.
>Meanwhile, climate change gets most of the press. Yes it is a contributing issue, but it's unfortunately being used to absolve the forest managers of accountability.
Forest management has become politicized. Massive blazes, homes destroyed, fire fighters dead are just props for political theater to push a political agenda.
> We're also up against a century of planting trees at 2x natural density after logging. Logging can be a useful management tool, but if we plant 2 trees for everyone we cut we're not building healthy forests, and we're just increasing fuel loads.
I'm thinking that mother nature generally plants trees at far higher than 2X density.
> For nearly half a century, lightning-sparked blazes in Yosemite’s Illilouette Creek Basin have rippled across the landscape — closely monitored, but largely unchecked. Their flames might explode into plumes of heat that burn whole hillsides at once, or sit smoldering in the underbrush for months.
> The result is approximately 60 square miles of forest that look remarkably different from other parts of the Sierra Nevada: Instead of dense, wall-to-wall tree cover — the outcome of more than a century of fire suppression — the landscape is broken up by patches of grassland, shrubland and wet meadows filled with wildflowers more abundant than in other parts of the forest. These gaps in the canopy are often punctuated by the blackened husks of burned trunks or the fresh green of young pines.
I agree, but imagine how many things we commonly use in the US that we don't make and would be impossible to get if China & couple other countries introduced export controls on them.
I do the same. In addition to the security and privacy benefits, the traceability have been helpful.
Years ago my Netflix account was hacked, and they refused to believe it was on their end. They were sure someone had accessed my email. I was not able to convince them that netflix@myserver.com was not a thing you could log into. But having a unique email was one of the clues that led me to be confident that my email had not been hacked, and it must have been something purely on the netflix side.
Playing devil's advocate - it could've been your Netflix password that was compromised, or someone you shared your Netflix password with (if you do it).
David Marcus is perhaps the poster child for failing up.
He started a mobile payments company that was acquired by PayPal. The product was later discontinued and generated no value for PayPal.
He ended up as the PayPal CEO. IMHO as a PP employee at the time, he was clearly out of his depth in that job. It was abundantly clear he did not have the toolkit to run a large complex business.
He then left abruptly to join facebook.
At Facebook he started this thing that did nothing but burn money and generate negative headlines.
If there was a metric that was the value created for the companies you work for vs. the money you personally earned I think his would be an outlier.
I believe that people who are willing to put their neck out there as a high profile leader AND are able inspire others to get to work on a bold vision are rare. I believe those are the sought after qualities in a tech leader.
It doesn’t matter if his last 3 projects failed. They were all ambitious and he got people to work on them. Many businesses run themselves on inertia alone and you just need people to keep working. He will find another job.
Results should be what's assessed. A lot of analysis around ideal leaders focuses on the "inputs" instead of the outputs.
Of course, important to understand and try to correctly attribute what factors led to success or failure.
But if a charismatic, visionary leader chooses to pursue projects that don't have a hope of succeeding, I don't see that as a success.
That being said, don't know much about this guy's background. Maybe everything he's worked on were perfectly great ideas and failures were not due to his direction/leadership.
Anyway, I only comment on this because there's something of a bias to put extroverts/outspoken people into management roles, but I've found introverted people often do just as well. Of course always comes down to the individual.
I doubt you're arguing to quite this extreme, but just to explore what focusing solely on the outputs side looks ('only results matter'), this can have some unintended consequences.
A great example is surgeons deciding not to perform riskier surgeries, because their % success rates would get dinged. This means if you're a patient with a rare / difficult to treat condition, you may not be able to get life saving surgery. And looking at the counterfactual, by being so risk averse, advancement in the field is slower because experimental surgeries aren't attempted.
Another example is finance. It can be a pretty unscrupulous place because money is the only real success metric, and they outsource their conscience to regulatory bodies that are always a few steps behind. This can lead to some serious negative externalities while enriching those participating - pretty much the same criticism leveled at this guy. A sort of horseshoe theory in play here.
I totally agree the extraverts & outspoken have an advantage in (getting into) management roles, and it comes down to the individual. So many factors related to learning from failure, luck, entrepreneur:market match, etc to consider.
> I believe that people who are willing to put their neck out there as a high profile leader AND are able inspire others to get to work on a bold vision are rare. I believe those are the sought after qualities in a tech leader.
> It doesn’t matter if his last 3 projects failed. They were all ambitious and he got people to work on them. Many businesses run themselves on inertia alone and you just need people to keep working.
This reads like a CV for Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh Balwani.
> It doesn’t matter if his last 3 projects failed. They were all ambitious and he got people to work on them.
Just getting people to work on your projects isn't necessarily that hard as long as you pay them market rates. Or they are young and naive.
If you're looking for evidence of visionary leadership, it kind of matters who, specifically, you're getting to work on your projects (because the folks you want all have their pick of places paying market rates), and it really makes a statement if highly competent folks are being paid below market rates in return for equity.
Other highlights include years of Messenger dallying and feature creep and abandonment causing the app to be rewritten and all work for years lost the moment he moved out of the org and M, the voice assistant that got killed soon as well.
