Yes. Everything is monitored, and it sucks. We’ve internalized it even, you can’t so much as have a hobby without dumping money into it to signal you take it seriously

Okay, let’s say you have a fuel injected car, but instead of using the 02 sensor to decide the fuel air mixture, it just squirts the same amount of gas every time.

The hardware might be able to achieve 400 hp, but the software means it only ever achieves 50 hp

It’s like that. The software drives the hardware. It doesn’t matter how good the hardware is, the software is the brain of the operation - if the software doesn’t know how to utilize the hardware properly, you’re going to have piss poor performance

Driver’s? They literally drive the hardware your computer is using

Probably at least some of us… There’s a lot of us, and given a year and a few acres anyone with an almanac would have a shot

It’s likely it’ll be a lot more, and we just have a dark age

Sure, but the R&D is largely subsidized because it’s a common good. Pharmaceutical companies generally take over when it’s already a pretty safe bet… It could fall through during clinical trials, but they don’t pay for the massive R&D they did traditionally. Sometimes they even just buy the patent

There’s overhead, but the vast majority is just profiteering

They’re scared. Of course they are.

Whether they hated Maduro or not, they’ve been forced into limbo

What happens next? No one fucking knows, no one has a plan, because Trump might come back for round 2 and decapitate the chain of succession or make an ultimatum

It must be terrifying. For all my brother’s and sister’s in Venezuela, stay strong, stay safe, and be ready to take advantage of opportunities

I mean, hopefully to bring perspective, the water wars are happening now. People are fighting corporations who are draining the aquifers for alphalpha and such to send abroad, there are faucets running dry and everything

It’s not going to be mad Max… These problems still exist and are on track, but they way they present themselves is as a slow burning down of the infrastructure that our country is built upon

The people will remain. There will be hard times, we will have to come together to solve problems. We might have to relocate as areas become untenable

There will be unrest and disorder, but not mass murder. We just don’t have it in us without years of indoctrination and drug use

Ah. Laws vary by state, mixing and matching manufacturers is illegal in my state, the manufacturer must be on the bottle along with a description. I’m less certain about the expiration date thing, but I believe here they require them all to come back to the same batch in case there’s an issue (including improper storage of the bottle or something)

I’ve been told this is how it works by a pharmacist when they were having trouble filling my rx, and we were talking about controlled substances in particular

What do you do with expired meds, does the pharmacy eat the loss?

Do you mix and match pills with different expiration dates to fill a prescription? From different manufacturers?

I’m genuinely asking. What I described is how things work here, and while our healthcare system is insane, this is one part that makes sense to me

I think you’re misunderstanding what I’m saying.

Yes, the companies need to sell the pills for a certain amount to make a profit, due to infrastructure and overhead. The R&D is a whole complicated thing, let’s just lump it in as overhead and put it aside

The pills themselves cost basically nothing to produce each, a batch will cost money but normally they’re consistently pumping out huge batches

So, most manufacturers have programs to retrieve pills. If you have 4 pills at the end of the roll, they can be reclaimed so patients can get a complete strip, because the pills themselves cost so little. They do the same if you end up with a small number of pills left in the big bottle, you can’t mix batches because of expiration dates and expiration. So you send them back, and they give the pharmacy a credit

The r&d costs come from government grants these days

Yes, a sterile lab is expensive, but like normal business expensive. It’s very achievable to build, drug cartels manage it just fine. Universities and YouTubers have no problem doing it with pretty modest funding

Yes, there’s overhead. But the pills themselves? The materials and production cost is cents. They themselves cost basically nothing

That’s why other countries can afford to sell them for cents - they really are that cheap to make

Pills aren’t really precious resources… They cost like cents to make, aside from a few very expensive special ones

The expensive part is all markup

I tell myself that the grief is me feeling bad for myself.

How did they go? Was it mercifully fast or drawn out? Was it painful? Were they ready?

And so I try to channel my grief though empathy for their pain rather then focusing on my own feelings of mood

I’m trying to move to a better area, one where things can get better locally

Even if the country ends, we’re not all going to die. We’re going to have to organize locally, and I’d rather be somewhere where I can do that

There actually might be enough water to help if we warm it up. And that would also release some hidden gasses too

It’ll still probably need more, and there’s sands that make it hard for plants to grow, but it seems like there’s feedback mechanisms that would help massively

I like to watch a streamer and skip through the stream for anything that looks crazy

I’ve definitely been watching less and less because less is happening, but I’m enjoying the highlights

I believe that orcas are out there having philosophical debates and singing stories of their history and mythology that dates back even further than our own. I don’t think they’re doing math proofs, but if they are I’d be curious what base they use

All the cutting edge science suggests we’re not special. We are not different in kind from animals

Since science became a thing, we’ve been drawing lines between us and animals since we could no longer gesture to the soul. We’ve progressively disproven every single one. I’ve had this debate over various lines so many times

It’s human arrogance

But that’s exactly what I’m saying. There are elephants out there contemplating morality. Even dogs do it, even if it’s massively based on the rules we impose on them

Not math though. Math exists in the minds of humans, it doesn’t even exist in the universe. There is no two of anything, there’s one object and another similar object

What does exist are ratios and harmonics, and animals have no problem understanding them

Lol right? It’s crazy how far on a limb they go, despite interacting with dogs

How often do we talk about how dogs want this or that, how they’re thinking of doing something “bad”, how they look so guilty they tell on themselves

But yeah, nothing going on up there. It’s all projection, they’re just dumb animals and humans are super extra special

LMAO okay then. My comment will age like wine, your’s will age like milk

Meet back in 5 years?