Is this a joke? Whenever I press the button it skips to the next video instead of preventing it from switching. So the ones I want to see are immediately stopped. It's quite frustrating but I guess that's the point?
I can see how this could be confusing.
If you click it once, on a fresh log in, it will stop switching. When you press it again it will resume switching.
As mentioned in the article they are very effective at preventing smaller companies from producing generic versions based on expired patents. Then they just stop manufacturing the old drugs so there is no supply.
That's not the issue. As long as a brand drug is listed by the FDA -- whether or not it's actually being manufactured -- physicians can write prescriptions for generic equivalents.
However, if a brand manufacturer has an old product delisted, then physicians can no longer prescribe generic equivalents. That's become more and more common.
However, there is a workaround: compounding pharmacies. To my knowledge, accredited compounding pharmacies can make, on a customer-by-customer basis, any product that the FDA has ever approved. And many of them are mail-order pharmacies. In my experience, prices are comparable to mass-market generics, or lower.
>As long as a brand drug is listed by the FDA -- whether or not it's actually being manufactured -- physicians can write prescriptions for generic equivalents.
>However, if a brand manufacturer has an old product delisted, then physicians can no longer prescribe generic equivalents. That's become more and more common.
Why is the ability to prescribe a drug tied to whether the branded version in still "listed"?
Physicians can only prescribe FDA-approved drugs. Only brand drugs are approved on their own. Generic drugs are approved, with much less documentation required. There's no need to demonstrate effectiveness, safety, etc. Applicants must only demonstrate that products are therapeutically equivalent to approved brand drugs. That's mainly about chemical identity, purity, and rate and degree of absorption.
At Drugs@FDA, search for a brand name. If there are generics, you'll see "Therapeutic Equivalents for NDA ...". Clicking that will display links to them.
If there's no listed brand drug, there's nothing for a generic to be equivalent to.
I'm not sure what the requirements for delisting products are. It might be as simple as "this is old, and we don't want to be associated with it". Or as specific as "we've learned that it's not as safe and/or effective as it should be, and should be delisted for health and safety reasons."
But the real reason is almost always that they have a new version, which costs much more, and they don't want competition from inexpensive generics to their old product.
There have been some antitrust suits over that. I don't know how they turned out.
Compounding pharmacies are brilliant. In the course of my treatment, my doctor and I worked with a compounding pharmacist to prescribe me lower dosage amounts of buprenorphine than the major drug companies have ever produced -- which allowed my taper to go smoother than expected.
I think too much focus on the trees. To get to a trillion we need 125 trees per person on the planet. Removing those who are not in an area where tree planting is possible and cannot viably get to one, those who don't care, and those who simply cannot (children, disabled, etc) we are probably looking at tens of thousands of trees per person. I think at that point a tiered leaderboard would be more effective. Naming and photographing 10,000 trees is going to get old fast but getting to Forest Ninja level before your friends has some appeal to it.
Also there needs to be some system of logging (lol) which areas are ok to plant (avoid messing with earth's albedo, fire prone areas, for example) and among those which have not yet been planted. This will require and a way for users to check off what they've already covered and a collaboration with some organization who can say which areas are ok to plant and what types of trees will grow well there)
Furthermore there's needs to be an instructional aspect as to how to properly plant trees (seeds are a bad idea because they require regular follow up until they have sprouted). Saplings are a better bet which will require a list of places to get sapplings.
Ideally saplings will be free for users which will require coordination with governing bodies in every country that participates in order to subsidize the cost either at an individual level or directly to the suppliers. Either that or some kind of ad-incentive program for suppliers who are willing to donate.
It would be ideal if the suppliers rented tools as well and provided top soil and Schultz (growth mix).
This stuff has to come from somewhere. Either private equity or big brother. Should ask MacKenzie Bezos. She'd be down. Bono would be all over it. Bill and Melinda too. Maybe a live8 style benefit concert or something. Orr.. here we go, let people who can't go out and plant pay for the supplies for other people to do so. So you can have points for paying for trees. Points for planting them and triple bonus for doing both yourself because that's just awesome.
Or a mix of all the above. Pool the funds and then allocate them to suppliers when users indicate that they want to go to that location and get started. Really well suited for management by an app.
The app should also facilitate group efforts like matching groups of people in the same area with a nearby planting zone so they can rent a bus for a saturday and make a trip to somewhere a little less local.
I'm trying to think of ways to make this as frictionless as possible. Like i have an afternoon to kill and maybe some friends who would be down so I open the app. I need a map with available planting areas nearby and also sources for saplings. Do I have a car? A car with lots of space? Just a bike? Can I afford to fund this myself right now? Based on this are there any opportunities nearby? Maybe a notification based on those criteria if my location changes? Like maybe I'm on vacation and I need something to do or I'm driving somewhere and could stop for half an hour if the stars align.
Yes but they all require a ~1bn dollar investment by somebody. Let's not forget the price alphabet is paying for this. And they have already agreed that they would not have IP level access to any of the data collected. Nothing personally identifiable. And all data goes through a 3rd party committee over which they have no control. I'm not sure what would lead somebody to vandalize the sensors besides ignorance and paranoia. What people fail to realize is that mass data collection, when done right, can be an extremely useful tool in improving convenience and efficiency of service. While alphabet may have a dodgy history of collecting information they had no right to, they are not Facebook or Equifax. As far as I am aware they havent mishandled or abused the data they've collected and it genuinely seems like they are committed to honest data collection this time around. Honestly I'm more concerned that the privacy committee that Toronto puts together will botch the data collection/storage end up leaking the data. And most likely they will blame alphabet for it in an "see we knew this would happen" kind of way. I lived in Toronto for a decade. Maybe it's because of Rob Ford but I have zero faith in the competence of Toronto city politics and fully expect them to over involve themselves beyond their capacity and royally fuck things up and then shift the blame to somebody else. #blockthesidewalk really says it all.
I would go further and lower the voting age to 16 and not let anybody over 60 vote. Call it undemocratic, call it a violation of rights but theyre not going to be here when shit hits the fan and they're going to vote accordingly and in doing so they will prevent anybody under 18 from making it to their age on a planet that anywhere near resembles the one they have devoured. That's an even more egregious violation of rights but nobody talks about it because there can be no accountability. Like putting a bag a flaming shit on somebody's doorstep and then running. Rather keep the shit where it is now then step in it later, thank you.
Well that seems perfectly reasonable to me. Read the terms of service or ask important questions when you before you start paying them once a month like "what happens if I don't use all my minutes?" (They rollover) "Do I have to keep paying if I have minutes already?" (No) "are the minutes refundable?" (No). You can't just walk into a store and say "talky talky please" and walk out with a phone. Allowing her to use the minutes toward internet and TV is generous of them.
Just because ADHD is poorly understood and often diagnosed incorrectly does not make it any less debilitating to those who have it and certainly does not imply that they are not in need of medication. Yes the medication can be abused by those who don't need it to get an edge. This is what makes it a controlled substance. Opiates can be abused too and have the same effect on everybody. The difference is that people in server pain need opiates to function at a baseline normal level. People with ADHD need medication to function at a baseline normal level. The fact that some people abuse them to go beyond that is completely irrelevant
> People with ADHD need medication to function at a baseline normal level.
This statement is so out of line I had to chime in. I was diagnosed with ADHD as a child. I was medicated for a few years, before I stopped taking the pills without telling my parents (they were being pressured by the private school I was in to medicate, I was kicked out shortly after they found out I had stopped.)
Those years are a complete empty window in my memory, and left me with physical ticks that _decades_ later I still have to suppress, alongside no actual tools for dealing with the symptoms.
Medication is not a silver bullet. Not all ADHD cases need to be medicated. Find what works for you, whatever the hell that is, and don't listen to dogma. For me that was coping mechanisms combined with a realization that much of the "attention deficit" was because I _didn't want to pay attention to the shit I was supposed to_ and _that's completely reasonable._ To insinuate that I haven't tractably found success ("baseline normal") with a non-medicative approach in my life is frankly insulting.
In Adults outside a courtroom, mental health treatment focuses on easing distress because the person seeking out treatment is the patient.
Parenting is stressful and imposes a powerful incentive to reduce that stress. Consequently, too often in children, mental health treatment focuses on controlling behaviors because the person seeking treatment is the parent.
The first is a person seeking greater agency for themselves over a problem. The latter is a denial of agency of the child. I’m hearing you express your pain at having your agency suppressed and expressing skepticism at the tools used to suppress your agency.
But those same tools also grant some adults an agency they are desperately drowningly seeking for themselves.
1. I might have when I was initially going through a ream of behaviorists, but I'd be lying if I said I recalled, this was around/after 3rd grade.
2. In large part, reminders. Notes, lists, alarms (calendar/phone alarms for _everything_, watering plants to finishing work shit), behaviorally trained prompts, anything to disrupt the "mental feedback loops" where I can find myself "unconciously" falling into something like tearing at my fingernails, reading HN, playing video games, or really any of the infinite things I'll come up with to not do what I should be doing.
e.g. even right now writing this, I'm being pinged to go back to reading PRs: after years of having automated browser alerts going "hey you shouldn't spend time in this video game/on hn, it's been 20 minutes and you have nothing to show." my brain has picked that up and is able to do it on its own. I found that hard blocking didn't work since I'd just find ways around it, but if I can remind myself this is something I _want_ in any way from pragmatism (mortgage) or emotional (getting wife nice things) whereas the games/Hn are actually _unwanted_ (despite what the dopamine might say) it's easier to force myself to focus on something I don't want, even in bursts. (getting myself to internalize and BELIEVE those facts took years and I still fight with sometimes when willpower is low.)
This was a bit of a ramble, and I'd be remiss to mention that the motivation to use the prompts would be missing without the philosophical context I assign to the things I do. (Disclaimer: I recognize not all people can use this technique, I simply use the fact that I have strong long-term motivations against my bad short-term focus) I mentioned it in passing (mortgage, wife, etc) but really finding things I _WANT_ and using my brain's likelihood to fixate on those, especially in periods of distraction, I can tie those things back to what I SHOULD be doing and create a virtuous cycle. Contrivedly: Distracted looking out a window at garden. Fuck, I can't afford this garden if I don't go back to coding. (Dang, this HN post is getting long. Better get back to work so I don't work late today and can spend time with the wife when she gets home :) )
I'm a patent holder for a pharmaceutically relevant class of compounds. There are two types of patents typically seen in pharma. One is procedural (how the drug is synthesized, isolated, formulated or administered) and another is composition of matter (the atoms in the molecule, their relative coordinates and the lengths and types of bonds that connect them). This program takes a target compound and does two things. 1) produces a library of similar compounds by structural diversification (making substitutions of atoms or small groups of atoms in the target compound with other atoms or groups which are known to behave similarly) with restrictions based on what has been patented under composition of matter. 2) It then takes each molecule and looks for ways it can be synthesized. It does this by breaking apart the molecule piece by piece until it obtains commercially available building blocks. These piecewise separations correspond to synthetic a steps in the other direction, which the program screens for literature precedence. It does this for every possible combination of piecewise separations until it finds a set of viable pathways from available compounds to the target. This is called retro synthesis. It then filters the potential synthetic routes for those that are covered by procedural patents until it has a list of non patented, commercially viable synthesis plans.
As you can imagine there are thousands of ways a moderately complex molecule could be deconstructed and the bank of known reactions is more than any one person can really grasp. That and the myriad patent literature and how cryptic and dense it can be make the problem particularly suited for algorithmic treatment. This is only being done now because cataloging all the research and patent literature (which goes back to the late 1800s) and digitally formatting in a way that allows it to be computationally analyzed and processed requires manual translation of each report by a human being. Not many people have the expertise required for this and those that do usually prefer less menial work. So it has taken this long to amass a digital library of sufficient size to give one confidence that the answers it provides are comprehensive and that further searching would be pointless.
> The research team hope that their software could help pharmaceutical companies in the protection of their intellectual property, and to hasten research into organic chemistry.
It seems what they are attempting to sell is a IP protection service: let us show you other molecules and synesis routes you should also patent defensively, without actually attempting them in practice. Pretty soon you will have algorithmically defined patents.
Depends on how many possible patents there are. Patents do cost money to maintain/file. It's possible that there could be life saving drugs that have so many possible patents that compared to the actual likely financial return it would be uneconomical to patent them.
Which to be fair is probably very unlikely given how healthcare costs and whatnot work in America. Can always bump the price up to compensate for expenses.
BUT - this is still a very useful tool for locating possibly cheaper/simpler methods of producing drugs that have expired protections. There is a project out there that is working on a bioreactor kit that allows the safe home production of several common drugs that are not patent protected. There are also projects that could have been life saving but were already not financially viable that could be rescued by this program.
And if someone is fast enough and has the funds to burn, they could patent some of those processes and then do what Tesla did with their patents.
I think this may open up more opportunities in the long run than it closes.
A not-so-fun fact: My country used to be on the 301 Special Report (IPR "rogue country" list) until 2015 because American pharmaceutical companies didn't consider procedural patents good enough. The last patents in that category were issued in 1995...
Apparently the income of Big Pharma investors is more important than the affordability of generics.
One thing I don't get: if you're trying to avoid patents, why go back to the 1800s? Don't you just need to look at recent patents that haven't expired?
The papers going back that far are to determine which synthetic steps are experimentally viable. You can look at a molecule and think how could I make this? Well if I broke this particular bond it would make A and B, which I can order from a supplier. So let's search the literature to see if anybody has successfully carried out a reaction that connects an A-like molecule and a B-like molecule in a way that would yield the kind of bond(s) that connect them in our target. That's a lot of searching because for a typical drug, there are 10s to 100s of bonds and a total synthesis can take upwards of 20-30 steps. Thankfully, making and breaking most of the bonds is just not possible given the fundamental nature of the compounds (more specifically, it would take a ton of energy to put the molecule together this way, and if that much energy was applied, it would react at more reactive sites long before the desired reactivity occured). For others it is less clear, which is why having a comprehensive literature sure is useful. If your database goes all the way back to the 1800s you can say with some confidence that a certain step has never been done before and therefore assume its not possible (perhaps an incorrect assumption, but pharma isn't interested in developing novel types of reaction methodology for a target screen because if it hasn't been done already, it would probably take several years and the chance of success is low. And besides, that's what graduate students are for ;)
So the literature search is to find out what's possible. Among the possibilités, the only ones of interest are those that are not covered in patents, hence the second screen.
Depends what you want: If you want to find new processes and compounds that you can patent, then avoiding older patents is essential, as they're prior art.
On the other hand, if you want to find new processes and compounds that aren't patented, then finding a past expired patent covering a part of the process would mean that part of the process is "safe" (not finding one might mean it is safe, or might mean you've overlooked something)
