One of the amazing things from a western perspective about the less developed world is being able to buy a full course of antibiotics without a prescription for a few dollars.
In the US you'd need an appointment, insurance paperwork or no insurance and then the actual meds might be $50-$80, if your doctor insists on prescribing the latest pharmaceuticals.
Not everywhere 'Western' is like the US. Saw my GP a couple of weeks ago and got prescribed antibiotics. Full course was < 10 AUD. No insurance necessary.
In France (and probably the rest of the EU, at least the countries I visited) you cannot get antibiotics freely. They need to be prescribed by your MD. And usually generics.
Cost is 1€.
Whether they are prescribed correctly is another story (France used to be very into prescribing antibiotics for everything, this changed in the last 20 years)
Generics are generally pretty cheap. There are some indications that US doctors are incentivized to prescribe patented meds. I know I've received them when I strongly suspected a generic would have been fine.
>These analyses included several types of prescribing decisions, finding that physicians who received industry payments were more likely to prescribe drugs made by the companies that had paid them over alternatives, had higher prescribing costs, and prescribed relatively more brand-name products over generic alternatives. The positive results of these studies spanned a broad range of physician specialties and drug classes.
In France generics are compulsory (there are some exceptions), otherwise you have some problems with the reimbursement. This is not strong enough but at least this is something.
The pharmaceutics have to provide a generic if it exists, even if the prescription is for another drug (except if the MD explicitly states that the specific drug must be used, with an explanation and they have to report this)
My ex-gf had a condition that needed to be treated with antibiotics and at the time she was between jobs. The doctor made a few calls and her out of pocket for a full prescription was $5.
"No Wires, No Batteries - Spying Changed FOREVER because of this invention!"
Apologies for changing the title. The clickbait style felt inappropriate for the content. Decent story telling and an in-depth explanation of his work to recreate the bug.
Ya, a lot of product being sold illicitly has no change of being sold over the table given the horrible liability. Drug dealers can afford to lose a few customers, a corporation can't (at least not without losing lots of money over it).
Typically this kind of appeal to special circumstances is the line of reasoning offered by addicts. "I know I still owe you money from last time and the time before that, but thistimeisdifferent"
We've heard this line of reasoning before during the crack epidemic. Policy makers are addicted to authoritarianism. The prison industrial complex profits. Black-marketeers profit. Intelligence agencies profit. Law enforcement agencies are given bigger budgets. Those wishing to use cartels to geopolitical ends profit in the political economy.
Just like with the drug addict, strong malign incentives exist for the continued addiction to authoritarian policy.
Of course, there's no need to go that deep. Simply invoke something scary sounding like, "think of the children", "this new drug is horrifying!" or any of the other stock tropes used to rationalize further expansion of state power. The same faulty lines of reasoning are used in attempts to prohibit encryption.
As long as people are sufficiently scared, there's no need to have a rational debate. Fear is a powerful emotion. Empathy for drug users, not so much. How effective has the last century of prohibition been? No, I don't agree that this is the best solution. Cheaper and more optimal policies exist, but we are stuck with this due to entrenched interests.
The financialization of the economy is downstream from central bank policy.
You cannot divorce the existing financial system from cryptocurrency. Rampant speculation and bubble mania isn't happening in a vacuum. Rather, it is a symptom of easy money and cheap credit. When regulators remove barriers to a natural rate of credit by no longer centrally planning interest rates, speculative mania will be naturally disincentivized.
I'll say no, but only because cryptocurrency is a single toddler to traditional finance's group of cigar smoking, sociopathic men with the scars to prove they've learnt through experience how far they can stray from legal boundaries before too much attention is brought.
Feels like tradfi's improprieties are normalized. They're adjacent to or in bed with government's financial abuses, which are politicized and sometimes portrayed as just.
More importantly, FTX couldn't make customers whole during an exit stampede. As long as there is no rush to the exits or until there is, the entire issue is relatively irrelevant.
The exit stampede had nothing to do with it. FTX had less assets than liabilities. Customer's wouldn't have been made whole if they gave FTX a hunderd years.
In the US you'd need an appointment, insurance paperwork or no insurance and then the actual meds might be $50-$80, if your doctor insists on prescribing the latest pharmaceuticals.
"I think this is infected"
"Looks like it. Here you go!"