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I benefit from an orphan drug, and the R&D was most definitely subsidised by the public purse.
My insurance pays a few grand a month for it.
The mfg coupon covers most of the rest, minus a copay.
This is the second iteration of the original drug. The first hasn’t meaningfully fallen in price and only the original company can manufacture and distribute the generic even under the name of competitors.
There was no breakthrough in the second iteration, and the logic to solve the “problem” they solved was straightforward. So now I pay more, for an anecdotally less effective version that addresses a risk irrelevant to me but present in the original.
There is yet a third iteration on the way.
Shock revelations:
- pharma companies are greedy and will double dip against both government subsidies and patients/insurance at every opportunity.
- XX Pharma didn’t pay for the original R&D, my gov did.
- if one replaces Na with a/several similar elements, one still ends up with a salt, often resulting in a drug variant that “doesn’t affect blood pressure” and offers no other real benefits, nor risks.
- Clinical trials for said alternative salt are broadly leas expensive than for the original. That does not result in lower prices.
Nationalise pharma research, if not the manufacturers.
Also, generics are often manufactured in countries with, shall we say, fewer controls and regulations. Know who makes those pills and where. If you can’t stomach the FDA reports on that manufacturer, find a pharmacy who will sell you something else…
Right there with you on “just works,” as well as the simple fact that the config snippets you need are readily available - either in the repo of whatever you’re putting behind the proxy, or elsewhere on the internet.
I consistently keep in mind that it’s ultimately an RU product, of course. But since it’s open source and changes relatively infrequently, that’s mitigated to a large degree from where I sit.
Nothing against Caddy, though Apache gets heavy quickly from a maintenance standpoint, IMHO. But nginx has been my go to for many, many years per the above. It drops into oddball environments without having to rip and tear existing systems out by the roots, and it doesn’t care what’s behind it.
Ages ago, I had a Tomcat app that happened to be supported indirectly by an embedded Jetty (?) app that didn’t properly support SSL certs in a sane way on its own.
That was just fine to nginx and certbot, the little-but-important Jetty app just lived off to the side and functionally didn’t matter because with nginx and certbot, nothing else gave a crap - including the browser clients and the arcane build system that depended on that random Jetty app.
There are three restaurants I distinctly remember long-term as health risks: Chipotle, Chi-Chis (decades ago), and Jimmy Johns.
The first, I still consider a risk. The second is long gone, and exists only as branding for salsa and the like. The latter, made a concerted effort to get rid of the one risky part of their product which couldn’t be cooked or otherwise sterilized (sprouts, by definition) and to my knowledge hasn’t had a large-scale problem since.
JJs is the only one that handled it even remotely correctly, after either the first or second outbreak, by straight removing the risk. They’re also the only one of the two remaining above that I’ll patronize. I’ve never eaten Chipotle, and it strikes me as highly unlikely that I ever will.
Sell them to someone who will test and resell them to the airline or medical industry… Manufacturing is a likely customer as well, plenty of legacy equipment there that’s airgapped and still running decades-old hw/sw.
Youtube warning, some Boeing 747s
(This is a wrong answer since you only have a single pack. If you had several cases, you might actually be able to make a buck)
Billionaires and rent-seeking companies. There are at least three national companies I can think of who are hoarding single-family homes in major cities and renting them out.
Generally they purchase at scale via REO scenarios, and provide no value whatsoever while driving up prices drastically
One example is a company called “Progress,” no better or worse than the others but with a meaningful web presence if you’re curious.
The value of my labor, daily.
The nominal “cost” of my healthcare, at every encounter.
Etc.
There’s also zero reason for me to ever set foot in a Chipotle when we’ve two different local chains, one primarily sit-down and one primarily food truck-based, offering broader menus, safer food, and better food - along with all the miscellaneous one-offs that one would expect in a city of any size.
(Shout-out to Moe’s, for anybody in Chambana!)
Been looking for this sort of device for my Pantech laser.
The cartridge is good for 1,600 pages - no more, no less.
All well and good, they’re cheap, except… the vast majority of my printing is in A5 size (roughly half-letter, or exactly half-A4).
Those half pages count just like any other page against the total, and I get shorted by the better part of 800 pages or so.
Content? Hardly.
Disinformation. Lies. Etc.
I’ve worked side by side with RU devs who were both personable and damned competent. Never were their tech skills in doubt, and I retain quite a bit of respect for those individuals.
I’d not do the same today explicitly because of the political and compliance implications. It’s unfortunate, but necessary.