anon4this1

This reminds me of hearing Reed Hastings of netflix talking about starting the DVD mail-rental business as preparation for when streaming became technologically viable. They knew that internet delivery would eventually work, but to be the big first mover they needed to establish a customer base. As soon as broadband reached a level where streaming video is viable, they convert the customer base over to it.

Likewise, robot street delivery is going to be huge. The marginal cost of delivery will tend towards zero, and its really useful. If a company spends years and zillions of dollars messing around with AI and machine learning bullshit to power these, they will miss the boat. The goal of a successful company should be:

- Get as much VC as possible

- Spend it on low cost chinese built bareboned GSM controlled bots

- Hire warehouses full of vietnamese computer gamers to control them

- Get more VC

Once you have a market cap of billions, THEN you get a lab of engineers together to make them increasingly autonomous

Also.. Vitalik (and his offsiders) created ethereum when he was like 19. This is impressive, but it also makes you wonder - what real world problems did Vitalik have experience of that he was trying to solve? Zuckerburg was trying to connect groups of friends. Was Vitalik really so driven by the need for unintermediated prediction markets and zero-trust digital contracts as a teenager?

Vague gambling stuff - is this really going to be a 10x improvement over betfair who already offers solid p2p gambling markets with <5% house take?

Distributed computing rewards - maybe for a subgroup off applications (eg. illegal stuff eg. piracy), but in general terms a centralised system is easier, cheaper and quicker to develop

Replacing national currencies - this is already bitcoin's killer app. Ethereum adds almost no utility to this space.

When I got into bitcoin in 2011, it had a market cap of $20 million, and already had several killer apps:

- Making darknet drug markets possible

- Allowed permissionless, highly convenient storage of wealth

- Allowed large, rapid, low friction money transfers anywhere in the world

Now, in 2017, Ethereum has a market cap of 8 billion, yet I can't find a single use case for this technology other than enabling other scammy ponzi-like coin offerings.

Went to a bitcoin conference recently and met a plumber who had quit his job to margin trade altcoins. I think a lot of his positions would have been wiped out in the beartrap 12 hours ago.

Elsevier look like a ripe target for a worldwide campaign to cancel access to their journals unless fees arnt dropped.

Germany are (have?) Pulled access, some other south american countries have also with local academics saying that everyone uses sci-hub for everything anyway.

Could be a good target for an activist hedge fund investor to short the stock and attack the company.

Patients (and addicts) state there is a particular euphoria that oxycodone has (and diamorph/heroin) that morphine doesn't really have. Of course oral morphine does cause addiction, but oxycodone just seems to have greatly increased rates.

Diamorphine is given IV/IM/SC - not orally - which generally means that its use is confined to a short period in the first few hours/days of a hospital admission until the patient can be switched to oral medication. Noone is sent home with diamorphine unless they are end stage palliative and they are on a home syringe driver to get it.

OTOH oxycodone is almost always orally administered which means patients stay on it for longer in hospital and are commonly discharged with a prescription for more.

The doctors I work with who have done fellowships in USA state that oxycodone is (?was) given out like lollywater compared to hospitals here, where it is only prescribed if the patient has a REALLY good reason they can't have oral morphine.

Alibaba sells fully featured non-fda approved (usually) veteranary ultrasound machines for as little as $800 USD - this includes a monitor and control panel etc. That is probably pretty close to commodity pricing for a specialised device.

There are also wireless ultrasound probes for around $800 USD - these could potentially come down in price too.

The reason commercial ultrasound sound machines cost 50-500k is that hospital are paying for:

- a brand name with reliability behind it

- the ultrasound rep to come and demo the machine a few times before and after it is purchased, as well as bring in some platters of food. Also the ultrasound machine reps also bring additional machines along for courses in use of the ultrasound for intern teaching etc.

- a support contract

The cheap, ubiquitous ultrasound machine seems like a great idea, and is useful in some settings (like ER especially), however there are some significant issues - probably best understood with the example of echocardiography.

Performing an echocardiogram (ultrasound of the heart) is a highly specialised field with neverending levels of complexity. Firstly, you are often dealing with inadequate images due to the patient's obesity or other anatomical factors, therefore less experienced operators get worse images which can make interpretation impossible. Even when you do get good pictures, it is a very subjective area and 2 operators will commonly have divergent results for the same scan. Thirdly the there are dozens and dozens of parameters which can be measured or calculated which are used as surrogates for functional measurement of the heart - these are being proven or disproven/or becoming fashionable or falling out of fashion over time.

Practicioners need to perform a certain number of echos per year to maintain base competency, and those with low numbers generally perform much worse than those who do echos every day.

A quick, goal directed, focused echo can yield useful results, and does work a lot better than a stethoscope, but then many would argue that allowing allcomers (physicians/ED docs/anaesthesiologists/ICU docs) to perform poor quality scans is a step back from having more specialised doctors performing fewer, high quality scans.

So overall, the issue is probably not that the machines are too expensive, it is that we have not worked out exactly who should be doing these scans. The truth lies somewhere between a very few people (ultrasound trained cardiologists/radiologists) and everyone, but we are not sure exactly where.

Overall I think that the technical advances here will not come from building cheap open source ultrasound machines (although it does sound fun!), but from improving ultrasound machines in their ability to acquire and interpret pictures themselves. This may be by having a remote telesonographer that guides and interprets a scan performed by a layman (eg a nurse) which would allow rapid, remote results without the telesonographer present (and could also allow utilisation of excess sonographers in some locations to places where they are scarce, or allow daytime sonographers on one side of the world to help scan patients at 3am on the other side, or allow utilisation of outsourced remote indian/filipino sonographers for cost savings.

Alternatively, new tech would perform scans automatically (eg. robotic arms, or human operator guided with instructions or haptic feedback) and then do tech guided interpretation - eg. generate all the important data from the information given and present it at a level appropriate to the person requesting the scan.

The common working class person has no real ability to alter the globalisation and pro-immigration agenda pushed by mainstream politicians. Successive governments have indicated that they would reduce immigration but all it has done is increase.

My father was born in Birmingham, a city in which people of english-descent will be a minority by 2020. When a city is only 40% english-descent, it is no longer an English city.

Karachi is still a pakistani city. Lagos is still a nigerian city. Birmingham is not an english city.

Most brexiters aren't particularly fussed with the finer points of the common market, or EU centralised decision making. They just want border control and feel completely powerless as things stand to change anything. There is no neat referendum question regarding immigration, and there seems to be no way other than a referendum for real democratic hearing of people's views on this issue.

I have experienced a lot of volatility with the bitcoins I bought. Namely, they're all worth 100x what I paid for them, while fiat currency continues to lose value every day as central banks print money non-stop.

any link to details on what parts you use for these bots?

As a Doctor, the potential for improvement begins from very basics. For instance - a radiologist sees a funny looking line on an xray and reports "this is probably nothing, but we should repeat the xray in 6 weeks to make sure." Sometimes these requests slip through the cracks and in a fraction of cases the patient presents 2 years later with terminal cancer from their metastatic lung Ca.

Ensuring blood thinners are prescribed post coronary bypass surgery or stenting is another one. It should happen every time, but sometimes by human error it may not.

A good startup idea would be to make a hotlist of the top ~1000 of these obvious, preventable errors, combine IT data sources to predict when they might be occuring, and have checking systems in place to prevent them. If it worked even adequately, hospitals would be seen as negligent for not using such a system.

People are sick of biased crap and vague economic theory being touted as data telling them how good immigration and free trade is for them, while in their own lives only seeing things getting worse.

Nassim taleb sums it up well: http://reason.com/blog/2016/03/15/nassim-taleb-the-global-re...

Well, I'm an anaesthetist, and have heard this argument.

I personally did a heimlich maneuvere on a hospital inpatient who was blue and choking on a big bit of bread, and the bread came out and he turned pink again.

So from my samples size of N=1, it works 100% of the time. I would like to know the high quality randomized controlled trials which show that it doesn't?

I wasted about 10 years of my life on fc related forums. They were great to begin with, and then gradually just became utterly terrible.

I know when I was broke, working crappy jobs and in debt, $500 would basically have put a small dent in my credit card, and not much else.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk has $16 billion dollars and hes making significant strides towards colonizing mars and slowing global warming.

"The Oxfam report An Economy for the 1%, shows that the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population has fallen by a trillion dollars since 2010, a drop of 38 percent. This has occurred despite the global population increasing by around 400 million people during that period. Meanwhile, the wealth of the richest 62 has increased by more than half a trillion dollars to $1.76tr. The report also shows how women are disproportionately affected by inequality – of the current ‘62’, 53 are men and just nine are women."

OK so assume these top 62 people give all their money to the poor. 1.76 trillion is distributed among 3.5 billion people giving $502 each. the average net worth of these people goes from $500 to about $1000. 1 year later what will have happened? probably not much. These people will increase consumption somewhat, some might invest a bit, but mostly the money will just disappear.

Huge swathes of the population have minimal net worth, like many of my friends, and live happy, comfortable lives. If they had an extra $500 they would spend it quick. This isn't the rule obviously, and there is a lot of poverty, but these statements don't really quite give a true picture of the issue.

each year 19,000 americans die from prescription opioid overdoses and another 10,000 die from heroin overdoses which often start with prescription opioid use.

In my experience (as an anaesthesiologist), people who use opioids as a response to non-pain problems are some of the most miserable people there are. It might work for a couple of weeks, but soon you're tolerant, addicted, intermittently withdrawing and your life becomes a wreck. "The prevalence of suicide attempts among opioid addicts is reported to lie between 8% and 17%, with some studies reporting an even higher rate among special groups of addicts. " http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9018906

Using MDMA might be useful as it is non-addictive, but again habitual use leads to decreasing benefits and increasing problems.

you should look up "debt monetization" and investigate how it relates to quantitative easing and money printing.

Cliff's notes is that quantitative easing is really money printing used to finance government spending, and is really just another form of taxation, although it goes through a slightly convoluted process to get there.

The world economy has seen plenty of downturns but the whole developed world turning to negative interest rates is a new thing.

Is this a sign that the economic dogma underlying central bank decision making is not really based on anything solid but rather just follows keynesian trends of the day combined with the race to the bottom of "europe is doing it so we need to as well!"

Fortunately I hold a large bitcoin position which I believe hedges me pretty well in this situation.

if chinese miners are indeed trying to limit blocksize in order to increase transaction costs, then the necessary chain of events which needs to occur is: 1) faith in bitcoin as a currency/payment system drops causing price crash 2) miners realise that the marginal increase in money made via transaction costs is massively outweighed by what they have lost in block rewards by limiting growth of the system 3) the miners get their act together and everyone upgrades to a new whizzy high capacity bitcoin.

This should continue to work until block reward becomes negligible in 2035.

http://www.anchoragecapital.com.au/team/

Phil Cave was the anchorage capital guy who they made the chair of dick smith, and who must've led this thing.

"Phil was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2007 for services to the community, particularly support services to children and young adults with disabilities, and to business as a company director. He is currently Chairman of the not-for-profit organisations Ability First Australia and Excelsia College (Formerly Wesley Institute)."

this guy needs at minimum criminal charges, preferably a fucking bullet.

In modern economic terms, subsistence living in small communities barely registers as existence at all. However it is the way most of humanity lived for most of history. And generally it seemed to be a satisfying way of life. We evolved to live in this way.

We think of people living in situations of subsistence as being unbearably impoverished and disadvantaged now. We have no evidence that we are really any happier or more fulfilled than them. We have longer life expectancy, and we spend much of it isolated and lonely and sick.

I suppose this is what separates environmentalists from non-environmentalists.

You have a fixed belief that any and every human life is more important than all animals or plants.

"lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty"

Objectively, humanity most closely resembles a cancer. The more you feed it, the more it grows. It tramples everything in its path. The belief that somehow exponential economic growth is going to fix everything and everyone will lead happy middle class lives in some kind of harmony with nature is delusional. We are in the midst of the largest mass extinction event of all time. In developed places, the natural forests and wildlife are 90-95% gone. The only places where nature still truly thrives are in undeveloped regions - the rainforests of Papua New Guinea, the amazon, the plains of africa. As "development" accelerates in these places, they too will destroy nature in the name of the eternal quest for positive economic growth, attainment of first world healthcare, buying a car.

Humans are just an exponentially increasing function which will generally grow to consume the resources available to them.

Why do they deserve to be prioritised over the millions of other species on earth?

Oh .. and another thing.

I do point of care needlestick blood testing on people every day. I check haemoglobin and blood sugar levels. When doing a needlestick test for Hb I always do it twice because these results are often spurious (especially when you "milk" blood out of the finger). The Hb/liter figure can vary by as much as 20-30% routinely. If this is the case I then do a proper venous draw to find the true result. These tests are marginally useful in screening for really low or really high values, but they are pretty much inadequate compared to a proper venous draw for clinical decision making.

MD here. The vast majority of soldiers are fit and healthy and will have completely normal labs 99% of the time. The times when they are not normal will be insignificant 99% of the time (had a few drinks last night? your GGT level will be slightly above normal briefly). This information is worth next to nothing to anyone.

I'm dismayed by the lack of focus on the environment here. Humans as a species are doing just fine. Health gains just marginally improve that. We need to focus on finding balance with nature that doesn't involve mass extinctions and subjugation.