HN user
I work as an actuary and data scientist, but I started my career as a software engineer.
In a nutshell, the defect that causes the guns to fire when holstered occurs when there is a small amount of pressure on the trigger. If the slide (top part of the gun) is wiggled / nudged, it will fire. Also, the gun can fire when dropped. Both these issues are mitigated by other manufacturers with a trigger safety and longer trigger pull.
Semaglutide / GLP-1 compounding is not limited to just Hims. Lot's of pharmacies do it. The manufacturer (Novo Nordisk) charges 5x-10x for the exact same thing. The author calls the GLP-1s used in compounding "Chinese Knockoffs", but offers no evidence of quality control problems, and is instead relying on the reader's prejudices.
GLP-1 drugs may be a game-changer for obesity and diabetes, the same way that cholesterol (statin) drugs have greatly improved heart health. Hopefully reversing a long trend of increasing waistbands in developed / developing countries. Unfortunately, America will pay the highest price (including Medicare). I'm all for anything that makes them cheaper, including the many compounding pharmacies currently exploiting the loophole the author takes issue with.
No, this doesn't imply an "infinite amount of money", it's just a pricing model. You still need the parameters of the distribution (brownian motion / random walk), and these are unobservable. You can try to estimate them, but there is a lot of practical problems in doing so, primarily that volatility / variance isn't constant.
Your post is completely off-topic. The paper includes a great discussion about how the property insurance crisis in Florida dates back to Hurricane Andrew in the 90s, not a court decision in 2017. The issue raised in the paper isn't climate change, its weakly capitalized insurers and the conflict of interest created by one particular rating agency (Demotech), that is giving sketchy insurers clean bills of health that allow them to operate.
Tort reform in Florida is a bandaid. The state-run insurer is creating serious market distortions by undercharging for the risk, accumulating very large proportions of the state homeowners insurance policies (since no one else will), and then offloading the policies to undercapitalized insurers while looking the other way about their poor financial condition. When Citizen's claims are in excess of its reserves, the legislature steps in and taxes the rest of the state to cover the shortfall. I'm guessing when the other insurers become insolvent, the shortfall is offload to the state guarantee fund (possibly on the taxpayers dime). This is all covered in the paper.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/505/what-doe...
I really don't want to keep googling things for you. The police are not judicial officers. Yes, I've read the article.
https://www.hipaajournal.com/hipaa-compliance-for-pharmacies...
The police are breaking federal law and the article is wrong. This is not a gray area.
When you buy health insurance, you sign a temporary HIPAA release (limited duration) to cover the period that they are underwriting. They can only query your specific pharmacy records for the purposes of underwriting. So yes, this is a HIPAA violation when it is being used by the police. I work in this space with HIPAA data.
I work in this space, and your comment is completely wrong. Data covered by HIPAA is always covered by HIPAA. A covered entity would also include a health insurer, and all payment intermediaries, this is straight from the HHS faq (https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/covered-enti...)
no prob, go ahead
I think there is an additional reason here too. Software development work is (too often) seen as heads-down, anti-social work. Large corporations often bridge communication between software developers and the business/end-users via third-parties, such as product owners/manager, architects, and business analysts. Remember the "telephone" game we all played in kindergarten, where a message whispered between participants becomes comically unrecognizable by the time it reaches the last person? That is BigCorp software development in a nutshell.
Solving this communication problem is uncomfortable. Connecting software developers with end-users is hard. It means software developers have to have courage to ask "dumb questions" when the end-users explains something too quickly in jargon-laden terms. It means that end-users have to be patient, with the time to teach and explain enough about the problem domain. People with strong communication *and* technical skills are hard to find, and creating ongoing mutual respect and cooperation between end-users and the oft-hated IT department is only possible when employee attrition is low enough to create long-standing relationships.
Software development is fun when it is a high-momentum, self-contained exercise. So we direct our energy to complexity, because its fun and safe. We don't need to stop and engage with end-users who speak a language we barely understand. We don't need to create consensus among disagreeing end-users representatives. We just need put on some good music, drink some coffee, and solve clean technical problems, rather than messy people problems. I'd guess most software developers would say "you don't pay me enough to deal with people", and walk away.
witch (incorrect), rather than which
Have you heard of Citadel?
Generally they make 25-50% more than a similar level vanilla software engineer.
It's often even less in my experience. Despite having a "unicorn" skillset (soft-skills, advanced degree, domain experience, and SWE experience), I make about as much as a vanilla SWE. There are a huge number of inexperienced PhDs that want into the field, and we are flooded with resumes every time a DS leaves. Also, most of the time, models don't really matter. What makes or breaks most DS projects is soft-skills, stakeholder management, and data cleaning / feature engineering.
Not if you factor in risk aversion and declining utility. Most investors would happily give up some upside for downside protection. This is where option strategies are not zero sum
"I used an leverage to take a concentrated position in a risky asset, you can too".
Then they start issuing rebates instead of discounts?
They already do, and it's a huge amount of money. It's how they keep prices opaque. There is a list price (retail price), the pharmacy dispenses the drug, and gets reimbursed a variable amount from the insurance company (called the reimbursement price), usually about 50% of the list price. Then, the insurance company gets a kick-back from the drug manufacturer (usually for non-generic drugs). Medicare also gets these kick-backs, and they stopped disclosing the actual amount around 2016.
It’s a huge rip off. Medicare should be paying a discount to the median price actually paid on the open market. But apparent nobody has an incentive to fix this.
This is utterly wrong. First of all, Medicare Part D covers pharmacy benefits. Part D is supplemental insurance purchased by seniors from a private insurance company. If you are too poor, I think you go on Medicaid. Also, Medicare Part D plans DO pay less than commercial plans.
This study is probably complete B.S. because no one knows how much is paid in drug rebates. Manufacturers pay the insurance companies (including Medicare) huge amounts of money (back) for prescription drug utilization coming from their members. In short, it's a legal kick-back. And I'm not kidding, it's a huge amount of money (like 20% - 30% of the reimbursement price)
U.S. drug pricing is broken for many reasons, and sorry to call you out, but nothing that you said is true. Everybody gets ripped off by big pharma, not just the government.
Conceptually, I agree that it's cool, but oh man are there going to be some indecipherable formulas showing up in spreadsheets once the power users start using it.
So here is my super simple understanding take on the long-winded article.
If the duration of treasuries, or whatever you are basing the spread on, is equal to MBSs, the spread would be constant. This is not the case because of prepayments (i.e. the option).
When interest rates rise, refinancing-related prepayments slow. Duration increases. But, it's a hot housing market, so there is an offsetting effect. Duration is decreasing due to the housing market (buyer-driven prepayment).
The option-adjusted spread would capture both these effects, but good luck with that.
Not defending this, but what you are doing is entering claims information exactly how a hospital / clinician would have to. A lot of this is done automatically by software now. This isn't a dark-pattern, it's just slapping a shitty user interface on top of a standard claims billing process. It's sort of like using POSTMAN to interact with an API.
You seem to have very strong anti-establishment opinions. There are a lot of off-patent drugs (i.e. generics) that are dirt cheap and widely prescribed. Metformin is one example. Unfortunately, your world-view prevents you from seeing through the logical holes of your own statements. If dichloroacetate cured cancer, it would require a global conspiracy to conceal that fact. Doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies have quite the opposite incentives from big pharma. Like you, they dislike the excessive profiteering from pharmaceutical companies. Why would they be party to this conspiracy?
Because there is, and the person who wrote the original article has no domain experience. Fixing data sucks and it requires judgement. Public health and medical researchers derive an enormous amount of research benefit from anonymized health records. Medicare publishes a large dataset.
Not sure if you are being sarcastic, but that's precisely what the ACA did. It created giant incentives for hospitals to modernize their medical record systems, which many did.
Typical draw-down rate is 3%-5% per year, so yes, very gradually.
The wealthiest generation in U.S. history (boomers) are exiting the workforce, where will they park their retirement nest egg? Bonds and savings products (CDs etc) are paying historically low rates, and lose value as interest rates rise. There are few places for the typical boomer to park that capital other than the equity markets which have served them well for the last 30 years. It is unlikely they will exit the markets and hoard cash, especially with inflation fears.
Jeremy Grantham has a megaphone right now. Every single news site keeps repeating this. They also ignore the fact that the guy is a perpetual doomsayer.
Look at Lemonade.com, they do not benefit from not paying out as their margin is fixed
Lemonade reinsurers the vast majority of the risk. Their historical profitability will determine what reinsurers charge them (which is a premium). Basically all of their risk (75%) is reinsured.
If/when reinsurers tire of thin margins and high volatility, they'll hit Lemonade with a rate increase. Lemonade can either retain more of the risk, or pay the reinsurance premiums. The additional capital required to do that will either come from policyholders or shareholders.
This is essentially what Enron was doing to pay the bills before their loans disguised as assets fraud scheme blew-up. They explicitly manipulated supply in some instances.
Consumers are cashflow (payment) driven.
Assuming a $1500 / month payment at 1999 interest rates (8%) gets you 200K in principal. Assuming a 4% (even though it more like 3%) gets you 315K today in principal. Same payment, but instead of paying interest to the bank, you pay more into equity.
As an aside, inflation rates were quite similar in 1999 as they are today. So I think the interest rates are a fair comparison (i.e. Fisher hypothesis).
Rising interest rates might have a similar effect in the housing market as with the bond market (bonds issued at lower interest rates trade at a discount), but my suspicion is that house prices are more "sticky" than bonds.
Seconding that. Although Firebug was wonderful, cross-platform development was not (IE and FireFox). Example of "quirks mode" nonesense:
1. The "hidden" element at the root of the IE DOM tree, only accessible with "*" via CSS
2. inline-block was broken on IE6 (but fixable with hacks), and no transparent PNG support.
3. The outline CS property was implemented the same as background in IE
Best of all was the dog slow IE 6 JavaScript interpreter, which was like 50x slower than Firefox and IE 7+.