If you are a homeowner, property transaction records are public information in the US. Plenty of data brokers collate from the numerous city/county databases for those who only know your name.

I’ve seen the urn characterized both as rare/expensive and not uncommon/inexpensive. It seems to change depending on the point different articles are trying to make. Perhaps it’s relative.

The Planet Money episode on this was an interesting listen. If I remember correctly, after the bans he held this weird discussion group at the White House where everyone just talked over each other, and he ended it completely noncommittally.

Amazon literally did this with diapers.com that led to them acquiring the company and shutting it down. I’m sure they’ve done it in hundreds of other product spaces as well.

Many monopolies form by first using a dominant market position to sell at a price no competitor can afford to match. Choice has already been removed before the “competition” folds or pulls out of the market. The consequences don’t happen overnight; you feel the squeeze before the “true” monopoly emerges. Amazon isn’t going to sell at a cheaper price once their competitors go out of business out of the kindness of their hearts.

Further, high consumer price is just one form monopoly power takes. Reduced labor power, wages, and worse working conditions are other important concerns, in addition to removing product variety and innovation incentive.

It reminds me vaguely of Operation Trojan Shield, except with explosions.

The people in charge of the program are getting fired, and an outside consulting firm is being hired to investigate. So, I imagine there will be a follow up later on with more details on that front.

It doesn’t inspire confidence that there wasn’t the oversight to prevent this however. These are human remains, not widgets.

I know. This is one of my major pet peeves, that even major publications seem to skip copy editing. I’ll forgive it in an independent journalist’s substack, but not much more.

It really depends. One tenant could have an ant problem because another adjacent tenant is attracting them, which the landlord needs to address. If the structure has decaying wood, that can attract carpenter ants which is a landlord issue. Some ants like humid environments, so a poorly ventilated structure (like one with mold) could be the cause–also the landlord’s problem.

The shareholders in question suing are a public employee retirement fund. I wouldn’t exactly consider retired sanitation workers and bureaucrats societal leeches, but to each their own I guess.

I’m genuinely not certain if you are meaning to reply to my comments because your replies don’t actually reflect what I’ve said. It is possible to have a larger discussion about a topic from a smaller example, and it’s also possible for things to not be all or nothing. I hope you can sort whatever bee is in your bonnet.

I’m not quite sure how you’ve turned “we should have the option” into “we should buy everything foreign.” I think you’re having an argument you want to have rather than addressing the point I was making.

Great, and where local is the best choice they should do that. But nobody can seriously argue that reducing the ability of government to shop around for the best cost/quality balance is a good thing. It’s not like the only options are buy everything American or everything from China. I’d like qualified experts making that decision, not legislators.

You create bad incentives if you artificially reduce competition like this. Not every good or service will have tons of American choices, so you end up with a handful of companies who know the government has no other choice.

I feel like all this is going to do is raise government costs and line the pockets of selected contractors. We aren’t always going to be the relative best producers in cost/quality balance for every product and service.

If we’re going to subsidize any industry, it should be done directly and explicitly. Otherwise, it becomes another example of “inefficient” government that should be privatized.

That priest was not speaking based on the Church’s beliefs, then. Natural family planning has been largely accepted by the Church for centuries, and the Pope more formally said it was ok in the early 50s. You just have to be ok if it leads to children anyway.

It has either gotten better or just improved its suggestions for me over time. I basically never get right wing content anymore. There’s plenty of garbage, but it’s stupid garbage rather than dangerous garbage.

Exactly. If it’s a regulated industry, they’re not just paying for Teams. They’re paying for someone else to worry about meeting certain compliance requirements and take the heat if things go wrong. I’m not sure how many companies besides Microsoft can offer that. At most it’s a fraction of the available options.

Two points about R&D costs:

First, they aren’t just trying to make up what they spent on this treatment, but others that failed during research/trials. There’s a lot of them the general public will never hear about, and pharmas generally don’t like to bring attention to their failures. Part of that is many shareholders are morons who don’t understand how science works.

Second, the costs can get fuzzier for larger companies who in-house much of the R&D process, since the costs get shared among many programs. Properly attributing spend in that case can be a serious challenge.

All that said, they’ve clearly seen an opportunity to rake it in with this trendy drug and are charging way more than they need to.

The two Black Panther movies combined have grossed over 2 billion dollars. I wouldn’t say that agrees with him. It’s also odd to assume that movies which didn’t do as well, like The Marvels, were because of a female dominated cast and not because they were just bad movies.

Check out their controversies section on Wikipedia. This doesn’t seem out of character for this publication. It’s more likely incompetence than malice.