Been there done that but from a different continent flying in. Nobody cares in general unless you're importing scheduled substances. You need to do your research but it's a way to beat the racket.
Drive up to the border and walk across on a day trip to the pharmacy. I believe the first few miles into the country are a NAFTA special economic zone with very relaxed paperwork requirements.
You can buy prescription drugs online from India without a prescription for super cheap. They arrive in your mail.
This is probably illegal, but not enforced.
I’m insured so it’d actually be cheaper for me personally to go in to the doctor and ask for a prescription. But I got tired of taking time out of my day for this - these are just beta blockers for fuck’s sake.
Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC/MS [1]) by an independent third-party lab [2]. For unscheduled substances they'll even email you the mass plot.
Nearly all of our (US) pharmaceuticals already come from India anyways. Manufactured there from Chinese bulk precursors.
I trust a third-party GC/MS plot way more than any brand slapped on a package.
I'm confused. Are you saying that every time you receive a package of medications from India, you send a sample off to for spectrometry?
That seems extremely arduous.
The point is that you don't trust this specific supply chain/manufacturer, which is part of the approval process.
"India/China" is not some monolithic entity that is either good or bad, there are some manufacturers that you can trust, and some you cannot.
Quality control in drug manufacturing is what ensures that every single pill has the correct dose, and not some random batch accidentally having 100x the active drug you need - or 0.01%.
the good pharmacies in India have started asking for prescriptions..
so, one is left to go the sketchy/tinier ones, where quality can be expected to be lower as well.
Completely disagree. They have even more to gain by being in absolute control, and bitcoin cannot be completely controlled, unlike a financial instrument which can be adjusted at the whim of the court systems and by decree from a central institution
There is no central court or institution. Trillionaires don’t trust those things. The only absolute control is in themselves. The principal agent problem is not solvable at that level.
Trillionaires still work in teams; they don't operate in a vacuum. Their influence extends throughout government, which is how they enforce their will, using the police, military, and court systems.
And that's the kind of innumerate thinking I don't understand. Masks aren't an either/or thing. Say masks are maybe 60% effective (there's no real consensus and good science is hard to come by). A mask-wearing vaccinated person is now 96% protected. Add that to staying outside (maybe another 75% or so?) and you get to 99%. Every bit helps, which is one of the reasons why we're reaching herd immunity.
Now, you're right, there's a cost tradeoff. If everyone is at 99% it would be pure insanity to close restaurants, say. But... masks? Leave them on, until it's dead. Again, this is the cheapest mitigation we have. Roll back every other protection first. Send people back to the office. Open up the stadiums. Start hugging again. Lift the visa restrictions. Visit the grandparents. Do all that stuff first before relaxing mask use.
While you’re at it why don’t we mandate everyone wear latex gloves all the time? No biggie.
And just always have hand sanitizer on your person. Just a small bottle so not much of a problem.
Can we just mandate people select a group of 100 people they will interact with? Almost nobody has more friends + family to see than that so it’s hardly an issue when you think about it.
You have this backwards: mandates must be continually justified beyond a reasonable doubt, not the reverse. Remember: mandates are dictating how others live their lives. Just because something isn’t that big a deal to you or aligns with your values doesn’t mean imposing that on someone else with the threat of government enforcement is reasonable in the slightest. Wear your mask, they are tools used to good effect, but requiring others to wear them is a step that should be continually challenged with all available true evidence and aggregate personal values - as should any mandate or law.
This is a giant list of strawmen. I'm not arguing for a mask mandate, I'm saying that masks as mitigation have been and continue to be good strategies (and in particular very cheap ones) and that we want to continue to use them until the pandemic is actually controlled (vs. just shrinking) and not incessantly mock people who continue to use effective means of disease control.
It’s telling how any mention of the fact that masks aren’t really that effective instantly is branded ‘mocking’. Especially while the pro mask Facebook groups have spent the last year pointing fingers at ‘anti mask Karens’.
I think it isn’t necessarily innumeracy to move past napkin math 18 months on. People have had the time to see the results of several cycles of behavior modification and perhaps aren’t interested in participating further.
However, if people are to wear masks until covid is truly gone, you may be asking people to wear masks forever. I think once covid is less of a population risk than a bad flu, all mandates should be dropped.
You should also disregard anti-vaxers* from the stats. If they want to die, fine. So at this point we have anti-vaxers, kids under 12, and some very rare medical cases left in the US now. With community spread where it is (low and dropping), the flu is genuinely scarier for kids under 12, and likely to kill more.
There is no quantitative reason for any restrictions at this point.
* I'll note the first thing that should have been prioritized is un-banning vaccines.
*Anti vaxers in this context means anyone who at this point has had months to get a free vaccine and still hasn't, they have now earned the label.
They aren't dysfunctional in the sense you imagine. Their state is fighting for survival in the face of foreign agents and interference. They are in a weak position to defend themselves so you see them lashing out in less subtle ways. Civilians are unfortunately caught in the crossfire.
> Civilians are unfortunately caught in the crossfire.
Not a crossfire, but a very directed one. It's critical to such regimes to never let anything the West does happen without it hitting their own civilians.
If the population see Western sanctions benefiting them, and visibly harming the regime, people will be ready to take bigger sacrifices, knowing that the regime will loose much more than they do.
It is equally critical for the West to communicate loud, and clear to Belarusian people that they are doing those actions to support their resistance, and not just because they want to hit Lukasenka.
This is the fundamental flaw with open research and open source. You can't have both open access and working intellectual property protections, especially when there are jurisdictions that don't care about your laws, or are even actively encouraging theft.
It's easy to complain about China but that's what the Mainland Chinese system is designed to do. If they're able to break ours then that's just survival of the fittest. Adopt of perish. Who says you have to roll over and simply let them get away with it? Why are our universities collaborating with these "researchers"? Name, shame and blacklist them.
US intelligence reports that researchers from the virology lab in Wuhan were hospitalized with an unknown illness in November of 2019, most notably before the "patient #0" was infected.
It seems recently they uncovered evidence that patient 0 never visited any wet markets. Among some other head scratchers. Fauci says it's a coin flip, 50/50 odds it came from a lab.
More research is necessary, but it's worth keeping your mind open to new evidence.
In my own amateur opinion, either natural crossover or laboratory escape theories are plausible but we'll almost certainly never be able to prove it either way.
Reading between the lines, they started out by “designing” i.e. choosing genetic sequences. But they found out it was more efficient to generate more virulent viruses simply by natural selection in mouse and human respiratory cell cultures.
