If humans didn't manage risks to livestock on an industry scale they would be at risk. It requires a constant investment from both commercial industry and government. Activities like the dept of agriculture and university ag depts have been really so good at what they do. Its like the rest of civilization has forgotten what it takes and the costs involved if we neglect the investment. Agriculture and livestock is just one foundational civilization technology where we have forgotten the significance of
What is considered livestock varies over time - chickens range from "free range and can survive in the wild" to "so fat they can't live". One guess as to which is the most common by numbers - one reason that if you do decide to have a backyard flock, go with something "more natural".
More dangerous in all these is the monoculture - a hundred years ago we would have a wide range of crops and livestock; now 90% of meat chickens are probably the same genetically; similar with cows and bananas and corn and rice and pigs, etc. That sets us up for a "wipe out 90% of chickens" risk.
Monoculture is definitely a risk, one exacerbated by megacorps and overly corporatized industry - but if you look at the history of ag departments they have introduced multiple variants and variations across crops and animals time and time again. They also work with smaller growers in communities in many ways - natural pest controls consultations for example
It's been known to people working in the space for a long time. Heck, I was working on similar stuff for the Maxwell and later Pascal over a decade ago.
You do have a lot of "MLEs" and "Data Scientists" who only know basic PyTorch and SKLearn, but that kind of fat is being trimmed industry wide now.
Domain experience remains gold, especially in a market like today's.
The richest people I know talk to a range of people like personal assistants, but really the PA is valued for getting things done reliably and in the real world with any needed resources. Even calling in experts as needed - of course they may indeed talk to an AI too
The health insurance industry drives highly increased administrative costs - costs which the insurance companies are happy to foist off onto non insurance channels?
It "may be other than health care" but most (all?) other modern nations on multiple continents in multiple cultures spend less percent GDP on healthcare with longer life expectancy than the US
Every time Ive looked into it marketing is more than half of the costs of US pharma companies - and I would suspect even more as don't know if there has much work to unmask even more of that spending via channels that can occur in ways not obviously marked as marketing or at least are really not core to research and manufacturing.
e.g. is all the "discount coupon" pharmacy rigamarole considered marketing or administration.
This is not correct. Here's Pfizer's 2025 annual report [1]. Total expenses for the year were $55.1 billion. Advertising expenses were $2.7 billion of that, or just under 5%. R&D expenses were $12.1 billion, or just under 22%. They do have a lot of SG&A, but the large majority of that is not going to marketing.
Advertising is only a subset of marketing. From that doc, look at operating costs: SGA was ~$11B and R&D ~$12B - basically 50/50. Pfizer is very international, so is pretty difficult to break out US operating costs and what marketing vs R&D is for just the US. But one can also assume US marketing is higher than any other nation as direct-to-consumer advertising is primarily only allowed in the US.
No. Marketing is an issue but it's not the main driver.
Everybody else uses price controls to keep prices "reasonable"--the drug companies tolerate this so long as selling to the country exceeds their marginal cost of production. They count on the US market to recoup the $1B R&D costs.
Simply mandate that a drug company can't charge more in the US than they do in any other first world country. Major earthquake in drug costs.
The "discount card" bit is basically a reduction in revenue, it's neither marketing nor administration.
The Mad Max stuff is occurring at scale more due to unchecked governments, and governments that don't work for society than it is from insufficient surveillance
They probably omitted it because it is irrelevant. It says (according to the title of the Reddit post...the body has been removed) Meta is supporting laws to collect more data, which they profit from.
The Register article is about laws that were specifically designed to not give Meta and their ilk anything more than an unverified age bracket. The age reported is whatever the person who set up the account on the computer said to report.
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