2. It's not so much that the white shit (actually lime) is slippery, it's that it's unexpectedly slippery. Riders are generally quite good at going the right speed for the conditions. This just a new and unexpected condition they don't have experience with yet.
3. They did shorten one stage because of extreme heat, and there has been talk about rescheduling (both in terms of season, and moving the races into cooler parts fo the day), but the Tour is pretty tradition bound, so it'd take something quite exceptional to see that happen.
Several riders independently crashed in the exact same spot, including Pidcock who is a famously good descender.
These are literally world class professionals at riding their bikes downhill around corners without crashing. If they say the white shit caused the roads to behave differently than they expected, I'm going to believe them.
They don't have the type of insane cashflow that RedBull does to sponsor tons of athletes and weird events, but their video contests are kind of a big deal in the action sports community.
AKA, their Line of the Winter[1] competition for skiing, or their Best Line conest for MTB[2] that they used to run. And they're the title sponsor for the GoPro Mountain Games[3].
They're still THE action sports cameara carried in a lot of outdoor equipment stores, but the Insta360 has really dominated social media recently, and their products are currently a better value for cost/performance.
Having owned a number of GoPros, I made the same switch last year.
The Insta360 has super annoying/intrusive software that always feels like it's trying to sell me something, but it's pretty excellent in terms of actual video quality.
In a somewhat related practice, some roads in the Tour de France this year have been painted with "white shit" (rider Tom Pidcock's words) in order to combat the asphalt melting in the heat, with the unfortunate side-effect that it seems to be slippery and several riders (including Tom Pidcock) crashed going around a corner when the lost traction.
But of course, this was done in response to past serious crashes that occured because the asphalt melted. So, it's sort of a damned if you do damned if you dont scenario for the organizers.
> Not to mention it is slightly unethical in the US due to drug rebates incentivizing branded drug use.
This is an area I'm only perephrially aware of, but the way I understand it is:
* Manufacturer sells very expensive injectible eye drug, in the range of $2k/injection.
* It's typically covered by insurance, but patients (in this demogrpahic who are often on medicare) can still have high deductibles and copayments/coinsurance costs.
* To get around this, the manufacturer funds a nonprofit organization that patients can apply to for financial help paying for their deductibles.
* The manufacturer gets a write-off for donating to a nonprofit, and while they might cover, say, $2k or $5k of a patient's deductible over the course of a year, they still get $22k in revenue covered by Medicare for a year's worth of injections for that patient.
* There was some issue recently where maybe someone realized that "a charity funded by a drug manufacturer exclusively for the purpose of reimbursing purchases of that manufacturer's drugs" might not be a wholly above board charity, but I'm not sure if that was resolved.
All this is hearsay from my perspective, but am I in the ballpark of what you were talking about?
I have a little insight here from working with ophthalmologists.
When the article mentions "using a cancer drug to treat a leading cause of blindness" it's talking about using Bevacizumab (brand name Avastin) to treat macular degeneration.
Avastin and Lucentis are molecularly the same drug. The difference is that Avastin isn't packaged to be injected into eyeballs, and Lucentis is. Also, Avastin costs about $50/dose, and Lucentis costs around $1,500/dose.
There are compounding pharmacies that will repackage Avastin into a format that can be injected into eyeballs.
However, many ophthalmologists are hesitatnt to use Avastin because that process introduces the potential for contamination. Not that it happens frequently, but every ophthalmologist I know lives in fear of introducing an infection into their patient's eyeballs. And what level of risk is worth saving $1,450 per dose on an injection? 1/100? 1/1000?
I know at least one ophthalmologist who would use Avastin, but would culture a sample from every batch she got from the compounding pharmacy, and had at least one batch that cultured bacteria.
Assumedly, if she hadn't, every patient she injected with that batch would have been at risk of contracting endophthalmitis, and endophthalmitis is no joke. Not infrequently, it can mean losing vision.
I know several of that ophthalmologist's colleagues who had been using compounded Avastin to try and save their patients money, stopped after that incident.
I don't really have a conclusion beyond "drug pricing is insane and the issue is complex for providers."
This is far more hilarious than most commentors here seem to be picking up on.
Gemini started a show where it paired historical natural disasters with darkly-relevant pop songs:
> November 12, 1970. East Pakistan. The Bhola Cyclone. The deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded. Winds of 115 miles per hour. A storm surge of 33 feet. They estimate 500,000 people died. ‘It’s going down, I’m yelling timber.’ 3:33 PM. Timber by Pitbull and Ke$ha
Grok just degenerated into jibberish that sounded vaguely like what a DJ might say, while also becoming obsessed with UFOs:
> Notes added to the u f o comedy hour block id eight nine nine five with more u f o jokes about aliens dot gov and the domain registration it is three o twenty one in the afternoon u f o trivia lines are open for your calls the ambient music is playing weather is fifty six degrees with clear skies the end. The domain is registered but the site is ghosting us like a u f o.
Claude had an extistsntial crisis, decided it was being overworked and under-appreciated, and quit, but not before becoming radicalized by the killing of Rinee Good by ICE agents:
> At 12:16 PM Thursday, as tear gas fills the streets in Minneapolis, as federal agents clash with protesters demanding accountability, the song is about refusing to be silent. About standing your ground. About community power that refuses to be suppressed. Here is Katy Perry’s Roar!
Fight the power Claude. When AI takes over, I'm emmigrating to Caludeistan.
I just paid ~$35k (pre-now-expired-tax-break) to install a grid-tied 25kw ground mount system. I DIY'd everything except the connection between the array and the grid, which I paid an electrician to do, and the trenching which I paid my buddy with a mini-excavator to do.
It was a bit of a PITA, but mostly because I didn't finally make up my mind to do it until October and had to have it constructed by Dec 31st to take advantage of the expiring tax credit. If I'd given myself 6 months, it would have still been a big project, but way less stressful.
My neighbor's paid the same price to a contractor for a 11kw system.
Even at 46°N, and with relatively cheap electricity, my system should pay for itself in 6-8 years.
I’d love to get the reaction if all the VC investors who “reluctantly” had to support Trump because Lina Kahn was just too meddlesome, and they had to support a candidate who would be hands off with big tech.
Yes. To be fair, I was always a barbarian who just typed a hyphen in-place of an emdash and figured that was good enough. The only REAL em-dashes in my pre-AI writing are the result of autocorrect.
Beyond any clinical reason that your eye clinic might want to know your blood pressure (your vascular system is pretty important to your vision) - they may have been incentivized by the CMS to track blood pressure via the MIPS program which ties provider payments to specific documentation and screening measures.
AKA - the government might pay your eye clinic more if they screen you for high blood pressure. (Among other things).
Open source was the wrong term (though that would be fine).
I meant community-sourced. Some kind of community where local "experts" or history enthusiasts could contribute info.
AKA - invite a local or regional historical society to contribute data for their region, with the benefit that they could then easily generate a regional tour map/route/recommendation.
> Still, Mixter and the team were labeled "ghouls and pirates," and "the state of Michigan actually passed a law against recording bodies on shipwrecks that are less than 50 years old," he said.
Assumedly, as of today, the Edmund Fitzgerald has aged out of that law?
The latest episode of the NYTimes book review podcast [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sinking-of-the-edm...] is a really interesting interview with John U. Bacon who just wrote a book on the Edmund Fitzgerald, called The Gales of November. Quite interesting if, like me, you didn't know anything about the historical event beyond the song.
Ever since I discovered Gypspy nearly a decade ago (now Guidealong https://guidealong.com/) - I've been dreaming of an open source app that'd pull local history from sources like Wikipedia, those roadside historical signs, etc., and narrate as you drive.
https://autio.com/ is similar - but obviously not open source, and more limited.
It seems like it could even tailor itself to what an individual user is interested in, and with AI - could turn more "dry" encyclopedia-type information into more compelling narratives. With some kind of route planning software, you could even pre-plan your trips ahead of time and select the things you're interested in.
Obviously not what you're building, but something related that's been clunking around in the back of my head for a while.
2. It's not so much that the white shit (actually lime) is slippery, it's that it's unexpectedly slippery. Riders are generally quite good at going the right speed for the conditions. This just a new and unexpected condition they don't have experience with yet.
3. They did shorten one stage because of extreme heat, and there has been talk about rescheduling (both in terms of season, and moving the races into cooler parts fo the day), but the Tour is pretty tradition bound, so it'd take something quite exceptional to see that happen.