The claimed increase in ridership is modest (18%) off a low baseline (0 service on weekends) and occurred over a long time period (pre-pandemic to today.) They also expanded service during that period, which probably fully explains the increase in ridership. Certainly the reduction in fare ($1-->0) is nice for some people, but it's hard to imagine that it is actually decisive for a large portion of trips.
The estimates of traffic reduction and CO2 reduction just quote the city's numbers without establishing that "traffic cleared, and so did the air."
Key paragraphs:
> In 2021, the city starting [sic] running more buses, streamlining routes and seriously considering waiving the $1 fares. In 2023, the City Council voted to pay for a two-year fare-free pilot with Covid-19 relief funds.
...
> Ridership eventually grew to 118 percent of prepandemic levels, compared to the average nationally transit ridership-recovery levels of 85 percent.
The belief is that MH370 was depressurized which would have killed the passengers. A better example is Germanwings 9525 where the locked door allowed the first officer to crash the plane.
The study you linked concerns whether the hospital is owned by a nonprofit or by a private equity group.
The question in this study is whether physicians work for their own practice or for the hospital directly, regardless of the ownership of the hospital.
IPOs aren't what they once were. The burden of being a public company has increased (SOX and related public company costs are $5-10M/year), so companies are far more likely to stay private. That has created a positive feedback cycle as the private funding ecosystem has become increasingly robust, which is why you see so many $100B+ private companies.
Also keep in mind that the biggest companies during that bubble had peak market caps of ~500B and then lost ~90%, so 400-500B in losses each and total internet related losses of a couple trillion. If NVDA lost 90%, it would be down 4 trillion dollars, or twice that total just by itself.
AI company valuations collapsing would have meaningful impacts on the broader market. Big pension/mutual funds are important sources of capital across every sector, and if they're taking big losses on NVDA, GOOG, and a portfolio of privates, it will have a chilling effect on their other activity.
Checkpoint inhibitors (which are the primary driver of improved cancer treatment over the last 15 years and generate > $50B/year in sales) generally don't look very good preclinically. Even their clinical data can be hard to interpret prior to a large scale trial, which led to them almost being shelved.
The catch here is that only two targets (PD(L)-1 and CTLA-4) turned out to work well in humans. All of the other immunotherapies that looked mediocre preclinically turned out to also be mediocre or entirely ineffective in humans.
This is an oft-refuted trope that does harm to patients. Numerous randomized phase 3 studies show meaningful survival advantages for modern treatments.
This isn’t really an issue in biotech since companies don’t have any revenue until late in their lives. Ie if I’m doing discovery work for a drug candidate today, it won’t generate revenue for 7+ years. So when if I have to amortize those costs over 5 years, that process will be complete by the time the project generates revenue.
I can’t speak to the pharma side as much, but since the 174 issue is most painful for companies with liquidity issues, I doubt it has a huge impact on them.
That’s the freedom-to-operate side. But “Patent hell” could also be the lack of clear IP that would allow a commercializer to capture a return on developing this. Not much incentive to spend tens of millions on trials if at the of the process the product can be sold by anyone.