To be fair, even "just increased weight loss" would be huge, obesity is a factor in so many causes of preventable deaths bringing people closer to a healthy weight would help a lot.
I agree, but that was the whole premise of the drug's approval. So I was wondering if this was some additional benefit, like if two groups of people were losing the same amount of weight somehow the group drug saw an additional benefit.
I heard a wild, unsubstantiated take on a podcast the other day, that effectively went like this:
with all of these proven weight loss drugs, the government should be mandated to have them prescribed free of charge to the consumer (IE, either the government pays or insurance pays), because if you look at the cost of obesity related illnesses / complications vs the cost of the drugs, the drugs will cost less.
I have no idea if that ends up being true (it feels right but doesn't mean it is right, at least in current pricing mechanisms) but I agree with the sentiment. This is a class of drug that could dramatically alter society for the better and it should be covered akin to how vaccines are covered.
EDIT: I'm not one to respond to comments via an edit, but I feel like everyone missed what I said here: I agree with the sentiment, and I think drugs like this should be covered in the same class as vaccines (e.g. how its a net good for society to have it generally available to those in need). I didn't say we should carte blanche cover them in the manner that was suggested, merely, I understand the sentiment, and the government, much like it has with vaccinations, should do what it can to make them generally available to those who need them and lower the cost.
The US Semaglutide patent ends in 2 years, it is cheap and can already be bought in bulk. There is absolutely no reason for it to be expensive apart from the broken US medical system.
Hard to see the math working out. 70% of Americans are overweight. Wegovy costs are about $12,000 and the average household income is like $70k. We are talking about half the federal budget spending on wegovy
Sure, but we are talking about the US. If we are thinking outside the box, anything is possible. The US government could negotiate in bulk, licenses the IP, or even go in with the army and comandeer the factory and scientists.
I don't think it needs to go that far -- one of the effects of capitalism is indeed competition-induced reduction of prices. Pharma is a bit different, but with time prices should go down and availability should go up.
Also note that the battle of insurance coverage of the drug is raging -- many do not pay retail for the drug, and Wegovy improving heart conditions opens up another path to needing to be covered by insurers.
On the fringes, I read (can't remember where) that some other large pharmas in the US are working on their own formulations that trigger GLP1, and abroad India and China have taken an interest (there are quite a few Chinese research papers floating around on the effects).
By the same logic, one could argue that the government should ban fried foods, as the lost profits to the food industry would be outweighed by the medical benefits.
I'm pretty sure the most profitable course of action is just to let those who are obese suffer and die from the consequences. As ever, mixing human morbidity and mortality with a profit incentive gets macabre fast.
Something happened recently (or maybe not so recently. I am an old fart) with the cooling situation. Previously a beefy air cooler could give you good performance at a low noise level. Now they all sound like jet planes when they try to dissipate 200w of heat.
Heck, even my 420mm AIO was struggling with the newer processors before undervolting. With AMDs latest series I have started using eco mode. An undervolted 7900x at 88w ("105w TDP") is at 95% of stock performance and doesn't make a sound with a decent air cooler if you are comfortable with it staying at 85 degrees C when doing work.
The single thread performance is the same, and I managed to have a stable boost of 5.8ghz for single core workloads. It compiles code good enough for me, and the occasional Minecraft session is a breeze.
It's a wheelie bad situation (sorry, couldn't help myself) - got woken up at 0600 when the recycling bins lined up on my street started to topple over, scattering cans and bottles everywhere.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I suppose I need to add that I'm not talking (and don't care) about your position on Muskness, Xness, or anything else. I'm just responding to a pattern of unsubstantive/flamey/snarky comments in your account history. That's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
To be clear though — Musk acknowledged it was worth a fraction of what he paid for it many months before he paid for it. In his view, the company's value crashed in early 2022 and that more information came to light during the acquisition process which further changed his view of the company's value.
This is objectively true, since every other tech company's stock prices dropped dramatically. Twitter's stock price was pinned because Musk made a commitment.
> more information came to light during the acquisition process which further changed his view of the company's value
This is objectively false, he misread Twitter's quarterly statements and didn't understand what mDAU meant, he wasted months and millions of dollars dragging Twitter through court, only to be forced to follow through on his commitment or get a worse judgment from the court.
> This is objectively false, he misread Twitter's quarterly statements...
Whether it's objectively true or false is irrelevant. What I said was it changed his view of the company's value which resulted in him acknowledging that his estimation of Twitter's worth had dropped.
And while I don't disagree that Musk had a different interpretation of mDAU than Twitter did, I don't sign onto the assertion that how 2022 Twitter's view of the world is anything like objective. These numbers have been considered controversial and suspicious long before Musk's interest in Twitter.[0] Twitter had a history of dodgy numbers.[1] And there was substantial evidence that Twitter was turning a blind eye to bot traffic in their mDAU analyses.[2]
The reason the previous owners were eager to dump Twitter was because Elon offered far more than it was worth, despite it being a cash flow positive business.
He backed out because he was foolish enough to think that the legally binding offer was not in fact binding.
It's only more efficient in screwing over the customer, you are paying the same amount for less of the video you want to watch.
It's a shame really, my family had Sky TV about a decade ago and it always baffled me how you pay for the extra channels and then they still have ad breaks.
Avoid Euronet everywhere in Europe, just find a bank or credit union with an ATM, they will charge you no or very little fees usually, unfortunately Euronet have a lot of ATMs at airports and in tourist hotspots but their fees and conversion rates are very bad.
