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Conversation has been slow here. I feel like the standards have increased to the point where people are afraid to post (except of course for bad faith posters who don't care).
So, let me try a post that's more of a conversation starter and less of a PhD thesis.
According to Bernie Sanders, it costs about $5 to make a monthly dose of Ozempic, the blockbuster-weight loss drug. Americans pay about $1000/month. Canadians pay $155. Germans pay $59.
The stock of the company which makes the drug, Novo Nordisk, has doubled since the beginning of 2023. (I considered buying in 2022 but didn't because I thought I was already too late 💀) It now has a market cap of nearly $600 billion, making it the most valuable company in Europe.
I assume that if companies were forced to charge the same price in U.S. as they do in Europe, the global pharma industry would become insolvent.
So why is the United States paying for > 100% of global pharma research? And how can we fix the glitch?
Well 1) I'd rather have a slower forum with higher quality posts than a faster forum with lower quality posts, and 2) I don't think the standards are actually that high. I've never seen a top level post get modded for effort as long as it had ~2 paragraphs of original text that wasn't copy-pasted from the linked article. Maybe even one paragraph would be fine.
I think discussion has been slow simply because the news itself has been slow. The American culture war has entered its trench warfare phase, and it's not nearly as fresh and exciting as it was in the 2015-2019 period - the lines have been drawn, wokeism isn't going anywhere, much like the Ukrainian situation the territory that has been won is very unlikely to be ceded. It's hard to come up with a hot new take at this point. Instead we'll simply witness the long slow grind of things continuing on as they have for the past decade.
There was a lot of AI discussion around the time of the site transition, but AI news has also been rather slow for the past year, compared to the frenzy of activity that happened in late 2022 and early 2023.
I'm always happy to read high quality evergreen philosophical/theoretical essays, but these sorts of posts have understandably always been less popular and fewer in number than current events-y type stuff.
This has been my feeling as well.
We're literally facing down a repeat of the 2020 election, and so the battle lines are already very well defined, with maybe some defections one could note here and there.
Trump is a 'known' quantity. Virtually nothing he can say should shock anyone. The left still sees him as the fascist boogeyman. Anyone who could be convinced of that is already convinced.
There's an active tug-of-war over the trans issue, especially as it pertains to kids. Issues like same-sex marriage, gun control, and abortion have taken a backseat to this almost across the board.
Honestly it seems like most people who are active culture war participants know exactly what their goals are, have a decent idea of who their allies are, and are now just probing around for effective ways to advance their cause and break the 'stalemate' that has somewhat emerged.
Israel-Palestine is still a hot fight where it's not clear where things will fall, but against the backdrop of world events right now, seems like small potatoes?
All that said, expect another flurry of activity in the immediate leadup and aftermath of the election because no matter who wins the other side is being heavily primed to simply not accept it as legitimate.
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