But prices are going up. Look at the statements your insurance company provides about the reimbursed "cost" of covered generics:
Some experts report that PBMs overcharge for generics; The Wall Street Journal estimated that Cigna and CVS Health, both of which own PBM services, are able to charge prices for specialty generic drugs that are 24 times higher than what manufacturers charge.
The US did this to a slate of Hong Kong administrators in 2020 for implementing China's repressive national security law. It didn't seem to act as a deterrent, as the US did it again to a different group of officials earlier this year.
Regarding the darkness trend, a great HN comment from a few years ago by @atoav who worked as a director of photography:
Movies have dark scenes nowadays mainly because it is a trend. On top of that dark scenes can have practical advantages (set building, VFX, lighting, etc. can be reduced or become much simpler to do which directly translates into money saved during shooting).
If I had to guess, the trend of dark scenes are a direct result of the fact that in the past two decades we our digital sensors got good enough to actually shoot in such low-light environments.
The article suggests Larry thinks his son has demonstrated brilliance as a media executive:
Their relationship grew warmer as David Ellison achieved professional success, they said. Larry Ellison has always considered himself wise about Hollywood, and one of his best friends, Steve Jobs, mentored the son about the business as well.
Larry Ellison was initially skeptical of Skydance, the Hollywood company that his son started and that bought Paramount. But he has told friends in recent years that he considers his son to be one of the smartest people in the business world, trusts his judgment and tends to agree with him on corporate matters, several people with knowledge of the Ellisons said.
Is Skydance/Paramount under Ellison ahead of other Hollywood firms in terms of successful development of profitable film/streaming properties? A quick look at the list of successes shows IP that was initially developed outside of Skydance ... Mission Impossible, Terminator, Star Trek, etc.
The article mentions he was convicted of falsifying records. Kind of surprised Japan lets foreigners with criminal records stay in the country.
And:
At shells.com, his personal cloud computing platform, he’s quietly developing an unreleased AI agent system that hands artificial intelligence full control over a virtual machine: installing software, managing emails, and even handling purchases with a planned credit card integration. “What I’m doing with shells is giving AI a whole computer and free rein on the computer”, a brilliant idea, really. AI agents on steroids.
Like managing other people's crypto, it seems like an idea that could actually blow up your face.
Deporting criminals is in no way a new concept. In fact, it used to be commonplace to deport your own citizens, not just foreigners. The modern nation of Australia exists as a result of such a policy! Japan will certainly deport you for drug-related offenses or violent crimes, but like most places, white collar crime is not treated as "real crime", even though the impacts are usually more severe than a simple shoplifting or robbery.
Incidentally, if Germany had deported a foreigner who led an attempted coup d'etat, perhaps it would have saved tens of millions of lives. The things people get away with a slap on the wrist for...
Whoops. Yeah, worded the original post badly. My intent was that it is relatively new that this is a policy under active (and heated) discussion.
> In fact, it used to be commonplace to deport your own citizens, not just foreigners. The modern nation of Australia exists as a result of such a policy!
Which just proves my last point... it's in almost all scenarios really really bad for the destination country. The Australian Indigenous people have been driven to the point of extinction by that policy.
> Incidentally, if Germany had deported a foreigner who led an attempted coup d'etat, perhaps it would have saved tens of millions of lives.
German here. I don't think it would have changed much. Sure, Hitler was undoubtedly charismatic... but even the most charismatic demagogue needs a desperate populace. If it weren't Hitler, someone else would have risen - a lot of powerful interests were aiming for the final collapse of the Weimar Republic, which is part of the reason why Hitler got off with a slap on the wrist, and part of the reason why he did get elected legitimately a decade later.
> Many countries have no issue with that, serving time is considered enough of a punishment. The idea of (especially mandatory) deporting of criminals is relatively new
Paul McCartney would like to have a word with you.
Not just Japan. For decades, SE Asian countries such as Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia have deported foreign convicts upon release and applied re-entry bans. It's not a new thing driven by right-wing politicians.
I got a call from the country service manager. Telling me I caused quite a ruckus. They offered to sell me the part for something like 75 Euro's or something I believe. Which was still an outrageous amount of money for a HEPA filter. But I agreed since this was probably as good as it was going to get. Now it is true that there are laws regarding reasonable pricing of replacement and spareparts in the Netherlands I might have been able to base a lawsuit on. But I didn't really feel like going to court over 250 Euro (or really 75 Euro with the new offer) with a multi billion dollar company...
The issue was that their line of thought was; Well according to Dutch standards a vacuum cleaner has a life expectancy of 5 years. So if you want to replace something in it after 5 years (even if it is a customer replaceable part like a HEPA filter), it's not a replacement part / consumable, it's a spare part (which are usually more expansive). Which is also why I asked them; "Does that mean it is the official stance that you shouldn't expect your vacuum cleaners to last much longer then 5 years? Because that HEPA filter certainly needs replacement after 5 years.". Obviously they never answered that.
BTW We are talking about a premium house hold appliance brand here. The vacuum cleaner now costs well over 500 Euro. But when I bought it, it was about 240 Euro's or something. Sells for 700 dollars at Walmart it seems.
> I helped my dad transport the 35" which, from memory, was 150 or 180lbs. It was likely the largest CRT commercially available
I helped friends move one of these old monsters out of an apartment in MIT's west campus 15 years ago. Don't remember the brand but it seemed even bigger than 35". It was shockingly huge and heavy and they lived on the top floor.
As we were doing this, I was thinking, how come the original owner didn't get a projection TV? They have been available since the 80s, the separate components were easier to manage, and the screens were far bigger.
In addition to the reasons mentioned in the other reply, maybe you actually didn't want anything much bigger. People replacing (say) a 27" CRT might upgrade to the latest fancy 32". They wouldn't have seen the purpose of a 60" projector behemoth. Depth could have been an issue as well. CRTs are deep, but depending on the projector style, it might have been worse.
Projectors (front/rear/enclosed/whatever) could produce a huge image, but they had their own issues.
In a bright room, the contrast was typically lacking.
Even on relatively late versions like the Toshiba 57HX93 (a 57" 16x9 doghouse from ~20 years ago with an integrated scaler and a 1080i input), which I personally spent some time with both in Toshiba form and as $10k Runco-branded units. Things got washed out in a bright room compared to a direct-view CRT.
And viewing angle is an issue, too: Whether front- or rear-projection, one of the tricks to improve brightness (and therefore potential contrast) is to reduce the angle of light transmission from the screen. Depending on the room layout, this can mean that people in seats off to the side might get a substantially darker image than those near the middle. (This applies to all projectors; film, CRT, DLP, LCD, front, rear, whatever -- there can be a lot of non-obvious tech that goes into a projection screen.)
And CRT projectors were fickle. Their color convergence would change based on external magnetic fields (including that produced by the Earth itself), so they needed to be set up properly in-situ. A projection set that was set up properly while facing East would be a different thing when rotated 90 degrees to instead face North: What once was carefully-adjusted to produce 3 overlapping images that summed to be pure white lines would be a weird mix of red, blue, and green lines that only sometimes overlapped.
The CRT tubes themselves were generally quite impressively small for the size of the image that they'd ultimately produce. This meant pushing the phosphor coatings quite hard, which translated into an increased opportunity for permanent image retention ("screen burn") from things like CNN logos and video game scores.
Plus: They'd tend to get blurry over time. Because they were being pushed hard, the CRTs were liquid-cooled using glycol that was supposed to be optically-clear. But stuff would sometimes grow in there. It was never clear whether this was flora or [micro]fauna or something else, but whatever it was liked living in a world filled with hot, brightly-lit glycol. Service shops could correct this by changing the fluid, but that's an expense and inconvenience that direct-view CRTs didn't have.
And they were ungainly things in other ways. Sure, they tended to be lighter (less-massive) because they were full of air instead of leaded glass, but a rear-projection set was generally a big floor-standing thing that still had plenty of gravity. Meanwhile, a front-projection rig ~doubled the chance of someone walking by occluding the view and came with the burden of a hard-to-clean screen (less important these days, but it used to be common for folks to smoke indoors) and its own additional alignment variables (and lens selection, and dust issues, and, and).
So a person could deal with all that, or -- you know -- just get a regular direct-view CRT.
Even today where projectors use friggin' laser beams for illumination and produce enormous, bright images with far fewer issues than I listed above, direct-view tech (like the flat LCD and *LED sets at any big-box) is still much more popular.
(But I do feel your pain. When I was a teenager, my parents came home from shopping one wintry night with a 36" Sony WEGA for me to help unload. Holy hell.)
> Things got washed out in a bright room compared to a direct-view CRT.
You're right about that. A friend's dad was a gearhead and had one of those. It always seemed dim, practically unwatchable during the day and even at night it was flat which made darker films hard to watch.
But it was a mid-80s model and I figured 10 or 20 years later the tech had improved.
I also had a friend whose dad had a big, for the time, rear-projection set in the 80s.
It was in the room with the furniture that we weren't allowed to sit on, and we weren't allowed to think about using that TV. (I mentioned once when we were unsupervised that maybe we could turn it on and watch something, and the color drained out of his face like doing anything like that would surely result in a very painful death. After he calmed down, we went outside and played with bugs or something instead.)
As far as I could tell, the old man (who was much younger than I am at this point) only ever switched it on for watching football on Sunday afternoons. But once or twice I'd wander by and -- with permission, and being careful to touch nothing -- try to watch part of the game.
It was a miserable thing to view. Big, blurry, dim, and just broadly indistinct. I didn't see the attraction compared to the perfectly-good 20" Zenith we had at home at that time that seemed so much more vibrant and useful. But the speakers sure sounded better on the projection set, so I guess there's that.
The tech did improve. The brightness did get a lot better, and so did processing (including using tricks like Velocity Scan Modulation that sought to improve brightness, at the expensive of making geometry an deliberately-dynamic thing instead of an ideally-fixed thing), and the colors improved. Things like line doublers and scalers and higher-resolution electronics to drive the tubes did improve some aspects of the blur that was apparent, even with regular NTSC sources. But those same improvements were also made in direct-view CRTs; after all, they were both the same tech.
So CRT rear-projection was as good as a person could get for a bigger-than-direct-view for a long time, but the fidelity was very seldom particularly awesome on an absolute scale -- at any pricepoint.
Competing rear-projection systems like DLP and LCD began to dwarf it in the market not long after the turn of the century. Despite their hunger for expensive light bulbs (and single-chip DLP's own inherent temporal problems), these new players were often cheaper to produce and sell, came in smaller packages (they could often rest on furniture instead needing their own floor-space), had fewer setup issues, and fared pretty well in brightness and geometry.
CRT rear-projectors then got pushed completely aside as soon as things like plasma displays became cheap-enough, and big LCDs became good-enough -- somewhere between 2006 and 2009, on my timeline.
(CRT did last a bit longer in front-projection form, for people with very serious home theaters [think positively-enormous screen, tiered seating, dedicated space, and some blank checks], but LCD caught up there soon-enough as well.)
Worse still, the war also revealed an alarming side of his own character – a ‘viciousness’ and ‘cruelty’ of which he had, until then, been only dimly aware. He realised that, beneath the veneer of middle-class civility, he had the same instincts as the Nazis. And it wouldn’t take much for them to break the surface, either.
I once heard a talk by someone involved in microfinance/impact investing in poor countries. Through her work she met many people at all levels of government in the places she worked.
One thing that stuck with me was her comment that while everyone is capable of greatness and kindness, they also have the capability of becoming a "monster."
She cited the experience of one of her Rwandan contacts, who later became the Minister of Justice and was one of the senior government officials responsible for driving the genocide of hundreds of thousands of members of the Tutsi minority in the mid-1990s.
Some experts report that PBMs overcharge for generics; The Wall Street Journal estimated that Cigna and CVS Health, both of which own PBM services, are able to charge prices for specialty generic drugs that are 24 times higher than what manufacturers charge.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/5-things-to-know-ab...
reply