can someone explain what this means for the general economy? my understanding is that the spread widening is compared against the US treasury bill, and these junk bonds' prices are going down.
as the junk bond prices decreases and the demand for yield increases, this increases the cost of borrowing and can potentially create a ripple effect of defaults.
It's difficult to say with any certainty what it means for the general economy, but your understanding of what this is saying about the junk bonds themselves is basically correct.
Whether it leads to a lot of defaults depends on a lot of factors. A sell-off in bonds can really screw a company if it happens to have immediate financing needs at the time, but otherwise it doesn't really impact the company directly. Junk bonds are, as the name suggests, known to be risky assets, so they are generally the first to be sold when things get a bit choppy and investors decide to sit the market out for a bit to see how events unfold.
This seems like it is pretty clearly a response to the recent tariff escalation so, as with all the other tariff announcements, it will depend on whether the recent announcement is a change in policy or another negotiating tactic.
You also see a lot of headlines like "worst losses in six months!" "biggest sell-off since September!" but these are fairly short timeframes and a lot of this is just trying to make some news out of the usual market noise.
This doesn't mean a lot. People made bets on lower rates which drove money into junk. Those prices renormalized to levels seen over the past year.
In fact, lots of business had the opportunity to roll their debt over the past year, so bankruptcy in the medium term seems unlikely.
The broader question is why now and so quickly. In my view, people got way over their skis in rate-based trades which drove a lot of things higher including tech multiples. This likely why we also have the NASDAQ down 3.5% in a single session.
My slightly informed cynical opinion is that if a consensus existed for what this meant for the general economy, plenty of experts would be telling you. So, we don't know.
Feedback effects ("ripple effect" in your usage) are a genuine risk of economic systems, but by their nature they aren't predictable. You get the non-linear feedback we're all terrified of (a "crash") when some buffer or another runs dry: some notable demographic needs money, normally gets it from place X (for example: selling stock, repackaging and selling mortgage securities, raising a series B round, issuing corporate bonds, etc...) and suddenly X doesn't produce the same returns. So they need to do another one of those things, which drives that price down, which causes the demographics that depend on that resource to run dry, etc...
This is a metric for just one buffer: the amount of cash available to issuers of high interest bonds. Is that the tipping point? We don't know, and won't until it tips.
I used to be pretty into junk bonds during my MBA (I don't do this at all professionally, so YMMV with my commentary here), and I think, as usual, a lot of context would help with understanding what this could mean, which ajross described. In the most simple terms, as other have also mentioned, it's basically non-investment grade companies (and there are a lot of em - you'd be surprised at the names on the list) now have to pay more for money. This could mean that investors are worried and want more compensation for risk, which means that the reality of the economy is shakier. OTOH, it could mean that investors are being more realistic, and not letting risky companies just have cheaper money to make value destructive decisions could be a good sign of sanity in the markets, and thus (in theory) the economy. It's hard to know with a simple headline or article. Even if you dig into all the numbers and do all the reading, it's still hard to know since the world is really complex.
I look at this as a single data point amongst many re: how I end up assessing my feelings about the economy. Truth be told, I'm probably more concerned about what lots of news outlets are discussing - all the AI capex spend. Apparently there's more financing being negotiated with fewer restrictions on the debt, which tends to be a really bad sign of a bubble.
All that said, my slightly informed mildly-hysterical opinion is that aggregate downside risk is absolutely out of control in the markets right now. Valuations of basically everything are at all time highs relative to production. Volatilities are high. And non-economic risks are off the charts.
Basically, everyone is placing too many bets. AI stocks are bets, sure. VCs have too much money in play. Datacenter spending is a giant bet.
But the Trump administration is also placing bets on world trade markets, expecting to win the trade wars it keeps provoking. Likewise it's betting on US labor stability with mass deportations, and now para-sorta-maybe-martial-law decrees. I mean, let's be honest: the risk of a general strike in the USA is probably higher now than at any point in the last century.
Oh, and Russia seems about to hit a tipping point in its refining capacity, which says dark things about Europe too if that goes awry.
Basically most of these look "not really that scary" from a fundamentals perspective. But what are the chances we make it through the next 9-12 months with none of them having gone sour? And any of them could be the trigger for a real market crash!
I'm moving almost everything out of volatiles, personally. The loss of the next 10-20% of upside seems like a good bet vs. what-maybe-50%-or-more downside.
To late to edit it in, but you'll note in my doomeration of downside risks I completely forgot that the government is shutdown! Things are messed up enough that I can't even remember why they're messed up!
US Junk Bonds can be used as an early economic indicator. Potentially indicating downturns in GDP and increases in unemployment up to one year earlier than other indicators.
When Junk Bond yields are low, it suggests investor confidence is high (and a low risk of corporates defaulting). The article notes that yields are rising, this is understood to be a signal of economic uncertainty (i.e. greater chance of defaults/increased risk of investing.)
There are considerations to be made regarding about what caused the changes - in this case the presidents declaration of additional tariffs on China. Since this is an arbitrary decision, and not say the result of an economic trend, the certainty around the correlation is lower. Nevertheless the randomness of the actions are themselves a source of uncertainty, which too scares away investment.
Bond spreads widening reflect lenders' fear that borrowers will default. So what this means is that on average people think that the lowest class of borrowers (junk) are going to struggle to repay. That means it is more expensive for them to borrow, which is going to generally discourage those companies from investing in projects or starting new things which require debt finance. So you would expect the knock-on effect to be less activity in general.
The weaker companies experience the impacts of financial stress more quickly, and investors start to flee to safety.
Running an economy based on the whims of a decrepit old man and the weirdos he surrounds himself with introduces a lot of risk. It doesn’t mean that the end is nigh, but large money flows are going towards lower risk.
Barely surviving companies might die. And stop employing people, buying and selling... Thus they can then have at least short term effects on both up and downstream...
So in worst case enough triggers might result in larger collapse. Basically big enough issue anywhere not just in AI might bring rest down with it.
It's from news sources. They will bring him down when the time is right. He is clearly a foreign agent. It is surprising that nothing happened to him even though he is an obvious foreign agent.
Most supplements are garbage. Since they don't actually work, most people would never know if you replaced their magnesium or calcium supplement with chalk. Some supplements do work, but since they're not regulated, they're drowned out by nonsense and noise. OK, so you don't want to be a rube?...you do your research and then piece of shit fitness influencers tell you "ohh...that vitamin you bought form Walgreens or Costco didn't work?...of course not, you need to buy mine...it's CHELATED!!!!! thus is more BIOAVAILBLE...or some other random scientific work which is either incorrectly used or outright fraudulent.
Half of my family spends a huge fortune on supplements, most of which are placebos. If you're young, you may not understand, but for us over 40, life starts to suck, physically. When you're young, your body is very fault-tolerant...have 6 beers and a cheeseburger for supper every day for a week?...nothing a few tums can't fix. Now that I'm over 40, I do everything right (daily exercise, eat healthy, get sleep, etc) and still feel like shit most of the day....same with most my age...thus we're desperate for anything that will make us feel better and not have any side effects that make things worse.
Supplements are the dream and an age-old scam. Maybe punishing big retailers who tolerate fraud will not only reduce false claims, but make the public more aware that so called health experts online are ignorant, scammers, or both.
>Now that I'm over 40, I do everything right (daily exercise, eat healthy, get sleep, etc) and still feel like shit most of the day....same with most my age...
I’m nearing 40. Are you sure it’s normal to feel terrible most of the day when eating right, exercising, and getting enough sleep? This doesn’t sound normal to me.
It's not normal. None of my over 40 friends have the same experience. And in general, I doubt that turning 40 is a clear biological threshold regardless of one's lifestyle, diet, fitness level, etc.
I'm 45, walk, weight lift, eat well, sleep well, and feel better than I ever have. My dad says he didn't start to "feel" his age until 80: it may just be genetics?
Can I overdo things and feel like shit? Yeah but mostly I feel great.
My knees are kind messed up but that is from running 500 miles every summer during middle school and high school.
So no, being in your 40s shouldn’t mean feeling like shit.
As to the topic at hand, I use two supplements in addition to prescription blood pressure medications. I take my blood pressure 3 times daily. I can see in the cold hard numbers if I forget to take them.
GP might have an illness/disease and fully aware of their condition, none of us know. No need to lose the main point by flexing our superior health against them.
That point being: All of us deteriorate. We all reach an age/state where conventional medicine has reached its limit and snake oil begins to be look attractive. Not all of it is proven wrong, none of it is proven right.
I think OP was being a little hyperbolic, but I know what they mean. Little things add up. Certain minor issues become chronic. Waking up with minor aches and pains is somewhat frequent. Sleep issues are common.
It falls short of feeling like shit, but there is a kind of death by many cuts that changes the baseline for feeling normal in the wrong direction.
Yeah, there's something else going on. If you don't have permanent damage from some injury or disease, you shouldn't feel like 60+ if you barely hit 40. Maybe it's related to low testosterone, but even for that 40 is early.
One of the things that really bother me being over 40 is that my body is no longer immune to injuries. I can now throw out my back just my sneezing too enthusiastically.
> Chalk is typically almost pure calcite, CaCO3, with just 2% to 4% of other minerals
The supplement I just looked up uses Calcium Carbonate. That could just be purified chalk and be in compliance with the FDA. In fact, it probably is just that.
> Most supplements are garbage. Since they don't actually work, most people would never know if you replaced their magnesium or calcium supplement with chalk.
Whether or not that's true, if you replaced someone's magnesium supplement with viagra, you could seriously hurt them.
>> FDA confirmed through laboratory analyses that the [...] products, purchased on www.amazon.com, contained [...] the active ingredients in the FDA-approved prescription drugs Viagra and Cialis, respectively, used to treat erectile dysfunction (ED). These undeclared ingredients may interact with nitrates found in some prescription drugs, such as nitroglycerin, and may lower blood pressure to dangerous levels.
holy crap, that’s insane. You don’t just accidentally add sildenafil or tadalafil to your supplements. Unless the FDA is misidentifying compounds present in the herbs in these supplements, which seems unlikely but I’m no pharmacology expert.
Yeah, I don't think "accidentally" is something that happened here. What's the best way to make your "all-natural Viagra" actually work? Make it with real Viagra.
I’d be surprised if the buyers were expecting any different.
With the amount of mislabelled product out there in circulation (and presumably a general lack of harm), does it still make sense to require a prescription?
I'm personally pretty torn on that. On the one hand I agree with you, especially from a harm-reduction perspective (e.g. people who are on blood pressure medication ordering "natural" Viagra because Viagra's contra-indicated with the medication they're on, not realizing that they're getting something that could cause a very bad situation). On the other hand, requiring a prescription does mean that a physician can ask that question ("are you on blood pressure medication?") and counsel the patient to look at different options instead.
I mean, even though 50% of these are intentional overdoses... the other 50% probably didn't know they were doing something that was going to destroy their liver: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK441917/
It’s pretty much just an interaction with “nitrates” which are typically taken by people with pretty serious cardiac issues, and usually educated re: the side effects if taken with viagra or similar compounds (cuz you never know if someone has Viagra in their drawer from another pharmacy or years ago or “natural” Viagra from another source).
The interaction with other blood pressure meds appears additive rather than synergistic and Viagra alone only minimally reduced blood pressure. The cough and cold aisle or a cafe presents more dangers.
Adding restricted ingredients to generally available supplements is a known tactic that supplement producers utilize extensively. In the past, this has been a well-known "secret" that bodybuilders basically relied on: buying tainted pre- and post-workout supplements that contain illegal steroids and such.
It's a better regulated industry now, but with the explosion in supplement popularity over the last decade I doubt there is an easy way to test and punish all manufacturers. If you look at the list of supplements included in that warning letter, they have classic nonsensical names that Chinese companies are known for (WeFun, Genergy, etc). None are on www.amazon.com anymore, but hundreds of other supplements show up with absolutely no way of telling whether any of them are clean (e.g. "Endurance 2Nite").
Although they are most associated with ED, those supplements are also performance enhancers. For decades, unscrupulous supplement companies have put illicit or prescription drugs in their products. Many of those drugs (not the supplements) do, in fact, work. The rumor was the gameplan was to start with that until you get enough market hype and then remove them, but I've also heard some of the illicit drugs are cheap enough that they could still continue tainting them and make a profit. So even if they work, people deserve to know what they're putting in their bodies.
same with most my age...thus we're desperate for anything that will make us feel better and not have any side effects that make things worse.
The issue is that a chronic mistreatment of your body (similar to what you describe). The solution is a chronic loving of your body. Best time to start was 20 years ago. Second best time is today. I wish you luck and I can tell you: it doesn't have to be the way you describe, but it WILL take patience and a life-long commitment.
It's funny you mention chelation. The most common method (cheapest) of chelating some metal is with EDTA, which is such a strong bond that it makes it completely bio-unavailable. In fact, if your body was somehow able to break the bond and absorb the metal ion, EDTA would happily go along and find some other metal in your body to bind to. You literally take EDTA for lead poisoning, but it'll happily take calcium, copper and iron out of your body while doing it, it doesn't give a damn.
> most people would never know if you replaced their magnesium or calcium supplement with chalk.
Minerals and vitamins come from USP, which is tested and regulated and everyone in the industry gets the same quality (regardless of what they claim). It is what they say it is, if it’s USP.
Where is gets sketchy quickly is all the other stuff, like plant extracts etc
USP is an old compendium, it is not an organization! it means United States Pharmacopeia, there is an organization that manages the trademark but they do not produce pharmaceutical, nor do they enforce quality, the enforcement is delegated to the FDA.
Have you considered that your expectations of supplements not working have caused a reverse placebo effect?
I don’t take many supplements but they all work for their intended purpose.
creatine for muscle recovery and making me a tiny bit stronger
ZMA (zinc, magnesium, b6). for deeper sleep and overcoming multiday hangovers
melatonin for vivid dreams and waking up feeling more refreshed.
b12/d3 for energy
i don’t take them all every day, but they have consistently noticeable effects and have improved my quality of life.
i also just use the store brands from major retailers, and have low expectations.
More importantly when I was in my late thirties I also thought feeling shitty was just part of getting older, but it turned out I had cancer. talk to a doctor.
> My family spends a huge fortune on supplements, most of which are placebos
Unless you are just using “most” as a weasel word to hedge the chance that you might be wrong, using “most” would imply that you are aware of some supplements that aren’t frauds. Can you share them?
I cured my asthma with magnesium and iodine ssupplements. While I agree with you that there are false claims out there, I have data to show stuff worked for me. YMMV of course.
Chelated supplements are, generally, more bioavailable than their oxidized counterparts because they are bound to nutrients for which you have transporters. Like amino acids, for instance.
Supplements are absolutely regulated. To say otherwise is just ignorant of the law. Those regulations are not well enforced. That is the fault of the US justice department and Congress. The FDA is under-equipped in the way of funding to enforce regulations. And they're dependent on the justice department to actually follow through on enforcement. The justice department is only really interested in enforcement action where harm has occurred.
Amazon can do better, but why are we exclusively placing the onus on them to enforce federal law? Why is the FDA not going after the brands making and selling this shit?
personal experience..in one of the school systems i went to (grade K-12), i had to pay $2.50 for lunch because my parents had a certain income. $2.5 was still a lot to me, so i rather not eat and felt really bad for using my parent's income. i think about it from ($2.5 * 5 days a week) for a whole school year.
most of my friends didn't have to pay as their parents didn't meet the income threshold. they just have to show a certain ID for school lunch and get a pass.
i remember, i did have some sort of resentment...and the smell of food that my friends ate during lunch even made me more hungry!
Does anyone have insights/thoughts as to the implications of this variant growing as fast as it subsides? Does that mean a new variant will emerge which will be more/less infectious or more/less deadly?
I don't know if it's possible to assess the infectiousness and deadliness in isolation from the collective social immunity.
Each wave is less deadly because:
a) we're getting better at treating it
b) the most vulnerable populations have been killed off in previous waves.
c) through vaccination and prior infections our individual immune systems are primed to deal with it.
Virus just wants to replicate and spread as much as possible. Sometimes the side effect of this is death etc.
If this one spreads super fast, has generally more mild effects... it will ramp up faster, infect all, and may get more severe so that it can last longer in the host and spread more.
But the combo of high infectiousness and more mild side effects might be a net negative for this one. If we get a good amount of herd immunity, it may be a few weeks of heavy spread and then very little.
Viruses don't "want", anthropomorphizing COVID like media headlines do is a bit of a "language virus" in and of itself that makes global understanding of what's going on more difficult. AFAIK the virus mutates randomly, and we just see more of the more infectious and less deathly (in the short and mid-term) variants because those are the ones that spread faster and successfully among humans, but attributing even collective behavior to COVID, like to an ant colony, is too liberal of a use of our imagination.
Classic HN response spending an entire paragraph to disect how I used the word "want" even though it's obvious that I meant "to achieve their goal of maximizing proliferation".
Hmm, good question. I guess I can go full pedantic on this because it's HN but probably on any other social setting this exposition would drain everyones vital life and just fuel my autistic dissociation until I have no idea where I am anymore.
Giving "natural selection" as a force the capacity to "want" is probably less controversial that saying that a virus "wants". For example if you are a religious evolutionary biologist you can think that natural selection is an entity that makes some kind of conscious decisions that may appear random to us only because we don't understand them. I don't think that believing that will hamper your ability to actually understand natural selection as much as any other scientist, specially if you go by the Roman Catholic tenet of unquestionable faith in unsolvable misteries.
If you go by the more neutral terms used in evolutionary science I think natural selection is more of a process than a system or force and then it "wanting" things is also anthropomorphism.
My personal line for when anthropomorphism is tolerable and when it's not is when as an analogy it can make you come to dangerous conclusions. For example "oh COVID wants to mutate, we should just let it mutate because when you give something what it wants it will usually leave you alone" or stuff like that.
Nope but we can attribute properties to a group of brain cells that we can call a "human" the property of "wanting" without implanting incorrect analogies that, so far and according to our understanding of consciousness, don't impair the collective spread of the best knowledge we have about how "human" works. If you really literally think COVID wants something you are probably delusional or your understanding of what's a virus is like below high-school level.
super fast spread even with milder effects will still meant overwhelming healthcare capacity
let's not even go near the notion that more infection means brewing more variants
we've never entertained herd immunity for polio, why covid..
It only means overwhelmed healthcare if the hospitalisation/requirement for healthcare rate is high enough.
If this variant is 5x more infectious, but 5x less likely to result in hospitalisation, the net effect on healthcare resources should remain level, no?
No, there is no formula quite that simple while we're still in the transient, exponential growth stage for omicron. 5x transmissibility can lead to single-day infections much greater than past peaks. If omicron does cause a disaster in the US and other western countries, it will probably be due to a short (2-3 week) window of insanely high daily case rates, leading to very high daily hospitalization/ICU requirements. If the US hits let's say 1M confirmed cases/day for example (3x the peak last winter), with a daily demand for beds (non-icu) of ~25k, things would get very bad in urban centers. The combo of exponential growth and localized hospital resource constraints means that what would seem at face value to be an even tradeoff of transmissibility for lethality is not so simple.
Omicron might be a blessing in disguise, but there is a very bad plausible outcome for the coming month.
Not if you factor time into that math. 5x more infectious on the first cycle means just 5 times the infections, and equal hospitalizations, but the next cycle all of those 5x the number of people spread it again to 5x the number of people. So even though it's 5x milder, you've still got 5x the people showing up in the hospital. It gets worse and worse the more cycles you go. 25x in hospital, 125x in hospital, etc. You run into mitigating factors in real life, as the entire population is consumed, but that's a super steep slope comparative to the baseline.
Not necessarily. The load that the healthcare systems must carry depends not just on the absolute number of cases, but also on how long the average stay in hospital is. Think of it as IT notorious "man-days", in this case "patient-days".
If the infection is milder across the board, hospital stays will be shorter on average. People will improve faster and will be discharged sooner.
500 people who on average need 3 days of hospitalization are less of a load than 200 people who on average need 10 days of hospitalization - unless those 500 arrive at the same time, of course.
More than five million probable died from Covid, the vast majority since summer 2020. The pandemic isn’t over because someone decided it was. This person’s comment is asinine.
> The pandemic isn’t over because someone decided it was.
Doesn't matter. The virus has nothing to do with how humans react to it. The virus didn't tell us to shut everything up and hunker down for 2 years. We could decide to move on tomorrow if we chose. Many places moved on almost a year ago with very little repercussions.
It's fascinating to me that a multiple of 2-9x the median flu in YLL (after mitigations) in only a few countries "clearly justifies" the quite disruptive mitigations. I look at the same measures (and I'm implicitly estimating that the non-vaccine mitigations were around 50% effective) and conclude that the mitigations [excluding vaccines] were, in retrospect, probably not justified for as long and as impactful as they were on daily routines.
They were (IMO) justified early on when vaccines were not available and when we knew a lot less about the effective treatment regimens.
Imagine a reliable oracle tells you: "The flu season in 2025 will be 10x as bad as the typical flu season." Is that cause to shut down restaurants, bars, close offices, schools, and universities, shutdown borders, etc, etc. for 12 months to make it only 5x as bad? For me, that's cause to make sure I get the flu vaccine that year, wash my hands a little more, not go to work if I'm ill, and pet my dog.
Some jackass tried unsuccessfully to light his shoes on fire and 20 years later we're still taking our shoes off at the airport. I hope we have a more threat-appropriate response over the long-run here.
> I personally think that YLL of 2-9x the flu after mitigations clearly justified the mitigations
To properly debate this claim we need to know (1) the baseline -- how many YLLs are caused by flu?, and (2) how many YLLs were _saved_ by the mitigations. (Would we have had 2x more Covid deaths without them? 10x? 1.1x?)
They disclose a bias: "Those dying from COVID-19 may be an at-risk population whose remaining life expectancy is shorter than the average person’s remaining life expectancy"
Could someone please expand on the current outrage?
Article did say "The 11-member committee voted nearly unanimously in November that Biogen's drug should not be approved, citing inconclusive evidence that the drug was effective.", but was wondering why the some would think otherwise for the approval.
In short, the medication does appear to reduce the beta-amyloid plaque buildup in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's. However, in the phase 3 study that plaque reduction did not appear to result in any clinical improvement in patients. The Phase 3 trial was "stopped for futility."
That's why the advisory panel could recommend rejection -- the drug did not appear to help patients. But equivalently, it did do the thing it set out to do, so that justified (ish?) the final approval.
It's worrisome because this sort of thinking - "We don't have proof that it treats the actual disease, but it does seem to treat with this thing that we think might be (but have yet to prove actually is) a cause of the disease, so let's forge ahead anyway." - has led to so many instructive case studies in purported cures that ended up being worse than the disease. It's a complete abdication of what should be basic scientific and medical principles to decide that an un- or ill-evaluated hypothesis is good and run with it, on no firmer ground than the fact that you happen to be quite fond of this particular hypothesis.
I don’t see what’s wrong with the FDA approving a drug only for specific niche proximate-cause X that currently has absolutely no reason to ever be prescribed, presuming it’s disallowed from being marketed as being “for” anything other than specific niche proximate-cause X. Maybe someday a problem will come along that can be solved by treating for specific niche proximate-cause X — and hey, then you’ve already got an approved drug to treat that problem. (For example, maybe in this case the drug could also happen to treat some novel prion disease, where the mechanism of that prion disease involves beta-amyloid buildup, such that this drug would actually stop that disease’s progression. Sort of the same way corticosterioids were already approved for other uses, but then happened to be able to be used in managing COVID, because the same mechanism they target — systemic inflammation — was being triggered by the disease.)
Of course, if the marketability restrictions truly worked the way I’m talking about, then the drug would have zero sales until that real-world problem matching its niche use-case came along. Which means there’d be no point in manufacturing it until then. But it’d be nice that it’d be “on the books” as being allowed to be produced and sold, such that it could be later rushed to market if the problem it solves was ever realized as a necessary problem to solve.
As someone else commented above - there is precendent to this, this is exactly how the HIV epidemic was approached. I was as upset about this decision as everyone else on this thread, then I read this[0] and now maybe not so much.
This has historically been a challenge regarding understanding the mechanisms of Alzheimer's in the first place, let alone treating the disease.
We know the plaques and the memory dysfunction are correlated. But we don't know whether the plaques are build up of waste product from the mechanism that is destroying memory function or the cause of the memory function loss. If it's merely a waste product, clearing it out of the brain may not only have no effect on the memory loss, it could even accelerate it (if the chemistry of the process is such that build up of plaques interferes with whatever process damages memory). Destroying the plaques may be like picking a scab off a wound.
Biomedicine is hard; none of the systems operate in isolation and everything is intertwined.
It seems that the committee is an panel of outside advisors for the FDA.
The advisors advised that Aduhelm should not be approved because it only helps with a likely contributor to Alzheimer's, and it doesn't actually help with Alzheimer's.
The FDA ignored the panel and approved the drug anyways.
I wonder about the financial incentives and the corruption in the FDA. Every drug maker wants to be the first with an approved Alzheimer's drug; there's a ton of money to be made there.
I highly recommend the piece by Derek Lowe down thread, but the tldr is basically that researchers have believed amyloid plaques cause the symptoms of Alzheimer's and so the theory is that if you eliminate them, you can treat the disease. This drug gets rid of them. But the gold standard is whether or not the drug actually helps people, not whether it meets a technical definition of "working".
This is the drug equivalent of an engineer following a requirements document and saying to a product manager, "Hey, you said the form has to be submitted through the website. You can see here when I hit submit, it submits! The website doesn't save the data anywhere because that wasn't in the requirements".
I have noticed this too during crunchtime projects. At some point you lose your ability to do other things besides working. For me this is a clear signal to take a vacation or work less. I don't really want to sacrifice my life to my corporate overlords.
A lot of my peers are in a certain age that should be dating. But it's been 1 year now, and there are paranoia and concerns about safety. It's really tiring. Missing out on 2 years of developing a healthy social relationship with other people -- it really is a lost of time in a prime age.
I can't honestly imagine how bad indirect negative impact of all related to covid will be, I would say at least on scale of direct deaths / long time sufferers (although those things are obviously not directly comparable). And yet despite all these costs, most of the world failed desperately and repeatedly in handling it and the show is far from over.
Meeting the other sex is a topic on its own - all normal venues often just disappeared, especially here in Europe. No bars, no restaurants, concerts, schools, group sports, and most importantly not that much work in the office, arguably the most common place for folks to meet their significant other.
I am just a remote observer of this, we were lucky to get married in summer 2019 - one year later the marriage would be with 6 guests max if it would happen at all. But still can't wrap my head around all this no matter which angle I try to look it form.
Me, my wife and my son been through covid in February, my parents back home are going through it now and I really do have respect from this unpredictable sickness. But as damage mounts in each one of us and there is always this fleeting political promise that in next 2 months it will be much better, I am getting tired of largely inefficient yet very restrictive constraints and starting to lean more towards 'fuck it, keep basic measures mandatory everywhere and lets go back to behavior as it was before covid'. It may be just a stupid kneejerk reaction, but over 1 year wears one out
The most tiring thing isn't missing out on life, it's seeing all the people who are vagrantly choosing to ignore safety precautions and continue on with THEIR life while others are distancing, staying at home, avoiding people, etc.
By far the worst part about this has been the feeling that I have wasted a year, while others chose not to. My mistake I guess, but for everyone who chose to ignore the rules, many spread the virus.
The other day my daughter asked why I listen to tsunami alerts and head uphill when the the waves arent much bigger that a normal wave by the time they get to us (inside island). I told her that I'm not going to be the dummy that gets killed by not heeding warnings.
I think the same applies here. You do you and dont worry about all the folks taking risks to go out. Statistically, some of them are responsible for someone's death from COVID or died from COVID. I would rather not be part of that statistic just because I felt like I missed out.
Certainly years of this are not sustainable. That’s why the approach taken by a few countries to eliminate local transmission are preferable (China, Vietnam, New Zealand, South Korea).
as the junk bond prices decreases and the demand for yield increases, this increases the cost of borrowing and can potentially create a ripple effect of defaults.
recent cracks where these these companies issued junk bonds include First Brands, Tricolor, and Saks: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-10-12/first-bra...