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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The DEA says that “manufacturers only sold approximately 70 percent of their allotted quota”, but we don’t get our medications from “manufacturers”; we get our medication from pharmacies, who often only carry 1 generic version of each medication in addition to the brand version. What percentage of generic manufacturers have hit their quota? My guess is that most of the slack is held by manufacturers of brand-name medication, while most of the limits are hitting manufacturers of generics.

    Also, the “70 percent” stat is for “amphetamine products”, but what is that referring to, exactly? Adderall? Vyvanse, which is an amphetamine prodrug? All stimulants? (It wouldn’t surprise me, coming from the agency that likes to refer to all illegal drugs as “narcotics”.)

    This narrative that the FDA and DEA is pushing – that manufacturers are somehow deciding not to make and sell medication that there is obvious demand for – does not pass the smell test. Maybe the DEA quotas aren’t to blame, but the notion that drug companies are deciding not to make and sell medication – the one thing we’ve been able to count on them to do historically – for some unknown reason that nobody is able to figure out is ludicrous.





  • If there was an easy answer, someone would have implemented it already. Obviously, it’s a challenging problem, and I don’t claim to have the solution.

    I think expanding the voting dimensions (a la Slashdot) would make it easier to create an algorithm, but it pushes complexity to the user, so that’s a tradeoff.

    But, even with up/down votes, I think there are potential ways of identifying users whose votes deserve more weight. For instance, someone who up-votes both sides of an argument chain (because both sides are making good-faith responses and adding to the conversation) should be boosted.


  • We need the karma-equivalent of PageRank. Every vote should not be treated the same, just as Google doesn’t weight every link equally. The “one user one vote” system is the equivalent of pre-Google search engines that would rank pages by how many times they contained the search term. But it can’t be as simple as “votes from higher-karma users are worth more” because the easiest way to build insane karma is to build a bot or spam low-effort replies to every rising post. Still, the system needs to be able to extract the wisdom of the crowd from the stupidity of the crowd, and the only way to do that is to apply a weighting gradient to users and their votes.