D.A. WallachVerified account

Pharma: Let the free market be Also pharma: US govt should fund basic research with no royalties. Medicare shouldn't be allowed to negotiate. Importation should be banned Medicare must cover every drug in protected classes. Out-of-pocket should be 0 so there's no demand curve

To put this in perspective, Merck ANNUAL net income for 2018 was (roughly) $6.22B, AbbVie was $5.687B, Bristol-Myers Squibb was $4.92B. For 2018 net income attributable to HCA Healthcare was $3.78B, for the Mayo Clinic $706M. For CVS Health annual net income for 2017 was $6.622B.https://twitter.com/DrugChannels/status/1163424152549769217 …

Positive note: Biotech exponential innovation continues unabated in a downturn, so is a safe bet. And the USA leads. We have $3 trillion of wasted healthcare money to eat into with preventive and curative medicines, and spending is not going down under any political outcome.

If every cell in every human became a star, that'd only be ~1/10 the # of stars in the universe, which itself is <1/20 of all matter/energy. And each person could have 100 galaxies for themselves. Our solar system is just a speck in 1 galaxy. Our ignorance must be unimaginable.

Machine Learning is often viewed as a black box curve fitting scheme, devoid from physics. We take an approach to derive a new scheme for DFT where ML can naturally plug in and learn the missing features of the functional, leading to remarkable accuracy. https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.00971 

Better solution is to lower the underlying cost in these areas. Gov't policies too often reward waste & inefficiency. We @Arnold_Ventures work to increase value in healthcare & higher-ed, but it's lonely. Too many politicians would rather just throw $ at problems than try to fix.

The largest driver of economic immobility is rising cost of the 3 H's: healthcare, housing, higher ed. The default response by some is to increase gov't subsidies to consumers. But doing so just leads to further price inflation and spiraling need for even larger future subsidies.

So-called Influencers don't influence. According a 2007 paper by Duncan Watts, “large scale changes in public opinion are not driven by highly influential people who influence everyone else, but rather by easily influenced people, influencing other easily influenced people.”