No. Never. It takes whole teams of people to get it right. (Even then, they sometimes get it wrong.)

That’s a false dichotomy if I’ve ever heard one, dude.

No, just follow the money. It’s all going into marketing. Ban marketing (like the rest of the world!) and prices drop overnight.

There is exactly one easiest option: be like the rest of the civilized world and ban consumer marketing of medicine. HUGE amounts of the prices of drugs are just down to TV ads. “Ask your doctor about…” is horse shit, let your doctor decide what prescription drugs you need. And fire the cocaine-riddled, law-breaking marketing departments that soak up so much money.

“Our recipes are consistent, like a good espresso maker.”

“Okay cool, how do you know that?”

“So many questions! We’re hackers! We are very smart.”

That’s the thing. They have no way of even knowing if they messed up! I’m not even sure the way they could be messing up is a thing they know they should be worried about.

I’m not disputing the reasoning behind why this is important. But “it is important” does not imply that their solution is the right one.

People make illicit drugs chock full of impurities all the time too, and it fucks people up.

There are standards for purity on pharmaceuticals. Impurities have to be ridiculously low. Lower than you can measure in your garage.

These dudes either don’t know you need to even measure purity or have decided that it’s inconvenient and are ignoring it.

I’m a process chemist. I do this sort of thing for a living.

These guys don’t even know why what they’re suggesting is so dangerous. Do not do any of this.

got lucky

That is not how I’d characterize 2016 at all. Also, I would like to refer you to argument number two.

1. 2016
2. He currently works for a crypto betting market
3. 2016

Why on earth are we still listening to Nate Silver?

1. Hack together a proof of concept
2. Works well enough that management slaps a “done” sticker on it
3. Pile of hacks becomes load bearing
4. One or two dependencies change, the whole thing falls over
5. Set evenings and weekends on fire to fix it
6. Management brags about moving fast and breaking things, engineers quit and become cabbage farmers and woodworkers
7. New graduates are hired, GOTO 1

Hopefully not as a bunch of really good question posts full of mod-deleted answers.

The labrats subreddit was kinda fun. I’m a chemist, but the chemistry subreddit was overwhelmed by people asking for homework advice, showing off bad caffeine tattoos, and getting upset when they couldn’t talk about drugs or explosives.

The axe forgets, the stump remembers

It’s a consequence of the terminally-online brain rot idea that if you do not explicitly state that you are against a bad thing, you must be actually a huge supporter of it. Or that if you do explicitly state that you are against a bad thing, the fact that you didn’t mention a different bad thing means you are a huge supporter of it. Ad nauseam.

A single AA battery is going to discharge itself just sitting on the shelf over a decade

I appreciate your thorough response, but I think it’s clear that “maximize individual freedom” is a BS marketing phrase given how much nuance you had to use when rejecting the “freedoms” I proposed.

But also. No problem with coercing workers to do 80 hour weeks? I don’t think you’ve ever been in a situation where someone had that kind of power over you.

And selling junk but “safe” medicine is as dangerous as selling cyanide labeled as aspirin. Or are you content suing the drug company after your kid’s asthma rescue inhaler was actually just full of nothing and they asphyxiate to death?

You’re forcing a black-and-white dichotomy where one does not exist, which is a nice oversimplification that’s the exact sort of thing I’m talking about.

Everyone loves freedom! Like the freedom to:

• pay a child to work in a mine
• schedule workers for 80+ hours a week
• drive without speed limits
• use as much water out of the local river as desired
• dump waste into that same river
• sell unregulated, untested medicine

So obviously there are “freedoms” that mainly serve to infringe on the actual freedoms of others. Those just happen to be the ones that libertarians don’t talk about so much but are really what they’re after.