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Murfdogg21

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Everything posted by Murfdogg21

  1. The article said they were paid $93m over 15 years for multiple products, not just oxycontin. So their dealings with Purdue were a loss, but better than execs going to pound me in the ass prison?
  2. Tucker gladly would've signed a 8+ year deal at $50m/yr in previous years if we bypassed his final years of club control and he went straight to $50m. He wasn't signing a deal like the extensions Yordan and Bregman signed in the past.
  3. George Springer's looking pretty good now, eh fellas?
  4. Yeah, please take our trash too, Chicago! Sounds like their offer was just Paredes and Smith and we worked to get Wesneski added. Hopefully it works out in 2026 and beyond.
  5. I've been through several *device* approvals (or rather, clearances) with FDA. FDA's primary charge is safety, so they default to being conservative on the preclinical and clinical data they want before letting products hit the market. They charge user fees and others to companies applying, in addition to their demands of data that can cost $100k's for the most simple products, to $10m's on the high end. These costs come after years of product development, where many products in the pipeline fail due to not working or risk of not making it past the FDA. The typical FDA review group is a manager (who will be working for a Pharma company in 3-5 years), an experienced reviewer who is a lifer and satisfied with being a career federal employee, and 3 or 4 eager and inquisitive young scientists fresh out of grad school with little perspective on industry or how their tangential questions result in major $$$ to the applicant company. It's very challenging for new, smaller companies with limited money and resources to break through. This hampers innovation and competition. It's also why big dogs have hundreds of employees in the regulatory department to strategize and try to streamline the process and minimize time and cost to get to market. What level of safety risk is the American public willing to accept if we direct the FDA to be more lenient (and less expensive) on approvals? Other countries benefit from USA innovation in drugs and medical devices. FDA approval/clearance (or the data you acquired to get it) gets you 90+% there towards approval in foreign countries. American patients pay for the innovation and FDA approval costs through higher prices than are paid elsewhere. We can cap prices or profits, but there will be undesirable effects. There are a lot of levers to pull that impact expensive healthcare is in America (pharma/device company profits, insurance company profits, FDA regulation, physician costs, medical school costs, etc. etc.). I stepped on a couple Surly doctors' toes in an earlier post that suggested physicians' income and fees were one of those levers.
  6. I watch the animated content but don't read the books and comics. Apparently "Crimson Jack" is a space pirate during the rise of the First Order (25-30 years after Skeleton Crew). I don't know if/what the connection is. Probably just another fake alias Jude Law's character uses.
  7. The show is set in year 5 ABY, meaning about 24 years after Order 66. If the character is even close to Jude Law’s age (51), he’s older than Ahsoka and may be closer to Anakin’s age.
  8. SEC did a solid for ACL and F1 with no October home games.
  9. I'd prefer something like this (trading Framber for Correa, taking Springer off the Blue Jays' payroll, flipping Tucker for top prospects, trading Chaz and/or Jake for whatever they can get) over paying Bregman $400m. Someone send Dana a link to this thread.
  10. The Astros had the #3 to #7 highest payroll last year depending which site you look at, and are sitting in the top 10 for 2025 before resigning Bregman or whatever they end up doing. It's not like we have the A's, Rays, or Pirates ownership. They shipped prospects to get Verlander back in 2023 and to get Kikuchi last season, and haven't restocked the shelves. Crane burned himself with the Abreu and Montero contracts, but all of us were thinking Abreu was going to be crushing a lot of dingers to the Crawford boxes when he signed. It would be nice if Crane admitted he made a mistake and spent an extra $30m more than he planned to in 2025 to offset the dead money of those two contracts. Mega contracts in baseball are never worth it. You'll get some good years and some bad years, but you'll be paying top dollar every year. By the end, it's just a money sink that really only NYY, NYM, and LAD seem to be able to afford.
  11. Hey man, I just file the TPS reports.
  12. and chooses to flee by riding a Greyhound to McDonalds...sounds like grounds for an insanity plea.
  13. Effectively yes, but the committee could lower them and they are only guaranteed a bye if they are in the committee’s top 4 conference champions. The committee dropped FSU to 5th last year based on the QB being out.
  14. Learning from FSU, Georgia will wait until after the rankings are announced to report Beck has a torn UCL and punter blew out his ACL.
  15. Quinn throws off his back foot 90+% of the time. His elite arm talent allowed him to thrive in spite of poor mechanics in high school and against poor college defenses. Sark and offensive staff probably should’ve worked on this the past 3 years to make him better for Texas and his draft stock. When he’s under pressure from a rush, dealing with an injury, and/or in a high pressure situation, it gets magnified and he floats balls.
  16. Arch at QB improves those rushing numbers through his runs as well as opening things up for Wisner due to threat of Arch run.
  17. If Sark is getting scared/conservative here because he can’t trust Ewers, then Ewers shouldn’t be playing.
  18. Can we start an NIL to fund Bert cutting his stupid ass ginger curls?
  19. As a semi-professional medical scientist, I'd speculate that the amount of shit ingredients and substitutes put into processed food and beverages has increased at a similar trend to obesity. Perhaps some people's genetics are minimally effected, while others store excess calories. Some of these ingredients have neurological effects, such as craving/addiction and behavioral disorders in children. Most European countries ban these ingredients or slap warning labels all over it, which could relate to Europeans not being as obese as Americans. Also, the poorer you are, the more cheap food you buy, which has more of the crap ingredients. Switching all Americans to fresh meat, produce, dairy, and baked goods and eliminating processed sweets, pasta, sauces, etc. would probably result in a significant decline in obesity without watching calories.
  20. The discussion of healthcare costs and sources of greed and inefficiency warrant its own thread, but I'll jump in here. The entire spectrum of "healthcare" is tainted and would require a complete reboot which would cause serious damage to stakeholders throughout even if it is the best long term solution. 1. Education costs - Why is it so damn expensive? The costs and debt are major justifications for physicians' salaries. If I ever ran for federal office, I'd campaign to treat "healthcare" education (med school, nursing, may stretch into associated med techs and admin, maybe even dentistry while we're at it) like ROTC type programs. Tuition subsidized or completely funded in return for minimum term of service at some lower salary. Encourage opening more medical and dental schools. Lower the barrier to entry for more professionals, lock them in for a few years at a reasonable (perhaps "below market") rate, and more competition among providers when they are free agents. Universities have been jacking up tuition because they have unlimited demand and know people can just go into 6 figure debt. 2. Physician costs - Should getting into med school justify a lifetime of top 1% or 0.1% status? I realize not all doctors make that kind of money (family, GP, etc.) and I am biased by my frequent interactions with ortho surgeons, spine surgeons, sports medicine, and interventional/PM&R docs. Although not universal, the overwhelming majority of those docs make great money and are always looking at how to make more, sometimes unethically. I'm not in sales and don't worry about offending them, so sometimes I engage in this debate and they will lean hard into they deserve it because so few can do what they do (get accepted and graduate from med school? Perform injections or surgery after years of training?). There are many talented people that could've pursued medicine, and most that did were driven (on some level) by earnings potential. Defensive doctors often point at the debt incurred during college, med school, and residency as a justification...so we could eliminate that via #1 above. 3. Hospitals, ASCs, private practices - Nobody still sees these entities as anything but for-profit businesses, right? Hospitals and ASCs collect the lion's share of procedure reimbursements, and try to cut their costs by pushing (or forcing) the lowest cost supplies (medical devices, implants, third party services), reduced support staff (nurses, techs, admins), and ways of reducing physicians' fees and options. For private practices, doctors/owners go to as many business conferences as they do medical conferences to learn how to maximize profit, cut costs, minimize liability, etc. We could dedicate part of the great enshittening thread to this topic. Now we're in an era of private equity buying out hospitals, ASCs, and private practices (and dental and veterinary clinics too, for that matter), making the doctors salaried (more or less) employees, and reorganizing everything to maximize income and minimize costs. 4. Self-insured employers - Many (most?) mid to large size companies and municipalities have employee insurance administered through Aetna, UHC, BCBS, etc. but are actually self-funded. They collaborate with the brokers to set premiums, deductibles, fees, and coverage. Some employers look out for their employees more than others and take a big hit on these costs to offer cheaper healthcare, others absorb little to nothing of the costs and pass it right through via a crappy insurance plan at high premiums and deductibles. 5. Insurance companies - Not much need to add to what has already been discussed in this thread. They set premiums and reimbursements to maximize profit as much as the market will tolerate, while trying to minimize services covered. All of the entities above are for profit (some will argue universities aren't, but come on). If they didn't make a profit, why would they be doing it? If they were out of the space, there would be less competition and theoretically higher costs and/or lesser quality and variety of service. How much profit is "too much"? As with all debates on capitalism, which of these should have prices capped by the government? How much lower should the cap be than "free market" rates? How will such caps reduce the number of players and long term state of the healthcare industry? Would fixed, lower education costs cause some universities to drop medical and nursing programs? Caps on physician fees would push some out of the business (it already has a bit) and push other college graduate into alternative fields. Hospitals, ASCs, private practices, and similar facilities would not respond to lowered reimbursements by accepting lower profit, but through further cutting their costs in head count of support staff and quality of supplies. Forcing self-insured employers into coverage minimums and premium maximums could be possible, but they would offset it by reducing other forms of compensation to employees. Capping the profits of insurance companies could make healthcare more affordable in the short run, benefiting consumers. However, there are risks associated with reduced innovation, possible market consolidation, exploiting loopholes, and a potential decline in the quality of care. The overall impact would depend heavily on the specifics of the policy, including how the cap is structured, the level at which it is set, and how insurers adjust their business practices.
  21. I think the concern was/is that we can’t beat Georgia or Oregon with mediocre QB play, and Arch provides a threat in zone reads, RPO, and deep passes that defenses don’t have to plan for with Quinn. It’s possible that Quinn can be better than Arch at somethings (like reading defense, pinpoint accuracy in short to medium passes), but Arch’s strengths give us a better chance of beating elite teams.
  22. Usually salary caps include salary floors, so the players collectively make more money. It just gets spread around to more mid tier guys than just being too heavy. NFLPA usually goes with it because the rank and file guys are the majority of votes and they get more money.
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