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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • I agree with a lot of this but this bit is a non-sequitur:

    One thing many people don’t realize is that the Zionist colonial project was in motion long before WWII, as far back as the late 1800s.

    Political zionism did get started in the late 1800s, as a proposed solution to the centuries of pogroms, expulsions and discrimination against Jews in Europe. Prior to the horrors of WWII, most Jews considered it literal heresy. It was the Holocaust that convinced many that Zionism was their only option, not least because most of the free world closed its borders to Jews fleeing the Holocaust and its aftermath. There was nowhere else to go.

    This is a very useful short piece by a Jewish anti-zionist, pleading with the pro-Palestinian movement to take more care with their understanding of history: Zionism, Antisemitism and the Left Today

    The Palestinians are paying the price for Europe’s crimes. The problem cannot be solved by denying that those crimes ever happened.










  • It doesn’t cost that much because the company are making a hefty profit, of course. And much more profit off it in the US as per usual, the NHS pays considerably less

    The deal struck [in 2021] with Novartis Gene Therapies, secures the drug for NHS patients in England at a substantial confidential discount and paves the way for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to publish draft guidance recommending treatment with Zolgensma.

    The terms of the deal mean that some young children that currently fall outside the NICE recommendation criteria will also be eligible to be considered for treatment by a national multidisciplinary clinical team (MDT) made up of the country’s leading experts in the treatment of SMA.

    This means as many as 80 babies and young children could potentially benefit from the life-changing gene therapy a year.

    But profiteering aside, the number in the final paragraph is your answer. Up to 80 kids in the UK per year, so up to ~400 in the US, ~500 for the EU. It’s not a big market but the cost of drug development doesn’t get cheaper just because the number of cases is small, it gets more difficult and more costly. And there’s more than one drug company chasing the market.

    None of that is a defence of Pharma. But it is inevitable under capitalism. Eat the rich etc etc.







  • JoBo@feddit.ukOPtoTechnology@lemmy.worldOn Being an Outlier
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    3 months ago

    The way he plays with the meaning of words

    She (or, if you’re not sure, they).

    any kind of bureaucratic or rule-based decision-making

    Human-written rules are often flawed, and for similar reasons (the sole human thought process that ‘AI’ is very good at reproducing is system justification). But human-written rules can be written down and they can be interrogated. But Apple landed itself in court because it had no clue how its credit algorithm worked and could not conceive how it could possibly be sexist if the machine didn’t get any gender data to analyse.

    Perhaps that is the point.

    That is, indeed, the point.