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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • For the record, this is almost certainly a genetic defect of the father, some kind of dominant mutation. Nutrition and other environmental factors most likely didn’t play any role in a height difference this big.

    There are two copies of each gene. Here, one of the copies got mutated in such a way that it caused the stunted growth of the father. Each sperm contains one randomly selected copy of each gene. Therefore half of the father’s sperms contained the mutated gene and the other half the normal version. There was 50% chance the son would be normal height and 50% chance he would be small like his father.

    I actually know a family like this. Nothing fishy going on there, the mutation is well described and now new kids with the mutation get growth hormones during their growth to reach normal size.






  • I relatively often meet 4 of these:

    • no speed limit (use the normal limit for this type of road)

    • car tires may defy laws of nature (slippery road, usually followed by a sign saying it applies during rain)

    • speed camera ahead

    • no water polluting goods (not very common, but occasionally comes up. There is also no dangerous materials with an orange trapezoid instead of an ellipse)

    I also saw don’t drive off the pier (around ferries), watch for skiers (in the mountains with cross-country skiing routes), and warning about planes, although in different design (around airports).





  • You don’t need profit in the sense of making lots of extra money compared to how much money you actually put in. I would be very interested in how much net profit is compared to gross in relative numbers. It’s a lot in absolute numbers, but I suspect not so much in relative. The problem why drug development is so very expensive is that you don’t just pay large sums for the drugs that are developed, but also for all those that are not, because they prove not useful during the testing. And there is way, way more than the successful ones, perhaps 100 to 1? I don’t have numers at hand. So in the end, you have to charge a lot of extra money above the production cost if you want to have enough money to develop any drugs at all.

    Of course, that isn’t true for old drugs. Which is a reason why generics are so much cheaper. And also why patents need to exist.

    I’m sure pharma companies abuse the system as much as they can, but not as much as it might appear at a first glance.