Author: philg

Can Trump get rid of drug ads on broadcast TV?

by philg

“Trump Moves to Crack Down on Drug Advertising” (NYT):

The administration is proposing a return to a 1990s-era policy that kept most drug ads off TV. That could dent the revenues of drugmakers and major networks.

The proposal, which would effectively reverse a 1997 policy change that opened the floodgates to a deluge of TV drug advertising, is likely to be aggressively opposed by the drug industry, which has long had the courts on its side on this issue.

Past efforts to even modestly restrict drug advertising have been blocked by the courts on First Amendment grounds.

I would be delighted if our kids could be spared from having to learn about all of the disgusting diseases that afflict adults when they’re trying to enjoy an NFL game, but it seems as though the Trump plan is not a blanket “no disgusting diseases” policy. The workaround of the First Amendment is to force pharma companies to disclose all of the disgusting side effects of their marginally effective products.

On Tuesday, the administration said that it planned to return “to the status quo policy pre-1997.” It said that companies would no longer be allowed to simply “recite a vague ‘major-risk statement’ and then point viewers to a website, toll-free number, or print insert for more complete information.” Instead, they would have to give detailed safety information in the ad itself.

[the hated sub-dictator RFK, Jr.] likes to point out that the United States and New Zealand are the only wealthy countries that do not sharply restrict prescription drug advertisements.

The F.D.A. has significantly slowed the pace of its warnings to drug companies about ads that do not align with federal rules. In 2010, the agency’s Office of Prescription Drug Promotion issued about 50 warning letters, and it posted at least 20 letters per year through 2013, according to an analysis by the law firm Covington.

In more recent years, the numbers have fallen to five or fewer warning or so-called untitled letters per year, typically telling companies that they overstated the effectiveness of a treatment.

If Trump is successful what would replace pharma ads on TV? It has to be something that is ridiculously lucrative and also mass market. AI is ridiculously lucrative, but everyone with enough money to buy Nvidia’s server chips already knows about Nvidia and the average consumer would buy only a gaming GPU board, no longer a significant source of revenue or Nvidia. Maybe OnlyFans? From Hearst, the company where I built most of my early web publishing software (user activity analysis, catalog shopping ecommerce with credit card billing (same weekend that Amazon launched!), ad serving, content management, nationwide classified ads with auctioning (same month that eBay launched!), etc.), “Inside the Rise of OnlyFans on Campus” (Town and Country):

Remember when coeds made some extra cash stacking books at the library or working a shift at a restaurant? Now, with tuition skyrocketing and talk of entrepreneurship and fast and easy millions in the air, students—including those attending highly selective schools—are turning to a new line of work to pay the college bills.

Loren, 21 and starting her senior year this month, has been doing OnlyFans since her senior year of high school. A natural entrepreneur (she previously ran her own handmade soap company), she saw the sums of money that could be made through online content—especially if she was willing to go topless—and evaluated success within that ecosystem mainly as a challenge involving branding, marketing, and advertising. Could she, a young woman from Olympia, Washington, with the ambition to attend an elite university, game the system? It turned out she could. “My second month on OnlyFans, I made $50,000,” she says. “At that point I couldn’t stop.”

Loren had already been accepted by Boston University—a highly selective, Top 50 institution that charges more than $91,000 per year—as a Presidential Scholar. Her parents (her mother is a doctor, her father a marketing entrepreneur) had saved enough money to make a dent in BU’s tuition, but by her sophomore year Loren told them to keep it. Her OnlyFans income could cover it.

From Harvard in 2017, “Do not get sold on drug advertising”:

The United States and New Zealand are the only countries where drug makers are allowed to market prescription drugs directly to consumers. The U.S. consumer drug advertising boom on television began in 1997, when the FDA relaxed its guidelines relating to broadcast media.

A documentary film on female students responding to increases in college tuition:

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Is U.S. immigration policy a form of animal hoarding?

by philg

People in the U.S. who say that we have a critical shortage of affordable housing and that income and wealth inequality are a “crisis” simultaneously say that we must keep our borders open to low-skill migrants, elderly and disabled migrants, and others who will never be able to pay a median rent. The people who observe that the U.S. health care system is unusable due to lengthy waiting lists and capacity shortages also say that we should bring in child migrants with diseases that will entail months of hospital stays (at a cost of $millions and with a result of extending waiting lists for native-born Americans; see, by contrast, Australia).

Let’s compare this to animal hoarding, as explained by the Minnesota-based Animal Humane Society (I picked Minnesota because the noble citizens there are passionate about importing as many Somalis as possible, regardless of education level or propensity to work):

Animal hoarding is an accumulation of animals that has overwhelmed a person’s ability to provide minimum standards of care. … Rescue hoarders believe they’re the only people that can adequately care for their animals. Their hoarding begins with a strong desire to save animals. They also may have an extensive network of enablers, and are in complete denial about the dangerous or unhealthy conditions in which the animals are living.

Does the analogy hold up? Below, from Politico, a situation that has changed exactly nobody’s mind in Maskachusetts regarding the merits of open borders.

Related:

  • the UK is jammed with advocates for open borders despite a 2023 report by Human Rights Watch about “this system [of taxpayer-funded everything for migrants] has increasingly been plagued by serious deficiencies, in violation of people’s human rights to housing, food, education, health, and social security”
  • national ASPCA page: Animal “hoarding” can be identified when a person is housing more animals than they can adequately and appropriately care for. … guardians believe they are helping their animals and deny this inability to provide minimum care.
  • “‘You’re not welcome here’: Australia’s treatment of disabled migrants” (BBC): It is one of few countries that routinely rejects immigrants’ visas on the basis of their medical needs – specifically if the cost of care exceeds A$86,000 ($57,000; £45,000) over a maximum of 10 years. New Zealand has a similar policy but Australia’s is much stricter. … The government defends the law as necessary to curb government spending and protect citizens’ access to healthcare.
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Have you reported your recent vaccinations to Facebook?

by philg

A Trump-hating professor at the University of California recently posted “Got my flu and new covid vaccines at CVS this morning”:

His friends (nearly all Trump-hating academics) were thrilled. Here are some of the 27 comments:

  • Sounds good. For the theorists amongst us …. Yale researchers last year used, simple parsimonious 😃 models (see screenshot) to compute the optimal time of year for a Covid vax. For NYC, it’s Sept. 15th.
  • Where? There appear to be none available (yet) in San Diego. Using their scheduling tool, I could only get it to declare me eligible if I clicked the “I have an underlying condition that makes me susceptible to severe outcomes from the COVID-19 virus”. Is that what you did? (Response: CVS in La Jolla Village Square. I went to pick up a prescription and the pharmacist asked if I would like to receive the flu and/or covid vaccine.)
  • Good on you. I have been told to wait until next month. Wearing my mask on the MTA until then.
  • Mazel tov. I had Covid a few weeks ago so I will have to wait a few months. (This is my favorite; she got 7 previous shots and then got the disease and her confidence in the value of Shot #8 is not diminished.)

Readers: I hope that all of you posted on Facebook after receiving a vaccine!

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U.S. population has doubled and housing construction has remained constant

by philg

Happy National Construction Appreciation Week to those who celebrate.

We’re supposedly building roughly the same number of new houses and apartments that we did in 1960 when the U.S. population was 180 million, i.e., roughly half of what it is now. St. Louis Fed:

During the intervening years we had an influx of about 80 million immigrants (Pew for 1965-2015 then add for the extra years before and after) and we are also home now to the children of those immigrants. How is it possible that we haven’t been building more houses in the aggregate?

One possible answer is that families are much larger today and, therefore, we have more people in the typical house or apartment. But 1960 was prior to the age of no-fault (unilateral) divorce. ChatGPT:

Another possible answer is that we have people living in tents, California-style. But Brookings says “Our calculations show that the U.S. housing market was short 4.9 million housing units in 2023 relative to mid-2000s”. I.e., if we assume a household size of 2, at most 10 million Americans and migrants are living in tents. (Note that this 10 million number is roughly comparable to the number of undocumented migrants who came across the border during the the Biden-Harris administration.)

A final possible answer is that we are living in shabby old houses. I asked ChatGPT:

Maybe this is good because it shows that we did such a great job building homes circa 1960-1980 that they’re not wearing out? ChatGPT says it is not good:

I can’t figure out how this happened. We are informed that migrants are skilled eager construction workers. Labor is 30-50 percent of the cost of building a single-family house. We are richer in migrants than at any time in U.S. history. Why wouldn’t we have at least the same ratio of housing starts to population size that we had in 1960 before we began to be enriched by migrants?

In fact, the New York Times says it is more or less impossible for us to have built any houses without immigrants: “How Would We Build Homes Without Immigrant Labor and Foreign Materials?” (April 1, 2025)

Related:

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Full spectrum of current American religious faith in the Boise airport terminal

by philg

Happy Bisexual Awareness Week for those who celebrate.

Photos taken just a few minutes apart in the Boise airport, July 5, 2025, show the full spectrum of current American religious faith:

I’m still awed by folks who, rather than drive or Zoom it in, voluntarily enter a 100% jammed commercial airliner while relying on a Fauci-style cloth mask to keep themselves safe from an aerosol virus.

What about converting legacy Christian buildings to one of the new religions? Here’s an example from Cleveland, Ohio in June 2025:

The eagerness of churches to convert supports my theory that Rainbow Flagism is the most attractive religion to Americans because adherents are never asked to donate money or even do anything than posit the existence of anti-2SLGBTQQIA+ haters.

The Boise City Hall flies just one religious flag (July 2, 2025):

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How’s Intel doing now that the BLM and DEI cheerleader white guy is out?

by philg

It’s been about six months since a Chinese guy took over at Intel from the white male who said that his primary passions were mostly peaceful BLM protests, giving big jobs to women and people with dark skin, etc. (And nine months since the white savior BLM warrior was ousted.) Has Lip-Bu Tan managed to turn the company around? At least with a dead cat bounce?

I still would like to know why Intel’s Gaudi chips are such a failure compared to NVIDIA. They sure sound great in HTML (replacement phrase for “on paper”):

Did Pat Gelsinger follow his BLM and DEI passion into a full-time job at a social justice enterprise? Apparently not. Investors who suffered a 75 percent loss on Intel stock (adjusted for Bidenflation) during the white savior’s leadership of Intel now have the opportunity to lose some more money by giving it to Playground Global, a venture capital fund where Gelsinger is a partner.

Is it too soon to do an INTC v AMD stock price chart? Maybe not! Remarkably, now that the Social Justice Warrior is out, INTC has actually outperformed AMD over the past year:

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Starved of migrants, the Metropolitan Opera decides to migrate to Saudi Arabia

by philg

In June we learned that undocumented migrants were big customers for the Metropolitan Opera (AP):

Metropolitan Opera season attendance dropped slightly following the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that coincided with a decrease in tourists to New York.

The solution to a migration-related problem is always… more migration. September: “The Met Opera Turns to Saudi Arabia to Help Solve Its Financial Woes” (New York Times).

The Metropolitan Opera, one of the world’s most renowned performing arts companies, is turning to Saudi Arabia to help it solve some of the most severe financial problems in its 142-year history.

The company has reached a lucrative agreement with the kingdom that calls for it to perform there for three weeks each winter. While neither the Met nor the Saudis disclosed financial terms when they announced a memorandum of understanding on Wednesday, the deal is expected to bring the Met more than $100 million.

The Met hopes the agreement will help it emerge from a period of acute financial woes. Since the coronavirus pandemic, the company has withdrawn more than a third of the money in its endowment fund to help it cover operating costs — about $120 million overall, including $50 million to help pay for the season that ended in June. The withdrawals have raised questions about the viability of staging live opera on a grand scale in the 21st century.

As we prepare for Bisexual Awareness Week (Sept 16-23) and LGBT History Month (October) and Trans Awareness Month (November), it will be interesting to think about how the Met’s LGBTQ+-themed lighting will be used in Saudi Arabia:

Here’s what the new opera house in suburban Riyadh will look like when it opens in 2028, but before the Met’s rainbow lighting scheme is applied:

The Met began spending in a whole new direction in 2021 (NYT):

“The Met Opera Has a Gay Conductor. Yes, That Matters.” (NYT, 2019):

Mr. Nézet-Séguin — who has been openly gay for his entire professional career and nonchalant enough about it to post a smiling partners’ beach selfie on Instagram — is impossible to miss.

“The fact that he’s so comfortable with who he is is part of what makes him a powerful, effective artistic leader,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in an interview. “Because he is proud of who he is, and that’s very important.”

ChatGPT:

In Saudi Arabia, engaging in same-sex sexual activity—whether between two men or two women—is illegal under the country’s interpretation of Islamic (Sharia) law. The legal consequences are extremely severe and can vary depending on the specifics of the case and judicial discretion. Same-sex acts are considered sodomy or illicit sexual intercourse (zina) and are punishable by death under traditional Wahhabi interpretations of Sharia law. Even when the death penalty is not applied, those convicted may face indefinite prison sentences, flogging, financial penalties, or deportation in the case of foreign nationals. … Saudi Arabia enforces some of the strictest laws against same-sex relations in the world. Punishments include—but are not limited to—execution, flogging, prolonged imprisonment, hefty fines, and deportation.

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Latino Conservation Week

by philg

Today is the first day of Latino Conservation Week (not to be confused with Latinx Conservation Week, the (Deplorable) Latino Conservative Week, or the (turncoat) Latinx Conservative Week). From Audubon, the society named after a notorious advocate for slavery:

LCW events are inclusive of all communities but, in particular, are events that break down barriers Latino communities face when it comes to outdoor recreation and/or conservation efforts.

The National Park Service, under the cruel divisive tyranny of Donald Trump, doesn’t seem to be observing this “inclusive of all communities” week. Their web page on the subject dates to your tax dollars being at work in 2024:

(Despite Joe Biden’s advocacy for 2SLGBTQQIA+ community, note the government’s failure to use the correct gender-inclusive term “Latinx”.)

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Cuban government much smarter than U.S. government?

by philg

“Motel beheading suspect’s criminal history reveals escalating path of violent crime” (NBC Dallas):

Yordanis Cobos-Martinez was previously arrested on charges of indecency with a child, carjacking, false imprisonment and grand theft of a motor vehicle. … Four months later, in June 2017, in South Lake Tahoe, California, a police report details a carjacking in which Cobos-Martinez, while naked, tried to force himself into a woman’s car while pulling her hair and clothes and sitting on her lap. … ICE says he was released on an order of supervision under the Biden administration and because Cuba would not accept him based on his criminal history.

What did this noble migrant do? “ICE calls for removal of man accused of beheading another man with machete at Dallas motel” (CNN):

Police say Cobos-Martinez was cleaning a room with an unnamed witness as the incident unfolded. The witness told police Cobos-Martinez became upset when the victim, Chandra Nagamallaiah, used the unidentified witness to translate his request to not use a broken washing machine instead of speaking to him directly, according to the affidavit.

Surveillance video shows Cobos-Martinez leaving the motel room, pulling out a machete and attacking Nagamallaiah. After the victim ran, the attack continued outside – in front of the victim’s wife and son – both of whom attempted to intervene, according to the affidavit. After beheading Nagamallaiah, Cobos-Martinez allegedly placed the victim’s head in a dumpster.

Should we give the Cuban government credit for being smarter than the U.S. government? Cuban officials protected their own citizens/residents by wisely giving Americans what Americans voted for (i.e., to collect a miscellaneous assortment of humans from all of the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies with particular emphasis on collecting those directly embroiled in violence).

Separately, this latest beheading seems to be another example of Migrant A killing Migrant B on U.S. soil, similar to Indian enricher Harjinger Singh killing three Haitians in Florida (NY Post).

Related:

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