haircut / brows fr
try to have dinner (chicken) ready by 5ish
The coffee table is 20" high - much closer to 2/3-incline than half-incline for pushup purposes. I was able to do 10 with some wrist discomfort, but it didn't feel like anything was grinding / wearing down, so I guess that's the new bar for pushups.
* * *
Smart Speaker without the Space Bro
1.
In 2015 the epithet "pharma bro" bubbled up from the collective vernacular and stuck to Martin Shkreli: the greed-slug who, as then-CEO of then-Turing Pharmaceuticals (now Vyera), raised the price on anti-malarial medication pyrimethamine from $17.50 to a stunning $750.00 per dose. Turns out there are laws against price-gouging; Shkreli served 5 of a 7-year prison sentence and was banned from the pharma industry.
But ultimately it was a matter of crossing a line in the wrong direction, as the law so often is.
You don't need a license to drive a "motor-driven cycle" with a sub-50cc internal-combustion engine in DC.
The line is drawn at 50cc, anything 50cc+ is deemed a "motorcycle". Operators of sub-50cc vehicles flout traffic laws constantly, but they can't be charged with "operating without a license" and there's no license to revoke for violating adjacent traffic laws.
Another example, the maximum lending interest rate is 15% in New Mexico but only 5% in Delaware.
BUT these state regulations generally exclude credit cards.
50% of Americans with credit cards carry a balance from month to month.
Less than 50% of Americans are homeowners (65.6% in 2024 Q2) with mortgages (61.5%).
So credit cards happen to be the most prevalent form of "lending", with no hard limit specific to credit card interest rates. 25% is not unusual even on otherwise "good" credit card products, and some issuers (targeting credit-poor consumers) charge upward of 30% APR.
So the laws setting the bar for criminal usury are wildly inconsistent, and fail to point in the humane direction: twisting peoples' arms to borrow at interest is shitty. Poverty of humanity was exactly Shkreli's undoing. Compare Salk, who declined to patent his polio vaccine - the whole idea of paywalling and skimming from a life-saving protocol was repugnant, as it should be. More generally, the private-capitalized, shareholder-value-driven foundation of today's pharma industry is inhumane. Paywalling/gatekeeping live-saving protocols - be it a polio vaccine or an antimalarial medication or abortion - is not what community-minded, humanity-minded people do.
That argument has been extended to banning for-profit healthcare, prisons, and schools on the basis of respective correspondence to "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness". And I tend to agree with that formulation, though not because I think the Declaration of Independence is so singularly articulate. It's just that they're all societal universals, they're everybody's business, and what's everybody's business shouldn't be gate-kept for private profit.
2.
The fact that there are billionaires buying politicians to tilt the playing field toward their selfish mania of playing space emperor, while millions of their own countrymen go hungry, should be an outrage most of all to the Bible-thumpers they've hornswoggled. Pharma Bros suck. Space Bros suck.
I don't have the means to pry the whole rainforest ecosystem out of space-bro shareholder hands, but the "smart speaker" product is an egregiously mediocre implementation of the widget's market space. There are open-source approaches, and I'm kind of clever when it comes to automation stuff, so I'm thinking a Ras-Pi smart speaker might help relieve my resentment at AI tools being paywalled and held hostage to space bro selfishness.