anon4this1

This reminds me of hearing Reed Hastings of netflix talking about starting the DVD mail-rental business as preparation for when streaming became technologically viable. They knew that internet delivery would eventually work, but to be the big first mover they needed to establish a customer base. As soon as broadband reached a level where streaming video is viable, they convert the customer base over to it.

Likewise, robot street delivery is going to be huge. The marginal cost of delivery will tend towards zero, and its really useful. If a company spends years and zillions of dollars messing around with AI and machine learning bullshit to power these, they will miss the boat. The goal of a successful company should be:

- Get as much VC as possible

- Spend it on low cost chinese built bareboned GSM controlled bots

- Hire warehouses full of vietnamese computer gamers to control them

- Get more VC

Once you have a market cap of billions, THEN you get a lab of engineers together to make them increasingly autonomous

Also.. Vitalik (and his offsiders) created ethereum when he was like 19. This is impressive, but it also makes you wonder - what real world problems did Vitalik have experience of that he was trying to solve? Zuckerburg was trying to connect groups of friends. Was Vitalik really so driven by the need for unintermediated prediction markets and zero-trust digital contracts as a teenager?

Vague gambling stuff - is this really going to be a 10x improvement over betfair who already offers solid p2p gambling markets with <5% house take?

Distributed computing rewards - maybe for a subgroup off applications (eg. illegal stuff eg. piracy), but in general terms a centralised system is easier, cheaper and quicker to develop

Replacing national currencies - this is already bitcoin's killer app. Ethereum adds almost no utility to this space.

When I got into bitcoin in 2011, it had a market cap of $20 million, and already had several killer apps:

- Making darknet drug markets possible

- Allowed permissionless, highly convenient storage of wealth

- Allowed large, rapid, low friction money transfers anywhere in the world

Now, in 2017, Ethereum has a market cap of 8 billion, yet I can't find a single use case for this technology other than enabling other scammy ponzi-like coin offerings.

Went to a bitcoin conference recently and met a plumber who had quit his job to margin trade altcoins. I think a lot of his positions would have been wiped out in the beartrap 12 hours ago.

Elsevier look like a ripe target for a worldwide campaign to cancel access to their journals unless fees arnt dropped.

Germany are (have?) Pulled access, some other south american countries have also with local academics saying that everyone uses sci-hub for everything anyway.

Could be a good target for an activist hedge fund investor to short the stock and attack the company.

Patients (and addicts) state there is a particular euphoria that oxycodone has (and diamorph/heroin) that morphine doesn't really have. Of course oral morphine does cause addiction, but oxycodone just seems to have greatly increased rates.

Diamorphine is given IV/IM/SC - not orally - which generally means that its use is confined to a short period in the first few hours/days of a hospital admission until the patient can be switched to oral medication. Noone is sent home with diamorphine unless they are end stage palliative and they are on a home syringe driver to get it.

OTOH oxycodone is almost always orally administered which means patients stay on it for longer in hospital and are commonly discharged with a prescription for more.

The doctors I work with who have done fellowships in USA state that oxycodone is (?was) given out like lollywater compared to hospitals here, where it is only prescribed if the patient has a REALLY good reason they can't have oral morphine.

Alibaba sells fully featured non-fda approved (usually) veteranary ultrasound machines for as little as $800 USD - this includes a monitor and control panel etc. That is probably pretty close to commodity pricing for a specialised device.

There are also wireless ultrasound probes for around $800 USD - these could potentially come down in price too.

The reason commercial ultrasound sound machines cost 50-500k is that hospital are paying for:

- a brand name with reliability behind it

- the ultrasound rep to come and demo the machine a few times before and after it is purchased, as well as bring in some platters of food. Also the ultrasound machine reps also bring additional machines along for courses in use of the ultrasound for intern teaching etc.

- a support contract

The cheap, ubiquitous ultrasound machine seems like a great idea, and is useful in some settings (like ER especially), however there are some significant issues - probably best understood with the example of echocardiography.

Performing an echocardiogram (ultrasound of the heart) is a highly specialised field with neverending levels of complexity. Firstly, you are often dealing with inadequate images due to the patient's obesity or other anatomical factors, therefore less experienced operators get worse images which can make interpretation impossible. Even when you do get good pictures, it is a very subjective area and 2 operators will commonly have divergent results for the same scan. Thirdly the there are dozens and dozens of parameters which can be measured or calculated which are used as surrogates for functional measurement of the heart - these are being proven or disproven/or becoming fashionable or falling out of fashion over time.

Practicioners need to perform a certain number of echos per year to maintain base competency, and those with low numbers generally perform much worse than those who do echos every day.

A quick, goal directed, focused echo can yield useful results, and does work a lot better than a stethoscope, but then many would argue that allowing allcomers (physicians/ED docs/anaesthesiologists/ICU docs) to perform poor quality scans is a step back from having more specialised doctors performing fewer, high quality scans.

So overall, the issue is probably not that the machines are too expensive, it is that we have not worked out exactly who should be doing these scans. The truth lies somewhere between a very few people (ultrasound trained cardiologists/radiologists) and everyone, but we are not sure exactly where.

Overall I think that the technical advances here will not come from building cheap open source ultrasound machines (although it does sound fun!), but from improving ultrasound machines in their ability to acquire and interpret pictures themselves. This may be by having a remote telesonographer that guides and interprets a scan performed by a layman (eg a nurse) which would allow rapid, remote results without the telesonographer present (and could also allow utilisation of excess sonographers in some locations to places where they are scarce, or allow daytime sonographers on one side of the world to help scan patients at 3am on the other side, or allow utilisation of outsourced remote indian/filipino sonographers for cost savings.

Alternatively, new tech would perform scans automatically (eg. robotic arms, or human operator guided with instructions or haptic feedback) and then do tech guided interpretation - eg. generate all the important data from the information given and present it at a level appropriate to the person requesting the scan.

The common working class person has no real ability to alter the globalisation and pro-immigration agenda pushed by mainstream politicians. Successive governments have indicated that they would reduce immigration but all it has done is increase.

My father was born in Birmingham, a city in which people of english-descent will be a minority by 2020. When a city is only 40% english-descent, it is no longer an English city.

Karachi is still a pakistani city. Lagos is still a nigerian city. Birmingham is not an english city.

Most brexiters aren't particularly fussed with the finer points of the common market, or EU centralised decision making. They just want border control and feel completely powerless as things stand to change anything. There is no neat referendum question regarding immigration, and there seems to be no way other than a referendum for real democratic hearing of people's views on this issue.

I have experienced a lot of volatility with the bitcoins I bought. Namely, they're all worth 100x what I paid for them, while fiat currency continues to lose value every day as central banks print money non-stop.

any link to details on what parts you use for these bots?