Donald Trump keeps saying that he's the guy who reduced the price of insulin, not Joe Biden, and he repeated this claim yesterday. What's up with that?
It's a bit like claiming that Henri Poincaré really invented the Theory of Relativity, not that Einstein fellow.¹ It isn't true, but there's a little something there. Here's what Trump did about insulin prices:
- In January 2020 Trump indicated that he wanted CMS to reduce insulin prices under Medicare.
- In March, "under President Trump's leadership," CMS announced a voluntary pilot program that reduced insulin copays to $35.
- In July Trump signed an executive order that reduced insulin copays for certain low-income patients on Medicaid.
- In January 2021 the CMS pilot program for Medicare started.
So that's it. Trump did talk about insulin copays, and he started up a test program with lower copays. But nothing more. It was Joe Biden who permanently lowered insulin copays under the Inflation Reduction Act.
¹Edmund Whittaker published a history of electricity and the aether in 1953 that famously said "Einstein published a paper which set forth the relativity theory of Poincaré and Lorentz with some amplifications."
Now, it's true that the problems of physics in 1905 were very widely known, and it's also true that Poincaré nibbled around the edges of a solution. In a sense, you can say that Einstein merely explained the conceptual premise of empirical facts well known to Poincaré. Needless to say, though, it's those conceptual innovations that were of prime importance.
Any other contenders in history for the title of Most Dishonest Person to Ever Live? There must be some good ones.
Trump is not dishonest. He is anti-honest.
"Dishonest" means something like "readily use lies when it is useful".
Trump lies whether it is useful or not, and also make other people tell lies, whether it is useful or not. He tries to extinguish honesty.
I give you Harry G. Franfurt On Bullshit.
For that matter, Einstein didn't come up with the notion of space-time either. That's Hermann Minkowski:
But the public is determined to have their Great Man narrative come Hell or high water.
I'm always amused by the way people tend to say "Einstein's Theory of Relativity", instead of just "relativity" or "relativity theory", as though adding Einstein's name to it somehow certifies that it must be right -- because everyone knows that Einstein was a great genius.
and planck initially refused to give boltzmann his due, but held his nose when statistical mechanics solved the ultraviolet catastrophe (which einstein also used to win his nobel for the photoelectric effect)
boltzmann, a lifelong depressive, committed suicide in 1906 but lived long enough to see his vindication
Boltzmann is where I got my handle. In retrospect it's obvious, I guess ????
as in... crushing a violet (a violet catastrophe) releases its scent?
A 19th Century problem: In one corner of a room, open a bottle of violet scent. Initially, in the opposite corner, one smells nothing. However, eventually -- a minute or so tops -- one smells the scent of violets. Why?
And from that seemingly trivial problem, plus a couple of other ingredients, we got Boltzmann's statistical mechanics.
gotcha... didn't know violet was the chemical they specified
much nicer than butyric acid 😉
Well, yeah, really they were just talking about how scents propagate. But violet perfume smells ever so much nicer than butyric acid. That's why it was colloquially called the 'scent of violets' problem and not the 'butyric acid problem' 🙂
I tried learning more about this and made it through the first sentence. ????????
yeah, maxwell worked on ordered/pretty things, boltzmann worked on disordered/ugly things
I had to look this up. Adolf Eugen Fick came up with two laws describing diffusion. Boltzmann was able to convert Fick's second law from a partial differential equation into an ordinary differential equation. This was important because the ordinary differential equation was easier to solve.
Cute. But a lot of people aren't going to know you made that up.
It's a filter. And I had to have a handle, after all.
And Francis Bacon really wrote Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter!
couldn't have.
francis bacon was not the real shakespeare. maybe of the bard's sonnets addressed his personal love interests, which were women, & francis bacon... also a homosexual.
trump should have his own news section, 'lying sack of shit quote of the day'
and they shouldn't even try to determine whether any specific utterance is true or false; just post it in that subhed with an asterisk saying 'caveat lector'
but if against all historical precedent readers still wanna waste their time fact checking that's up to them
a bit like george w. bush saying he was the one who got osama bin laden because it was the bush administration that allowed obl to abscond to pakistan, where eventually he was captured.
It’s what a sociopath/likely psychopath (google it) does. He’ll never stop.
compare and contrast
today's AP:
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Coalition to March on the RNC 2024 filed a lawsuit last month against the city of Milwaukee, alleging that the city’s plans for protesters violated their free speech rights. They had asked the judge to order that the city design a protest parade route that is within sight and hearing of the Fiserv Forum where thousands of Republicans will be gathering starting Monday to nominate Donald Trump for president.
U.S. District Judge Brett Ludwig said in his order that protesters have a right to march in protest of the RNC, “but the First Amendment does not allow them to protest or parade in any way they choose.”
Ludwig said that Milwaukee city officials and the U.S. Secret Service have worked to balance protesters’ right to express themselves and “legitimate security and other governmental interests.”
**********************
June 26, 2014
The Supreme Court has struck down a Massachusetts law mandating a 35-foot buffer zone around clinics that provide abortion services.
Backers of the legislation have said the law treats groups equally, requiring both supporters and opponents of abortion rights to maintain their distance from the clinics. But in a unanimous ruling Thursday, the justices found that the buffer zone infringes on the First Amendment rights of protesters.
Poincare was known to say that Einstein stole his work. After all, Einstein's paper rather famously contained no references. However, Einstein took a conceptual leap that Poincare either didn't think of or was unwilling to do -- revamp Newtonian mechanics to make its principles consistent with Maxwell electrodynamics. To be fair to Poincare, though, the idea that different physical theories should follow the same fundamental principles is a relatively new one in physics. It is by no means obvious that the worlds of cannonballs and radio waves should be the same.
Donald Trump is lying about lowering the cost of insulin. Here's why that's bad for Joe Biden...
The NYT
FWIW, both Trump and Biden have completely screwed up insulin along with many other drugs. Insulin producers have been routinely discontinuing production of older, non patent protected versions in order to push marginally improved (if at all) versions that have patent protection. Insulin is cheap, you just can't buy the cheap versions in the US as we encourage such shenanigans to provide incentive to "innovate" but the only real innovation that is going on are schemes to dramatically jack up the price.
I'm always happy to learn my place in the world even if it reflects badly on me. This comment section, while interesting, lets me know I'm not as smart as I had hoped. Poincare? Minkowski? Einstein I've heard of. I even wrote a paper on the Theory of Relativity (high school). All I remember about it is that light is affected by gravity. I think. Many of you must be physics majors who had to learn the controversies. I'm a Humanities major. Everything is settled over there. No problems.