1000mH

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Friday inaugurated the federal government’s new “Well-Being Mega Pharmacy,” a facility he described as “possibly the largest pharmacy in the world.”

The opening of the Megafarmacia del Bienestar — a warehouse from which medications will be supplied to public hospitals and clinics — comes about five months after López Obrador first proposed the creation of a “kind of pharmacy, … a warehouse with all the medicines of the world in reasonable quantities” as a “definitive way out” of the medication shortages that have plagued his government.

There have been numerous protests against medication shortages in recent years, the most frequent of which have been demonstrations by parents of children with cancer. Shortages have eased somewhat compared to earlier in the government’s term, but many patients still encounter problems accessing the medications they need.

On Friday, López Obrador said that the establishment of the mega pharmacy will allow “everyone to have the medicines they need” wherever they are in the country and no matter whether they are rich or poor.

All the medications that will be distributed from the new facility will be free for patients, he said.

“This is what makes us different from our adversaries, and hopefully they’ll understand. Health care isn’t a privilege, it’s a right,” López Obrador added.

Where is the mega pharmacy?

The facility is in Huehuetoca, a México state municipality about 60 kilometers north of central Mexico City.

López Obrador said last month that the warehouse’s proximity to the Felipe Ángeles International Airport (AIFA) will allow medications to be promptly transported to different parts of the country. Huehuetoca borders Zumpango, the municipality where AIFA is located.

How big is it?

López Obrador said at his Friday morning press conference that the facility — formerly a warehouse owned by department store Liverpool — covers an area of 90,000 square meters, but the government subsequently clarified that it’s slightly bigger than that at 94,546 square meters.

The area is equivalent to about six or seven “Zócalos,” López Obrador said referring to the Mexico City central square.

Saying the mega phamarcy is twice as big as the Zócalo would be more accurate given that the central square spans an area of 46,800 square meters.

“It’s possibly the largest pharmacy in the world,” López Obrador said before challenging reporters to find out whether that was indeed the case.

“… The pharmacy is big, big, big, and it will have all the medications that are distributed in our country’s health sector,” he said.

Who will operate it?

The facility — which the government bought for around 1.4 billion pesos (US $82.5 million) — will be run by state-owned medical company Birmex, while the military will assist with the logistics of moving medications around the country.

Birmex director Jens Pedro Lohmann Itutburu said that the mega pharmacy will have the capacity to store 286 million “pieces” of medication.

He said that the facility will seek to resolve requests for medication made by hospitals and clinics affiliated with the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS), the State Workers Social Security Institute and the universal IMSS-Bienestar health care programs within three hours.

Individual patients and doctors will also be able to submit requests for medications.

How long will it take to get medications to public hospitals?

According to the government, public hospitals or clinics that request a certain medication or medications will receive their delivery within 48 hours.

Air Force planes and military vehicles will be used to transport medications.

López Obrador has stressed that medications will even reach hospitals in remote, rural areas of the country in no more than 48 hours.

Will the mega pharmacy actually solve Mexico’s medicine shortage problem?

The government certainly thinks so, but experts have some concerns.

Mauricio Rodríguez, a professor in the School of Medicine at the National Autonomous University (UNAM), questioned whether the government will have the capacity to purchase and distribute thousands of medications on a national scale from one central location.

He told the Associated Press that the government is opening the mega pharmacy without providing sufficient detail about how the system will operate, especially for urgently-needed medications.

Rodríguez also said that having such a large stockpile of drugs at one site is risky, and could sideline existing distribution systems.

Dr. José Moya, the World Health Organization’s Mexico representative, said that a centralized medicine warehouse could be a solution to the shortages problem, but stressed the importance of a good logistical system to support it.

“If they are considering a warehouse like this, it’s because there is a need, and this has to be very well organized,” he said.

Wondering what other hexbears are gifting their loved ones.

• For mother, a set of gardening tools and hat.
• For father, a leatherman multitool.
• For sister, an appointment with her favorite hairdresser.
• For sister, a tee shirt and tote bag from The Cure tour.

I will get nothing and deserve it.

What about you?

I'm not gonna watch it but someone might

The M1 Garand is correctly considered the best battle rifle of World War II. It was the only semi-automatic rifle––meaning that it fired each time the operator pulled the trigger––to be the standard issue infantry rifle of any army during the war. Other forces were equipped with bolt-action rifles––the British Lee Enfield, Soviet Mosin Nagat, Japanese Type 99, German K98, etc.–––that required the operator to manually pull back a bolt to eject the clip, and then push it forward again to insert a fresh cartridge into the chamber. The most obvious advantage was an increased rate of fire: a semiautomatic rifleman with an M1 had an official aimed rate of fire of 24 shots per minute. Compare this to the 15 aimed shots that British soldiers were expected to pop off with a bolt-action Lee Enfield in a “mad minute” drill. And the Lee Enfield was one of the fastest bolt-action rifles ever produced! In a pinch, a GI could blast out a clip in a few seconds, approximating a burst from an automatic weapon. Furthermore, with semi-automatic fire, the shooter could stay focused on his target, whereas working the bolt generally forced the shooter off target, requiring time to reacquire a proper sight picture.

Source with more fantastic photos.

Here are a couple.

Source with many more posters.

Here are a few that stand out.

Excerpt

What will happen to AI is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots. LLMs are a pretty good advance over Markov chains, and stable diffusion can generate images which are only somewhat uncanny with sufficient manipulation of the prompt. Mediocre programmers will use GitHub Copilot to write trivial code and boilerplate for them (trivial code is tautologically uninteresting), and ML will probably remain useful for writing cover letters for you. Self-driving cars might show up Any Day Now™, which is going to be great for sci-fi enthusiasts and technocrats, but much worse in every respect than, say, building more trains.

The biggest lasting changes from machine learning will be more like the following:

• A reduction in the labor force for skilled creative work
• The complete elimination of humans in customer-support roles
• More convincing spam and phishing content, more scalable scams
• SEO hacking content farms dominating search results
• Book farms (both eBooks and paper) flooding the market
• AI-generated content overwhelming social media
• Widespread propaganda and astroturfing, both in politics and advertising

Excerpt from the most interesting bit:

Architecturally this is interesting. Because if we are going to have AIs living inside our apps in the future, apps will need to offer a realtime NPC API for AIs to join and collaborate – and that will look very unlike today’s app APIs. And how will we get the visual training data for AI models to connect together what the user is seeing and the machine API? Questions for the future.

Anyway: I want to show you where I ended up.

Here’s my dolphin NPC PartyKit sketchbook. I posted this just today.

You’ll see three GIFs:

• You create a “pool” or a cursor park ("a space on a Google Docs page designated for placing your mouse cursor when you’re not actively editing the document") or (as I call it) an embassy on the whiteboard. The NPCs need somewhere to hang out when they’re idle. Then you summon your NPCs from the comms walkie-talkie on the page.

• NPCs can accept commands! From your walkie-talkie, you can tell the poet NPC to venture out of its embassy to write a poem. So it does that, as you can see, leaving a haiku on the whiteboard, then returns home.

• NPCs can be proactive! The painter dolphin likes to colour in stars. When you draw a star, the painter cursor ventures out of the embassy and comes and hovers nearby… “oh I can help” it says. It’s ignorable (unlike a notification), so you can ignore it or you can accept its assistance. At which point it colours the star pink for you, then goes back to base till next time.

Check out the movies on that page. It’s all working code! I can interact with these dolphin-cursor-NPCs. Let me tell you, it is uncanny to see a machine-driven cursor. It doesn’t move right.

Look yes it’s ridiculous, and these are woefully simple, toy interactions.

But, but, and, I learnt a ton.

Original caption from Getty Archives: 10/27/1954-Kimberly, South Africa

All African mine workers are x-rayed before leaving the diamond mines. A trained radiologist like the one in the picture can easily identify even the smallest diamond, which a would be thief might attempt to smuggle out of the mine in his stomach.

Source

Having never seen this photo before, I decided to post it.

Source is here but the description is wanting.