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languagelog_feedLast August and September, President Donald Trump asserted that his actions would reduce drug prices by as much as 1500%, and more recently claimed actual reductions by as much as 600%. On April 22, Elizabeth Warren questioned RFK Jr. about this. She registered a doubt about the mathematics of a reduction in price by greater than 100%, although she mainly focused on the fact that Costco's prices for some cited drugs are substantially less than those at Trump Rx.
The president pitched his Trump Rx website as the answer for Americans who are worried about healthcare costs. He claims that Trump Rx has reduced prices by as much as 600%, 600%, which I think means companies should be paying you to take their drugs.
A couple of days ago in the Oval Office, RFK Jr. left Costco out of it, and offered an odd defense of the president's percentage calculations.
I was reminded when the President was speaking
of a conversation that I had yesterday with one of the Democratic senators
who was questioning me during the hearing and
she was ridiculing President Trump for his math
and she was saying
"It's im- mathematically impossible
to have ((that)) a drug drop by six hundred percent cost"
which he had claimed.
And I said "well if the drug was a hundred dollars
a- and it raised the price to six hundred dollars
that would be a six hundred percent rise.
Well if it drops from six hundred to a hundred
that's a six hundred percent savings."
Last fall, a report on remedial math programs at the UC San Diego shocked some commenters with the proportions of students apparently unable to solve some very basic math problems. But the clips featured above underline the fact that this is not not a new issue.
As explained in the Wikipedia article on Relative Change, if V1 represents the old value and V2 the new one, the formula for Percentage Change is
So an increase in price from \$100 to \$600 is an a percentage change of
And a decrease in price from \$600 to \$100 is a percentage change of
As Senator Warren suggested, the only way to get a 600% decrease in price would be to make the V2 price negative, specifically -\$3000:
In other words, the company would need to pay you \$3000 to get the drug.
My experience teaching today's (generally smart and well prepared) college students is that many of them have conceptual problems with percentage change calculations, and in particular often need to be reminded of the just-cited asymmetry. So it's not surprising that Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had similar problems; though it's worrying that none of their aides straightened them out.
The video clip for the Senate hearing:
And for the Oval Office press event:
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lilly_c posting in 3weeks4dreamwidth3weeks4dreamwidth. I used a randomiser several times to get the final choices from my list of over 400 words once the sneaky duplicates were removed.| temperature | breakdown | magic | gone | darkness | improvise | investigate |
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umadoshirenay got nominated for Intergalactic Mixtape for Best Fanzine (all the more impressive for how new it still is!), as well as for The Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom for Best Related Work. ^_^scruloose and I watched the c-drama that I mostly only remember my feelings about it, so I have no real sense of how faithful its plot wound up being by the end.)scruloose if they'd be up for giving Justice in the Dark a shot, if only to give me the excuse to rewatch the first eight episodes before finally moving on to the ones that eventually got released in Japan after not being cleared to air in China. They agreed, and we're now four or five episodes in!
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Hovertext:
During the book tour of A City on Mars, I did a talk with Randall Munroe in NYC, and he made, impromptu, a better joke than any of us have committed to paper. During a discussion of whether you could eliminate all life on Earth for a reasonable price, a person asked if there might be a way you could specifically annihilate Queens. To which he replied, 'regicide?'
lsandersonrydra_wongoursinWoman in question was clearly the despair of her family and the local police who failed to discourage her from sending £££ to a series of romance scammers.
The family even spoke to her doctor, who said she was of sound mind, merely 'brainwashed'.
Eventually she
was contacted by a man in Ghana known as Kofi. He claimed he was a doctor and had found out she was being scammed when he came across her details while working part-time in a phone shop. Kofi told her he would help her get her money back and she flew to Accra in October 2022.... The relationship with the man appeared to develop into a romance and Fordham agreed to marry him, the inquest heard.
This also makes me think of a possible historical sort of parallel, whereby in the days of belief in witchcraft if you got cursed, there was also - well, perhaps not quite a profession - a class of individuals whose job it was to lift curses, cunningfolk. (Am not going to rush off and delve into the fairly numerous works on the subject around here.)
And more generally on the topic of spam, that conference in Kyoto is still anxiously asking for my response on whether I will be joining them.
