🌃Nightvision Phones, Hacker Insulin, and MetaMap

See wendigos with phone

Jul 05, 2021

Greetings all! and Happy Independence day weekend!

Did you see the latest Fast and Furious movie? I’ve never seen one (you see, when it comes to cars, I played Twisted Metal at around 8 years old . . . so Death Race is the only Car racing movie I like . . . .but I digress) BUT the movie literally brought in $70 million during its opening weekend, which is the most since 2019.

2019! It’s crazy to think that the movie industry has kinda been turned off for a year due to the pandemic.

I just watched Monsters - It’s a really interesting sci-fi film. It kinda reminded me of Alien Outpost -but from a more human perspective.

Speaking of crazy - a Lord of the Rings ANIME will be coming out. That’s right. Anime. Peter Jackson is involved too and Kenji Kamiyama. This will be good.

Oh, and the original code for the internet was sold as an NFT.

Truly, we live in some wild times.

Jeffrey Bezos stepping down . . .

C’mon Jeffrey you can do it, pave the way, put your back into it1

While you read today, shake things up with some spooky lo-fi vibes.

Let’s hop on in!

🌃Nightvision Phones

I used to read about all those crazy phones - the Red phone, Essential phone, the energizer phone with the 18000 mAH battery.

Back in the day, they used to cost like $700, 800.

Now you can get a smartphone with night vision for $400. Just look at this crazy thing. It looks indestructible.

I never would have imagined that we’d be at a place where a phone packing this much tech would be so cheap.

For the measly price of $400 you get a phone that

has enough battery for two days
has fast charging
Nightvison
8 gigs of ram
can go underwater, withstand heat . . .

The list goes on.

It’s a niche phone for a niche audience. I don’t need a phone with night vision - but I could see it being very useful to a first responder, a hunter, or in the horror movie scenario of . . .

Check it out at the link!

Nightvision

🐱‍💻Hacker Insulin

The prices of insulin are insane. That’s a fact.

Insulin prices tripled from 2002 to 2013, and doubled between 2012 and 2016. To put this into perspective, in 1996 a vial of Humalog produced by Eli Lilly cost $21. Today, it's priced at $324 despite the cost of production remaining steady. For those who rely on several vials per month, expenses can quickly end up in the thousands.
In the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, 90% of the global insulin market is owned by three companies: Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and Sanofi. These companies essentially have a monopoly on the market; there is simply no competition to drive the price down.2

Rather than - ya know - lower the price of insulin - everything is wrapped in a enigma - a “web of secrecy.”3

How are these skyrocketing prices determined? The manufacturers make the drug and set the price. This is part of the reason why insulin is so expensive. There's no limit to how high the price can be set, and they don't have to disclose how they set it. The manufacturers negotiate with Pharmacy Benefit Managers to be placed on PBM formularies in exchange for rebates. These rebates and negotiations also don't have to be disclosed.4

Not to mention the “complexity of the supply chain.”5

Truth is - it’s unlikely that anything will be done in the near future as it regards these three companies.

The question is - what do we do? What can we do?

There’s an organization of biohackers and volunteers leading up efforts to create an open-source model for producing insulin.

We are creating an open-source (freely available) model for insulin production that centers on sustainable, small-scale manufacturing and open-source alternatives to production.6

Rather than create a cheaper alternative to the big 3, they’d rather create an open-source model that can be adapted and used by anyone, and they’re getting closer to a solution.

Check out Open Insulin at the link!

Open Insulin

📍Meta Map

Outside of the audio chatroom space, not too much is happening in the land of social media.

TikTok has solidified its place.

The great war is waging with Clubhouse and others . . .

That’s where the interesting little guys come in - like MetaMap.

Here’s the deal with MetaMap

MetaMap helps people discover their immediate surroundings - letting them share news, ask questions, and interact freely. MetaMap lets you leave comments and chat with everyone near you. You’ll get notified when someone says something and vice versa.7

It’s an interesting idea - one that skews towards the organic and whimsical.

Here’s what it looks like. I downloaded the app, and it really is this basic. You’re a point on a map, and you can drop a point and comment only where you currently are.

There aren’t a whole lot of users. The app feels pretty proof of concept at the moment - but it represents an interesting idea.

Organically share information or meet up randomly - discover a hidden restaurant or bar - without sharing your identity or email address - sounds like it could be fun - or backfire.

I could see Google buying this and putting some sort of map comment idea within Google Maps. Heck, i’d spend a lottt of time in Google Maps if there were tons of comments around . . . highlighting cool stuff.

Check it out at the link!

MetaMap