The Sacklers need an attitude adjustment.

Unfortunately I think it is now necessary to think of such things if only to inoculate ourselves against the numbness that follows horror. They escalate in shocking steps as an intentional strategy to stun healthy people into inaction.

At least for me personally, I have chosen not to spend the next 4 years in a state of emotional shock. I get it, they are callous monsters. I won’t let them distract me from working with every remaining sane person in my life to destroy them.

That is far from ‘how it works’ with capital equipment of this cost. It’s like steering the titanic to change a major piece of diagnostic equipment. These types of devices are integrated into the health records databases, they require gas supply of various sorts, you might need to knock out a wall to remove it, which shuts down other critical lab functions.

All in all, in my experience installing lab automation, it took over two years from the moment the decision is made to buy a 6-7 figure system to getting the first real patient data from that system. It involves architects, contractors, medical and lab directors, training, hand holding, lawsuits.

So it’s a type of vendor lock-in far worse than anything else I have encountered.

I think I get you. You can’t really play around with a new concept in your head until it has a name.

I hate AI slop, but one research trick they are good at is identifying the existing vocabulary others have developed. You can describe the phenomenon in pretty shaky terms and it will spit out the magic words to connect you to the research of others on that topic.

I have found that it accelerates my research significantly because I spend less time in the weeds trying it on my own. It is thus easier to find the edges of our collective knowledge and move research efforts to more unexplored areas.