A tax takes a percentage of value that someone else created. A royalty collects payment for access to something you already own. When Alaska collects from oil companies, it's not taxing their profits. It's charging them for extracting a resource that belongs to the people of Alaska. The oil was never theirs.
It being a royalty and not a tax is the reason Alaska's dividend is politically untouchable while tax-funded programs get gutted every budget cycle. Ownership is a fundamentally stronger claim than redistribution.
Probably not the case for some modern pure nicotine products (gum, patches). Vaping is harder to say due to lack of data and clear cases of addiction in young people, but pure nicotine is definitely a different animal than the classical delivery forms. See my response to GP.
I wonder if the issue with vapes isn't the sweeteners they put in them. I sometimes vape a specific liquid, which has never given me any cravings. I'll just stop after my bottle is done for multiple months until I remember to buy some more. I never carry my vape with me when I leave home (not to the office, not for multi-week holidays, nothing). It's not difficult to go without, I don't even think about it when I don't have it.
But the other day I ended up vaping some melon-flavored liquid. When it was empty, I was going crazy for a few hours, I absolutely had to have more. And it didn't even have more nicotine than what I usually vape. It was just the sweet taste that had me wanting more, exactly like back in my college days when I was eating Snickers bars like no tomorrow. Now that was a habit that was tough to break. And most people I see vaping out in the street seem to be vaping those ultra-sweet smelling liquids.
An interesting thought, I myself have met at least a couple people that tried to break an addiction by switching to vape products that were essentially just flavour (no nicotine, no THC; THC vapes are common and legal in Canada) and somehow stayed just as addicted to the flavour / oral stimulation. So that sounds at least plausible to me.
Nicotine is depending on how you measure the 3rd or 4th most addictive substance on the planet. It's up there with Heroine, Fentanyl, Cocaine, and Meth.
If you consider heroine a "not even once" type of drug then nicotine should give you pause.
What dimension of “addictive” are you anchoring on? Capture rate? Withdrawal severity? Reinforcement strength? Relapse rate after quitting? Nicotine dominates on some of those and not others.
Pretty clear from the responses to OP that most people are quite unaware there is almost two decades of decent research on pure nicotine now, and that, outside of vaping (where hard evidence is mostly lacking, due to the novelty), the purer stuff probably really isn't all that addictive, in the grand scheme of things. In many cases it is hard to even say it is much different than caffeine.
It's a reasonable mistake, I'd say. We spent those decades conflating "nicotine" with "smoking" and, through herculean efforts, managed to get the smoking rate down to 12-14% (in Germany it's still 22.7%!). Now, tobacco companies have come through with genuinely less harmful, genuinely less addictive products, but because of their previous wild duplicity, nobody really "believes" it. They think that nicotine must cause cancer. "Fool me once," for sure.
Can you point to said research because everything I can find from any kind of authoritative source is that form doesn't matter and nicotine is strongly addictive in all of them.
There is like zero messaging out there from anything resembling a health organization that says, "nicotine in purer forms is okay actually." It's an extraordinary claim that nicotine is super addictive only when mixed with other stuff and if you get the pure concentrated drug that actually lessens its pharmacological effects.
The delivery system modulates speed and magnitude of the hit, which affects how rapidly and how strongly dependence forms, but every form produces dependence with sustained use.
There isn’t anyone who is going to say “nicotine in purer forms is okay actually” because there isn’t anyone who is tasked with answering such a broad question.
Also, be careful not to shift the frame. Spivak ranked nicotine with other drugs. You changed the framing to “all are highly addictive.” These are different assertions, and both can be true at the same time. That’s why it’s more important and more interesting to discuss it in terms of addiction subtypes
bullshit. i've been smoking cigars for 5 years now. sometimes 2 or 3 a day and have zero issues stopping or going without a smoke for months. i was surprised as i was never smoker, but it is what it is. nicotine addiction is not nicotine addiction but cigarette addiction. cigars are pure tobacco. nothing else. cigarettes have over thousand ingredients in them. cigars also have higher nicotine dose than cigarettes and as i have said, zero issues.
as i said, nictoine is a non-factor. as for caffeine, i quit multiple times. once the headaches are gone, which takes a week or two, followed by another week, or few, of feeling lethargic, it is back to normal(ie. give it a month altogether). so it's not too bad. it might be also easier to wean off slowly by decreasing caffeine consumption over longer period than quitting cold turkey to avoid the negative effects altogether.
Utter nonsense. I have replaced my ADHD prescription with nicotine patches, and in my experience I have had worse withdrawals, and greater desire to consume caffeine than either dermal nicotine or dexamfetamine. And I’m only a cup a day kinda guy, and I used to be a heavy smoker for years, so I know how dangerous the stuff can be.
If we’re talking about smoking or vaping, or nicotine pouches, sure, but mode of administration and how quickly it peaks in your bloodstream cannot be hand-waved away like that.
Got something other than anecdata? Because a web search returns a list of contrary sources as long as my arm.
But, hell, if we are trading stories, I dipped snuff for 30 years and I’ve consumed coffee since middle school. I can go days without coffee, even if I might not be happy about it. Quitting tobacco, OTOH, that was tough, with multiple starts and stops until success.
Is that because it's a stimulant, or is there some other known mechanism? It seems like most (maybe all) stimulants I've read about are correlated with cardiovascular issues.
I think one theory is that nicotine is a vasoconstrictor. Though whether, in its pure form, it is a particularly significant one, i.e. any worse than caffeine, is really not so clear.
Cancer also stems from non-heated tobacco because the plant itself contains carcinogens that are pressed into the skin in the mouth for example, often including lesions and such
Given the long-term, widespread usage of coffee, is there something specific they're waiting on? Or is that an "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" thing?
Your final statement doesn't really add value without knowing that, unless you agree that we shouldn't assume other people are actually people, and not lizards in people suits until they prove, definitively, otherwise.
My mistake. I interpreted their comment to be implying that nicotine pouches do. I'm not referring to evidence for the safety of coffee, but of nicotine pouches.
I don't think zyn has been studied enough to be conclusive, but it does have some negative effects similar to dip I suppose? Dip on the other hand is described as using something like 'fiberglass' that cuts your mouth so your gums can absorb the nicotine quicker, of course the tobacco industry denies this. I've only tried dip once, and it was like a kick to the face. I'll stick to casual cigar smoking (its been 4 years though!).
These kind of synthetic nicotine products aren't carcinogenic. They were originally developed as a safer replacement for the traditional Swedish practice of stuffing a bag of tobacco in your mouth, although after acquisition by Phillip Morris they've become common among people who never used tobacco in the first place. (As the article gestures towards, they are "tobacco products" under US law because of their nicotine content, even though they contain no tobacco leaf.)
they are horrendously addicting though which is the huge difference between nicotine and caffeine. Even though I love caffeine I can go days without it no problem (besides being slightly more tired). Habitual nicotine users tend to need to re-up every hour or so
I quit zyns a year ago and still crave them daily. Sooooo good and addictive and they don’t have that “it’s killing you” imperative to quit like cigarettes do
I'm not sure it is actually all that clear that pure nicotine products really are so addictive as people believe. E.g. most studies claiming such addictiveness may simply be because those that get addicted to patches / gum were already addicted to cigarettes (or other classic tobacco product) prior. See e.g. Gwern's notes on the topic.
Both of these links go to self-reported data about how addicted people feel themselves to be, which I don't think is credible at all. It's very common for addicts to falsely believe that they're not addicted and could quit whenever they want.
> Both of these links go to self-reported data about how addicted people feel themselves to be
This is an incredible and outright lie.
Actually try reading the page I linked, there are plenty of links to scientific studies, scientific reviews, and high-quality resources, as well as lots of careful notes about serious confounds in the usual studies. This includes in exactly the sections I linked.
By all means still be cautious and not careless about using the stuff, that is a perfectly sane position. But I think it is very clear that e.g. patches and gum are highly unlikely to have anything even approaching the risk profile of classic tobacco products.
Experience is usually a subjective thing. But it seems pretty clear to me. I’m was huge advocate of free speech and a political moderate
but X made me question my priors on content moderation. There was genuinely heinous shit on my feed and i had no good way to filter it.
I don't use that site much nowadays, but every time I do, I am shocked at just how many fucking bugs there are. This idea that they laid off whatever percentage of their workforce with no impact to the quality of the software is not based in reality whatsoever.
And don't get me started on the UX. Fucking dumpster fire of an experience. But network effects gonna network effect.
I logged into xitter recently after a long time, and my feed was cluttered with anti immigrant scare stories, western values under threat etc. that I got really scared thinking what the future holds if people are getting brain washed to this extent. It was things I never followed anywhere, so Elon is literally stuffing this crap down everyone's throat. Vibes of invention of radio and television powering the Holocaust.
Would nuclear energy research be a good analogy then? Seems like a path we should have kept running down, but stopped bc of the weapons. So we got the weapons but not the humanity saving parts (infinite clean energy)
Nuclear advancements slowed down due to PR problems from clear and sometimes catastrophic failure of commercial power plants (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima) and the vastly higher costs associated with building safer plants.
If anything the weapons kept the industry trucking on - if you want to develop and maintain a nuclear weapons arsenal then a commercial nuclear power industry is very helpful.
Nuclear energy hasn't been slowed down much, let alone stopped. China has been building new reactors every year for more than a decade and there are >30 ones under construction.
The same will go with AI, btw. Westerners' pearl clenching about AI guardrails won't stop China from doing anything.
Define "so many". Most people have health insurance through their job, which translates to them having basic affordable healthcare. Not everyone has this, so I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's not some abysmal state of affairs where most of the country is suffering.
They aren't. Anyone can go to the ER, and if you're poor it'll be billed through Medicaid. When I was young and poor, I had a multi-day hospital stay and multiple surgeries that totaled to $3.50 out of pocket. Urgent cares are everywhere and affordable.
I had a cholecystectomy a few years ago and had a complication that caused a gallstone to get lodged in my common bile duct after removal. Three days after surgery I was in the ER, I let them know I was in debilitating pain and that I just had surgery. They made me sit in the waiting room for 8 hours and only took me back when a doctor walked passed and noticed I was jaundiced. After his shift ended, the nurse who was watching me overnight while I waited to have an emergency surgery (because the surgeon had already gone home for the day by the time I got triaged) was told to keep an eye on me and do blood draws hourly. I didn't get seen once and by morning my liver enzymes were so high they were off the testing scale.
Sure you can go to the ER. The level of treatment you get heavily depends on luck
They'll treat you if you have a heart attack and make it in alive. They won't put you on blood thinners or statins 10 years before that to keep you out of the ER in the first place.
>> so many of your citizens without even basic affordable healthcare
> They aren't. Anyone can go to the ER, and if you're poor it'll be billed through Medicaid.
You guys are both wrong, and arguing with broad brushes about something that's complicated and subtle.
Health insurance is available to everyone in the country, but it's expensive and extremely complicated (among other things: you don't "bill through" Medicaid and lots of folks who qualify aren't on it because they can't figure it out).
It's true that the pre-ACA world where getting sick without employer-provided insurance means dying poor is gone. Almost everyone who needs serious care in the US gets it in some form, but lots of care is delayed because people aren't covered, as getting covered is "affordable" but extremely expensive (unsubsidized family plans run $20k/year and up!). It's much better than it used to be but not a great system.
The flip side is that it's also true that the large-payer corporate insurance system provides "better" care in the sense of access and outcomes[1] than the state-run systems in Europe. It's extremely rare in the US to hear the "on a waiting list" stories about elective care that you hear especially in regard to the NHS.
It's complicated, basically, and not well-suited to yelling on the internet.
[1] Obviously the system pays for this with much (and I mean much) higher service rates than the rest of the world extracts for the same care. US doctors and health systems do very well.
Not "rich", but "employed by a major corporation". Large-payer private insurance in the US is fine and produces outcomes at or above the level you see in the rest of the industrialized world. All the yelling is about ACA plans and subsidy programs.
What is the 'INSERTNAME' law that explains how all conversations on HN, which is ostensibly focused on tech, devolve (evolve) into the realm of the humanities?
UK isn't EU, especially when it comes to health system. I lived in the US for quite some time (from Fr), the healthcare is great... if you can afford an expensive health insurance AND pay some extra money when required. The avg US people can not pay and when you can not pay the experience is just far worth than terrible.
They have worked recently to implement a self-hosted tax submission system and given their rate of return while there may be some mismanagement it is one of the most provably efficient organizations in the government netting 415$ for every dollar of funding in 2024.
Isn’t that a completely bizarre metric though in this instance??! It is specifically the revenue generating arm of the government. If it wasn’t running at a “surplus” that would be very concerning indeed.
No the point is that if the IRS was at maximum efficiency, more funding wouldn't increase revenues because tax law is tax law: you can't market it or expand the customer base.
But if every new dollar currently produces much more then a dollar in returns, it means it's underfunded because taxes that should be collected, that by legal analysis would be planned for in budgeting, aren't.
And that matters for a great many things, but one reason is that if you pay taxes and want a tax cut then one reason you're not getting it is because actual revenues are lower then they should be due to uncollected taxes.
Most law enforcement related entities end up being a money sink while enforcing our laws - the IRS actually runs a substantial profit while enforcing laws and additional funding would increase that funding. This also isn't a case like asset forfeiture where the money being collected is arguably unwarranted and shouldn't be taken from citizens. The IRS's "profit" ends up coming purely from catching people trying to commit fraud and enforcing the laws as written.
I did no verification on whether that metric is correct or not, but I would suspect the metric would be only measuring the amount of revenue the IRS "generated" from doing manual work like audits. The regular, I owe 1,000 in taxes, and I paid 1,000 in taxes. Wouldn't be considered +1,000 in that case, it would be excluded from the metric altogether. Only the additional "findings" from audits would be counted.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have an IRS, and I think IRS agents are probably one of the best ROI gov't employees possible, but 8,500 IT engineers and managers (who I have heard literally didn't even know how to code) makes no sense at all
I don't work in the IRS so I'm not certain what all of that is doing - but here we've got an organization that is highly efficient that's being targeted and downsized for political reasons. If we want to discuss wasteful government spending we need look no further than the DoD which still hasn't passed an internal audit for the past eight consecutive years. I don't know how the DoD is spending its money - that's fair, I'm just a rando... but the DoD doesn't know how the DoD is spending its money and that's purely absurd. The scales of budgets are also astronomically different - the DoD has a projected budget of 961 billion this year while the IRS has a projected budget of 11.9 billion - and that 11.9 billion ends up producing a large amount of excess revenue for the government.
I'm sure there's waste in the IRS - but these budget cuts are not being done in good faith.
The tax code is complex and Direct File isnt the only IRS digital service. It was built by F18 and USDS. You should inform yourself instead of being hysterical about numbers. If you inform yourself the numbers aren’t so scary.
I'd be more impressed we got rid of income tax on salaried people entirely, or permit families the same type of deductions that businesses get, and only tax my actual profit - I can't deduct my overpriced housing, or my utilities unless I have a home office for ny own business.
It's not the IT department's fault, but it makes one wonder if the IT department needs to actually be that large, since customers need to do so much on their own.
Per capita the UK has 2.5x the IT workers in tax collection compared to the US (~25 IT per million vs 65 IT per million). But, those tax collection IT workers help create a system which means UK citizens don't spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year just to file their taxes.
And yet all countries with socialized systems pay less per capita for healthcare than we do and pretty much all have better health outcomes. Further privatizing our system will only make it more dis-functional. Healthcare isn't a normal marketplace. * When you really need it, you can't shop around. * There is a knowledge asymmetry built in. * A civilized society can't just let poor children die of preventable causes.
I’m going to drop my doctor this year because he abuses appointments. I call in about an issue and he charges me $75 for telehealth. Then he wants me to come in to run labs for the telehealth call. Another $75 at least. Then another telehealth call for the results. And another one for the results from the radiology department. I told him I have a high out of pocket and he says “I’m sorry to hear that.” Then books me for a follow up.
Doctors do not care about the healthcare system one bit.
> I call in about an issue and he charges me $75 for telehealth. Then he wants me to come in to run labs for the telehealth call. Another $75 at least.
I live in EU country with public universal healthcare and healthcare over here looks exactly the same. These cunts travel to US on holidays and as kickbacks, and salivate at how the American healthcare is "organized".
Is that very different from what Joe Gebbia is doing now as chief design officer? Seems to be largely a rebranding of 18F's mission with different people and prioritization
I don't know how into building organizations you are, but 18f succeeded. they had a small footprint, and outsized impact, and really good relationships with the rest of the government. That kind of effectiveness is really difficult to grow in a massive bureaucracy. If your goal is efficiency you try to nurture that success.
throwing it away and starting over for purely political reasons is a completely negative outcome. the best you could hope for is to replicate what it was, but odds are against you.
I am so confused when I read things like this because my Tesla model 3 is effectively self driving for me for months now. Hundreds of miles without intervention. No other car I can buy can do this yet
That’s irresponsible at best give it doesn’t support full self driving. I never understood why end users are allowed to just beta test a car on public roads.
Is it responsible to let users do auto speed and auto lane on a high speed highway without other autopilot features ?
Rollout both technologies at scale , and try to guess with one will cause more harm giving th fact there will be users in both cars trying to put legs on a steering wheel :
A stupid tech that will not even try to do safe things
Or software that is let’s say 4x less safe vs avg human but still very capable of doing maneuvering without hitting obvious walls etc ?
Giving people more ways to shut themselves in the foot does not improve the safety.
I find the entire thing a kind of dark pattern as the system along with misleading marketing makes you lax over time just to catch you off guard.
You get used with the system to work correctly and then when you expect less it does the unthinkable and the whole world blames you for not supervising a beta software product on the road on day 300 with the same rigour you did on day one.
I can see a very direct correlation with LLM systems. Claude has been working great for me until one day when it git reset the entire repo and I’ve lost two days work because it couldn’t revert a file it corrupted . This happened because I just supervised it just like you would supervise a FSD car with “bypass” mode. Fortunately it didn’t kill anyone , just two days of work lost. If there was the risk of someone being killed I would never allow a bypass /fsd/supervise mode regardless of how unlikely this is to happen.
they have very good guardrails to prevent you that, unlike autolane etc.
Teslas has sensors , eye trackers etc is it possible to shoot yourself in the leg, sure. But not in any different way vs human doing irrational things in the car, make up, arguing , love etc.
Human-being is an irrational create that should not drive except for fun in isolated environment. Tesla or Waymo or anyone else.... It is good to remove human from the road, the faster the better.
>> It is good to remove human from the road, the faster the better.
I’m all for this but not to replace dumb people with dumb software. I think the FSD should be treated more like the airplane safety. We have the opportunity to do this right not just what’s the cheapest way we can get away with it.
well, if you don't read news that try to panic about everything new, that's +- exactly how people currently use FSD.
When I'm driving FSD If i want to drink, eat, etc, instead of doing weird one hand tricks every driver did, i just turn FSD and let it drive. When I'm tired , I'm doing the same. Again , attention control works really good, it doesn't let you sit on the phone etc. unlike many other cars with less advanced features. You can't be on FSD + Phone but you can easily be on the phone + lane control in other car.
Phone is by far the biggest real killer of people, and no body is trying to create a campaign against phone mounts, etc.
Based on the self driving trials in my Model Y, I find it terrifying that anyone trusts it to drive them around. It required multiple interventions in a single 10-minute drive last time I tried it.
I'm using FSD for 100% of my driving and only need to intervene maybe once a week. It's usually because the car is not confident of too slow, not because it's doing something dangerous. Two years ago it was very different where almost every trip I needed to intervene to avoid crash. The progress they have made is truly amazing.
This exact sentence (minus the specific version) is claimed every single week.
No, you do not "become scary good" every single week the past 10 years and yet still not be able to drive coast to coast all by itself (which Elon promised it would do a decade ago)
You are just human and bad at evaluating it. You might even be experiencing literal statistical noise.
I have not been proclaiming scary good every week for the last 10 years. In fact, I have cancelled my subscription at least two times, once on v13 and once on v14, with the reason ‘not good enough yet.’ I am telling you that for me personally it has crossed a threshold very recently.
It certainly wasn't in the past few weeks, but I've been hearing about how good it's gotten for years. Certainly not planning to pay to find out if it's true now, but I'll give it another try next free trial!
Make sure you are on AI4 hardware when you do. If you buy FSD on AI3 you’ll be limited to v13, which is is terrible. I have used both and they are in different leagues altogether.
You need only look at Tesla's attempts to compete with Waymo to see that you are just wrong. They tried to actually deploy fully autonomous Teslas, and it doesn't really work, it requires a human supervisor per car.
They are behind Waymo but they are getting there. They started giving fully autonomous drives since last month without safety driver in Austin. Tesla chose a harder camera-only approach but it's more scalable once it works.
Clearly at this point the camera-only thing is the ego of Musk getting in the way of the business, because any rational executive would have slapped a LIDAR there long ago.
> Mr Keegan said he was “pretty confident” that in “the next five to 10 years” driverless vehicles would “make a major contribution in terms of sustainable transport” on Dublin’s streets.
As always, people were overoptimistic back then, too. There are currently no driverless vehicles in Dublin at all, with none expected anytime soon unless you count the metro system (strictly speaking driverless, but clearly not what he was talking about).
Ask Musk why he refuses to provide details of accidents so we can make a judgment.
Tesla’s own Vehicle Safety Report claims that the average US driver experiences a minor collision every 229,000 miles, meaning the robotaxi fleet is crashing four times more often even by the company’s own benchmark.
I don't see how we could know the rate of US driver minor collisions like that. No way most people reporting 1-4mph "collisions" with things like this.
You don't have to know. You can fully remove the few "minor" accidents (that a self driving car shouldn't be doing ever anyway) and the Tesla still comes out worse than a statistical bucket that includes a staggering number of people who are currently driving drunk or high or reading a book
The car cannot be drunk or high. It can't be sleepy. It can't be distracted. It can't be worse at driving than any of the other cars. It can't get road rage. So why is it running into a stationary object at 17mph?
Worse, it's very very easy to take a human that crashes a lot and say "You actually shouldn't be on the road anymore" or at least their insurance becomes expensive. The system in all of these cars is identical. If one is hitting parked objects at 17mph, they would almost all do it.
Even on highways I've had to intervene maybe once every 50 miles as it will often miss exits for me. This is a 2025 Model 3 with the latest 14.2 update in a major US metro.
The data from their self driving pilots disagrees even if it works for you. Its simply not read to be a taxi that makes money by itself.
It might a nice feature for your car to have. But most people aren't paying for it, the conversion rate is very low.
So they are not making money from taxis and not making much money from software sales.
So does it matter that for you personally it drives you around sometimes?
Even if you price in a 4x increase in FSD buy conversion ratio, you can't explain the stock price.
And I say this as a former Tesla investor who assumed that conversion ratio would be better then it is. But for that reason (and many others) I couldn't justify the valuation and dropped the stock.
Because if you get in an accident you personally not Tesla are liable. Soon as I’m not liable for an accident when the computer is driving I’d sell my other cars and put my family in pink PT Cruisers if those were the only cars offering that
I am confused as to why you think no interventions in "hundreds of miles" is good enough. It has to be no interventions for hundreds of thousands of miles WITH THE CAR BEING EMPTY to be good enough.
Months where you’re still required to be paying attention. Meanwhile 2 years ago Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot a level 3 system let you sit and watch a movie without paying attention to the road.
Personally that’s way more useful for me even if they didn’t let you turn it on at highway speeds.
They canceled it because of poor adoption rather than any technical issues.
Which if anything looks worse for Tesla long term. If luxury car owners aren’t willing to pay 200$/month for self driving then trying to up charge people buying used model 3 and Y’s after canceling the S and X looks dubious. Which means that 100$/month subscription likely loses them money vs an 8k purchase.
Mercedes system was pretty useless because you could only use it in very limited conditions (specific freeways, only following another car). Nobody wants to pay $200/month to use it for 5% of their driving. Tesla FSD drives for you end-to-end.
Most people have a rather consistent commute, so the Mercedes was a more like a 0% or 80% kind of thing. The issue was adding more roads wasn’t going to help, the underlying benefit to attention free driving just wasn’t that valuable even to customers who could use the system regularly.
They are looking to reintroduce it with a much higher top of 81MPH which might help, but agin my issue isn’t with the particular system but the underlying assumption of how much people value attention free driving.
The new robot demos from Unitree make me wonder how many classes of unskilled labor are about to be automated (garbage collection, laundry & dishes, pothole repairs, last mile delivery, simple food preparation…)
There are already human-operated robots that collect garbage. Things like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pl9vRCC6V0. If the automated robots end up being anything like that, I wouldn't expect them to be silent.
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