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I guess you have missed all the stories about pharma raising prices

Apparently you read at0mjack's post and didn't understand anything. at0mjack even mentioned insulin. Since you didn't understand it, I'll restate it using littler words. Hope this helps!

Because the FDA requires insane red tape, companies that successfully get past the red tape then charge a bunch, knowing that other companies can't compete (since the other companies haven't gotten past the red tape). The big companies that can get past the red tape are okay with this situation since they like being able to charge a bunch of money.

Cutting down the red tape at the FDA would allow the free market to operate and would prevent companies from charging too much money for well-proven things like insulin.

Another classic example: the EpiPen. Since the technology is decades old, it's no longer under patent. Since epinephrine is a well-understood drug, many companies can make it. Yet the EPA still requires crazy red tape before something like an EpiPen can be sold, and as a result only one company can sell the EpiPen and that company is free to jack up the prices. If the drug market was more of a free market, there would be more than one company making epinephrine self-injectors and competition would bring the prices down to a sane level.

When this was discussed here on Slashdot, some commentators said "it makes sense to have the FDA put a bunch of red tape on this. What if some stupid company sold something like an EpiPen that didn't work right? People could die!" But the current red tape is so bad that the company can charge $600 for a device that costs something like $5 to make, without facing any competition... that's pretty bad red tape.

ACHS -- Government Is The Big Reason EpiPen And Other Generics Are So Expensive

Face it, pharma is the poster child for greed.

Let's go back and see what at0mjack wrote:

So, there is definitely blame here for a failure of the market, and at least some of that can be laid at the feet of regulatory capture by the pharma companies, but the FDA (and lawmakers) are equally to blame and it's not a "conspiracy".

In other words, drugs are expensive due to the situation, and the drug companies are partly to blame but the rest of the blame is on the FDA and the lawmakers. Or in other words, you are criticizing someone who has a much more complete understanding of the situation than you have.

Stanton A Glantz, author of your link, is a hack who is in it for the grant money and has made a career with the anti-smoking schtick. He just switched it up to anti-vaporizers when he realized that is where the money is.

Here is a link that goes into great detail about what a hack Glantz is

Can you explain to me why both the US NIH and UK NHS have both stated that vaping is 95% safer than smoking cigarettes?

They are starting new sites with a focus on local (State) level news. Most local news sites are owned by a handful of large companies.

https://www.businessinsider.co...

These people are obviously responding to a need for news that the public feels isn't being met.

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_...
https://www.acsh.org/news/2018...
https://thehill.com/homenews/m...

Simply because a website sources some of their news from large national sources does not make it fake news. Local news companies source stories from Reuters and the Associated Press all the time. Why do you think you can find the exact same article in a range of news outlets?

Presuming news to be fake simply because it comes from a different political perspective is hubris at best.

I'm guessing no one asked for GMO insulin and GMO cheese 30-40 years ago either, but dropping society's dependence on chopped-up cow pancreases and calf stomachs allowed us to significantly ramp up production and lower costs.

What is the objective of calling them and treating them like SCUM?

I may not be an antivaxxer but I also understand fear. It is an irrational beast and you just like them have irrational fears that make you do stupid stuff too. In fact most people have them. Just because that irrational fear is over vaccines does not make it better or worse than peoples fears of disease, terrorists, crime, fire, or any other fear you can come up with.

I bet you are more understanding with other fears, why have you decided to be less understanding on this one? AND to the point where you feel the need to underplay peoples totally legitimate concerns? Drugs are not safe...
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017...

When people have a reason to mistrust institutions then those fears become overriding factors and when you run around offering things that are not true and using well I was not talking about exceptions for those cases then wind up hurting more than helping because they are only going to put you in the mindless zombie group that just believes anything they are told.

Anti-Vaxxers are hardly the only group of people causing us risks because of their ignorance. Lets be less like buttheads and instead just point out the facts as we know them.

That's the problem; we're number 3 in the world in spending per student, and we're 17th out of 22 in the OECD in high school graduation rates.

We should pay more attention to Eisenhower's warning about the Government-Education complex, and how it's feeding off of the US taxpayer as much as the military-industrial complex. For example, the DOD budget in 2016 was $585 billion; Federal and State spending on K-12 education in 2016 was $620 billion. How many people would guess we spend more on education of K-12 than we do on the military?

When DOD cost overruns are found, there is much howling about cutting back to the DOD, increasing oversight, etc. When the educational system fails (as it does), there is handwringing and demand to spend even more. Somehow society has been conditioned to accept failure of the Government-Education complex and reward that failure with even more dollars and apologies.

fixing the post (HTML on mobile is an adventure: no "preview"):

Recycling plastic waste. We do it here in the USA.

All? (Some is recycled here in Brazil too... Some cities here do almost all: that's not enough, not even close...)

Perfect is surely the pernicious enemy of good. We have four recycling setups here where I am. One is the municipal, which takes glass, aluminum, most plastics, paper and cardboard. Large metallic items can be dropped off at our transfer station gratis. Oddball plastics that are recyclable are now being taken at the nature conservancy locations, and they also take large cardboard items - think the box a refrigerator comes in.

The last line is the local people who will buy copper and other metals from you. I have bags of wire that I just drop off for them.

Is it all of every recycleable item? That's probably not attainable. But one thing is for certain, precious little makes it into rivers that dump in the ocean. We don't do badly, The first world's contribution to the problem is in microspheres. But we'll take care of that as well.

So let us look at where evil America is in the list of criminals befouling our oceans with plastic. From eco watch: https://www.ecowatch.com/these... Hardly a conservative anti-ecological site. They even have vegan pink hair dye recipes. China, indonesia, Phillipines, Vietnam, Thailand.

https://www.acsh.org/news/2018...

90 percent. 90 freaking percent of the plastic pollution. The USA could disappear tomorrow, and it would hardly make a dent in the amount of plastic dumped in the ocean.

So no, the USA does not recycle 100 percent of all materials. I'm skeptical that anyone is. Oh, bullshit - no one is. But worrying over our lack of perfection, to blame it on us, while 90 percent is coming from elsewhere is simply irrational. And won't fix the problem either.

But people need their steady supply of hard cheese and insulin.

In California, certain trees need to have a Prop. 65 warning sticker:
https://www.acsh.org/news/2018...

We all just got through discussing how much the concept of Daylight Saving sucks. So the Gilded State's response is to...make it permanent.. Yeah, right. Now Newsomstan will be permanently out of sync with surrounding states, rather than just every summer.

This is the state that in earlier proposition drollery passed a toxic chemicals labeling law so draconian that now certain trees have to be labeled:
https://www.acsh.org/news/2018...

Ah, I see you support the return of mass DDT sprayings.

Why not? It was being overused. It was quite effective and isn't very toxic though.
http://www.acsh.org/news/2016/...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04... ... or do any number of searches regarding it.

Do you use a cannon or a howitzer for that projection? You're repeating a Randian fantasy that's been debunked more times than the idea that Clinton was responsible for Waco and Ruby Ridge. It's a fable put together to seem reasonable to people ignorant of history, like the yarn that DDT bans killed millions because the pesticide kept malaria-carrying mosquitos in check. Except the yarn is total bullshit, because 1) DDT was never banned for mosquito control, but agricultural use which 2) bred DDT-resistant mosquitos.

But back to the Great Depression, and the canard that trade laws made the depression worse. So go ahead and grab a DeLorean, go back in time and pass the biggest, baddest free trade law you want. Just who was going to buy goods and materials to bring jobs to 15 million unemployed Americans?

Can't be done. Whereas massive Kenysian stimulus not only can be done, but was proven to work with the New Deal - which put 4 million Americans back to work in 4 months through direct hiring programs - and World War II. High marginal tax rates. Direct hire. It works.

Randian voodoo economics? Not only has it never worked, it's only resulted in skyrocketing income disparity and misery for the poor and working class.

Example: The Saccharin scare. How many times have scientists made claims which required immediate action or people will die?

Just look at all the "studies" that claim you should eat more of this and less of that...or more of that and less of this...wait...we mean....

This kind of stuff creates scientific cynics.

You mean like the Saccharin Scare?

We have been screwed over by scientists that were so sure that they were right only to find they had their heads up their asses.

Not according to the FDA or the ACSH or MIT, among others. On the other hand, überquack Mercola and the holistic nutters agree. Basically, the aspartame thing is just like the vaccine thing: scientists with evidence versus quacks who try to dress their bias up as information. Sure, aspartame tastes like dog shit, but (unless you have a certain rare genetic disorder), it isn't dangerous.

I've not read the first two articles here, but I imagine they'll have referenced much of the information I've seen in the past.

http://www.skepdic.com/organic.html
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4019
http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsID.1190/news_detail.asp
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4162

makers of the cancerous Aspartame

Not according to the FDA or ACSH. But at least The Holistic Healing Web Page is of that belief. In general, you should beware of medical advice that has its origins in fowarded emails.

Furthermore, the response to "Silent Spring" did not stop the sale of DDT to third-world nations

Wrong. The response to "Silent Spring" was that anti-DDT donor organizations who funded the bulk of many third-world countries' public health budgets refused to continue donating if they used DDT.

So there are no "tens of millions of humans who died of preventable malaria infections." That claim is made up by businesses with a vested interest in the production and use of DDT as part of a smear campaign.

Ah, the always excellent: "It's funded by eevil corporations and therefore false!" argument. Nice one. No, again, wrong. It's not just the eeeevil corporations that Wikipedia told you were eeevil:

According to Dr Donald Roberts, professor of medical entomology at the Uniformed Services Hospital of the Health Sciences in Maryland, USA, the huge drop in houses sprayed with DDT has resulted in an average annual increase of 4.8 malaria cases per 1000 of the population in Latin America, from the mid-1980s to the mid-90s.

For the whole of Latin America, a minimum of 1.8million additional cases of malaria were occurring each year up to 1996. Case rates have continued to grow since 1996, and according to Dr Roberts, 'we can reasonably expect that the number of excess cases is now much greater than in 1996'. Only Ecuador, which has continued to use DDT, has seen a reduction in the number of malaria cases in recent years.

Other mosquito-borne diseases are also on the rise. Until the 1970s, DDT was used to eradicate the aedes aegypti mosquito from most tropical regions of the Americas. The reinvasion of aedes aegypti since then has brought devastating outbreaks of dengue fever, dengue hemorrhagic fever, and a renewed threat of urban yellow fever.

I'm not the one making stuff up here.

You're a fool. There's no scientific proof that MSG and HFSC are bad for you.

I will preface this post by saying that I am not attacking you directly. I only want give you links to the information you requested.
1. http://www.abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=19 55237&page=1 20/20 story you referenced. In reading the article it looks like your description of the story is misleading. They do not say secondhand smoke is not dangerous, only that there is a group of extremists that take banning smoking way too far.
2. http://www.acsh.org/publications/pubID.498/pub_det ail.asp You said the anti-smoking lobby does not give details how they confirm people die from smoking. This is response of the American Council on Science and Health to the article "Lies, Damned Lies & 400,000 Smoking-Related Deaths" published by the Cato Institute and the National Smokers Alliance. It details how statistical information is gathered and verified.
3. http://www.cato.org/dailys/04-29-99.html You said most people diagnosed of dying of smoking are over age 70. Even according to this is the website for CATO (part of the pro-tobacco lobby) 52% of people diagnosed with dying due to smoking were over 70. So a guess according to the tobacco lobby you are technically correct (if only by a margin of 2%)

I guess that is why we like to see facts and reasoning in posts, even if it does take a couple of minutes to look them up. Anyone can make of the cuff statements about things they heard once upon a time.(Sorry guess that last line was a bit of a personal attack.)

Lung cancer kills more women than breast cancer. Lung cancer has killed more women than breast cancer every year since 1987. And the gap is widening: lung cancer deaths in women are increasing. CDC TFK

Lung Cancer kills more women every year than breast, uterine, and ovarian cancers combined. Joan's Legacy

"There are four major cancers that account for over 50 percent of cancer deaths. Far and away, the most important in both men and women is lung cancer." PBS online focus

Yet women's magazines and other media pass out gobs and slathers of information on breast cancer. They hardly ever even mention lung cancer. By an amazing coincidence, they run a lot of tobacco product advertising. ACSH

Oh wait, it's not a coincidence: NIH

http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsID.660/news_det ail.asp

Historical Background of the _harms_

About the various substitutes mentioned and the lack of a "ban": From the American Council on Science and Health (disclaimer, they receive 75% of their funding from private chemical/pharmaceutical companies, although since DDT replacements are more patented and higher cost, you'd think that'd prejudice them the other way):
"Despite the cost in human lives, many groups stubbornly defend the ban. While the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences, and UNICEF have recommended continued DDT use, influential organizations such as the Norwegian Development Agency, the Swedish International Development Agency, the Swedish Aid Agency, and USAID -- the sorts of groups from whom some poor nations such as Belize, Mozambique, and Madagascar receive the majority of their public health money -- continue to insist that DDT be left out of malaria-control efforts.

Countries have found themselves faced with malaria upsurges due to pressure from such international aid organizations to avoid DDT use, according to a report in the March 11, 2000 British Medical Journal. The use of DDT in Mozambique, noted the Journal, "was stopped several decades ago, because 80% of the country's health budget came from donor funds, and donors refused to allow the use of DDT."

The WHO estimates that malathion, the cheapest alternative to DDT, costs more than twice as much as DDT and must be sprayed twice as often, while another mosquito-fighting chemical, deltamethrin, is over three times as expensive, and the highly effective propoxur costs twenty-three times as much. For countries with minimal public health budgets, dependent on foreign aid, such substitutes are impractical. More importantly, there is no compelling public health reason to substitute these chemicals for DDT, which as stated is harmless to humans."

Anyway, Wikipedia has a relatively balanced article that covers both sides of the issue.

My conclusion is that DDT was banned in many areas in the early 70's at the behest of environmentalists relying on flawed science. A large number of people who would currently be alive are dead due to bans in various countries that still suffered malaria. Using DDT for regular agriculture instead of just anti-malarial spraying is probably a bad idea due to the possibility of mosquitos developing resistance.

The deaths are real, but probably exaggerated. Likely only hundreds of thousands per year have died uneccesarily since the bans started, not millions. The millions figure is an extrapolation that uses primarily most of the people who die from Malaria each year. Some contries who've substituted more expensive and/or less effective anti-malarial programs for widespread anti-malarial uses of DDT may not have as good of results as those who still use DDT widely have had, so it's better to be conservative on the numbers.

Finally, that hotbed of right-wing extremists, the British Medical journal states that "The Persistent Organic Pollutants Treaty aims to completely phase out global use of dicophane (DDT), while many donor agencies will not fund any malaria control programmes that use this insecticide. But dicophane is effective, with a remarkable safety record when used in small quantities for indoor spraying in endemic regions. Malaria cases soared in the KwaZulu Natal province of South Africa after it stopped using dicophane in 1996. Its reintroduction together with artemisinin based combination therapy for treating malaria brought the disease back under control. Dicophane, a "dirty word" in the malaria world, must surely be reintroduced into the conversation on rolling back malaria."

So it's fine and good to say "oops, the environmentalists screwed up and should stop pressuring people not to save li

A 1996 poll of 1,000 adults found that 79% believed that spiritual faith can help people recover from disease [McNichol T. The new faith in medicine. USA Today, April 7, 1996, p 4.]. This idea is also popular among physicians. Although many studies have found associations between various measures of religiosity and health, no well-designed study has demonstrated that religious beliefs or prayer actually benefit health [Sloan RP, Bagiella E, Powell T. Religion, spirituality and medicine. Lancet 353:664-667, 1999. The full text of this article can be accessed online by registering at the Lancet Web site and going to the contents page of the Feb 20th issue.]. In fact, one well-designed study found just the opposite. The study involved patients whose progress was followed for nine months after discharge from a British hospital. They evaluated the outpatient records and the responses of 189 patients to questionnaires. the researchers concluded that the health status of patients with stronger spiritual beliefs were more than twice as likely to be unimproved or worse [King M, Speck P, Thomas A. The effect of spiritual beliefs on outcome from illness. Social Science & Medicine 48:1291-1299, 1999.]. Although some studies have found that churchgoers tend to be healthier and to live longer than nonchurchgoers, church attendance itself is unlikely to be responsible for the difference [Gorski T. Should religion and spiritual concerns be more influential in health care? No. Priorities 12(1):23-26, 41, 2000.]. [context]

--
Stephen Barrett, M.D.

And that is my #1 issue with GM foods: not the frankenfood FUD, but instead the excessively greedy corps like Monsanto who would be able to concentrate wealth & power like you wouldn't believe.

Also, organic food simply taste better.

Organic food also isn't sustainable; organic food can't feed the world.

--

Alar on apples. Bogus

Silicon Breast Implants Bogus

DDT Mostly Bogus

Somewhere along the way we lost our ability to actually use science and facts to evaluate things and have fallen back on a faith based consensus pseudo-science.

Remember, None of us are getting out of here alive. Life - A sexually transmitted terminal disease. Always fatal.

There is no proof that Microsoft had anything to do with this, and I think they didn't. I believe what he said in the article, he was fired because of the ties @stake has with Msoft, not because they specifically called @stake and asked for him to be fired.

By way of comparison,
magazines that run cigarette ads tend to do poor coverage of the health effects of cigarettes even though those same magazines do all sorts of coverage on other health questions.

Now, do you think this happens because tobacco executives call the magazines and threaten them? Not!

Instead, it's just understood, by everyone who works at the magazine, that you don't do hard-hitting articles on tobacco as long as Altria (Philip Morris) is a major advertiser.

If you work at People magazine, for instance, you soon learn that as long as Altria and R. J. Reynolds and Brown and Williamson are buying full page full color ads, your editors won't be real interested in a lung cancer story. It's seldom necessary for your editor to tell you this. You work for People, you learn that certain stories aren't encouraged. And it's almost never necessary for RJR or B&W to say anything to People. Everyone understands the game. The tobacco industry almost never has to pull a few million dollars worth of ads to make its point. That's because everyone understands the game.

Now does that mean that Altria and RJR and B&W have nothing to do with the lack of tobacco coverage in People? Of course not! It just means that they very seldom have to show their hand. But they have everything to do with it. As does People. Both are complicit. The former uses its power, and the latter responds to it.

Both are responsible for the fact that, for instance, you'd never know from a People story that more women are killed every year from lung cancer than breast cancer.

The tobacco industry is a particularly ugly example, but there are others. Check out an eye-opening videofor other examples.

So it's a mistake to say merely because Msoft didn't make a call and ask for Geer's firing, that Msoft had nothing with it. Believe me, if Msoft was indifferent to it, @stake wouldn't have done it. And that's not how these things are done anyway. The story usually gets chilled out from indirect, unspoken, but very effective pressure. The unusual thing here is that the story ran at all.

And in particular, There aren't any large-scale studies showing a clear negative effect on human health. Despite many attempts. Even the claims of damage to birds have mostly been debunked. I didn't say anything about Dursban. I'm mostly unfamiliar with Dursban. But I'd like to point out that we don't need to "introduce" vast quantities of toxins into our environment; our environment is already full of natural "toxins" whether we choose to introduce new ones or not. Introducing new chemicals that - like everything that exists - are toxic to some at some dosage level, often reduces our overall health risk and removing old chemicals often increases health risk. For instance, outlawing DDT just meant that most people who would have used DDT used some other chemical as a substitute, and I don't believe anybody bothered to determine that DDT was MORE toxic than the likely replacements before banning it. It's also pretty clear that the short-term effect of banning DDT was to drastically increase human deaths due to malaria.

Junkscience.com's DDT FAQ

According to this report. Moderate consumption of alcohol (any alcohol; not just wine) can reduce risk of coronary disease.

On the other hand, people was going somewhat overboard in their enthusiasm of spraying with DDT, and the long time for natural decomposition meant it would accumulate through the food chain. One of the effects spotted was weaker eggs in birds of prey, especially those eating fish, such as in the antarctic region. As usual, it was the continued increased exposure that worried scientists, not the short-term effects (and yes, we live on top of the food-chain too).

Oblinks:

• ToxFAQ from CDC for DDT
• Short article about DDT usage in Australia
• More from the CDC about DDT and Malaria, look especially at figure 7
• Another overview article
• A typical "let's all spray with DDT again" article

So, it seems reasonable that we could continue to use some DDT, but because of the worrying long-term effects, it shouldn't be used as freely as in the 40's and 50's. The fact that we are still debating it's effects after 60 years shows us that Malaria/DDT is not an easy issue. As an added complication comes the economic divide between north and south, if it was us living in malaria-infected areas, we would probably have kept spraying...

As a direct result of the 1965 congressionally mandated "health" label on cigarette packs (which was broadened to require labels on advertisements in 1969) Congress gave the industry a unique and privileged legal status, a Teflon coating that repels all liability claims. Whether this windfall for the cigarette manufacturers was an inadvertent result of well-meaning government action or the product of industry manipulation of Congress is a matter of historical debate. In the end, however, the result has been that industry attorneys can rely on the label for their non-sequitur defense in liability suits. They argue, in essence, that, "Cigarettes are not dangerous, but if they were, which they are not, the government 'preempted' our responsibility to warn of those dangers." Put another way, the industry is saying: "Gee, we would like to tell you folks more details about the health risks of smoking, but the government took this authority away from us when they mandated the label -- so don't blame us now for not warning sufficiently."

This page seems to be mostly factual and will give you some numbers on this.

Of course there is some question about which parts of the body are more or less sensitive to radiation, and in my opinion 1,300 mrem/year is not as much of a risk as the chemical effects of the cigarette smoke. Still, 1,300 mrem/year is considerably greater than what the DOE allows nuclear sites to expose the general public to.

In terms of life expectancy the effect of smoking has been well estimated for a while. This is what life insurance companies are good at. It is interesting to see that radiation could be part of how smoking effects people. But as I said, I personally suspect the radiation is not significant enough to be a large factor.

References:
carbonated beverages linked to bone fractures in teenaged girls
ditto
an article disputing the above