Global Biological Experiment Generates Exciting New Results

New submitter hoboroadie writes "Scientific American Magazine says antibiotic-resistance genes have moved from the incubators of our hospitals and factory farms, and are spreading through diverse species in the wild. Resistance genes have been detected in crows, gulls, houseflies, moths, foxes, frogs, sharks and whales, as well as in sand and coastal water samples from California and Washington. This stuff is getting more and more like a Hollywood script everyday, n'est ce pas?"

Comments

Dystopia

[Anonymous Coward]

This stuff is getting more and more like a Hollywood script everyday, n'est ce pas?"

..and companies like Monsanto are just making it worse.

Re:Dystopia

[interkin3tic]

Wrong agriculture business. This is antibiotic resistance. Monsanto is arguably causing herbicide and pesticide resistance, although such claims are stupid: they made the herbicides and pesticides, and they worked. It wasn't going to last forever if it was used widely, and if it wasn't used widely to make cheap foodstock, what's the bloody point?

They even took steps to limit that much. The terminator seed technology was partly intended to prevent contamination: if the plants can't breed, they're less likely to mix with wild species and contaminate them. Obviously they had a lot of financial interest in it, both because if resistance gets into the pest populations, that's going to make their product worthless. And in response to the controversy and accusations that it would screw over farmers, Monsanto never actually put terminator seeds on the market.

Anyway, pointing fingers is only so helpful, even at the agricultural entities that ARE driving antibiotic resistance. At this point, we know the looming disaster. It's not rocket science or even climate science either. This is high school biology. Businesses can be expected to faithfully act without any regard other than immediate profit. Ignorant patients will always find greedy doctors willing to give them antibiotics they don't need for diseases that aren't bacterial. Fixing the problem won't happen voulontarily. We need legislation to prevent milk from cows treated with antibiotics from being sold in supermarkets cheaper than untreated milk. Same with other livestock. It's an externalized cost: there's an advantage to it that needs to be taken away. We also need to strip the medical licenses of doctors who give out antibiotics for the cold. Either they're shockingly ignorant of the last 20 years of research and aren't fit to be doctors, or they're intentionally contributing to a real health hazard and should face criminal charges.

Re:Dystopia

[Joce640k]

Ignorant patients will always find greedy doctors willing to give them antibiotics they don't need for diseases that aren't bacterial.

Why aren't doctors allowed to give people sugar pills instead of antibiotics? Of if they are allowed, why aren't they actively doing it instead of sending people home empty handed (which leaves them unhappy so they go looking for a 'better' doctor)?

There should be organization at a national level to produce nicely packaged placebos in important looking boxes. They could even change the name every few months so people don't figure it out.

If there's anything that's in world/national interest, this is it.

Re:Dystopia

[SeattleGameboy]

Because if a doctor did that and by some remote chance, the patient did have a bacterial infection and died, the doctor would be in a great deal of trouble.

Re:Dystopia

[SeattleGameboy]

Wrong company. It is more like Amgen is making things worse. If you want to give yourself a good scare watching the latest Frontline episode on superbugs is a great way to do it. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/health-science-technology/hunting-the-nightmare-bacteria/dr-brad-spellberg-antibiotic-resistance-is-everyones-fault/

Re:Dystopia

[parkinglot777]

sending people home empty handed (which leaves them unhappy so they go looking for a 'better' doctor)?

For that part, the word 'better doctor' is very subjective to the patient. Many patients look for 'magic pills' that immediately relieve their symptoms. How many people do you know that take pain relief pills whenever they have a headache rather than attempt to relax and rest first? Of course, there could be serious cases involved, but I doubt that is the majority. Therefore 'unhappy' does not imply 'find a better doctor' because the 'better' could become 'worse' under circumstances (including short or long term effect). I would suggest "which leaves them unhappy so they go looking for a doctor who pleases them better" instead (which means the doctor may or may not really help the patients).

Re:Dystopia

[ShanghaiBill]

Why aren't doctors allowed to give people sugar pills instead of antibiotics?

In many Asian countries, that is what they do. Except instead of sugar, they use herbs. They get all the benefit of the placebo effect, but none of the drawbacks of antibiotic resistance.

Re:Dystopia

[ShanghaiBill]

Wrong agriculture business. This is antibiotic resistance.

Not completely wrong. Monsanto does make some antibiotics for agricultural use. For instance, they make LS-50, a mixture of lincomycin and spectinomycin, which is used on chickens. LS-50 is also occasionally used, illegally, by dairy farmers.

Re:Dystopia

[Prune]

In the case of doctors, I doubt it's because of greed. I live in Canada, and the doctor gets paid a fixed rate for my visit by the provincial government, whether he prescribes an antibiotic or not. And yet, I've still had doctors do so for what were either clearly viral colds/flu, or at least without even bothering to do a throat swab. In my admittedly anecdotal experience, older doctors seem more likely to prescribe antibiotics, suggesting it may be the increasing emphasis on antibiotic resistance over the past decade or two that is an issue--one of education and habit, rather than greed.

Re:Dystopia

[marcosdumay]

There should be organization at a national level to produce nicely packaged placebos in important looking boxes. They could even change the name every few months so people don't figure it out.

It's called homeopathy, and they didn't need to change the name in centuries.

Re:Dystopia

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike politicians, doctors have a code of ethics that can get their license to practice revoked, even if the law said they were supposed to do something.

Re:Dystopia

[g0bshiTe]

I'm on Obamacare, my plan doesn't cover a $150 price for prescription placebos.

Re:Dystopia

[Adriax]

And the only side effect is global genocide of endangered species as poachers harvest the magic storing organs to mix in with those magic herbs.

Atleast homeopathic treatments promote conservation. Their treatments don't even contain a single molecule the active ingredient they claim.

Re:Dystopia

[cusco]

The insurance companies won't reimburse them.

Re:Dystopia

[TheCarp]

> In the case of doctors, I doubt it's because of greed.

Agreed, doctors do well for themselves generally, any kickback they could get from drugs as cheap as run of the mill antibiotics would be hardly worth it.

> In my admittedly anecdotal experience, older doctors seem more likely to prescribe antibiotics

This.

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -- Max Plank

While I know doctors have to keep up with the latest medicine, its a very wide field and there is only so much they can realistically do. My own paediatrician, who retired when I was about 16, used to argue that antibiotics should be prescribed for any illness, even a virus, because it prevented opportunistic infections.

Then she retired, and I garauntee few of the new doctors who have graduated since then are advocating such a position.

Re:Dystopia

[interkin3tic]

Not direct greed, but doctors telling idiot patients "no, you can't have that: you don't need it" often lose those idiot patients. And the money that comes from it.

Re:Dystopia

[kaatochacha]

I just discovered this a few months ago, looked up the definition, and went "whaaaaa? People believe this???"

Re:Dystopia

[sursurrus]

We also need to strip the medical licenses of doctors who give out antibiotics for the cold. Either they're shockingly ignorant of the last 20 years of research and aren't fit to be doctors, or they're intentionally contributing to a real health hazard and should face criminal charges.

"Intent" is an interesting legal concept. Shocking ignorance would amount to negligence, perhaps gross negligence. However I feel the doctors in question are guilty of more than that. The highest level of intent, 'purposely' or 'knowingly' might be a tad too strong, as in its difficult to think a doctor actually wants or desires global killer resistant infections to arise. However, the standard of "Reckless" seems to apply really well. Reckless is commonly viewed as knowing a certain outcome or result was likely and acting with blatant disregard for that outcome. The two classic examples of reckless are: #1 shooting a gun in the woods at a deer that is a few hundred yards in front of a school and #2 drag racing on a public street (Fast and Furious style). In both situations, if any bystander is killed the person(s) involved could be convicted of murder (vs manslaughter which is viewed as a negligent killing). In neither case was there a desire to kill bystanders, but in both situations the activities were so dangerous and involved such a high risk that the intent requirement for murder was met.

It's relatively common knowledge that colds and the flu are caused by viruses, which can't be affected by antibiotics. At the same time there's a strong and very perverse financial incentive to incorrectly prescribe antibiotics: it gets rid of patients quickly, allowing a doctor to increase daily billables (via patients seen). It may also help retain hypochondriac patients. I would argue that since multiple-resistant bacteria are also common knowledge (terms like superbug are in common use) doctors are acting with deliberate knowledge of a serious risk for their own gain. They are specifically acting contrary to their oath(s) - prescribing unnecessary medicine, and (since all medications have side effects) causing unnecessary harm to their own patients. They are also violating the spirit (if not the letter) of their oath(s) in that they have a duty towards humanity not to create or cause killer diseases that kill or sicken lots of people.

It's honestly an indefensible action. The defensive arguments simply don't hold. If the doctor is worried about liability (ie failing to prescribe an antibiotic when the illness turns out to be bacterial) they can simply do what all doctors do, everywhere, and order a test. There, ass covered. If they're sick of dealing with hypochondriacs they can go old-school and actually talk to them, or they can simply suggest that person find another doctor.

Lastly, I suggest anyone reading this who is skeptical that doctors' practices would turn into little more than pill factories, try this. Call a bunch of different doctors' offices in Davis, California and just listen to the answering machine messages. I was shocked the first time I heard "Please tell us what prescriptions you need from us" on an _answering machine_ I thought the function of a doctor was to tell me what prescriptions I need.

Re:Dystopia

[RockDoctor]

No major disagreements with your comment, but you've left out a significant case.

We need legislation to prevent milk from cows treated with antibiotics from being sold in supermarkets cheaper than untreated milk.

ITYM "cows prophyllactically treated" rather than "cows therapeutically treated in response to a bacterial infection".

There's nothing wrong with treating a cow with (say) an infected cut with antibiotics. It's the mass dosing of the herds with sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics that are stimulating the development of antibiotic resistance.

One way of achieving that would be to (1) make veterinary antibiotics available only on prescription by a licensed veterinarian (that may or may not be the case in your country at the moment ; I don't know) - the cost of getting the vet out would be sufficient discouragement to severely reduce the competitive advantage that the farmers would otherwise gain ; and (2) treat possession of (say) a kilo of un-prescribed antibiotics the same way that possession of a kilo of un-prescribed di-acetyl morphine would be treated (that's heroin to the rest of us).

I wonder ... if the antibiotic resistance genes used as markers for gene insertion are for antibiotics that work against bacteria, but only at doses that would be economically unproductive to make enough of the drug, or at doses that would kill the patient before it kills the bacteria. Or antibiotics that are only effective against a narrow range of bacteria? (Which wouldn't be a problem in lab testing, but would render the antibiotic unimportant from a therapeutic POV.) IANA biologist, but this sounds almost interesting.

EPA recognizes 2 facilities with CHP

[Anonymous Coward]

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today recognizes two federal facilities with the ENERGY STAR Combined Heat and Power (CHP) Award for their highly-efficient CHP systems, which increase the reliability of their electricity supply while reducing carbon pollution that causes climate change. The awards, which demonstrate how federal agencies are reducing carbon pollution in support of the President’s Climate Action Plan, were announced at the GreenGov Dialogue on Energy Management sponsored by the White House Council on Environmental Quality in Washington, D.C.

“Combined heat and power is a highly efficient way to produce energy,” said Janet McCabe, Acting Assistant Administrator for EPA's Office of Air and Radiation. “These federal facilities are leading by example and using this technology to help reduce their carbon emissions and make federal dollars go further.”

CHP, also known as cogeneration, simultaneously produces electricity and useful steam or hot water from a single heat source, using fuels such as natural gas or renewable landfill gas. By recovering and using heat typically wasted by the conventional production of electricity, CHP helps federal facilities achieve goals to reduce carbon pollution and energy use.

Award winners:

  Marine Corps Logistics Base (MCLB) Albany, Albany, Ga.
  National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

The National Archives and Records Administration CHP system achieved an operating efficiency of 72 percent—much higher than the efficiency of conventional production of electricity and thermal energy, which can be less than 50 percent. The MCLB Albany CHP system uses renewable landfill gas to produce energy that supports essential base operations, saving approximately $1.3 million annually in energy costs and reducing carbon pollution equal to that from the generation of electricity used by more than 1,200 homes.

CHP is ideally suited for many federal facilities as it provides reliable electricity, heat, and cooling for offices and other facilities, as well as protecting resources (like data servers) that are vulnerable to power outages. A Department of Energy assessment of the potential for CHP at federal facilities indicated that CHP could be used at hundreds of facilities, increase power reliability, reduce transmission congestion, save taxpayers more than $150 million annually, and prevent carbon pollution equal to that from the generation of electricity used by more than 370,000 homes.

Established in 2001, EPA's CHP Partnership program seeks to reduce the environmental impact of power generation by promoting the cost-effective use of CHP. The partnership works closely with energy users, the CHP industry, state and local governments, and other clean energy stakeholders to facilitate the development of new CHP projects and to promote their environmental and economic benefits.

Re:EPA recognizes 2 facilities with CHP

[Anonymous Coward]

As part of the Obama Administration's efforts to ensure America's continued leadership in clean energy and double renewable electricity generation once again by 2020, the Energy Department today announced eight teams to spur solar power deployment by cutting red tape for residential and small commercial rooftop solar systems.

But..

[i kan reed]

We had a half a percent higher profit margin on cattle for a couple decades. That's totally worth having permanent incurable deadly diseases. Tragedy of the commons sucks balls, and time and again, it turns out that the "invisible hand" won't develop any solution to it.

Re:But..

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

The ghosts of Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand find your lack of Market faith disturbing.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

The ghosts of Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand find your lack of Market faith disturbing.

That's OK. We think they were douchebags, so it's all good.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no free market solution yet because the governments are artificially insulating the people who do this from the effects of it. If some big aggra boss got MRSA it would probably change his or her thinking on antibiotics.

That and Huxley was right, most people are too stupid to care (bonus points because the processed food makes them even stupider and probably less likely to care)

Re:But..

[mfwitten]

Are you honestly disparaging both the tragedy of the commons and the invisible hand (i.e., a Free Market, i.e., capitalism, i.e., private owernship of resources) in the same sentence?

O, Slashdot comments... how you are a microcosm for what's wrong with this world...

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

...the "invisible hand" won't develop any solution to it.

That "invisible hand" is just much much slower than you seem to think it should be. The very fact that you have become vocal about your wants is the beggings of the market becoming aware of this problem and thinking about responding to it. Sure, a concerned legislator could respond much faster. Sure, we'll all be dead before the "invisible hand" gets its sleeve rolled up. But saying it won't do anything is like calling erosion impotent.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because food production is such a free market.
 
Another ninny who cries "It's the free market's fault" where there clearly isn't a free market. Infact, it could easily be assumed that these meassures are in place because of regulations.

Re:But..

[i kan reed]

In this case the "commons" are literally our own bodies and the ecosystems they interact with. Are you suggesting some sort of absurd enclosure movement for air so that bacterial genes can't spread from one place to another? Or are you being an absurd believer in a system for no other reason than your outward facing political philosophy depends on it?

Re:But..

[similar_name]

Private ownership of resources leads each individual to do what's in their own best interest. Even if the depletion of that resource is bad for the group it is good for each individual doing it. A tragedy of the commons generally arises from individual power and freedoms.

Re:But..

[i kan reed]

Oh, yes, please point me at the regulations that tell farmers to use non-therapeutic doses of antibiotics on their animals to make them grow a little bigger. Please. Absolutely, do it. I'll recant my position in 10 milliseconds flat.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you honestly disparaging both the tragedy of the commons and the invisible hand

The tragedy of the commons demonstrates how badly the 'invisible hand' fails us.

The free market is a myth, and always has been. The 'invisible hand' doesn't actually solve any problems such as this. Mostly it just ensures that a small group of people end up controlling our shared resources we all need for survival.

So, keep sucking the dick of capitalism and telling yourself how awesome it is and how it always arrives at perfect solutions.

Ayn Rand was a miserable cunt.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Au contraire. The permanent incurable deadly disease IS the SOLUTION to the common human virus that plagues the planet. You don't know the "invisible hand" very well, do you?

Re:But..

[argStyopa]

Does market capitalism solve everything? No. It has some glaring weaknesses.

I'll still take it over totalitarianism - no matter how benign or benevolent it says it will be.

Re:But..

[i kan reed]

I wasn't suggesting totalitarianism as an alternative. I don't know what might lead you to think that.

Re:But..

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The furious self-gratfication (in the hairy palm sense) laying blame on those who are responsible for feeding billions successfully is ferocious today. I can feel the generated breeze as used kleenex are tossed to the floor near the wastebasket.

The solution is known: use antibiotic coctails in the future. Nobody knew this, least of all you self-satisfied clowns who have nothing to do with feeding billions and, if you had your way, by stripping profits, would lead to the deaths of billions as hundreds of freedom-stripping, century-long experiments last century repeatedly demonstrated.

Re:But..

[mfwitten]

If, as you say, it's good for each individual, then it must—by definition—be good for the group.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that the free market model doesn't take non-local effects into account. (Or "Not my problem")
Essentially it doesn't prevent someone from causing damage to someone else for profit.
If there had been any connection, that is you can make huge profits by causing a little damage to someone else, this wouldn't be a big problem, then it would be possible to compensate those who got hurt.
Sadly the free market model leads to a situation where someone will cause much damage on a global level for a very tiny profit.

The regulated version is a form of socialism where the government limits and punishes those who tries to make a profit on the behalf of others.
The non-regulated version is an anarchy where the government doesn't step in and protect those who makes a profit when the those who were hurt by it wants to hang them.

The people who talks about "less regulation" seldom wants the second alternative, rather they strive for a system that is called fascism where the government steps in and protects specific individuals so that they can abuse others.

Re:But..

[SuricouRaven]

The 'invisible hand' concept isn't so much about the private ownership of resources, it's about the self-correcting property of markets. If there is a demand for widgets, the price goes up, causing more people to invest in their manufacture, bringing the price back down. All without any central management, just emergent behavior. Private ownership helps, but it isn't essential.

Re:But..

[mfwitten]

Just because you cannot interpret "some sort of absurd enclosure movement for air" as a metaphor rather than a literal solution doesn't mean that somebody else has the same trouble.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're blaming the "invisible hand" of the market for cutting down on food poisoning deaths? What do you want, asshole? You want unsterile condition at food processing plants and hospitals or do you want the possible, well...maybe possible, perhaps will one day be an issue threat of a virus killing more than 5 people? Enjoy getting hepatitis within a week when you launch your "Utopia experiment for Idiots!" where nothing will be cleaned or sanitized, because maybe your terrible understanding of evolution will impossibly breed the X-men of bacteria.

The only supervirus I see here is the infestation of fucking morons at Slashdot.

Re:But..

[h4rr4r]

No.

If what is good for me is to kill you and take your stuff, that is bad for you and the group. Each individual acts for his own best, he might not get that. Like when I kill you and take your stuff, before you take mine.

Re:But..

[h4rr4r]

Sure, but when the widget maker decides the widget waste is cheaper to dump in the river than a proper way, the market does not correct this since the widget maker can afford PR and filter for his water.

Re:But..

[SuricouRaven]

The problem we face now is that there are a sizeable number of people in the US who are so absolutely devoted to market principles, they are blind to those weaknesses - and see any effort to address them as an invitation to a communist takeover.

Re:But..

[SuricouRaven]

That's called 'externalising the costs,' or 'the invisible middle finger.'

Re:But..

[i kan reed]

I interpret it literally because there are fundamental scientific principles at work here, like convection, and the carbon cycle, which humans have not demonstrated any capacity to overcome in any sort of pragmatic sense.

Your attitude treats the market like a magic wand that you wave and *poof* no more serious real-world problems.

Re:But..

[chill]

You're missing one critical detail. The invisible hand is in the position of having only the middle finger raised.

Re:But..

[gstoddart]

If, as you say, it's good for each individual, then it mustâ"by definitionâ"be good for the group.

Horseshit. Complete and utter horseshit.

Individuals do not necessarily exhibit fully rational behavior (in fact quite seldom do), and individuals will always try to get 'more better' for themselves -- because people are irrational selfish bastards.

So, if I decide that what is better for me is to take away what you have, that isn't better (or even good) for the group if we depend on one another. Very often, what's good for an individual is detrimental to the group if the individual is utterly selfish or shortsighted -- like eating all of the food now and leaving none for later. Taking fresh water, bottling it and selling it isn't good for anybody except the ones selling it -- and once it's all gone, we're all fucked. But, for the short term, it was beneficial for some individuals to do what is best for them, and the group suffers.

The prisoners dilemma demonstrates that if everyone does what is strictly in their own best interests, everybody loses.

Capitalism just tries to take the things which are shared resources, and make sure someone gets to it first and claims ownership of it. And when we're talking about our environment and ecosystem, it impacts all of us. And in the end you get the selfish decisions of a few impacting everybody else.

People like to pretend that 'the market' will solve these problems, when in fact it's mostly a race to the bottom where every sociopath around grabs as much as he can, to the detriment of those around him.

Re:But..

[i kan reed]

Amusing over-extension of the metaphor, but the original intention of the description was that of pulling/pushing people, so I prefer to liken it to being shoved right off a cliff.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

We as a population are going to die anyway, so you're saying a fat & happy terminal patient is better than a skinny, hungry patient?

Is one really better than the other?

Is having an extra 3 billion people in the last 50 years, which abundant food has allowed, really better for the species?

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Your attitude treats the market like a magic wand that you wave and *poof* no more serious real-world problems.

That's called being a republican.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is that bad for the group?

Re:But..

[i kan reed]

That's not what anti-biotic treatments of farm animals do. So... all the reasoning the follows that premise is wrong.

Re:But..

[gstoddart]

Does market capitalism solve everything? No. It has some glaring weaknesses.

I'll still take it over totalitarianism - no matter how benign or benevolent it says it will be.

Right up until capitalism leads to its own form or totalitarianism, as corporations and cartels control pretty much everything and we all become serfs again.

Capitalism claims to be benign and benevolent, but since everyone tries to gain an unfair advantage and cheat the system, it just leads to a different form of losing your freedoms. The notion that it will self correct assumes that people are honest and not inherently out to screw everyone over -- which is completely disconnected from reality.

Left to its own devices, capitalism will subject you to the same atrocities, it will just defend them on a different set of principles.

Some people have mythologized capitalism and the free market to the point of it being a religion -- it is uncritically championed as being perfect and infallible, and completely ignores many aspects of human behavior which negate some of its assumptions. And once you are convinced that you are the keeper of Immutable Truth and Knowledge, you will defend that belief to the exclusion of evidence to the contrary.

Re:But..

[similar_name]

It is good for each individual to consume as much as they can but that's not necessarily good for the group. Are you arguing that there's no such thing as the tragedy of the commons?

Re:But..

[mrchaotica]

That is, almost verbatim, exactly the fallacy that The Tragedy of the Commons was written to disprove.

Re:But..

[h4rr4r]

Because the group would prefer I was not murdering their friends and family. They might also prefer they not be my next victim.

Re:But..

[Baloroth]

First: it's not a free market. Not in the US, anyways. The FDA and CDC and whatnot regulate what antibiotics can be used in animals... or, at least, in food animals (which is where most animal antibiotics are used). Secondly, the antibiotics used (and therefore the resistances generated) are different in animals than in humans, in large part for exactly that reason: we don't want the widespread usage of antibiotics in animals to result in human diseases becoming much more resistant. And finally: permanent and incurable is incredibly unlikely. Antibiotics resistance has an energy cost associated with it: it takes more effort to be antibiotic resistant than not. That means, absent the use of antibiotics, the resistance will naturally be selected against and fade from the population over time. And even then, there are many classes of antibiotics. Resistances are only to one or two of those classes (although a bacteria resistant to all of them is truly terrifying, it requires even higher energy cost for the bacteria).

Antibiotics resistance is a major problem on multiple levels, but the problem of resistant strains in humans is due to usage of antibiotics in humans (you know, to save people's lives), not the usage in animals. Resistant animal diseases is also a major issue, of course, because they're a huge part of our food supply, but not so much because we're worried about human diseases becoming resistant to human antibiotics because of antibiotics usage in animals.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

You mix up a lot of terms and confuse bacteria and virus. You should be careful calling others morons.

Re:But..

[operagost]

You act as if there were no regulation of the health care industry. Indeed, it's probably the most regulated in the world. So what are the free-market forces which you claim are responsible for this issue?

Re:But..

[fredmosby]

If capitalism and totalitarianism were the only options you might have a point.

Re:But..

[operagost]

Capitalism just tries to take the things which are shared resources, and make sure someone gets to it first and claims ownership of it.

A resource can't be shared if no one claims ownership of it. So is your solution that no one is allowed to claim ownership? Or is it that the State will claim ownership?

In a system where property is not allowed, what is the motivation to be productive? An interest in the common good? That demands altruism. Without individual moral principles, the common good fails... and look, here is the tragedy of the commons again.

I guess what we've discovered here is that both capitalism and a demand economy fail when people are immoral.

Re:But..

[mfwitten]

No. That is not what was being discussed.

We were discussing what's good for each individual. As you point out, being murdered is clearly not good for one of the individuals, namely me; ergo, your example is pointless.

Also, as an aside: As someone else pointed out, there's no indication that killing an individual is necessarily bad for the group.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not quite saying it's a free market.

Price floor & ceilings, loads of regulations are omnipresent in agriculture.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

No-poaching agreements.

It's all one needs to see to know what the "winners" at capitalism will do once they are in the position of power and there's a decision to be made between raw self-interest and supposed free-market ideals.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Farms use tons (literally) more antibiotics than the regulated health care industry, and are probably a large part of the problem.

Re:But..

[mfwitten]

A tragedy of the commons generally arises from individual power and freedoms.

Private ownership is a restriction of such individual power and freedoms; the question, then, is how to define private ownership. Capitalism is private ownership defined through voluntary interaction.

Re:But..

[Mab_Mass]

You act as if there were no regulation of the health care industry. Indeed, it's probably the most regulated in the world. So what are the free-market forces which you claim are responsible for this issue?

First of all, the regulation of the health care industry is to the side of this issue. The largest driver for resistance is the over-use of antibiotics in non-health care related fields, like industrial agriculture, and hand soap.

The market forces here are the desire for higher meat production (ie, more profit!) as well as the marketability of antibiotics to consumers that don't realize that you don't need or want antibiotics everywhere.

Where the market forces completely and utterly fail is that the very high cost of widespread antibiotic resistance is NOT being directly felt by the industries that are using them the most. It is in fact a very nice example of where pure capitalism fails - large, long-term, external costs are not felt by the people making short term profits.

Re:But..

[minstrelmike]

Despite the myth of Ayn Rand's _fiction_ ,
1. The market cannot regulate itself (the government is what regulates it and enforces contracts and legitimizes the money exchange)
2. Adam Smith's free market book talks about how competitive markets lower prices for consumers.
Monsanto does NOT want to be competitive. They say people won't buy GMO-labeled food when what they mean is people won't buy GMO-labeled food at the same price as already-familiar food. If Monsanto is forced to label it, they are also forced to pass the cost savings on to consumers in exactly the way Adam Smith--the god of free market enterprise--postulated.

Like most, they want all the benefits of the market without having to follow the rules that actually keep the market working for society as a whole.

Re:But..

[istartedi]

I wasn't suggesting totalitarianism as an alternative. I don't know what might lead you to think that.

Either false dichotomies were on sale today, or somebody forced him to buy one.

Re:But..

[locofungus]

it takes more effort to be antibiotic resistant than not. That means, absent the use of antibiotics, the resistance will naturally be selected against and fade from the population over time.

Actually, this (often) isn't the case.

It's obvious in theory that antibiotic resistance may or may not have a cost associated - but without any selection pressure, whether the resistance evolves is down to luck. Add the antibiotic and the selection is driven but remove the antibiotic again and the selection pressure doesn't need to be back towards the original state.

What is perhaps more surprising is that reversion to antibiotic susceptibility in the absence of the antibiotic is relatively rare - what actually tends to happen is that there are other mutations driven by the absence of the antibiotic rather than loss of the resistance.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/13/163
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.12158/abstract
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/11/14

The third one is interesting in that it says that sometimes antibiotic resistance can evolve due to a selection pressure unrelated to the antibiotic. If antibiotic resistance was very costly then you wouldn't expect to see this.

Re:But..

[i kan reed]

And what do any of those do to promote the particular situation with anti-biotics. That's a flimsy excuse that doesn't hold any water.

Re:But..

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

You act as if there were no regulation of the health care industry.

Health care? We're talking about the beef industry and Ayn Rand. You need to realign your dissention targeting sensors.

Re:But..

[NoImNotNineVolt]

My understanding is that cows are fed corn-based feed because it's cheap and it fattens them up very effectively.
But cows can't eat corn, so they get ulcers, which end up killing them.
But cows that die of ulcers are worth less than slaughtered cows, so we feed them theraputic doses of antibiotics to keep them alive.

Unfortunately, the "benefits" of corn-based feed are not "little". They're huge. That's why grass-fed beef is considerably more expensive than "normal" beef. Economically, there's no way you can expect factory-farmers to refrain from using corn-based feed. If you want things to change, the only way to accomplish that is to outright ban the use of antibiotics in cows. Of course, that won't happen. Too many huge entrenched interests. Do you think the corn lobby would stand for any regulation that would eliminate a very, very large portion of the corn market?

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't mention Hayek and Rand together as if they had the same economic views. Hayek recognized that markets have problems, Rand couldn't see them if you punched her in the face with them.

Re:But..

[mfwitten]

Individuals do not necessarily exhibit fully rational behavior

To an individual, his own behavior is always rational. The concept of "rational behavior" is relativistic, making your absolutist claims absurd.

So, if I decide that what is better for me is to take away what you have

Firstly, that's not capitalism (as explained below), and secondly, that is not even what was being discussed. We were discussing what's good for each individual. As you point out, having resources forcibly taken is not good for one of the individuals, namely me; ergo, your example is pointless.

and once it's all gone, we're all fucked.

Clearly people will act out of self-interest to avoid that.

Capitalism just tries to take the things which are shared resources, and make sure someone gets to it first and claims ownership of it.

No, it's not. The question is indeed how to define ownership. Capitalism defines owernship as gaining control of a resource through voluntary interaction; all of your examples involve gaining resources through involuntary interaction, and therefore all of your examples are not of capitalism.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

And we also have exponential population growth (7.1 billion and rising), so obviously these deadly diseases that you speak of are slackers.

Re:But..

[gstoddart]

A resource can't be shared if no one claims ownership of it.

Right, something must be owned to be shared. That makes total sense -- we all share the atmosphere and the oceans, and you suggesting someone needed to own it for us to share it? Sorry, but we were sharing it before someone claimed ownership. The ownership came later and is, in fact, independent of how much we share it.

In a system where property is not allowed, what is the motivation to be productive? An interest in the common good? That demands altruism.

You throw that out like altruism is inherently immoral. It isn't, we developed society and civilization by having some sense of "we're all in it together", not "fuck you" -- some things pretty much have to be done for (and by) everyone. Roads, government, plumbing. Because we all rely on them.

I guess what we've discovered here is that both capitalism and a demand economy fail when people are immoral.

With the corollary that people will always be immoral, and you can't count on anything else. You essentially have to build in safeguards which assume that at least some fraction of us will be doing things which only benefit them, but actively harm others -- like melamine in baby formula, for instance.

Unfortunately many of the assumptions of capitalism and the free market assume that people will be moral, all play by the same rules, and will have perfect information. That, of course, is false and completely ignores any actual observations of human behavior.

I'm not saying private ownership is inherently evil, or that everything being owned by everybody is inherently good.

I'm saying if you take any system and extrapolate it to its extremes, it breaks down completely -- and capitalism isn't shielded from that because people think it's better. Over time, capitalism has as much ability to turn into despotism -- because once someone controls all of the resources, they declare themselves king. Or people are beholden to the company store and are effectively serfs.

Everyone wants to looks at this as a black and white issue -- either you have full laissez faire capitalism, or you have teh horrible socialism. The reality is, I wouldn't want a pure form of either -- because both of them will degenerate into something else.

But if you don't build checks and balances into your system to prevent the extremes from happening, expecting the system to self-correct is just delusional. Because there's nothing to drive it, and people will exploit the system for their own benefits.

Any system which depends on the innate goodness and fairness of people (isn't that altruism?) to prevail is just pretending or kidding itself. So, much like when Communism says "once we force everyone to do this we'll have harmony" and we all say "bullshit" -- saying that "Capitalism will cause us to all play honestly by the same rules and we will have harmony" is an equal pile of bullshit.

So, my contention is neither system is 100% accurate, covers all cases, achieves all of the goals attributed to them, and works out well for everyone except those in power. And acting as if either of them is perfect or infallible and above the banalities of human nature is just plain moronic.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

It beats the tragedy of Communism any day. I'll keep my right to self-determination, feel free to give me yours if you don't value it.

Re:But..

[mfwitten]

But, as you point out, it's not good for each individual to cause a tragedy of the commons. Hence regulation, the best form of which is capitalism (by which I mean the Free Market, by which I mean a market free of coercion).

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to add that those people are also in power. Whether it's from CEOs who are bribing politicians or the politicians themselves.

Re:But..

[mfwitten]

See here.

I'm saying the tragedy of the commons is not good for each individual.

Re:But..

[TheNastyInThePasty]

I agree overall with your post but not this part:

The notion that it will self correct assumes that people are honest and not inherently out to screw everyone over -- which is completely disconnected from reality.

The economic theory of capitalism makes no such assumption.

For capitalism to work, one must assume that no single player or group of players can gain a permanent advantage and become powerful enough to single-handedly sway the markets. One must assume that no single player or collaborative group of players can gain control over all of the resources. One must assume that the consumers act perfectly rationally and will not buy from someone who will screw them over later or externalize costs to them. One must assume that marketing and PR will have no effect because capitalism requires the assumption that all players have perfect knowledge of the product and costs associated with it. One must assume that there is no cost to entering a market and therefore all markets will be subject to competition any time the other producers start to abuse their market position.

One must assume a lot of crazy things to think that capitalism will not fail. But assuming that people will not try to cheat and screw others over is not one of them.

Re:But..

[Prune]

Where the market forces completely and utterly fail is that the very high cost of widespread antibiotic resistance is NOT being directly felt by the industries that are using them the most.

Mod parent up. This is one of the most insightful comments I've seen on Slashdot today; it both gets to the root of the matter, and generalizes well to many related issues.

Re:But..

[Prune]

I don't think your post is conductive to changing anyone's mind, so you're either trolling or have given up on trying to reach people and this is just your venting. If you're trolling, well done; if not, perhaps you can try to put forward a reasoned out case for your position, and then there would be at least a chance for a useful discussion--even here.

Re:But..

[mfwitten]

But if dumping the waste in the river is such a problem, then obviously it isn't cheaper. Obviously it's an overhead for which a market will correct.

It is not capitalism to take resources by coercion. The waste-dumper did not gain control of the river through voluntary interaction; he gained control through involuntary interaction. Hence, this is not an example of capitalism (by which I mean the Free Market, by which I mean a market free of coercion).

Re:But..

[mfwitten]

Your comment is self-contradictory.

Re:But..

[ultranova]

The ghosts of Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand find your lack of Market faith disturbing.

The ghost of Ayn Rand should find her own existence disturbing, since ghosts are supernatural.

Re:But..

[mcgrew]

The health care system isn't the problem, the agriculture industry is. They're feeding cows and pigs antibiotics and other stuff to make them bigger, and they're the same antibiotics used in human medicine. It's insane and should be illegal. The free market doesn't curb abuse, no matter what the Randians say.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

We had a half a percent higher profit margin on cattle for a couple decades. That's totally worth having permanent incurable deadly diseases. Tragedy of the commons sucks balls, and time and again, it turns out that the "invisible hand" won't develop any solution to it.

Where can I buy insurance against future disease outbreaks?

Re:But..

[mrchaotica]

The problem here is that you're using a non-standard definition of "each." Everybody else understood you to mean "each, considered separately" (i.e., temporarily disregarding the action's effect on other individuals) but what you think you mean is "each, considered along with each other." However, your usage of "each" means the same thing as "all," and "all individuals" are the same as "the group," which means your claim is just a tautology.

Re:But..

[i kan reed]

Because there's some threshold of insurance payout that will cure an incurable disease?

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

That post was so fancy that I can't understand what you're actually trying to say. Are you sarcastically mocking people who think we would all starve without antibiotics in everything?

Just TYPING like that is "furious self-gratification". Just make your damn point, jeez.

Re:But..

[DNS-and-BIND]

There's no religion of the free market. It's not faith-based, it's reality-based. The reason that people know free enterprise and capitalism work is because these principles do not view man as he should be, but man as he exists.

it is uncritically championed as being perfect and infallible[citation needed]

Re:But..

[mrchaotica]

You're trying to make tricky arguments based on imprecise definitions. Just like with the "which is 'more free,' GPL or BSD?" debate, the essential question to ask is "for whom?" So: "private ownership is a restriction of such individual power and freedoms..." for whom? In this case, private ownership restricts people other than the owner, but inversely, de-restricts the owner himself.

At any rate, private ownership (whether its considered a restriction or not) is more-or-less irrelevant. The underlying problem is that true private ownership is impossible by definition (because if it were possible, it would no longer be a commons). For example, you can't fix air pollution by private ownership because you can't wall off the sky.

Re:But..

[ultranova]

If, as you say, it's good for each individual, then it mustâ"by definitionâ"be good for the group.

No. You are thinking of something that benefits every member of the group simultaneously, while what's under discussion is an action that benefits a single member of the group at the expense of the group as a whole, and can be done by any member of the group. It's classic prisoner's dilemma: if everyone defect, everyone are worse off than if everyone cooperated, yet any particular person is best off if they defect and others don't.

In other words, profits are private but losses public - that is the tragedy of the commons.

Re:But..

[mfwitten]

Nope. I am being very careful with language.

I was responding to: "Even if the depletion of that resource is bad for the group it is good for each individual doing it."

The idea is that individual self-interest will lead to a tragedy of the commons. However, a tragedy of the commons is in no way in the interests of any individual! Individual self-interest will, thus, correct for it.

As the OP said: "A tragedy of the commons generally arises from individual power and freedoms." Well, ownership is a restriction of such individual power and freedoms; the question, then, is how to define ownership. Capitalism is ownership defined through voluntary interaction.

So, regulation is necessary, and I'm saying that the best form of regulation is capitalism (by which I mean the Free Market, by which I mean a market free from involuntary interaction). It is not capitalism to take resources by coercion, and yet all of the disparaging examples that people are listing involve gaining control of resources in just that manner.

Re:But..

[Prune]

Both of you made good points; I only want to comment on the following:

> we developed society and civilization by having some sense of "we're all in it together", not "fuck you"

While this may be nice to believe, it's not representative of reality. Look at how civilization actually developed:
- we start off as foragers living in tribes where you know everyone in the tribe personally, and things are more or less egalitarian
- we discover agriculture
- the increased efficiency and per-unit-land density of food production allow, respectively, division of labor, and increased population density together with settlement
- due to division of labor, segments of the population engage in other tasks, some of which have to do with managing a growing settlement population and the complexities that entails
- size and complexity require a hierarchy to be managed, and now there are those who are free from the job of food production, and their skills allow them to engage in that management
- the lack of personal relations with the lower rungs of the ladder of the hierarchy means that those in the upper levels often don't care that much about those below, and certainly nothing close to how the foragers cared about their tribesmates
- abuse is inevitable, as the abusers have singificant potential advantages in such a system, with evolutionary social adaptations being subverted by the impersonalized nature of civilization (the 10,000 years of civilization is hardly enough time for our brains to have evolved from their configuration that was optimized for tribal life over millions of years)
- the hierarchy is a pyramid where the top of the pyramid benefits from ever growing it; thus, in a feedback loop, the usual human civilization is, historically, both the result and enabler of pyramid building

Note that I fully agree that there is often a sentiment of altruism in many people involved in public works. Unfortunately, this is not the dominant factor in a highly hierarchical civilization. The major force is the pyramid building impetus behind the propaganda, institutionalized power structures, and other mass influence like organized religion (especially in the past), educational indoctrination, and, especially nowadays, media and marketing.

I'm not sure what the solution is. This talk about capitalism and socialism is really just a small cross-section of the problem. We clearly cannot go back to a tribal lifestyle, but all other options seem equally bad (such as genetic engineering the population to be better adapted to the unnatural environment we've built up around us).

Re:But..

[Prune]

Just like nature, power abhors a vacuum. If it's not one institution that holds power, it will become consolidated around another. These power centers can be governments, businesses, or (in old times) individuals. Abuse can only be minimized if at least one of the following happens: there is sufficient counterbalance between the major power structures, each keeping a check on the others, or the main central power structure is led by benevolence. Unfortunately, the former configuration is generally unstable, and the latter is unrealistic, given human nature.

Re:But..

[girlintraining]

You know, I'm sure everything you said is right, nevermind the lack of citations or supporting logic for why this would actually be the case, instead of wishful thinking. Let's say it's all true.

The whole point being made here is that bacteria evolve very quickly, and trade genes with each other as a part of that. Bacteria doesn't reproduce sexually like we do; In fact, they happily cannibalize each other for genetic material. It doesn't do this intelligently, but it does do it very, very quickly. So the bacteria in your mythical "animals only" sphere of influence can and are cannibalized by the "humans aren't animals" category of bacteria. They cheat, see... they don't follow your nice little boxes you've built here.

Bottom line is your distinction is arbitrary and does not exist in nature. And antibiotic resistance isn't a 1:1 parity either... if it's even partially effective against, say, penicillin, it probably is effective against others as well. And as more of these genetic markers come together, not only does the bacteria become stronger against antibiotics as a whole, but because more and more of the bacteria has those markers now, there's a greater chance of transcription, mutation, etc., that will create an even greater resistance.

The fact is the biological clock is ticking. Even in the most optimistic case where everything you say is true and then some, it only delays the inevitable. What your post amounts to is basically apologism for the overuse of antibiotics to drive profits in unrelated fields, when they should have been kept strictly for use as humans, and not animals or livestock. The very day the first antibiotic was created, the so-called "miracle drug" of the 20th century, we knew this would happen.

We just didn't give a fuck. We ignored science because it meant prosperity today... but a terrible price later. And if anything defines western civilization today, its short-term gratification at the expense of long-term growth and prosperity.

Re:But..

[Solandri]

Right up until capitalism leads to its own form or totalitarianism, as corporations and cartels control pretty much everything and we all become serfs again.

Capitalism claims to be benign and benevolent, but since everyone tries to gain an unfair advantage and cheat the system, it just leads to a different form of losing your freedoms.

Capitalism doesn't claim to be benign or benevolent. It just claims to be better at finding more efficient solutions than systems which are (over)managed.

The key to making capitalism work though is competition. The more eyeballs you have looking at a problem and trying to solve it, the more quickly you can arrive at an optimal solution (vs. a single set of eyeballs in the managed solution). Evolution is capitalism. The totalitarianism and serfdom you complain about is the antithesis of capitalism. If you corrupt the system so all parties can no longer compete freely, by definition it's no longer pure capitalism.

The one area where capitalism does fail is in externalized costs. Where one actor gains the benefits of their decision while the other actor is stuck with the costs. Pollution and overfishing are primary examples of this. The technical nomenclature is the prisoner's dilemma (one actor shifts the costs of their decision onto another actor) and the tragedy of the commons (one actor divides the cost among all actors). So it's not a case of capitalism being a panacea or a complete failure. In these types of situations, capitalism fails and you need management. Outside of these situations, it's the most efficient solution (that we've been able to find) and management is usually just an opportunity to introduce corruption. Both sides of this debate are right, we just need to clarify the situations when one side is right and when the other side is right.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Is having an extra 3 billion people in the last 50 years, which abundant food has allowed, really better for the species?

Not at all... Thank you for your efforts to save the species- you and your family, citizen, shall be the first to set a selfless example by starving to death- please step this way.

Re:But..

[Solandri]

The prisoners dilemma demonstrates that if everyone does what is strictly in their own best interests, everybody loses.

The prisoner's dilemma is one specific set of circumstances. If you tweak the numbers in the grid, everyone acting in their own best interests results in everyone winning. In fact, for most situations this is true (which is why capitalism tends to work so well), and the prisoner's dilemma is the minority case.

So most of the time capitalism works. Some of the time it doesn't. The prisoner's dilemma (and tragedy of the commons) aren't a blanket condemnation of capitalism. They identify specific cases where capitalism fails and we need government management (specifically, those with externalized costs). But just as they demonstrate that unfettered capitalism doesn't work in some situations, they likewise demonstrate that government oversight is unnecessary in most cases.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you cannot interpret "some sort of absurd enclosure movement for air" as a metaphor rather than a literal solution doesn't mean that somebody else has the same trouble.

Just because you cannot interpret "some sort of absurd enclosure movement for air" as what I think it should mean rather than a literal solution doesn't mean that somebody else has the same trouble.

Fixed that for you.

Re:But..

[h4rr4r]

Reality disagrees.

Look at fishing fleets. They fish until extinction because the biggest catch this month is best for each individual participating. As a whole it kills their industry. This has happened to the atlantic cod and will soon happen to the bluefin.

Re:But..

[Jason Levine]

A free market assumes that consumers can make well informed choices between their options. If customers could choose between Widget Company A (who dumps waste products in the river and so sells his products for less) and Widget Company B (who doesn't and whose products are slightly more expensive as a result), they might choose A for the short-term monetary savings or B for the long-term environmental savings.

Of course, in real life, Widget Company A would hide their actions. If A is big and powerful enough, they could also buy off legislators to legalize their waste dumping and launch a bright and shiny PR campaign to make people equate Widget Company A's products with quality and B's with shoddy workmanship. In other words, instead of competing on a fair and level playing field with well informed customers, they would be competing on a field where A had all of the advantages and customers were kept in the dark on purpose.

Capitalism quickly turns into corporate oligarchy if suitable checks aren't put in place. Like many things, it's a good idea in theory, but reality complicates things.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.

Re:But..

[ralphaostrander]

When the pre antibiotic population of 750 million is reached they will be feeling it as there will be no one to sell to or anyone to sell. It will take the same time down as it was up say 100 years.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

The solution is very simple and at hand: Go vegan.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

"Do you think it might be true?"

--Ayn Rand, regarding Christianity, after the death of her husband Frank, as chronicled by Barbara Branden

Re:But..

[mfwitten]

The owner gained control of the resource through voluntary interaction.

Re:But..

[OneAhead]

Go look up "prisoner's dilemma" and "Nash equilibrium". And hand in your geek card on your way out.

Re:But..

[cusco]

That demands altruism.

Yep, and that's why we (and all other social species) have evolved altruistic behaviors and morality. It's very deep-seated in our brains, even feral children (wild children who have grown up without human interaction) demonstrate altruism. Unfortunately those who run our society seem to be predominantly sociopaths whose sense of altruism is pretty much non-existent.

Re:But..

[mfwitten]

Your comment and my response have both already been made here.

The idea is that individual self-interest will lead to a tragedy of the commons, yet it is in the self-interest of each individual to avoid the tragedy of the commons. "A tragedy of the commons generally arises from individual power and freedoms." Well, ownership is a restriction of such individual power and freedoms; the question, then, is how to define ownership. Capitalism is ownership defined through voluntary interaction, which is the best approach because it embraces—rather than ignores—individual self-interest and is therefore ultimately the most likely to be the most widely aligned with reality over some sufficient interval; indeed, voluntary interaction yields the most sustainable emergent constructs.

Re:But..

[cusco]

Over the long term. People in aggregate need to function in the long term, people individually almost always operate in the short-term. This is the point of regulation of businesses, forcing acceptable long-term behavior on an organization which focuses exclusively on short-term goals.

Re:But..

[cusco]

So the Cuyahoga River bursting into flames was caused by, what? If not capitalism, and not a Free Market approach to use of the common waterway, then by what? Watching a fucking river **BURN** on national television was the catalyst for the creation of the EPA, a very visible and very blatant demonstration of the failure of capitalism to regard the good of the public as being an equal to or higher priority than a producer's own good.

Re:But..

[mfwitten]

Note that governments subsidize the fishing industry, providing the incentives to keep up the reckless behavior, rather than allowing a market correction towards sustainable business models such as farming and fishing rights via private property.

While some governments establish regulations in the forms of quotas and fishing licenses, etc., the subsidies and indirect management of these resources has led to distortions and thus misappropriation. Were a private organization to make the same mistakes, it would go bankrupt and thus the resources would pass into the control of more capable hands. However, because the government controls these resources, it need not go bankrupt; the government coerces funding from its citizens regardless of how well or poorly it performs—it is a bad business that won't go away.

So, essentially, nobody owns the waters or the fish; hence, there is the beginning of a tragedy of the commons, but it will eventually be in everyone's self-interest to avoid it (at least with other industries that will have the benefit of this hindsight); the fact that you're worried about it and that it's being reported on at all is proof of this.

The solution is capitalism: The control of resources (i.e., ownership) derived through voluntary interaction (i.e., not coercion).

Re:But..

[ideonexus]

"The only problem with capitalism is the capitalists." ~ Herbert Hoover

Re: But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Worth trying, just to get to punch her in the face...

Re:But..

[JesseMcDonald]

For capitalism to work, ... One must assume that the consumers act perfectly rationally and will not buy from someone who will screw them over later or externalize costs to them. One must assume that marketing and PR will have no effect because capitalism requires the assumption that all players have perfect knowledge of the product and costs associated with it. One must assume that there is no cost to entering a market and therefore all markets will be subject to competition any time the other producers start to abuse their market position.

These things are necessary only for capitalism to result in an optimal allocation of resources: each resource put to its highest-valued use. If they aren't true, the result isn't failure, it's just a suboptimal allocation of resources. If they're nearly true—and they are—then the result will be nearly optimal. (And the effect of any of these things not being true is at least as bad in any other economic system, most of which don't even aim for optimal allocation of resources to begin with, instead prioritizing "fairness" or some other such subjective quality.)

Re:But..

[segwonk]

"The largest driver for resistance is the over-use of antibiotics in non-health care related fields, like industrial agriculture, and hand soap."

Honest question: I was under the impression that there is a significant difference between the antibiotics given to (e.g.) cows, and "antibiotic" hand soap. The first acts intracellularlyâ€"inside the cellâ€"while antibiotic soaps act on the whole cell itself. Two completely different mechanisms. One comparison I read said, about the risk of developing resistance to hand soaps, "it would be like developing a resistance to fire." Ain't gonna happen.

Are antibiotic hand soaps really a problem?

- jw

Re:But..

[segwonk]

…sorry about replying to myself, but WTF is with Slashdot's code? I previewed my comment and did not see all the gibberish in the middle. Apologies.

Re:But..

[hoboroadie]

We have a cow-calf thing going without unnecesary antibiotics. They don't bulk up as fast, but we still get to eat. I really believe an organic system could be scaled up to feed everyone, but you all are going to have to work that out for yourselves...
and that's all uphill considering who's running it now.

Re:But..

[cusco]

Yes, they work so well that without massive regulation and government intervention they destroy the society they function in.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Economists even have a term for this: negative externality. It's a well known cause of market failure - yes, markets do fail to produce socially optimal results from time to time, and this is a great/awful example of that.

Re:But..

[lgw]

Sure, but given enough altruism, there's no tragedy of the common in the first place. That's the fundamental flaw with communism: it requires more altruism than the greed-based market systems, and so cannot possibly be a solution to the problem of "too much greed".

Also, those sociopaths running things? That's never going to change under any system, so choose the system that works best with individuals being greedy and leaders being sociopaths! Market-based economies are the least-bad solution discovered so far.

Re:But..

[Altrag]

However, a tragedy of the commons is in no way in the interests of any individual!

This statement is absurdly false. If this were true, there would be no tragedy of the commons to talk about because everyone would be on the look out for such situations.

The tragedy of the commons happens because somebody does benefit from screwing everyone else over. In this particular case, if the beef industry was at all concerned with the tragedy of the commons, they would have abandoned antibiotic over-application years ago when resistant bacteria were first discovered.

The free market fails because some things simply are necessarily shared -- the air we breathe for example. By your "free" market, you're perfectly free to pollute the air above your land as much as you want. But unless you've figured out how to control the wind, that polluted air is going to affect all of your neighbors.

You, being the awesome capitalist that you are, see no reason to spend money installing air filters because what do you care? If you don't like the pollution yourself you just go ahead and use the money you saved on air filtering to buy a nice house a few miles away where it doesn't affect your personally.

So now we're in a situation with one of three outcomes:
- Your neighbors coerce you into installing air filters against your will.
- Your neighbors have to install their own air filters (essentially being coerced by your lack of care, to use your terminology.)
- Your neighbors just have to live with it (essentially being coerced to breathe bad air by your lack of care.)

In all of those cases, some form of market-breaking coercion is in effect. And its unavoidable as long as air is able to freely move across our arbitrarily defined boundaries.

Now you might say this is just an opportunity for more capitalism -- someone can just start producing air filters and make a fortune! This is true but it doesn't negate the fact that we're buying those air filters due to an initial breakdown in the market caused by you damaging an unavoidably shared resource.

And that's an example with fairly immediate and obvious impacts. Something like the antibiotic resistance is neither immediate nor obvious, so you don't even have to be a complete jerk to screw up the free market -- you can manage to do so completely unintentionally.

The free market works great under perfect conditions with a complete lack of externalities and a complete lack of barriers to entry. Unfortunately the real world doesn't have such conditions. The free market can still work well in the real world but some control must be influenced in order to prevent destroying public resources, prevent unnatural monopolies, keep natural monopolies in check and so forth. As usual, its very debatable exactly how much control is necessary for these purposes but it should be fairly obvious that the answer is neither "none" nor "total" but somewhere in between.

Re:But..

[HiThere]

Umnnh.... The health care system isn't the ONLY problem. Perhaps not even the major problem. But it's certainly a contributory factor.

Re:But..

[mfwitten]

The free market does not promise an immediate solution to every problem; the free market is about allowing a solution to emerge over time through evolution by variation and selection. Even under relatively mindless influences, this is much more likely to yield sustainable results than an attempt at Intelligent Design.

If choosing `A' proves too harmful in the long run, then choosing `B' (among other actions) will become all around a matter of self-interest. Let the bad actors poor all the money they want into a shiny PR campaign; a polished turd is still a turd; you can piss in people's mouths and tell them it's rain, but that doesn't mean you can sustain the lie, because the laws of reality won't allow it.

Voluntary interaction provides the only check that is necessary: Bankruptcy. The only way a bad organization can sustain itself is through forced funding by violent coercion, and that is a precarious foundation anyway. The government is just another bad company, and employing the government to coerce people for you (by, say, "legalizing" your behavior) is still just coercion; it is not capitalism to take resources by coercion.

So, saying that "capitalism quickly turns into corporate oligarchy" is really just saying: Under capitalism, you will at worst end up with... government.

Re:But..

[mfwitten]

Learn how to read.

Re:But..

[HiThere]

No. The "tragedy of the commons" results of individuals sharing access to a limite resource, without being regulated in their use of it. (Though in some formulations that "without being regulated in their use of it" is left unmentioned.)

This inevitably results in the destruction through overuse of the shared resource unless the group using it is sufficiently small that the common resource can regenerate faster than it is used. But since the use is unregulated this cannot be enforced.

OTOH, the use of the atmosphere for breathing is such a resource, and it has lasted for a long time, because plants regenerate it as fast as it is used.

Still, one should note that most of the plants that regenerate the atmosphere are plankton, and the plankton are currently rapidly decreasing in number. So it is not unreasonable to project that at some future date the common atmosphere will become unbreatheable. And this would be an example of the tragedy of the commons, even though it wasn't the breathing of the atmosphere that rendered the atmosphere unbreathable. (Much Oxygen is removed from the atmosphere through processed that have nothing to do with breathing, but they still have impacts on its common use for breathing.)

Please note that I didn't mention anything about "best interests". You can make that work via a digression through game theory, but the logic isn't as straightforwards as it appears. It is, after all, a game of imperfect information played by multiple players, and such games tend to be intractable. Worse, different players have different payoffs. And many of them aren't even aware that they are playing.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

While your analysis is sound, I believe it's incomplete and that's what leads you to the wrong conclusion you so desperately seek. Let's keep going down the logical path here:

Why is the industry not feeling the effects? Who *is* feeling the effects, and why isn't that being transmitted by the market to the industries in question? "The People", as in all of us, are feeling the effects in the sense that we're beginning to be impacted by the superbug fallout, and should be able to see that this will get worse over time. If "The People" were fully aware of the dangerous fallout that's beginning to result from our antibiotic abuse, it would make sense for us, as consumers to apply market pressure to these beef and soap industries and refuse to buy antibiotic-abusing products. So why aren't we applying that pressure? Largely it's because we're not fully aware. By now everyone has *some* idea that antibiotic abuse is bad, but they really don't get it. They once read an article on CNN 5 years ago about a strange superbug in a hospital that killed or maimed one isolated individual and didn't respond to antibiotic treatment. Most likely their takeaway was that hospitals are full of nasty bugs (and they are!) and to avoid hospitals unless necessary. Either way, the point is that the public is clearly not fully aware of the dangers on average.

I think this places the blame squarely on the feet of Science. The scientific community is well aware of the dangers. It is their job/role in society to be aware of these things and raise the alarm. It is their job to inform the public and make them alarmed. It is the government's job to fund and support those scientists to make sure they can tell the truth in the face of an industry that doesn't want to hear it, or a public who might be apathetic to a weak version of the message.

Why are there biological scientists out there carrying on with their day-to-day work and not raising hell about this? Why aren't they refusing, as a group, to work on new medicines until the media and industry give the issue the publicity it needs? Where's their sense of professional and scientific responsibility to mankind? It's their job to tell us to be scared of this, and they're clearly failing or we'd be refusing to buy anti-biotic-fed beef and antibiotic hand soap.

Re:But..

[HiThere]

I'd like some evidence before I believe that claim that the claims are nearly true. I seem to have seen a lot of evidence that appears to contradict that. This is most blatantly clear in the claim that there are "no cost to entering a market", but it's nearly as clear that "all players have perfect knowledge" is false.

Re:But..

[Em Adespoton]

Individuals do not necessarily exhibit fully rational behavior

To an individual, his own behavior is always rational. The concept of "rational behavior" is relativistic, making your absolutist claims absurd.

Really? I know a lot of people who are even proud of "thinking with their heart" that reject rational behaviour as it doesn't "feel right".

Of course, calling "not necessarily" absolutist is rather irrational, so you DO prove that SOME people think irrational behaviour is rational.

So, if I decide that what is better for me is to take away what you have

Firstly, that's not capitalism (as explained below), and secondly, that is not even what was being discussed. We were discussing what's good for each individual. As you point out, having resources forcibly taken is not good for one of the individuals, namely me; ergo, your example is pointless.

I think we need a venn diagram here -- when you say "each" do you mean each individual in a group, each individual in the world, each non-group entity, or something else? I don't quite get how your response lines up with his statement, which WAS a direct response to what was being discussed.

and once it's all gone, we're all fucked.

Clearly people will act out of self-interest to avoid that.

Capitalism just tries to take the things which are shared resources, and make sure someone gets to it first and claims ownership of it.

No, it's not. The question is indeed how to define ownership. Capitalism defines owernship as gaining control of a resource through voluntary interaction; all of your examples involve gaining resources through involuntary interaction, and therefore all of your examples are not of capitalism.

By your definition of capitalism, there has never been a correct implementation of capitalism in the world (kind of like communism). Through self-interest, I want to gain control of as many resources as I can. Unfortunately, so do others, and this setup turns into a glorified pyramid scheme, with each tier voluntarily interacting inside the tier, but subject to the tier above, and abusing the tier below. Such systems always depend on there being a tier below to exploit -- and the bottom tier never gets to fully take advantage of capitalism. The problem is, when the bottom tier is our environment, short-sightedness on the part of those further up the pyramid can mean that while they're voluntarily giving up one really good thing for one somewhat good thing, they (and their entire tier) may be totally aware of what they've really given up. In fact, this is how wealth and power passes between tiers in a capitalist system.

Re:But..

[cusco]

That's never going to change under any system

The ghost of Edward Bernays would like to have a word with you . . .

Barely a century ago the thought that an army would not gratuitously rape, rob and massacre the population of whatever area it was invading would have been considered absurd. Today it's a war crime. Three centuries ago the thought that peasants could have a viable voice in government was ridiculous. The world changes, your world-view needs to be able to accommodate that change.

Re:But..

[HiThere]

That's actually less than clear. In Classic Greece there was little regulation of trade. (This is one of the things that disturbed the Persians. I quote(well, paraphrase): "Who are these people who have special places to go where they cheat each other?" (I forget whether that was Darius or Cyrus. I don't seem to find it on Google.)

Re:But..

[mfwitten]

Are the regulators not also individuals?

You're correct in that the free market does not promise an immediate solution to every problem; the free market is about allowing a solution to emerge organically over the long term through evolution by variation and selection. Even under relatively mindless influences, this is much more likely to yield sustainable results than an attempt at Intelligent Design, because an evolved solution is necessarily aligned with reality.

Voluntary interaction provides the only regulation that is required: Bankruptcy. The only way a bad organization can sustain itself is through forced funding by involuntary interaction (that is, coercion). Indeed, the easiest way for a company (such as a regulatory agency) to achieve this is to employ another bad company that specializes in coercion—an organization known colloquially as "the government", which can be used to "legalize" bad behavior, or "regulate" competitors out of business, etc. However, employing somebody else to do your dirty work makes no difference; it is not capitalism to take resources by coercion.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

In this fantasy world where there are no livestock antibiotics, there is also more economic growth in the developing world because the external cost of antibiotic resistance never happened.

This is a common policy logic mistake - you know people who benefit from antibiotics, but you'll never know the people who were killed by the resistance those antibiotics bred. Freedom isn't the right to hurt other people without their permission.

Re:But..

[h4rr4r]

Why would anyone not fish out all the fish if they owned them?

I will only live another ~70 years. I might as well take my money now.

You are letting your ideology blind you to reality.

Re:But..

[cusco]

The world has changed in the last 25 centuries. Today a single company can shear off the top of an entire mountain, suck out the coal, and fill the valley with the detritus, it would have taken the entire Classical Greek population decades to do that. A couple of companies dumped so much crap into the Cuyahoga River that it burst into flames. Not regulating trade today is a recipe for disaster, there are too many people and our technology is too high.

Re:But..

[mfwitten]

A common waterway, you say? That sounds like a... tragedy of the commons... not a tragedy of private ownership of resources.

So, now there's an organization called "the EPA". Great. Regardless of how well they perform, they get paid. If they do a lousy job, they don't go brankrupt, they get more money, which is coerced from people they call "citizens". Meanwhile, they are coercing not only individuals but entire industries into solutions that may have more to do with bureaucratic fantasy than workable reality. Also, a big bad energy company could use the EPA to regulate rival technology companies out of existence.

Seeing a river burn on national television probably changed the way a lot of people thought about the environment. Perhaps environmental consciousness became prominent regardless of the EPA—perhaps even despite the EPA.

Re:But..

[HiThere]

That's a good analysis, but I'm not sure I accept the claim that those are the only problems They are, however, certainly major problems with it where it clearly fails totally.

OTOH, I don't trust any system that so concentrates power. Concentrated power, even without malice, is incredibly dangerous. And when positions with concentrated power exist, they inevitable attract people who are compulsivley driven to exert power. (This is one reason why I suspect that a lottery would, on the average, provide a superior government to an election, even if the electoral system were well designed and free of corruption.)

The capitalism that you have described would still tend to accumulate monopoly power in certain areas, and the director of that power, whatever his title, would be in a position to so act as to increase his power. So he would. There needs to be a negative feedback system to prevent this from happening. One such factor used to be the progressive income tax system, but it was not well designed, and has fallen into corruption. It should be a simple tax on all income without exemptions or exceptions. If, for some social policy reason, you want to encourage some behavior, actively subsidize it, don't distort the tax system. Often for simplicity I recommend a simple:
tax = rate * income - offset
equation for the tax system. That's probably not actually ideal, but it's simple enough that nearly anyone can understand it, which is a real advantage. The more complex
tax = rate1 * income^2 + rate2 * income - offset
is more flexible, and probably could better fit the desired values. But it's harder to understand, and three adjustment constants are harder to set correctly than is one.

However, do note that these proposals are continuous functions. At every step earning more money means a larger after-tax income. Also notice that if the offset is larger than the pre-offset tax calculation, then this counts as a negative income tax. But for fairness ALL sources of income must be counted. And the tax code should NOT contain any writeoffs for "business expenses" or the like. If it is desired to provide those, that should be in a separate law.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

We had a half a percent higher profit margin on cattle for a couple decades. That's totally worth having permanent incurable deadly diseases. Tragedy of the commons sucks balls, and time and again, it turns out that the "invisible hand" won't develop any solution to it.

Where can I buy insurance against future disease outbreaks?

Because there's some threshold of insurance payout that will cure an incurable disease?

Is there some threshold of life insurance payout that will bring a person back to life? Rationally we should be willing to accept SOME risk of outbreak (or airplane hijacking, etc) in exchange for money.

I wasn't trying to be snide... is there actually anywhere I can buy outbreak insurance? If enough people do it, the insurance companies will have an incentive to work out a deal with antibiotic-using farmers.

But if you're certain the government will succeed where the free market has failed, feel free to write a letter to your congressperson. There's no reason we can't try multiple solutions at once.

Re:But..

[hoboroadie]

The invisible hand is always making an obscene gesture at me and/or shovelling poison into my water hole.

oh disparagement, how inadequate you are...

Re:But..

[JesseMcDonald]

I'd like some evidence before I believe that claim that the claims are nearly true. ... the claim that there are "no cost to entering a market" ...

There are fairly high barriers to entry, but for the most part they're regulatory barriers, or otherwise based on force. To the extent that force is treated as legitimate, the system is not capitalistic.

... that "all players have perfect knowledge" ...

No one has perfect knowledge, but individuals tend to have better knowledge of those things which directly concern them than anyone else. They certainly have the most incentive. An impartial, benevolent expert, if such a thing actually existed, might be able to claim more accurate and in-depth knowledge on a particular subject, but they couldn't possibly apply that knowledge in the proper context, taking into account all the other things the individual cares about. At best they could advise the individual of the pros and cons of various options.

Re:But..

[Prune]

Ah, I learned something new today; thanks. :)

Re:But..

[cusco]

to emerge organically over the long term

Over the long term, we're all dead. Do you think that the executives of US Gypsum gave a flying fuck about the long term when they discovered that their asbestos products caused mesothelioma? No, they covered that information up, knowingly condemning hundreds of thousands of people to horrible, agonizing, drawn-out deaths, and so did their successors over the next four decades. Eventually they went bankrupt (for reasons unrelated to mesothelioma) and now belong to Halliburton, while society as a whole has suffered the long-term effects of hundreds of thousands of unnecessary early deaths and billions of dollars in health care costs. The only thing to "emerge organically over the long term" were thundering herds of trial lawyers.

Re:But..

[tmosley]

You know, the invisible hand actually does work. It's just that it isn't allowed to, because contrary to popular (read: idiotic) belief, the US is NOT a free market economy. This has been the case for 100 years now, and it is becoming ever clearer with each passing year.

The last company I worked at developed a new antimicrobial that was highly effective, but the regulatory barriers to market entry are so high, they have only made headway in using it to prevent tooth decay. Large companies might show interest, but they are risk adverse due to the bad economy, which has been caused by constant Fed meddling in the economy (chronically low interest rates caused a series of bubbles and busts, which have gotten worse and worse to the point that no-one wants to take ANY risk).

Re:But..

[tmosley]

Regulations raise costs, forcing farmers to do what they can to get more out of their money, including doing horrible things to their animals and the world.

There was no regulation that said that spent fuel had to be stored in a pool on site at Fukushima, but the regulations for moving and disposing of the stuff, not to mention upgrading the plant or opening new ones, were and are so severe that they didn't have another choice.

Re:But..

[lgw]

Well, democracy, just like market-based economics, is terrible, except it's better than anything else that's been tried. If you have a system for choosing leaders that doesn't give an advantage to lying sociopaths, and isn't based on sophomoric naivity, that would be great - we could use it for corporate governance too!

Really, just fixing the corporate side would be enough. There's nothing wrong IMO with profit-seeking, if mixed with long-term self interest (which pretty much requires taking the interest of the community into account) instead of immediate greed.

Re:But..

[tmosley]

Considering the current level of intervention, and the fact that you are calling for more, yes, you are, in fact, calling for totalitarianism.

The US is already a fascist state, if you hadn't noticed.

Re:But..

[tmosley]

I'm sure you mean "that WITH massive regulation and government intervention they destroy the society they function in."

Because we already have those things. And it's still happening. In fact, it is happening now, when it didn't back then, even when we were still fascist, but just much less so, like in the 60's and 70's.

Re:But..

[tmosley]

"down to luck"

Somehow, I don't think you took microbiology.

Here's a clue: small amounts of energy savings lead to total dominance of one culture over another. When you are talking about trillions upon trillions of bacteria, the gene is going to fall out of one of them, and that one is going to multiply and take over once the selective pressure is gone.

Re:But..

[Mab_Mass]

First of all, I wonder about this conclusion that I "so desperately seek." I thought that I was sharing my views and experience with the world and how I see things.

Anyhow, you point out that a big part of the issue is that the public is not making the fully informed, long-term self-interested decisions to create the proper market forces. I'd agree wholeheartedly, and extend this analysis to say that this is NORMAL. In modern society, our consumer decisions impact many, many things. Chances are, we are all walking around wearing clothing and carrying goods that originate from multiple countries and that are built up from many different suppliers. (Personally, I just checked that my fleece was made in the Philippines, my shoes were made in china, my socks in the US, my cell phone is by a Korean company, my car is Japanese, and so on.) Furthermore, there is no indication of the quality of treatment of the workers who mined the copper that is in this computer I'm using, and I suspect that it would be very difficult to trace the origins of that copper, let alone figure out the worker conditions.

My point here is that it is essentially impossible for all consumers to make all purchase decisions based upon a fully informed view of how the products are made and what kinds of direct and external costs are factored into the price of these items. In order for a truly free market, each person would need to make all kinds of these decisions all the time.

I think this places the blame squarely on the feet of Science....Why are there biological scientists out there carrying on with their day-to-day work and not raising hell about this? Why aren't they refusing, as a group, to work on new medicines until the media and industry give the issue the publicity it needs?

Perhaps it is because scientists are often ignored, ridiculed, and dismissed. Witness discussions around evolution or global warming, two concepts widely accepted by the scientific community, yet resisted by people with long-held religious beliefs and financial interests, respectively.

You're characterization of the issue as a failing of scientists and laying the blame wholly at their feet is missing much of the larger complexities here. Perhaps those who are pumping their cattle full of antibiotics, despite warnings of scientists, also share some of the responsibility? Pointing the finger at scientists who are not talking loudly enough sure sounds like scapegoating to me.

Re:But..

[cusco]

As long as your "long-term self interest" includes time spans longer than the self. RJR Tobacco and US Gypsum discovered in the 1930s that their products caused cancer when used as directed. They then spent the next two generations denying any problem existed, since the "long-term self interest" of the company management wasn't THAT long.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

So what can you do to stop the spraying of the biological fillaments, chemicals, heavy metals, toxins and radiologicals in the atmosphere, essentially conducting their experiments on the group? Strong enough to blog, but what is getting done to stop them?

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

If we call the Ghostbusters, we can deal to them much as society should have done while they were alive.

Re:But..

[cusco]

So how would your phantasmagorical free market magic have protected the Cuyahoga River? It didn't seem to be doing a very good job prior to the foundation of the EPA, today kids can swim in the river.

Re:But..

[mfwitten]

Are the regulators not also individuals? In the real world, they are not a class of special, noble beings; they are also individuals with the same failings of which you speak, and their industry is not set apart from the laws of the universe under which all other industries exist.

Voluntary interaction provides the only fundamental regulation that is required: Bankruptcy. The only way a bad organization can sustain itself is through forced funding by involuntary interaction (that is, coercion). This is also true of regulatory agencies; like any other company, a regulatory agency should instead be founded on capitalism as a "private" company.

In particular, what is "Government"? Any organization—any organization at all—that confiscates resources by threat of strike-first violence is a "governmental" organization. When one such organization becomes a monopoly, we call that organization "Government".

Government inevitably becomes just another bad company in the market place, one that doesn't go out of business because it is able to confiscate your resources by threat of violence; it doesn't give you the goods and services for which you personally think you are paying, but you have to pay them anyway—it's totally absurd and unconscionable. It is not a modern value to coerce resources from people by threat of violence. So, in fact, Government is actually the last barbaric vestige of a pre-modern civilization.

Indeed, the easiest way for a company to secure its own funding by coercion is to employ a specialist, Government, to "legalize" bad behavior, or "regulate" competitors out of business, etc. The fundamental problem here is a foundation of coercion, which is itself fundamentally a lack of regulation (as per above).

You are correct in that the free market does not promise an immediate solution to every problem, particularly ones that are completely unforeseen. But that's not the point of the free market; rather, it's about allowing a solution to emerge organically over the long term through evolution by variation and selection. Even under relatively mindless influences, this is much more likely to yield sustainable results than an attempt at Intelligent Design—the fantasies of bureacrats—because an evolved solution is necessarily aligned with reality.

Re:But..

[sjames]

No true free market?

There will NEVER EVER be a free market to suit your standards. They will always be regulated. For example, sausage may not include ground human baby. It will never be allowed to include ground human baby and so will never be a truly free(TM, pat. pend.) market.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you hate profits?

Re:But..

[lgw]

Sure, but that sort of example is rare. There's no need for a system to be perfect, just better. It's widely recognized that the biggest problem with corporate governance today is too much short-term focus, but there aren't any good ideas for fixing that. I think that fixing the taxing of dividends would help immensely - corporations focus on quarterly growth and dividends are often avoided mostly for tax reasons. Back when what made a top-tier company was the ability to sustain dividends through a downturn, long-term planning was required.

Re:But..

[sjames]

Resources can be shared under an inclusive group ownership. The classic example is the commons itself. That is, common grazing land. It was 'owned' by the entire village collectively but by nobody in particular.

The enclosure of the commons was literally dividing the commons into parcels owned by individuals. Generally wealthy individuals and to the detriment of the village.

The environment is owned by everyone in general and nobody in particular.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet, international mega-corporations lobby for less regulations and less information to their "consumers". Latest developments are treaties that allow corporations to sue and bankrupt countries for hurting their potential profits by their democratic politics and regulations.

Captcha: smothers

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess what we've discovered here is that both capitalism and a demand economy fail when people are immoral.

Please describe how our money system both demotes immorality and promotes morality in people.

Re:But..

[sjames]

The bacteria that are becoming a problem do cross fairly freely between humans and livestock. If you breed MRSA in cows, it will end up attacking humans.

Since we don't really want to ban antibiotics for humans, that leaves livestock.

Re:But..

[mcgrew]

Your scenario only applies to Weird societies. The prisoner's dilemma doesn't work the same in all cultures; and in fact, it only plays out that way in western societies.

Link supplied by /.'s resident biologist, Samantha Wright

Re:But..

[sjames]

It also fails in the area of perfect information and rational actors. There's too much information both true and false out there for most people to act rationally and still have time to live and work.

It's getting hard to find actual evidence of a healthy market in our economy.

More fundamentally, Capitalism completely fails to address a number of important social goals such as full employment (or at least a lack of involuntary unemployment or underemployment), the ability of all to enjoy at least a modest lifestyle, etc.

Re:But..

[cusco]

Rare??? What fracking planet do YOU live on? Here on Earth they slice the tops off mountains to get at the coal, dump ever-increasing amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, pour antibiotics by the ton through farm animals and into waterways, suck ancient aquifers dry, create massive dead zones in the ocean with animal waste runoff, etc. ad nauseum. These are **ALL** long-term issues that no corporation will address until some outside body forces them to. The Free Market Fairy isn't going to wave her magic wand and make it suddenly profitable to respect the Commons.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

They both can happily coexist

Re:But..

[kurzweilfreak]

Because the public is so willing to listen to scientists, right? *cough creationists cough*

At least in the US, there's an underlying sentiment of anti-intellectualism and "my opinion is just as valid as your knowledge", and a lot of people who just straight out don't trust scientists because of their own self-ignorance. This is why we have things spreading like creationism, anti-GMO activity, climate change debate, etc. If it were that easy, these things wouldn't exist. You can lead a horse to water....

Re:But..

[lgw]

But that wasn't my point - my point was that even when there is a clear long term downside to the company for doing X, but X makes a bit more profit this quarter, we don't even get that right. That should be a far more addressable problem than the tragedy of the commons (though, again, a corporation that wasn't led by lying sociopaths would do far less externalizing of costs)..

It would make things better if companies went back to caring about their own long-term self interest. That used to be far more common, at least among companies that had survived long term already.

I've never seen any sort of reasonable proposal for dealing with the tragedy of the commons long term, because regulatory capture is inevitable. The best, most rational cases of regulation are as short lived as the mythical unregulated free market. But if you have a magic answer to not having the government oversight done by lying sociopaths (often the exact same lying sociopaths who run the companies they regulate, at some other point in their lives), then that would be nifty.

Re:But..

[kurzweilfreak]

They say people won't buy GMO-labeled food when what they mean is people won't buy GMO-labeled food at the same price as already-familiar food.

No, what they mean is that people won't buy GMO-labeled food in the face of the anti-GMO FUD machine of propaganda and lies perpetrated by the organic food industry telling people that GMO foods cause cancer and a hundred other diseases despite evidence to the contrary. Also, the cost of massive changes in labeling and packaging to accommodate that kind of labeling mandate will probably cause the price of food to go up by a not insignificant amount. It's not as easy as just slapping a sticker on something that says "may contain GMOs".

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps biological scientists realize that life is an arms race, this type of thing is inevitable and the costs of implementing a possible fix would be far greater the benefits. Further they view it as a technology problem not a social problem.

Re:But..

[cusco]

You're right. I missed your point.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Read some of the threads about peer review and no replication of studies that appear on here. Do you see any scientist claiming there is not a major problem? No, you will not. There is only disagreement on what is the root cause and best way to fix it.

Re:But..

[HornWumpus]

I assume you understand that concentration of power is _the key flaw_ in socialism or any other planned economy?

Basically your claim is that, at it's worst, capitalism is no better then socialism.

BTW Nobody but Marx thinks monopolies are inevitable.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct, but you fail to realize that the individual almost never recognizes it before it's too late. In addition, why should I prevent the tragedy if you aren't going to.

By choosing not to do the action which causes the commons to be ruined, I perform worse than the people who choose to partake, and I get no benefit from the commons. But if I choose to partake, I get some benefit before the commons is eventually destroyed anyways.

The tragedy of the commons is a description of something that *actually* happens.

Re:But..

[kermidge]

Correct. Maybe - we haven't reached Soylent Green yet.

The only free market is outlaw. In my experience many of those who yelp and clamor for free market are speaking from unexamined or disguised agenda, ignorance, and wishful thinking. Some, of course, could simply be rapacious bastards from the "I got mine so fuck you." school of existence. There has never been a shortage there, in the human behaviour market - a case where it seems to me that supply greatly outstrips demand.

Of course, one could take what those who pervert Darwin to hide their agenda to see that, for instance, the poor could be limited to chalk in 'milk' while the rich could have real dairy trucked to them. (from historical instance, go look it up if interested)

Re:But..

[Altrag]

In particular, what is "Government"? Any organizationâ"any organization at allâ"that confiscates resources by threat of strike-first violence is a "governmental" organization. When one such organization becomes a monopoly, we call that organization "Government".

No, an organization that confiscates resources by threat of violence could be any organization whatsoever. Do you consider the drug cartels in Mexico to be the "government?" Absolutely not. They have their own democratically elected government, for better or worse.

"The government" is the body that makes the laws. Yes in some cases that happens to also be the violent warlords, cartels, etc but that's by no means a necessity. And yes, a government of any type requires a means to enforce said laws. There's a huge difference between using the threat of violence for legal enforcement vs using the threat of violence for confiscation. (Or using the threat of violence to stifle dissent or any other purpose.)

Government inevitably becomes just another bad company in the market place

I imagine most governments are terrible companies in the market place because that's not their realm of operation. They exist to oversee the public good (definition of "public" being the general distinction between types of government -- from monarchs who think they are the public to fully democratic systems where the public tries to protect itself to fully social system where big brother tries to protect his "siblings." All in theory of course!)

one that doesn't go out of business because it is able to confiscate your resources by threat of violence

You have to go a LONG way down the tax evasion line before actual violence is threatened. At some base level yes, the police will enforce the laws, but from a higher level perspective tax isn't a "confiscation" its a shared pool of resources that is (supposed to be) used for the purpose of keeping all other shared resources healthy for the public to use.

it doesn't give you the goods and services for which you personally think you are paying, but you have to pay them anyway

I suppose you never drive on a road, are perfectly happy if your house burns down and nobody comes to rescue you, don't care if children get educated, don't care if your country gets invaded and you can't defend yourself, don't care if your air gets polluted as per my previous theoretical situation, etc. Its absolutely true that the US government in particular has been using tax money to further the ends of individuals and corporations who hold too much sway over Washington for the past few decades but that's mainly because the US government is too close to the free market, not because its too far away. The free market equates money with power and that's not an system any government should run under if they are intending to provide services for the entire public rather than just the rich.

it's totally absurd and unconscionable.

Why do you think that? Because you don't like paying taxes? Most people don't like paying taxes but luckily the majority of us understand that our governing bodies don't operate in a magic land where everything is free only for them. They have to obtain operational money from somewhere.

It is not a modern value to coerce resources from people by threat of violence. So, in fact, Government is actually the last barbaric vestige of a pre-modern civilization.

The only reason its not a modern value is because we've invented governmental systems that allow deterrents to arbitrary violence. I'm not entirely sure what your alternative is. A purely free market cannot exist (at least in the real world) as I've previously stated even on its own merits, never mind taking into consideration in the guy who happens to be able to afford the biggest club and decides he's not a fan of anyone besides him being free, markets included -- and a guy like with always come around sooner or later unless someone manages to genetically engineer the asshole gene out of our species.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Organic companies do NOT want to be competitive. They say people won't buy shit-grown labeled food when what they mean is people won't buy shit-grown labeled food at the same price as already-familiar food. If organic companies are forced to label it, they are also forced to pass the cost savings on to consumers in exactly the way Adam Smith--the god of free market enterprise--postulated.

See how silly your point is?

Re:But..

[Guy Harris]

If, as you say, it's good for each individual, then it must—by definition—be good for the group.

Action X, if undertaken by individual A, might be good for individual A, but might not be so good for individuals B, C, and D, who are members of the same group of which A is a member.

"...leads each individual to do what's in their own best interest" means "for each individual a in group G, leads individual a to do what's in the best interest of individual a", not "for each individual a in group G, for each individual b in group G, leads individual a to do what's in the best interest for individual b". Doing the latter might be good for the group, but doing the former is most definitely not "by definition" good for the group.

Re:But..

[Guy Harris]

The solution is capitalism: The control of resources (i.e., ownership) derived through voluntary interaction (i.e., not coercion).

So, starting with a situation in which "nobody owns the waters or the fish", how do we progress to a situation where they do? Have the fishing community collectively decide to divide up the regions of the water, give each fisherman a region in which they're allowed to fish, provide a mechanism to enforce that rule, and allow people to sell their license to fish in that region? In order to avoid coercion, that would have to be a unanimous decision.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

(As said by Quigley) capitalism is the search for profits, not for prosperity.
and...
as been "money a claim on richness" and so not real richness.

I deduce that capitalism is a system for reaching poverty.

Re:But..

[mick.lausch]

Antibiotics resistance is located int he micro-organism and not in the host (human, animal) cells. Resistance genes are located on so called plasmids which are exchanged between different bacteria and this is what the article talks about. Therefore breeding lots of E. coli with antibiotics resistance in cows will leed to these bacteria to swap plasmids with E. coli living in the human body (digestion system) if they get in contact. So humans can be infected with resistant bacteria without ever coming into contact with antibiotics

Re:But..

[argStyopa]

It's a fairly black/white alternative; either:
- people are free to do what they want, in which case the collective good is often overlooked (the tragedy of the commons)

or
- someone (be they an individual, a council, a congress, whatever) is given the power to tell people what they must do.

Granted, my comparison is hyperbolic and rhetorical, mainly as a reaction to the fairly blanket condemnation of capitalism in the OP. In the same way that I would characterize "pure" capitalism as anarchic, the opposite would be totalitarianist.

There are many ways individuals can for example collectively decide to act in a way that's good for "the commons"; unfortunately, people eventually always cheat - then one returns to the notion that either they are free agents or they are subjects of 'the agreement and its designated agents'.

Re:But..

[bingoUV]

Ok, so it is "not capitalism" if rivers are used the way they are everywhere in the world. It is coercion, as is my breathing without taking permission from you.

How do you think rivers should be used (or should they at all be used) under "capitalism"?

You have skirted such questions multiple times in this and related threads. If you have no answers about practical ways to use resources in the real world kindly let adults discuss the real world.

Re:But..

[i kan reed]

Either people are free to murder, or we're in a totalitarian state. It's not a strawman when it's exactly what you just implied.

Re:But..

[dryeo]

Do you really believe the former owners of America volunteered for genocide? Or perhaps the English commoner volunteered to have their common property enclosed and given to the rich?
Capitalism usually (always?) results in violence if left alone as if someone is strong enough to take something, why not take it? Look to Mexico for a really free market in drugs and how that is playing out.

Re:But..

[operagost]

Then you see why I prefer capitalism, because if we're going to have problems with immoral people, I'd rather have them in a free society than an oppressed one.

Re:But..

[Agent0013]

In the free market, there would be a company that would create a clean river for swimming in and they would charge you money to access that river. See, it's simple. The natural resources all get destroyed and we end up having to spend money to buy new ones from "job creaters"! It's very similar to the "Perri-Air" from Space Balls.

Wow! In googling to ensure I spelled "Perri-Air" correctly I came across an article about a company in China that is selling cans of fresh air. I guess the real world ends up at least as strange as fiction. Does this mean Idiocracy will also come true someday?!

Re:But..

[cusco]

I had one of the resident Libertardians, roman_mir I think, tell me that the problem was the the Cuyahoga River didn't have an owner. If it had an owner the chemical companies couldn't have polluted the river because the owner would have sued them. When I asked what would stop the chemical companies from either buying the river from the owner, or paying them for permission to dump in it, he replied that the owner of the next waterway downstream would sue. That would mean that Lake Erie would need an owner.

I'm eternally amused by their bizarre methodologies for protection of what we today view as The Commons, generally consisting of courts and judges that are somehow incorruptible and unfailingly just, and thundering herds of lawyers.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you see why I prefer capitalism, because if we're going to have problems with immoral people, I'd rather have them in a free society than an oppressed one.

Alert: capitalism and free society are not synonyms.

Re:But..

[minstrelmike]

Try it
All Monsanto has to do is put a labeled product in the stores at a lower price.
It will sell.
I call it the Walmart-China effect. Most folks call it basic economics.

Re:But..

[HiThere]

Nobody but Marx? I beg to differ. In some areas they aren't likely. In other areas, at least local monopolies appear inevitable. Consider, e.g., water distribution.

OTOH, it is also true that most other governmental systems concentrate power. (Considering capitalism as a governmental system, which it shouldn't be.) So, rephrasing, most other governmental systems concentrate power. Perhaps they all do. (I can't think of a good counter example. Certainly an anarchist commune typically concentrates power.) But in some systems there tend to be larger concentrations of power than in other systems. Compare the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution. But note also that during it's early years, at least, the Constitutional US government has wide-spread approval. (Actually, it still does, but I hesitate to call it Constitutional anymore.) The major difference is probably the "closing of the frontier". Denser populations facilitate the creation of larger concentrations of power. So does better communication. But the nature of humans is such that when there are a few major concentrations of power, those most driven to occupy them are crazy, and among those crazy folk, some will be able to pass themselves as sane. A term I've heard that seems fit to describe them is "reasoning psychotic". They aren't necessarily sociopaths, but a large segment of them are. If there are dispersed centers of power, and none with major power, then these folk are generally relatively harmless, and often beneficial. (They want to hold on to the power, so they often do a good job.) But if there's any opportunity for "empire building" then they will grab it, creating a larger and more dangerous (because more attractive) center of power. This also frequently perverts the original reason for which the smaller center of power was created.

Please note that this is related to "Parkinson's law". It is an observed regularity of human behavior for which there is no formal theoretical grounding. Perhaps someone who is trying to put Sociology on a sound footing could explain this formally, as being derived from certain systems principles (with a certain probability over a certain population in a certain span of time). I can't. I can merely observe the regularity, and notice that it is socially destructive, but often beneficial to the individual holding power.

P.S.: I class most theories of human behavior with theology. Most of them seek to prescribe human behavior, without a sound basis rather than describing it in any useful manner. (I.e., they abstract out particular features that fit their theories, but don't tell you what they have omitted, and then prescribe how people should act because of that, when all an actual theory could say would be "If, in these circumstances, you perform this action, you will get this result.")

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Soap? I barely find soap in NYC. Come see.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

(capitalist competition is a kind of masturbation)

Re:But..

[CHIT2ME]

This is exactly why the Republicans want to destroy the Environmental Protection Agency. Wake up FOOLS!!!!

Re:But..

[luxifr]

Two completely different mechanisms.

To achieve one and the same goal: Killing germs. It's not the people or cows or whatever, which develop a resistance to antibiotics. It's the germs. And to that end it doesn't matter whether they are killed inside or at the surface of an organism. So yes: antibiotic hand soaps are really a problem, too. I'd say they are even more of a problem than the excessive use of antibiotics in health-care because they are even more abundant and using soap is even more harmless than swallowing a pill, isn't it? Plus: Clever advertising makes more and more people believe they'd actually need it so they stay healthy...

That reminds me: May be funny to see such peoples reaction when someone told them that there are more cells of bacteria and other micro organisms living on and in their bodies than their bodies themselves have :D

Re:But..

[lightbounce]

The largest driver for resistance is the over-use of antibiotics in non-health care related fields, like industrial agriculture

There's some truth to that, but to say the "largest" driver is something that nobody has ever demonstrated.

Growing up my family had a hog farm. It was started in the '30s before antibiotics and saw the effect of them on herd health when they became available for agricultural use in the '50s and going forward.

Keep in mind that farms don't use the most expensive antibiotics. Instead, they use common ones such as the various penicillin derivatives and sulfa drugs. They also use antibiotics which were never approved for humans.

So while farms may be the source of resistance to penicillin and sulfa, they can't be the source of resistance to expensive antibiotics used in hospitals. For example, we're running out of TB antibiotics that work. Most of these are never fed to farm animals, so any resistance comes from improper use in the human population. My point is that while farms may be a source of resistance, human misuse must also be a significant factor. Getting rid of factory farms won't solve the issue.

From the experience of my family farm (which was not a factory farm), there's no doubt the improvement with the introduction of antibiotics in herd health was huge. Before antibiotics we had massive die-offs that could take 25% of the herd. The only treatments we had for things such as dysentery were arsenic and copper sulfate, which were very hard on the animals (you basically try to kill the bacteria before you kill the animal). Other diseases such as pneumonia had no treatments. When antibiotics came along in the '50s the improvement was dramatic. While there was some resistance developed to the penicillin drugs, they still were effective in controlling dysentery and other diseases. It did take careful management.

Re:But..

[OneAhead]

I've read all your posts in this thread and you've made it abundantly clear that you don't really understand the concepts in my GP post nor their real-life implications. The other people who answered to your posts seem to agree with me, so unless you're going to pull the "everyone is crazy but me" card, you need to work on your writing skills rather than blaming everyone else's reading skills. So, if you have any interest at all in having an honest good-faith intellectual discourse (which I'm starting to doubt), please, please go do some reading on the subject. Otherwise it is pointless to continue this conversation.

Re:But..

[volmtech]

Why is it so hard to find lead based paint anymore? It performs much better than that low VOC crap sold in stores now. And where in the heck have they hidden the chlordane and DDT?

The same people who banned these products are responsible for not banning widespread antibiotic use. Banning use of antibiotics on food animals would cheer the hearts of the vegan and PEATA crowd. Few will be able to afford meat and eggs with the loss of 90% of farmers' animals.

Most Americans and Europeans would actually be healthier without so much meat but wild fish stocks would face extinction without strict quotas. Now about the whole fossil fuel global warming thing. If environmentalist are right it's almost to late NOW. We need to return to 1850s carbon usage tomorrow and that wont reverse the warming expected to happen in the next twenty years. Feeding 8 billion people without using diesel powered tractors and chemical fertilizers will be quite a challenge. I have yet to see a comprehensive plan for this. The market does not want to change. The market wanted to drive automobiles instead of horse drawn wagons. We can reestablish an agrarian society but I hate horses.

Re:But..

[volmtech]

If only. You forgot luxury, superstition and subsidies. If a Chinese billionaire thinks rhino horn works better than Viagra he will pay some poacher a million dollars to kill the last rhinoceros. The Japanese treat tuna like eatable gold and will pay $100 lb for it. Most fishing fleets are jobs programs and get paid to seine anything they can out of the ocean.

The world is too small now and the wealthy too powerful. Unless the weak band together and use their control of governments to prevent it the rich will denude the plant for their pleasure.

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does power abhor a vacuum?

Are you sure abuse [of power] can only be minimized through those ways/hypotheticals?

Re:But..

[cavebison]

However, a tragedy of the commons is in no way in the interests of any individual!

This statement is absurdly false. If this were true, there would be no tragedy of the commons to talk about because everyone would be on the look out for such situations.

I stopped reading at that point, as your logic is absurdly false.

You really think everyone tends to do what is in the best interests of the individual? That everyone is on the look-out for things that aren't? Quite a fantasy world there. If that was the case, the phrase "free as in beer" would be redundant, as all beer would be.

Re:But..

[nobodie]

walking around my university the number of students with the little bottles of handsoap hanging from backpack loops has exploded in the last two years. Now they are putting the stuff in extra dispensers around the buildings as well. My guess is that there is some corporate sales thing going on at very high levels. I don't hear the kids asking for it (i mean really, they are happy to give blood, but skip the flu vaccine) I wonder if the little soap bottles are just fashion accessories or fragrance thingies?

Exciting in an end-of-the-world sort of way...

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, welcome our new genetically modified overlords!

Duh

[onyxruby]

If you use something that kills of the weak members of a given entity over a period of time the result will be the surviving members will become strong. Darwinism is brutal and efficient like that whether you want it to be or not. In this case by over using antibiotics everywhere from handsoap to feed for cows we have resulted in the saturation of the environment. The result was inevitable and it really is a case of we did this to ourselves.

If memory serves Norway prohibits their use in all settings but hospitals and has healthier citizens as a result. It really does boil down to the classic George Carlin germs are good comedy bit. We need regular exposure to germs to become stronger and build healthier immune systems. The only thing were building is stronger and healthier bugs and weaker humans - there's something wrong with that.

Re:Duh

[nctritech]

I wasn't a terribly "clean" kid; I didn't shower often at all and didn't wash my hands unless I was about to cook food. I still refuse to use hand sanitizer or anti-germ wipes and I don't expect every surface I touch to be disinfected. Some of that has changed as I have gotten older (I shower at least once a day and by most peoples' standards I'm quite "clean"), but I'm willing to bet that my "unclean" behaviors in the past and my lack of fear of germs and dirt and grease under the nails explain why I very rarely get sick (once a year maybe) and even more rarely stay sick longer than a few days.

I read somewhere that there's a theory about auto-immune diseases being a result of humans no longer having parasites and infections. The theory was that the immune system has nothing to do and "gets bored." The possible solution is introducing a limited amount of relatively benign parasites. I don't feel like searching for it right now, but I found it to be a fascinating theory.

As an added bonus, I can kill germ-o-phobes by breathing at them and there will be no evidence linking it back to me. I'M A FUCKING VIKING.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a House episode. The incidence of autoimmune disorders in 3rd world countries is nearly zero, while in the 1st world it is relatively high.

Re:Duh

[omems]

Er, hygene hypothesis predates House by about 15 years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

Re:Duh

[somersault]

There are other obvious differences too though, like diet. You literally are what you eat. High sugar intake weakens your immune system, and is inflammatory. Artificial preservatives kill bacteria in your gut, furthering the lack of "good bacteria" that we hear about. Reading about this over-use of anti-biotics in livestock is making me seriously consider becoming a vegetarian :/ I hope it doesn't end up in milk and cheese.. though it probably does..

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

I'M A FUCKING VIKING.

<EverybodySing> And you smell like one too! </EverybodySing>

Re:Duh

[delt0r]

High sugar intake weakens your immune system, and is inflammatory.

Citation required. For both claims.

Artificial preservatives kill bacteria in your gut.

citation required. Including that these preservatives make it past your stomach. Given that most of the food i have still goes off, clearly its less preserving than your assertion.

Reading about this over-use of anti-biotics in livestock is making me seriously consider becoming a vegetarian :/ I hope it doesn't end up in milk and cheese.. though it probably does..

In many countries that allow this (NZ does not for example), it can't be livestock that is milked and if its to be slaughtered its need to have a antibiotic free period. Yes the meat/milk is often tested, at least in NZ. It does make it into the milk, as a dairy farmer in NZ if you need to administer antibiotics because the cow has an infection, you must keep that milk out of the main vat. They test and the fine is on the order of $100k. Same with meat. That even goes for feeding calves the milk from cows that are on antibiotics.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

If memory serves Norway prohibits their use in all settings but hospitals and has healthier citizens as a result.

I think that is the case for the entire northern Europe. There are also very few dangerous parasites and diseases there to begin with.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

You literally are what you eat.

Are you saying your girlfriend is my semen? Please, think twice when using "literally".

Re:Duh

[Bangmaker]

I've did a little research in the field if immunology in college, and this theory is not only widely accepted, but is being used to help explain other common 20th century diseases.

A great example: It's been discovered that fatty tissue in individuals with obesity often have a very high number of macrophages - white blood cells - that cause a general inflammatory response, in fact a response very similar or identical to what the body would do in the case of a parasite. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC297006/)

It's also well supported that being exposed to allergens at a young age decreases your likelihood of being allergic to them later in life, as the body has time to develop an appropriate immune response while antibody production is still malleable. I.e. A child who has never touched a cat is more likely to be allergic as an adult than one who grew up with cats.

I would argue that the biggest and most effective change that saw an increase in general health and longevity in the 20th century was the widespread use of sanitary cooking and waste management. The ability to stop excrement from contaminating drinking water and food was responsible for a huge reduction in disease and especially spread of parasites.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you're right in your recollection. It's called 'helminthic therapy' if I recall, and it involves taking a small capsule of pig whipworm eggs. They only persist in the human digestive tract for a few months, but while there they cause enough minor irritation that the immune system marshalls against them, instead of benign dust, pollen etc.

There was a British show kind of like Mythbusters ("Bang goes the theory"?) with one of the hosts who had terrible allergies testing this on himself -- six weeks after taking pig whipworm eggs, he didn't have any trouble with dust or pollen any more.

It's a shame Canada is so damn conservative; I have a friend with Crohn's who would likely benefit from this treatment immensely but he has no access to the treatment. Mexico apparently offers it but it's like $10K. I told him to go find a pig farmer locally and ask if they have any whipworm :)

Re:Duh

[somersault]

High sugar intake weakens your immune system, and is inflammatory.

Citation required. For both claims.

Maybe for the first one, but if you read even a little into how your diet affects the body then you should know that sugar is inflammatory.. but here you go

Effect of various carbohydrates on immune system. This shows that ingesting sugar weakens your immune system, and that fasting actually boosts it (which may be a reason that we sometimes lose our appetite when we're sick).

Sugar and inflammation. Though if you wanted, you could just try it yourself. Increasing your sugar intake also causes your body to retain more water and salt.

Given that most of the food i have still goes off, clearly its less preserving than your assertion.

Does most of the food that you have also contain artificial preservatives? I doubt it. I have to avoid sulphites. They're found in pretty much all wine, some beers (anything German is usually fine thanks to the Reinheitsgebot), cider, dried fruits, glucose syrup, any processed corn ingredient (maize starch, corn flour, HFCS, etc), and more..

Re:Duh

[somersault]

Yes of course, if she's been eating it. She literally will have some parts of her body that are made from your semen. I don't see what's so confusing that you have to ask about it.

Re:Duh

[delt0r]

scientific citations.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

I think youre on to something.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

She literally will have some parts of her body that are made from your semen.

Now you made a more appropriate use of the word "literally", yet your affirmation is still incorrect. Some of her body parts would contain some of the molecules and atoms of my semen, but not by far anything remotely resembling my sperm.

I don't see what's so confusing that you have to ask about it.

There is nothing confusing, your use was clearly wrong. We could extend your definition and say that we crap what we eat... by transitivity, I could then say you are just a pile of shit. Literally? Of course not. At least I have never seen shit type.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

And by more appropriate, I mean "not so obviously wrong".

Re:Duh

[somersault]

How much more scientific are you expecting to get than papers describing the results of scientific studies? o_0

Re:Duh

[somersault]

That doesn't make sense, since shit is by definition what your body is not using (or has finished using). Of course shit is used as fertiliser, so likely some of your body used to be shit at some point :p

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

"I wasn't a terribly "clean" kid..."

Neither was I. I went entire summers as a kid without shoes, bathed little and even drank from puddles. I too, rarely got sick.

Now, at the age of 45, I have a persistent infection in the skin of my face. All my pores harbor a bacterial infection. I was prescribed Doxicycline. This stuff is the last resort defense against Anthrax, Plague and a bunch of other stuff. It didn't work. The infection subsided, but was never completely wiped out. It came back in full force. Jody, you're lucky...for the time being. You simply haven't come across the nasty shit yet. Now that people like me are carrying these resistant bacteria everywhere we go, much like Typhoid Mary, you will eventually come across something that just simply doesn't play by the rules. There is nothing you, or I, can do about it. Even if we stopped using antibiotics--right now--for everything but humans with life-threatening infections, that resistance is already in place.

THIS is what we have to look forward to--simple infections will be permanent, major infections will be a death sentence.

All so McDonald's can sell you cheap food at great profit. For all our intelligence, we humans are pretty fucking stupid as a species.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

I read somewhere that there's a theory about auto-immune diseases being a result of humans no longer having parasites and infections. The theory was that the immune system has nothing to do and "gets bored." The possible solution is introducing a limited amount of relatively benign parasites. I don't feel like searching for it right now, but I found it to be a fascinating theory.

No.

Auto-immune diseases result from your body producing white blood cells to kill off the infection that also think that cells that belong to your own body are associated with that infection. So it isn't that the immune system has nothing to do but rather it is (or was) doing something good but rather than stop, it goes on to do something bad.

I'm trying to think of a car analogy but failing ... maybe I could say it is like deciding to replace Windows on all of the PCs at work with Linux and when you're finished, deciding that all of the Apple things running OSx were to be converted to Linux too because they're not Windows.

Re:Duh

[bhiestand]

I've been waiting a few years to have a reason to post this on Slashdot...

The Carbon Cycle - Lyrics here

Farm interests are traitors to the human race

[Anonymous Coward]

Politicians and lobbyists who continue to let last line of defence antibiotics be legal in farming should all be rounded up and imprisoned.

Re:Farm interests are traitors to the human race

[BreakBad]

Politicians and lobbyists should all be rounded up and imprisoned.

Fixed.

Re:Farm interests are traitors to the human race

[Anonymous Coward]

Politicians and lobbyists should all be rounded up and imprisoned.

No, much too good for them. Just limit their access to all antibiotics except penicillin. Same goes for the evolution deniers.

Re:Farm interests are traitors to the human race

[Anonymous Coward]

Politicians and lobbyists should all be rounded up and executed.

Fixed.

Surely you made a typo

Re:Farm interests are traitors to the human race

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I believe rehabilitation is a possibility. With intensive therapy, at least some of them should be able to be transformed into productive members of society.

We live in interesting times

[cold fjord]

We live in interesting times, and it seems they are likely to get more interesting as time goes by. What was the Chinese curse again?

Re:We live in interesting times

[3.5 stripes]

May you live in interesting times.

Re:We live in interesting times

[Anonymous Coward]

Try this one

Re:We live in interesting times

[oodaloop]

And you as well, for ruining the joke.

Re:We live in interesting times

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

"May you live in interesting times" wasn't really an ancient Chinese curse. There's no record of it before the 1930s.

It should have been, though.

Re:We live in interesting times

[nctritech]

I find 3 AM to be quite interesting. I was there, man. I lived in that moment.

Re:We live in interesting times

[Anonymous Coward]

What was the Chinese curse again?

The one where they peepee in your Coke?

Re:We live in interesting times

[Thanshin]

1. May you live in interesting times.

2. May you be recognized by people in high places.

3. May you get what you wish for.

Re:We live in interesting times

[Anonymous Coward]

"May you live in interesting times" wasn't really an ancient Chinese curse. There's no record of it before the 1930s.

It should have been, though.

Correct - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times

Re:We live in interesting times

[ebno-10db]

Ok, it's an American curse. A curse is a curse, just like the genuine American fortune cookies they sell in East Asia are nonetheless fortune cookies.

Re:We live in interesting times

[dmbasso]

Joke? Are you Mr. Bean?

Re:We live in interesting times

[Anonymous Coward]

I was cursed by those damned fortune cookies: "You will live in interesting times."

Re:We live in interesting times

[sjames]

Melamine?

Eating stuff affects you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who knew that eating cells, breaking them down into their component parts and integrating that into your cells had any chance of DNA transference?

Mean two different things...

[LongearedBat]

These two mean very different things...

genes that make the crows resistant to antibiotics

bacteria in the crows were resistant to several other antibiotics

I presume that the bacteria in the crows are resistant, not the crows themselves.

If so, then we're in for a Hell of a time finding a cure when we're hit with a devastating bacteriological pandemic.

However, if the crows were resistant (I doubt that's what the article means) then that would be a cool idea, because it would mean that bacteria could act as a DNA conduit between species.

Re:Mean two different things...

[jbmartin6]

I had the same thought. When was the last time someone had to fight off a crow infection? They are too big to fit in my bloodstream anyway.

Of course you are correct, original source article was entitled "American crows as carriers of vancomycin-resistant enterococci with vanA gene"

Re:Mean two different things...

[EvilSS]

I had the same thought. When was the last time someone had to fight off a crow infection?

1963

Re:Mean two different things...

[Anonymous Coward]

However, if the crows were resistant (I doubt that's what the article means) then that would be a cool idea, because it would mean that bacteria could act as a DNA conduit between species.

The summary is just badly worded, the article lists a group of papers showing studies of the bacterial flora of a whole different range of creatures and the response of those bacteria to antibiotics. The crows and other animals themselves aren't resistant to anything new.

Re:Mean two different things...

[Megane]

I RTFA and found only one place in TFA that makes it clear that it's the bacteria inside the crows that has the resistance. Everywhere else reads like the crows themselves have become resistant. (Which is silly, because crows aren't bacteria, and non-bacteria are resistant by default.)

Re:Mean two different things...

[Qzukk]

I wouldn't worry until they spread to blackbirds, if four and twenty of them can be baked in a pie, one just might get into an artery somewhere.

Re:Mean two different things...

[Charliemopps]

Actually, they've found that Bacteria and other organisms in your body do communicate through geene expression. So yes, Bacteria can change an animal in such a way that the animals own body informs future bacteria how to deal with antibacterial drugs.

Secondly, the devastating bacteriological pandemic is already here. Hospitals around the world are now opperating under the assumption that they now have permanent, incurable Gram Negative bacterial infections throughout their hospitals. Most hospitals wont even release data on the subject. They're finding drug resistant bacteria in the drinking water wells in India. This Genie is already out of the bottle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram-negative_bacteria

Re:Mean two different things...

[SuricouRaven]

Oh, you laugh now, but we will come.

Re:Mean two different things...

[LongearedBat]

Thanks on both points. Didn't know either. :)

Re:Mean two different things...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was thinking that if the summary statement was true, bacteria are extremely good at injecting their DNA into mammals. But then the soil samples thing made me think, no, it's just bacteria present in what they sampled.

Amusing CAPTCHA: condom

Re:Mean two different things...

[compro01]

You can bake anything you wish into pie. You just need to make it big enough.

Re:Mean two different things...

[jbmartin6]

I've just been informed that corviditis is a real problem and shouldn't be mocked.

Re:Mean two different things...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, they've found that Bacteria and other organisms in your body do communicate through geene expression.

If I wrote you were wrong, would you be gene with envy? (sorry, have to point out mispellings)

Just whose genes are we talking about?

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition to crows, resistance genes have been detected in gulls, houseflies, moths, foxes, frogs, sharks and whales...

I despair of the future of science writing, when even Scientific American allows an article that completely fails to distinguish between the genes of crows or other animals and the genes of their intestinal flora.

Exciting?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this exciting? It's worrying.

Re:Exciting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Excitation doesn't necessarily say something about mood. OTOH, if you're apathetic, you're neither worried nor ecstatic.

Re:Exciting?

[compro01]

It's "exciting" in the same sense that having bullets wizzing past you is "exciting".

Re:Exciting?

[Nrrqshrr]

This was obviously written by a bacteria.

Re:Exciting?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was wondering the same thing. Someone has a sick definition of exciting. I also don't understand how we can have a "global experiment" if we don't have a second globe as a control group.

TL;DR

[DeathToBill]

But is there any indication that these resistance genes weren't already in those populations beforehand? Is there actually some reason to think that the resistance genes have crossed from bacteria to all those higher-order lifeforms listed? What does it even mean for a crow to be antibiotic resistant?

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

What does it even mean for a crow to be antibiotic resistant?

Nothing, the summary is badly worded. The animals themselves aren't resistant to anything, it's the bacterial flora carried by the animals which are resistant.

Your question about the prevalence is an interesting one: glancing through the abstracts of the papers in the article most of them just say that they examined creature X and found that it carried antibiotic resistant bacteria, and that the creature should be considered a reservoir of resistant bacteria. That doesn't necessarily mean that resistance is spreading, it could have been there since the microorganisms themselves evolved the genes to make the compounds. In saying that one of the papers lists ciprofloxacin resistant bacteria. As far as I know that's a synthetic antibiotic so the odds of pre-discovery resistance are slim, which would imply it evolved in a clinical setting and then somehow made its way into the flora of the higher animal.

Re:TL;DR

[Charliemopps]

It's called Quorum Sensing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing

Until recently they thought Quorum Sensing was simple gene communication between individuals in a bacterial colony to co-ordinate behavior. Recently however they've found evidence that the bacteria can modify the genes in cells of the host and communicate even after the current infection may be cured. Not only that but they think these changes may even be passed from parent to child. They quite literally make the entire animal gene resistant, and it's offspring are gene resistant as well. I'm not sure if there is definitive proof of this yet but I've read a lot of articles by some very concern researchers lately. I'm not a biologist so take all of this with a grain of salt. I very well could have misread things, so I suggest doing your own research.

Zombie apocalypse one more notch closer

[Anonymous Coward]

And you thought those training exercises were jokes...

Antibiotics is the only thing that separates us from 1600s. We seriously should not fuck that up.

PBS Frontline "Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria"

[rwyoder]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hunting-the-nightmare-bacteria/

Scariest thing I've watched in a long time.

Re:PBS Frontline "Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria"

[DigiShaman]

Yes, it is. To think that all that stands in the way of life and death is a simple scratch on the skin. Quite terrifying actually.

Aside from being driven to absolute OCD insanity, Howard Hughes was ahead of his time.

GREED KILLS

[Anonymous Coward]

Geed. It's gonna kill us all.

Re:GREED KILLS

[rubycodez]

nonsense, thus far it has extended average human lifespan greatly

death by bacteria resistant to antibiotics, hardly ever happens compared to the leading causes of death

SimCity?

[EvilSS]

"Global Biological Experiment Generates Exciting New Results" So are we getting our headlines from SimCity now?

NO need to worry

[sl4shd0rk]

Relax. I'm pretty sure nobody here is a crow, gull, housefly, moth, fox, frog, shark or whale.

Re:NO need to worry

[SuricouRaven]

I doubt I'm the only furry on slashdot.

Exciting?

[JD-1027]

I must be misunderstanding, but this news isn't exciting. We don't want bacteria to be resistant to antibiotics anywhere in any species. Exciting from a research discovery perspective is fine, but can someone explain what I'm missing from a "this is good news" perspective?

Problem with the Title

[Anonymous Coward]

The title of this post was extremely sensational and MISLEADING. It's a cute trick to get clicks but it won't work forever. If this sort of thing becomes the norm, I'm sure your readership will go down.

Re:Problem with the Title

[BullInChina]

You can get chicks with titles. Wow what was I thinking?

Antibiotic resistant sand

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, how are we going to protect ourselves against sand monsters now?

Very poorly written article...

[dtjohnson]

The article makes it sound as if the crows are themselves acquiring genetic modifications giving them resistance to antibiotic compounds. However, it is the bacteria inhabiting the crows intestine that have acquired the antibiotic resistance genes, not the crows themselves. The article also suggests that antibiotics dispensed in hospitals are somehow a major factor when, in fact, the quantity of antibiotics dispensed in factory farms surpasses the quantity dispensed for human medical needs by orders of magnitude. If antibiotic resistance leads to increased human mortality, blame the steak on your plate, not the poor fellow down the street having surgery at the hospital.

Re:Very poorly written article...

[telchine]

The article makes it sound as if the crows are themselves acquiring genetic modifications giving them resistance to antibiotic compounds. However, it is the bacteria inhabiting the crows intestine that have acquired the antibiotic resistance genes, not the crows themselves.

There's only one solution: stone the crows!

Lets be accurate...

[0xG]

Sharks are antibiotic resistant?
(I always take some penicillin before I go swimming...)

Really, it's the micro-organisms that live in those hosts that have the resistance genes...

I find your lack of profit disturbing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lord Vader,
    The scientist/economist of the Capitalist Death Star have discovered that profit/revenue, and not medichlorians, generate the commodity known as "The Force". You will be re-assigned as a CDS janitor, as we feel that is where your body suit assets will provide the best ROI; we are raising interest rates and no loner require your services as "Lord".

Thanks,
CDS Management Team

fristM stop

[Anonymous Coward]

AA7 our times have bring your own about who can rant

n'est ce pas?

[Anonymous Coward]

n'est ce pas?

shut the fuck up

Re: n'est ce pas?

[Anonymous Coward]

shut the fuck up

ferme ta gueule

Re: n'est ce pas?

[HornWumpus]

I've said it before, I'll say it again: It's time to make North America a froggish free continent.

Canadians do your part!

Humans will evolve too

[C0L0PH0N]

Just as bacteria and viruses, exposed to high levels of antibiotics, have evolved antibiotic resistance and immunity, so will humans evolve resistance or immunity to the new versions of bacteria and viruses. Of course, the way evolution works, the few humans with superior resistance or immunity to the new superbugs will be the fittest survivors, and the rest of us will become extinct. Evolution has worked that way for 3 and a half billion years, no reason for it to stop now :).

Re:Humans will evolve too

[neo-mkrey]

The problem with that is the massive numbers of walking dead who will attempt to feast upon the flesh of the few human survivors.

Re:Humans will evolve too

[SuricouRaven]

Viruses don't need antibiotic resistance.

HIV is bloody good at developing antiviral resistance though. It adapts so fast that individual patients need to swap drugs after a few years. That's all the time the virus needs to adapt.

Genes In Sand?

[Anonymous Coward]

Resistance genes have been detected in crows, gulls, houseflies, moths, foxes, frogs, sharks and whales, as well as in sand and coastal water samples from California and Washington.

How are there genes in sand? WTF is this summary trying(and failing) to say?

Relax, Scientific American is not a science mag

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of you not aware, Scientific American is a poltical rag. When the political parties that correspond to their leadership zig, Scientific American zigs. When they zag, Sci-Am zags. I didn't realize it myself, until they did a whole issue on "where do all the guns come from?" That was the talk of the day in the standard political journalism circles, but .. . I asked my father, a PhD physicist, how that related to science.

He said it didn't, but that Sci-Am was a political rag, not a science magazine.

So it's kindof like talking about the AMA as being about medicine... it isn't. It's about politics, and incidentally in the context of science, when it suits their purposes.

For science articles, try Science News.

Now... all that said... I thought it was really cool, when someone in my Dad's physics department got an article about his project in the Scientific American. It wasn't one of the faculty... it was the maintenance man, who also would set up and tear down labs. It was Jim Lehman, and the article was about his Lehman seismometer, which was really an amazing invention for its day; and the article was in a column about the amature scientist.

So I still *like* Sci Am... I just don't consider it to be primarily about science. Relax, the articles only need to be up to political standards, depending on the meaning of what "need" needs to be, or "is" is.

Really Editors? Exciting?

[in10se]

Is "exciting" really the proper word for this headline? How about "terrifying" or "catastrophic".

BUT THINK OF THE GOLDEN RICE CHILDREN

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuses of the 20th century:

    Think of the children!
    Terrorism!

Excuses of the 21st:

    Feeding billions!
    Terrorism!

At least some things are constant... pearl-clutching and monocle-poppingly constant.

stop evolution

[minstrelmike]

We need to pass a law stating that it was great evolution got us this far but now it needs to stop.
If antibiotic resistance is spreading amongst 'wild' pathogens, perhaps Roundup-resistance will start spreading amongst weeds.
Who'da thunk?
Let's pass a law against evolution. Monsanto will surely be onboard with that.

Re:stop evolution

[jfbilodeau]

I thought Texas and most of the southern US already passed a law against evolution...

Re:stop evolution

[minstrelmike]

I thought Texas and most of the southern US already passed a law against evolution...

Exactly.
And the reason it hasn't worked is because not _everybody_ is on board.
Once there is a clear majority of homo sapiens worldwide who believes evolution will stop, then it will.
Isn't that how ideology works?

Great headline...

[Anonymous Coward]

for a birth announcement.

n'est ce pas?

[Anonymous Coward]

"This stuff is getting more and more like a Hollywood script everyday, n'est ce pas?"

Pardon my French, but fuck the submitter and his faux-intellectualism. This is an English-language site, isn't it so? So why use French, you nutball? Chinga tu madre, usted es mierde. Don't speak Spanish? Well, I just cursed you out. I don't speak fucking French. If you want to impress me, use an ENGLISH word I haven't heard or seen.

You are not erudite.

Some do

[Roger W Moore]

Why aren't doctors allowed to give people sugar pills instead of antibiotics? Of if they are allowed, why aren't they actively doing it...

Some do. My dad used to do this with obstreperous patients who would not take no for an answer when antibiotics and their ineffectiveness on viruses were explained to them. He was honest though. He did not call them antibiotics but rather he would prescribe a regular dose multi-vitamin with a fancy sounding name and tell them that this was the best treatment for them given their condition (usually just a bad cold).

The patients were not exactly happy with not getting an antibiotic but at the same time at least felt they were getting something to treat their condition. On the flip side my dada felt that he has not lied to the patient and, given that they had a virus, he was still giving them the best treatment option both for themselves and humanity at large. However my dad was a doctor years ago (and is now beyond the reach of any human courts!) and in this increasingly litigious world I can well imagine that doctors think twice about doing this. Even if it is in everyone's best interests they don't want to be dragged into some long lasting, expensive court battle just to prove it which is likely what would happen if a patient ever found out they had been prescribed simple vitamins.

Re:Some do

[TheCarp]

Wow thats great. I, unfortunately, grew up with a pediatrician who was gung-ho about antibiotics and prescribed them for me many times. My mother still defends the practice saying that the Doctors reasoning was that it would prevent opportunistic bacterial infections while the virus was running its course.

Only recently, after 20 years of it coming up, has my mother admitted that maybe it didn't actually help...especially since we eventually identified that I wasn't getting repeated infections causing my tonsils to swell.... it was actually an allergic reaction.

Got to the point the doctor was talking about having them taken out before they realized it was allergy releated.... but for as little as they do for a virus, antibiotics really don't do anything for allergies.

Re:Some do

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd die without bacteria. I'm not a huge fan of antibiotics unless the offending bacteria is getting worse, not going away, or has a chance of being dangerous if not immediately treated. Most infections that I have gotten are transient issues that clear themselves up over time or because of bad teenage hygiene.

Re:Some do

[Anonymous Coward]

Most infections that I have gotten are transient issues that clear themselves up over time or because of bad teenage hygiene.

This is your dick we're talking about here, right?

Re:Some do

[interkin3tic]

Is it actually more litigious today? I get the vague sense that predatory lawyers have moved onto greener pastures, though I have no expertise with law or medicine.

Re:Some do

[Anonymous Coward]

African? I was several ways denied antibiotics six years in the USA. Finally I got the brand I knew (albeit formula CHANGED), and in two weeks I had put on weight and looking younger (normal). Answer this!!!

Exciting? Maybe. But not in a good way.

[Chas]

Usually "exciting" is used as a positive recommendation. That's not the case here.
Something like this is BAD. REALLY bad.
There are whole classes of pathogens that are kept under control via antibiotic therapy now.
If they suddenly develop resistance, we're in DEEP shit.

Correlation != Causation

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA:

“We’ve documented human-derived drug resistance where it shouldn’t be – in wildlife and the environment. But we know very little about how this may impact public health. There just isn’t that smoking gun,” said Ellis, a research scientist at Tufts University’s veterinary school.

You fail at biology.

[Chas]

Humans MAY develop resistance or immunity.
MAYBE. It's never a guarantee.
And if the agent is particularly virulent, well, that's great. We just kill off a majority of the population so a small number of people who won the genetic lottery can spend the rest of their lives walking the earth trying to find someone to breed with.

There are already classes of pathogen out there that are resistant. MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), and VRE (Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus).
And yes, to a healthy person, these don't pose a massive threat. They're relatively mild. However, to someone who's immunocompromised (and I don't just mean HIV, I mean anyone whose immune system is suppressed, via illness, medication, etc), these can represent a massive overload to a person's system.

So, without being particularly virulent (as killing your host is bad ecology), these can still represent a massive health issue. As systemic overload results in two classes of people. The healthy and the dead.

Re:You fail at biology.

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly! is not like millions of species hadn't gone the dodo way because they didn't adapt to a particular evolutive pressure.

Re:You fail at biology.

[Chas]

This is not something you "adapt" to. PERIOD.

Yes, like a Hollywood script

[neminem]

If a Hollywood movie showed us a cataclysmic event in which millions of people died, I would call that "exciting".

If the same events occurred in real life, I'm not sure that's the word I would use.

Farm Vets push AntiBiotics

[Sir_Eptishous]

NPR had an interesting segment about how farm vets push antibiotics.

The livestock industry uses them, IIRC, to aid in the fattening of the cows, pigs, etc; Apparently some farmers have discovered other ways to raise healthy and "fat" livestock WITHOUT the use of AntiBiotics, however it is still an uphill battle convincing many farmers to leave that tried and true, ancient tradition of pumping cows full of AntiBiotics.

Re:Modern Pharming Practice

[hoboroadie]

I'd like to imagine this is from the farms, but the specific antibiotic they mentioned in TFA was said to be about the last hope of the patients who have a nosocomial infection.

Fifteen of the crows sampled, about 2.5 percent, harbored genes for resistance to vancomycin, a drug of last resort for hard-to-treat hospital-acquired infections. Crows with the resistance genes were found in all of the states except California.

Why do we let corporate pharmers inoculate our environment with this shit? We get our water from the Jenny (T.I.D.) and Neil Creek watersheds, which are fairly clear, but if Ayn Rand is going to fly in and shit on my pasture then I guess the jig is up.
Fuck this shit.

You're misunderstanding evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: antibiotics do not *cause* antibiotic resistance in bacteria. They only *select* mutations that already randomly occur. That's how evolution works. If these mutations did not have a drawback, they would long ago have become standard traits. In fact, there are cases where certain bacteria are always resistant to certain antibiotics. That's because those are the rare cases where being antibiotic resistant did not come with a drawback.

The point here is that if you look hard enough, you will find these same mutations everywhere. Does that mean we should panic and start passing stupid laws? Of course not. Every one of these mutations comes with something that makes it bad in the normal bacterial population. Consider people who are born with no legs at a time when humans are being attacked by something that only eats knees. It would be a beneficial trait (more fit) in that situation, but it would still be a negative (less fit) without that outside influence.

These are not "super-bugs" as the idiots would have you believe. They're the freakish mutant bugs, who happen to be resistant to antibiotics but whom the other bug all think are weirdos. They occasionally pop up in random places, but that doesn't mean there's going to be an epidemic. It just means there's been a normal random occurrence and there's nothing to freak out about.

N'est-ce pas

[Scotland]

Someone was showing off, but didn't bother to confirm the spelling/punctuation. ;-)

Dommage.

This means it is too late were doomed

[ralphaostrander]

Soon a doctor will be unable to perform even the smallest surgery Because the infection you will get be worst than what ever ails you. Perhaps 7 billion people will die as this gets us back to pre antibiotic population numbers.

Re:This means it is too late were doomed

[Anonymous Coward]

No. MOST surgeries don't need antibiotics because they use, wait for it, STERILE TECHNIQUE. That's all the nice blue suits and yellow facemask stuff and washing hands all of the time and using laminar flow rooms. We do overuse antibiotics in surgeries because we;re afraid of infections and, so far, the risk benefit for using the antibiotics is in favor of using the drug - that will likely change as 1) we get better at determining which surgeries really need antibiotics and 2) we really clamp down on using antibiotics in general. There are also improvements in sterile techniques although we're reaching the point of diminishing returns on that (we;re pretty good at it at present(.

Resistance not a serious Problem

[n2hightech]

All this scary doom and gloom talk about the end of the world due to antibiotic resistance. Its the same old story, somebody sees a problem they assume static conditions (ie no new antibiotics will be developed) against escalating problem (microbes are developing resistance to antibiotics) and presto draw the conclusion that we are all doomed. Has not happened will not happen. Recent research shows many new antibiotics are beginning to come out of the lab that directly attack the most drug resistant strains. The method used to develop them is amazingly targeted so they will be like the fabled magic bullet that kills just the bad germs. They are not broad spectrum however they do not need to be. Too much talk about restricting use of current antibiotics to maintain their effectiveness. Bad policy. We should instead work on creating great tools for identifying causative agents virus vs bacteria and type quickly so we know what to use when. It would save money and improve peoples health. Now its oh you have an infection here's some pills. If you don't get better call me. Instead it should be here let me take a sample and put it in the Germ Ident 1000. Ah here is shows you have virus 2187 no antibiotic needed. Just take this decongestant, fever reducer and anti nausea pills stay home for 4 days and you will be fine.

you are assuming rational people

[Chirs]

In the real world, there are those that only care about the short-term, and thus will betray their own long-term interest for the sake of short-term gain.

There are also those that only care about themselves, and see nothing wrong with wreaking havoc and then leaving others to deal with the problem.

Lastly, the Free Market also assumes everyone has access to sufficient information to act rationally--this is not always the case.

Re:you are assuming rational people

[mfwitten]

In the real world, "regulators" or "officials" (or whatever you want to call them) are not a class of special, noble beings; they are also individuals with the same failings of which you speak. However, a capitalist organization must secure funding through voluntary interaction, while a governmental organization secures its funding via coercion. A bad company can only sustain itself by coercing resources from people; indeed, bad companies tend to employ another bad company—the government—to provide the service of coercion for them (by "legalizing" bad behavior, or "regulating" their competitors out of business, etc.). However, getting someone else to do your dirty work makes no difference; it is not capitalism to coerce resources from people.

The Free Market does not assume everyone has access to sufficient information; the free market does not promise an immediate solution to every problem; the free market is about allowing a solution to emerge organically over the long term through evolution by variation and selection. Even under relatively mindless influences, this is much more likely to yield sustainable results than an attempt at Intelligent Design—the fantasies of bureacrats—because an evolved solution is necessarily aligned with reality.

Re:Modern Pharming Practice

[HiThere]

I doubt that the resistance was particularly directed a vancomycin. Many antibiotic resistence genes operate on a wide variety of antibiotics, so a resistence developed against one antibiotic and yiled resistence against many. E.g., some of the genes make pumps that pump the antibiotic out of the cell. These are often adapted to a wide variety of antibiotics, including many that the cell line has never experienced.

P.S.: In evolutionary theory this is called "preadaption". It's a poor name, but a common phenomenon.

you're optimistic

[Chirs]

and once it's all gone, we're all fucked.

Clearly people will act out of self-interest to avoid that.

No, that's not at all clear. People often act against their own interests--how else do you explain poor people who vote against expanding medical coverage for poor people?

Re:you're optimistic

[mfwitten]

Easy. It is in their self-interest to avoid a society based on the theft of resources.

Re:you're optimistic

[Mr0bvious]

how else do you explain poor people who vote against expanding medical coverage for poor people?

People make decisions without perfect information - not all decisions are based on a rational educated assessment .

ASCII only

[hoboroadie]

Nobody with the bleeding-edge skilz required to implement unicode, apparently.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Capitalism is an algorithm ...

[Anonymous Coward]

that converges to totalitarianism if left unchecked.

Capitalism allows capital to claim part of the added value generated in the economy. This augments capital, and allows it to claim even more added value in the next cycle. And therefore it can grow exponentially. Labour, on the other hand, can also claim part of the added value, but has to spend it on food, housing, etc. in order to continue. Labour can grow exponentially through breeding, but lately, in developed countries, this growth has halted.

Hence Capitalism, if left unchecked, will concentrate capital in the hands of a few, namely the ones that started out with most capital and made the best investment decisions. Society will try to redistribute some of the gains of these capitalists, who will react to these pressures by using part of their capital gains to promote totalitarianism.

Re:Capitalism is an algorithm ...

[HornWumpus]

Rich idiots have historically been pretty good at 'redistributing the wealth'.

It's usually the grand-kids of the person that made the money that are the first generation of true air thieves.

Financial Regulations

[hoboroadie]

Corporate bylaws demand it, usually, otherwise the "Free Market" enforces it by putting the health-conscious farmer out of business.
Am actually in San Francisco at the moment and paid about $19 a pound for some grass-fed beef the other day so I guess some are actually making money at it. (Better than home-grown; skilz.)

Recent Research... cited in TFA

[hoboroadie]

Indicates that improper practices have caused a widespread change in the ecology of our biosphere.
If this is not a serious problem for you then okay, whew, dodged a bullet. I feel better now but others who've been misled by Scientific American Magazine's scary doom and gloom talk about the end of the world due to antibiotic resistance should be immediately informed to prevent any hysteria. You sir, should not waste time posting on slashdot but should immediately demand a retraction.
Think of the children.

Sand?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sand has antibiotic-resistant genes now?

Re:Sand?

[hoboroadie]

The bacteria in the soil are evolving; I'd believe that the planet had (correctly) identified humans as a pathogen and was mobilising the antibodies, except this is anthropogenic. IIRC, the theme of the Bohemian Grove lecture series a few years back was the threats to profitability in the 21st century, and the conclusion was that the biggest threat was population, particularly all those Africans who were starting to get crazy ideas about owning the local resources and wanting to eat and stuff. I noted an apparent correlation with that weird white-cell deficiency thing started manifesting in the sexually promiscuous community, that they call HIV now. That shit had my spidey-sense tingling for a while, believe me. All these things correlate so nicely when you imagine that they could have been planned.

Re:Modern Pharming Practice

[Anonymous Coward]

If the hospitals go back to using copper rather than stainless steel for metal surfaces it may help.

Re:Modern Pharming Practice

[hoboroadie]

Good call. 19th century science ftw! Silver is also antiseptic and probably less toxic. It evaporates even faster upon contact with tweakers, however.

Re:Modern Pharming Practice

[Anonymous Coward]

It could still be cheaper than an ineffective attempt at controlling antibiotics use. "Drug resistant" bacteria are only resistant to certain drugs. The mechanisms that introduced that resistance should weaken them in other ways.

No "n'est ce pas"

[Anonymous Coward]

Cocoa.

All well and good, but

[wonkey_monkey]

I can think of another longer-running global biological experiment that produced, among other things, Justin Bieber.

Time to dump the lot in a bright yellow trash bag and start over.