We can make fuel from air and dirty water as feedstocks, by leaving them lie so they grow algae.
Then how come no one is doing it on a commercial scale? Congress mandated that a certain percentage of our fuel come from "bio-fuels", which is what you are describing. The oil companies all paid a large fine last year for failing to meet that goal and will pay an even larger one this year, because no one is able to make sufficient quantities to meet that mandate. If and when someone figures out how to produce bio-fuels on a large scale, cost-effective level, it may become true that it is stupid to burn fossil fuels, but currently there is no other way to meet the energy demands of the world and I for one have no interest in returning to the pre-fossil fuel world.
You are absolutely correct. There should not be a state or national evaluation system. Decisions about education should be made at the local level. I believe that you are wrong about the result of competition on education. Unless of course we do the same thing to education that we have done to other areas, which is impose regulations from the state and national level that make it too expensive for small businesses to compete. Education is not an area where the low cost provider is going to win. Parents are going to want to send their child to the high quality provider, not the low cost provider.
There is a problem with your logic. The FDA has been promising to ban asthma inhalers that use CFCs since 1997. This was not something that happened by an act of Congress (whether lobbied by pharmaceutical companies or otherwise). The decision on the part of the FDA is pursuant to a treaty signed in 1987. While I agree that this was a bad decision, it was not done at the behest of the pharmaceutical companies. This was something done at the behest of environmentalists, not drug companies.
Works for me, the sooner we acknowledge that the purpose of our public schools is indoctrination, not education, the sooner people will start looking for other solutions to get their children educated.
The real reason to go all digital for money is because it makes it much easier for the government to control what you can and cannot buy. It also makes it easier for the government to control who can and cannot go into business.
Well, I won't disagree with your idea that the FDA should be disbanded (or that quite a bit of the federal government should be shut down). As a matter of fact, I agree. I think that both from a practical standpoint and a Constitutional standpoint, the responsibilities of the FDA should be handled on a state level. From a practical standpoint, since different states would use different rules, we would be able to compare how well those different rules work and other states could adopt those of states that work best (and it might prove that different rules work better for different states). From a Constitutional standpoint, I believe that the FDA foes beyond what the Framers intended to be within the scope of the Federal government.
Yes, human trials are done by companies, but they are regulated by the FDA. The FDA does not have to "push" the concept that they can shut down how a company works internally. They have the authority to approve or deny an application for human drug trials. You cannot legally administer a drug to humans in the U.S. without approval from the FDA.
Well then, this evaluation systme would not work for the schools in your area. I am going to guess, however, that you do not live in NYC, which is what this article is discussing.
Human trials must be conducted according to FDA regulations and must be approved by the FDA.
It's not that I am against what you are suggesting. It's just that I am pretty sure that someone at the FDA has already closed the "loophole" you are suggesting that they exploit.
Relative to getting around the FDA, there was an article on here a week or so back about a company that only performs treatment at one location that the FDA is trying to claim falls under FDA regulation because it obtains some of its supplies across state lines (thus making it subject to Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce) and those supplies are regulated by the FDA even though the company only operates in one state.
Well in the article in question it is about evaluations of teachers in the NYC school district, the NYC school district uses a standard evaluation across the entire district. And usually, they do these comparisons within the same school.. So, you compare Teacher A teaching math to 5th grade students in room 204 to Teacher B teaching math to 5th grade students in room 274.
What part of "and compared it to other teachers with the same demographic and quality students" did you not understand? Your example is comparing two schools with different demographics.
The problem with that is that the Washington, DC school district spends more poor student than most school districts in the country, yet it is also one of the school districts where the students perform the poorest. There are other examples of this as well. For that matter, how do you know that the poor performing school was poorly funded? Maybe they just chose to spend their funds on things the students never saw? If you do indeed know how much money the school spent per pupil in each of those cases and the one that performed poorly actually spent less, than your example makes your case (although there are plenty of examples which show that it isn't as simple as just more money).
They just shut down a farmer who was selling shares in cows and then giving the owners some of the raw milk that the cows produced because it is against the law to sell raw milk across state lines. They alleged, and a judge agreed, that the selling of shares was merely a workaround against the regulation against selling raw milk.
While the FDA may not be set up to deal with this type of regulation, I am quite confident that they would view it as an attempt to work around the regulations and insist that they follow established procedure or cease and desist. I am not saying that that is the way it should be, just that that is the way I expect them to react.
I am pretty confident that there is no way that would work to let them get around the FDA rules. The problem with the FDA is that every time a drug gets approved that has significant negative side-effects, everybody notices and says, "How did they let that through? Why did they ever approve that drug?" However, no one ever notices the promising drug that the drug companies quietly drop because FDA rules make it to expensive to get approved to bother with (and the people who suffer and/or die as a result of this drug never being brought to market). Or the drug that is delayed being brought to market because of all of the hurdles that the FDA puts in place. As a result of this, people working at the FDA have lots of incentives to put up roadblocks to approving new drugs and no disincentives to doing so.
The only possible solution I can see would be to move the responsibilities of the FDA to the state level and let different states try different approaches to drug approval. There are problems with that as well, but the current system is broken and there is no easy answer. If more things that the federal government does were left to the states, the various states could try different approaches and we could see which one worked best (additionally, some of the things the federal government does are broken because what works best New York is different than what works best in Alaska).
no more incentive to create fifty pills for some stupid thing like erectile dysfunction instead of a harmful disease
As far as I am aware, all of the drugs used to treat erectile dysfunction were originally developed for other purposes. The original work on these drugs (they are all relatively closely related compounds) was looking for a treatment for high blood pressure and heart disease. It was only after researchers working for Pfizer discovered that Sildenafil (Viagra) induced penile erection in test subjects (when they were testing it for effectivieness in treating angina pectoris), that the other drugs were tested for the same purpose.
The answer is that they do not use rats instead of mice. They use rats as well as mice (and guinea pigs, hamsters, dogs, pigs, monkeys and other animals). It all depends on what they are studying and which animal is a better analog for humans for that particular study (or, in early stages, provides the easiest/cheapest way to identify the results being tested for).
OK, let's see if I get this straight:
Most new molecules are discovered by public research in (public) labs and universities, and then 'given' to big pharma for testing and development
Citation needed. As far as I am aware (and I work at a pharmaceutical company), pharmaceutical companies pend quite a bit of time developing and testing new compounds to see if they are more efficient/safe than known compounds (my job is to provide IT support to the scientists who do this research).
Testing indeed costs a large amount of money but needs the help of (public) doctors
Please define "(public) doctors", in the U.S. most doctors either work in private practice or for a large hospital/medical corporation.
Manufacturing is often cheap but sometimes priced absurdly high (like the recent example of an appetite booster that went from 1$/dose to $1000/dose when exclusivity was given to some big pharma)
Yes that last is true, however, in almost every case, the pharmaceutical company that gets the exclusivity to manufacture a drug is the one that spent the research dollars to develop and/or prove the safety/effectiveness of that drug (while I am aware that there are exceptions to the former, I am unaware of any exceptions to the latter--except in cases where the pharmaceutical company bought the company that did the latter).
Finally, you keep referring to Social Security. Social Security is purely a pension plan. For those who qualify, drugs and medical care are paid for by Medicare and Medicaid. Your ideas look interesting. However, if one looks at the history of medical costs in the U.S., one finds an interesting fact. Medical costs rose at a rate that directly correlated with inflation until 1966, when medical costs started rising much faster than inflation. What makes that fact interesting is that Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965.
Actually, there is an effective, although very limited, treatment for autism. It has been discovered that large doses of B vitamin (I forget which one) reduces the symptoms of autism significantly. It would be interesting to see what impact starting a B vitamin regimen on infants who show positive for autism via this scan has on their eventual behavior (and whether it impacts the way the scan comes out later).
There were two hypothesis developed from the study that showed that a B vitamin regimen reduced symptoms in autistic children. The first was that the child received insufficient b vitamins while in the womb. The second was that it was autism was caused by neonatal B vitamin deficiency. This study suggests that the prenatal hypothesis is more likely. In both hypothesis, the possibility was presented that for some reason children who developed autism needed larger dosages of B vitamins to function properly.
The combination of these two studies provide fertile acenues to further studies that may lead to finding a cure, or at least a prevention, for autism.
I'm definitely not 100% comfortable with advocating open season for abortions, and I think it's a tragedy whenever it happen, but to declare moral equivalence between abortions and shooting a child is a logical fallacy that only an idiot or a self-deluded fool could commit.
Or Peter Singer, highly regarded ethics professor at Princeton, who favors both abortion on demand and the right of parents to kill their children up to some unspecified age.
It's not really a problem that needs to be worried about. The primary reason that China is reducing the amount of rare earth metals it is exporting is because its own demand is starting to consume most of its supply. This means that they are unlikely to be in a position to dump enough rare earth metals onto the market to drive prices down.
That being said, I would expect the objection your plan to come from liberals decrying "corporate welfare".
What is your point? None of that information is present in the article that claims to debunk the original article. My point still stands this article fails to actually debunk the article it is claiming to debunk. Which is bad since you (and several other posters here on slashdot) have done so easily.
I don't support the position taken by the original article, but the second article claims to debunk the first one and then doesn't. That annoys me, because it shows bad logic. If they had made the argument you made, or several of the arguments made by other posters on this thread, I would have no problem with it, but they did not do that.
Slashdot Mirror
We can make fuel from air and dirty water as feedstocks, by leaving them lie so they grow algae.
Then how come no one is doing it on a commercial scale? Congress mandated that a certain percentage of our fuel come from "bio-fuels", which is what you are describing. The oil companies all paid a large fine last year for failing to meet that goal and will pay an even larger one this year, because no one is able to make sufficient quantities to meet that mandate. If and when someone figures out how to produce bio-fuels on a large scale, cost-effective level, it may become true that it is stupid to burn fossil fuels, but currently there is no other way to meet the energy demands of the world and I for one have no interest in returning to the pre-fossil fuel world.
You are absolutely correct. There should not be a state or national evaluation system. Decisions about education should be made at the local level. I believe that you are wrong about the result of competition on education. Unless of course we do the same thing to education that we have done to other areas, which is impose regulations from the state and national level that make it too expensive for small businesses to compete. Education is not an area where the low cost provider is going to win. Parents are going to want to send their child to the high quality provider, not the low cost provider.
There is a problem with your logic. The FDA has been promising to ban asthma inhalers that use CFCs since 1997. This was not something that happened by an act of Congress (whether lobbied by pharmaceutical companies or otherwise). The decision on the part of the FDA is pursuant to a treaty signed in 1987. While I agree that this was a bad decision, it was not done at the behest of the pharmaceutical companies. This was something done at the behest of environmentalists, not drug companies.
OK, so what is your suggested solution to the problem? A problem that has been getting worse for at least 50 years.
No, we do not all agree on that.
Works for me, the sooner we acknowledge that the purpose of our public schools is indoctrination, not education, the sooner people will start looking for other solutions to get their children educated.
The real reason to go all digital for money is because it makes it much easier for the government to control what you can and cannot buy. It also makes it easier for the government to control who can and cannot go into business.
Well, I won't disagree with your idea that the FDA should be disbanded (or that quite a bit of the federal government should be shut down). As a matter of fact, I agree. I think that both from a practical standpoint and a Constitutional standpoint, the responsibilities of the FDA should be handled on a state level. From a practical standpoint, since different states would use different rules, we would be able to compare how well those different rules work and other states could adopt those of states that work best (and it might prove that different rules work better for different states). From a Constitutional standpoint, I believe that the FDA foes beyond what the Framers intended to be within the scope of the Federal government.
Yes, human trials are done by companies, but they are regulated by the FDA. The FDA does not have to "push" the concept that they can shut down how a company works internally. They have the authority to approve or deny an application for human drug trials. You cannot legally administer a drug to humans in the U.S. without approval from the FDA.
Well then, this evaluation systme would not work for the schools in your area. I am going to guess, however, that you do not live in NYC, which is what this article is discussing.
Human trials must be conducted according to FDA regulations and must be approved by the FDA.
It's not that I am against what you are suggesting. It's just that I am pretty sure that someone at the FDA has already closed the "loophole" you are suggesting that they exploit.
Relative to getting around the FDA, there was an article on here a week or so back about a company that only performs treatment at one location that the FDA is trying to claim falls under FDA regulation because it obtains some of its supplies across state lines (thus making it subject to Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce) and those supplies are regulated by the FDA even though the company only operates in one state.
Well in the article in question it is about evaluations of teachers in the NYC school district, the NYC school district uses a standard evaluation across the entire district. And usually, they do these comparisons within the same school.. So, you compare Teacher A teaching math to 5th grade students in room 204 to Teacher B teaching math to 5th grade students in room 274.
What part of "and compared it to other teachers with the same demographic and quality students" did you not understand? Your example is comparing two schools with different demographics.
We are talking about the NYC schools here, do you really think that will make things any worse than they are now?
The problem with that is that the Washington, DC school district spends more poor student than most school districts in the country, yet it is also one of the school districts where the students perform the poorest. There are other examples of this as well. For that matter, how do you know that the poor performing school was poorly funded? Maybe they just chose to spend their funds on things the students never saw? If you do indeed know how much money the school spent per pupil in each of those cases and the one that performed poorly actually spent less, than your example makes your case (although there are plenty of examples which show that it isn't as simple as just more money).
They just shut down a farmer who was selling shares in cows and then giving the owners some of the raw milk that the cows produced because it is against the law to sell raw milk across state lines. They alleged, and a judge agreed, that the selling of shares was merely a workaround against the regulation against selling raw milk.
While the FDA may not be set up to deal with this type of regulation, I am quite confident that they would view it as an attempt to work around the regulations and insist that they follow established procedure or cease and desist. I am not saying that that is the way it should be, just that that is the way I expect them to react.
I am pretty confident that there is no way that would work to let them get around the FDA rules. The problem with the FDA is that every time a drug gets approved that has significant negative side-effects, everybody notices and says, "How did they let that through? Why did they ever approve that drug?" However, no one ever notices the promising drug that the drug companies quietly drop because FDA rules make it to expensive to get approved to bother with (and the people who suffer and/or die as a result of this drug never being brought to market). Or the drug that is delayed being brought to market because of all of the hurdles that the FDA puts in place. As a result of this, people working at the FDA have lots of incentives to put up roadblocks to approving new drugs and no disincentives to doing so.
The only possible solution I can see would be to move the responsibilities of the FDA to the state level and let different states try different approaches to drug approval. There are problems with that as well, but the current system is broken and there is no easy answer. If more things that the federal government does were left to the states, the various states could try different approaches and we could see which one worked best (additionally, some of the things the federal government does are broken because what works best New York is different than what works best in Alaska).
Doctors are allowed to try experimental treatments on their own patients.
Only if those treatments have already been approved by the FDA for use for something else, or are part of an FDA approved testing regimen.
no more incentive to create fifty pills for some stupid thing like erectile dysfunction instead of a harmful disease
As far as I am aware, all of the drugs used to treat erectile dysfunction were originally developed for other purposes. The original work on these drugs (they are all relatively closely related compounds) was looking for a treatment for high blood pressure and heart disease. It was only after researchers working for Pfizer discovered that Sildenafil (Viagra) induced penile erection in test subjects (when they were testing it for effectivieness in treating angina pectoris), that the other drugs were tested for the same purpose.
The answer is that they do not use rats instead of mice. They use rats as well as mice (and guinea pigs, hamsters, dogs, pigs, monkeys and other animals). It all depends on what they are studying and which animal is a better analog for humans for that particular study (or, in early stages, provides the easiest/cheapest way to identify the results being tested for).
OK, let's see if I get this straight: Most new molecules are discovered by public research in (public) labs and universities, and then 'given' to big pharma for testing and development
Citation needed. As far as I am aware (and I work at a pharmaceutical company), pharmaceutical companies pend quite a bit of time developing and testing new compounds to see if they are more efficient/safe than known compounds (my job is to provide IT support to the scientists who do this research).
Testing indeed costs a large amount of money but needs the help of (public) doctors
Please define "(public) doctors", in the U.S. most doctors either work in private practice or for a large hospital/medical corporation.
Manufacturing is often cheap but sometimes priced absurdly high (like the recent example of an appetite booster that went from 1$/dose to $1000/dose when exclusivity was given to some big pharma)
Yes that last is true, however, in almost every case, the pharmaceutical company that gets the exclusivity to manufacture a drug is the one that spent the research dollars to develop and/or prove the safety/effectiveness of that drug (while I am aware that there are exceptions to the former, I am unaware of any exceptions to the latter--except in cases where the pharmaceutical company bought the company that did the latter).
Finally, you keep referring to Social Security. Social Security is purely a pension plan. For those who qualify, drugs and medical care are paid for by Medicare and Medicaid. Your ideas look interesting. However, if one looks at the history of medical costs in the U.S., one finds an interesting fact. Medical costs rose at a rate that directly correlated with inflation until 1966, when medical costs started rising much faster than inflation. What makes that fact interesting is that Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965.
Actually, there is an effective, although very limited, treatment for autism. It has been discovered that large doses of B vitamin (I forget which one) reduces the symptoms of autism significantly. It would be interesting to see what impact starting a B vitamin regimen on infants who show positive for autism via this scan has on their eventual behavior (and whether it impacts the way the scan comes out later).
There were two hypothesis developed from the study that showed that a B vitamin regimen reduced symptoms in autistic children. The first was that the child received insufficient b vitamins while in the womb. The second was that it was autism was caused by neonatal B vitamin deficiency. This study suggests that the prenatal hypothesis is more likely. In both hypothesis, the possibility was presented that for some reason children who developed autism needed larger dosages of B vitamins to function properly.
The combination of these two studies provide fertile acenues to further studies that may lead to finding a cure, or at least a prevention, for autism.
I'm definitely not 100% comfortable with advocating open season for abortions, and I think it's a tragedy whenever it happen, but to declare moral equivalence between abortions and shooting a child is a logical fallacy that only an idiot or a self-deluded fool could commit.
Or Peter Singer, highly regarded ethics professor at Princeton, who favors both abortion on demand and the right of parents to kill their children up to some unspecified age.
It's not really a problem that needs to be worried about. The primary reason that China is reducing the amount of rare earth metals it is exporting is because its own demand is starting to consume most of its supply. This means that they are unlikely to be in a position to dump enough rare earth metals onto the market to drive prices down.
That being said, I would expect the objection your plan to come from liberals decrying "corporate welfare".
What is your point? None of that information is present in the article that claims to debunk the original article. My point still stands this article fails to actually debunk the article it is claiming to debunk. Which is bad since you (and several other posters here on slashdot) have done so easily.
I don't support the position taken by the original article, but the second article claims to debunk the first one and then doesn't. That annoys me, because it shows bad logic. If they had made the argument you made, or several of the arguments made by other posters on this thread, I would have no problem with it, but they did not do that.