I disagree. The question was "Would You Buy or Recommend One?". I don't see how this makes "none of the above" an invalid choice. For me the WiiU is a vastly superior choice to either, though I still prefer none of the above right now.
So you recomend against all consoles. Then why not lead with that, and leave the rest out.
Because I started by answering the question that was posed by the title of the article.
XBone is for people, especially families
I think you have that confused with the Wii and WiiU. Just because XBOne has a component that allows you to play a dozen or so games without the traditional controller does not mean they are actively trying to get families involved in gaming. Look no further than the game sales volumes and you'll see where their real interests are; the top selling titles for both the Sony and MS consoles are of the same genre, and with the exception of the console-exclusive titles they are the same games.
But picking PS4 because you like
Maybe someone else preferred the PS4 in this thread, but not me. I don't want the MS or Sony consoles, period. No generation of either has ever been in my home, and I can't see a reason to change that.
That is a different matter, there. Those have been offenses that one could be fired on-the-spot for even back when workers did have rights, and they deserve that status. The problem is that now the employer has so much power over the worker that they can can them at a moment's (or less) notice for no real offense at all. Not long ago the idea of a career was almost guaranteed to any hard-working skilled employee. Now it is devolving into the realm of pure mythology.
Few people - including those of us too old to be millenials - have truly stable employment any more. Long ago we signed away our rights to contest being fired or laid off. If one job pulls in enough money to keep you afloat, you need the second in order to put money away for when the first one is no longer there.
It's still a Microsoft product. It still mostly plays games of a genre that I don't care about (doom clones). Maybe if I was a single guy with money to burn and time to kill, I would be interested but there is no room in my life for a Microsoft or Sony console right now at any price.
I guess that depends on how you define that arena. I credit Apple with killing the floppy drive (arguably not just the 3.5 with the Imac but also the 5.25 with the original Mac) and leading the way towards killing the optical drive as well. They were also a big developer for CUPS.
Yeah, their market share is slim, but their followers are astonishingly devout. Even though the hardware is no longer unique you still have a better chance of converting a windows person to mac than the other way around.
Doesn't anyone remember the G4 cube? I do. Maybe the current crop of Apple execs and designers don't - or they just really don't want to - but it also was released with no headphone/speaker jack. While that was not the sole reason for its failure, it was a contributing part.
The G4 cube was cute - similar to how the SGI O2 (the "toaster") was cute, but cute did not equate to functionality.
They can make patent-able and marketable products from natural pot and still make a killing.
Like I said, I don't think that they can. I think that there is too much prior art.
Again, I don't think you're being creative enough here. Sure, they can't just ground it up into a pill and expect to patent it; that's a given. But once they do something more than that - say isolate a particular compound, or use a novel carrier with it, or a different delivery system, or compound it with an OTC medication - then they have something they almost certainly can patent.
demonstrate hundreds to thousands of years of prior art.
Again, that comes down to what they patent. They wouldn't be dumb enough to try to patent the plant (or at least a common variety of it) directly; that would fail quickly. Such a thing would be like Toyota attempting to patent the wheel. However when they do something clever with pot extracts, then it changes significantly and it is more like Toyota patenting the circuitry for the solar roof in a Prius.
Actually, it's not clear that the tobacco industry will even be the ones to get there before big pharma. There's a lot of big investors lurking around to see how this comes out.
So then who are the investors going to invest in? The investors want to put their money in businesses with solid potential, not just scattered head shops. No businesses strike me as better positioned to make money off legalized pot than tobacco and pharm, as they have the most similar products to it currently.
Sure, although I suspect that for both parties the bigger driving force for the vote is the fear of the other candidate winning. A President Drumpf would likely be disastrously bad for me. From the other side there is nothing that stirs up anger from the GOP as much as the name Clinton.
Worst of all would be if there's something bad in there but not bad enough to hand Sanders the nomination, that could threaten to hand Trump the win over Hillary.
I have a hard time imagining many voters who are on the fence between Trump and Hillary at this point. If the results are bad - though not bad enough to drive Hillary out of the race - I could expect it to maybe drive some people who would vote for her to vote third party instead. It doesn't seem real likely that such people would occur in large enough numbers in battleground states to flip the election to Trump, though.
When Assange previously was given front-page status on slashdot for having a cache of Hillary emails to release, I said I figured he was going to do it to help Bernie Sanders win the election. After all, if Hillary were to actually fall out somehow before November, Sanders would be the only choice the party could present. Being as every poll that ever asked voters about Sanders vs Trump showed Sanders completely wiping the floor with Trump, this strongly suggests that Assange has a favorite here.
I know we love to cater to conservative critiques of government here, but that was not even slightly useful in the realm of criticism. If you don't like the EPA tests, then propose a better one that would be usable across all the cars sold in the US today. Yeah, there are certainly problems with it but the EPA numbers - even if they are not particularly useful on their own - can at least be useful to compare two cars to each other. They are particularly useful for some of the 4 cylinder cars out there that have wildly variable MPG depending on their configurations... compare say a Ford Focus to a Subaru Impreza and you'll see what I mean.
Don't hold your breath. It's been more than 40 years since the last person walked on the moon. The US has no program started to get anyone up there again in the foreseeable future. Russia is happy just making money as a taxi service to the ISS. The private initiatives don't have the resources to make it happen either. Unless China pulls off a huge upset on the matter, I'd be surprised to see someone on the moon again in my lifetime.
I don't see anyone telling you that you will be forced to live in a small place.
In fact, if you have $325k you can go buy the home of your lord and savior, although if that seems a little too small for you there may be larger homes for sale in the same area. Maybe with all the money you've made by not paying employees you could buy your Lord's place, turn it into a museum of his greatness, and then buy another place for yourself at the same time?
They aren't hired for their solid grip on reality, they are hired because they are narcissistic types who will tell the shareholders what they want to hear regardless of the actual situation. She probably isn't even allowed to look at the books; it would be bad practice for any CEO to actually know the state of the company they are tasked with managing.
If big pharma could produce a product with the therapeutic benefits of pot without the high and the effects of the high (or the smoke) that would be something that would have a very large market.
They have, and it has been incredibly foolish.
That crap was not made by big pharma. That shit comes from seedy chemists from all over the world who either don't understand or don't care about QC. At least half the time those "bath salts" don't have the ingredients they claim to have in anywhere near the quantities they claim to have, and the rest of the crap in them has never been tested on anything. Basically some joker who thinks he remembers something about high school chemistry reads the wikipedia entry on THC and thinks they can make it, and this is what you get.
Again, there is plenty wrong with big pharma as it is. You don't need to lie about their problems to make them look bad.
Big Pharma is a failure at making synthetic marijuana
They don't need to make synthetic pot, that is the point I've been trying to make here. They can make patent-able and marketable products from natural pot and still make a killing. They are well aware of this. Do you really think nobody in pharma has read any of the predictions of the value of the marijuana market (both medical and recreational)? Once it becomes legal in all 50 states pharma will be at war with the likes of RJ Reynolds (or whatever they are calling themselves this week) to try for market dominance. They will compete for who can put the first collection of OTC pot-based products on the shelves at your local drug store.
No: The research quoted in TFA says that prescriptions for painkillers and other classes of drugs fell compared with states that did not have a medical-marijuana law. This is a comparison study, not a "opiod use dropped, therefore it must be medical marijuana" correlation=causation study.
States across the country have seen reductions in prescriptions for opioids, including ones that have no medical marijuana laws. A non-trivial part of this is due to the VA passing a regulation across their system calling for prescribers to reduce their prescribing rates of opioids, though many other health systems are following suit.
Faulty thinking: "cheap to make" means high profit, not low.
That would be the case if you were the only one who could make said item. Virtually none of the opioids that are commonly prescribed today are covered by patents, though. Synthesis of many of them is very easy compared to many other commonly prescribed drugs - even easier than some NSAIDs - which makes it very hard for the big companies to make money on these.
Three, big pharma could make lots of money selling pot if they wanted to. There are plenty of people who would prefer to be able to buy it in a way that does not require smoking it.
They can't patent it, so they'll be up against the low cost competitors
There are plenty of patent opportunities there. Just because it starts as a natural component doesn't mean nothing can be patented from it; the companies can easily patent it by compounding it with something else, purifying a specific component of it, or changing the delivery system (to name just a few ways).
Sure, they will be competing with drug dealers on the street corner but there will be plenty of market for alternative administration and dosing methods. After all, even if we made pot legal for all uses this afternoon across all 50 states your employer could still fire you for testing positive on a drug test (or violating their anti-drug policy in any other manner).
Bayer still make aspirin... but it's not much of a profit center any more.
If they aren't making money on it, then why are they paying retailers for so much shelf space? Same applies to Advil (Ibuprofen) and Tylenool (Acetaminophen).
There is plenty wrong with big pharma and with the system. But all that big pharma is doing against generics is marketing.
False.
Your article is about big pharma in respect to prescription medications. I am particularly looking at big pharma with regrads to OTC medications. I fully expect that once there is a 50-state law regarding medical marijuana, it will be an OTC product of some sort. In fact I expect it will rapidly become a large number of OTC products; that would be the only way big pharma could compete with the pot dealers on the streets.
You are doubting the creativity of big pharma. They only need to change the formulation of a mixture and they have something they can sell as unique.
Something nobody wants. Unless they can keep the other stuff illegal, they won't be able to sell it.
I disagree. There are still down sides to buying pot and smoking it. Even if it became 50-state legal starting this afternoon to smoke as much pot as you want, there would still be stigma attached to it. Employers would still be free to fire employees who fail drug tests for it. If big pharma could produce a product with the therapeutic benefits of pot without the high and the effects of the high (or the smoke) that would be something that would have a very large market.
big pharma could make lots of money selling pot if they wanted to.
They can't make big money on anything they can't patent.
That is very much untrue. If that were the case then we wouldn't see any name brand Tylenol, Advil, etc being sold at retail. There are plenty of other drugs that have gone off-patent (and OTC as well) that the big pharma companies are still making lots of money on. Go to your local drug store, and look in the NSAID aisle. Compare how much of the shelf space is name-brand Advil to store-brand Ibuprofen; this is based on how much money the company behind the name brand is making, as they are paying the store for that shelf space. You can do the same comparison with Claritin, Prilosec, and any number of other medications.
That's why they engage in so much skullduggery against generics.
There is plenty wrong with big pharma and with the system. But all that big pharma is doing against generics is marketing. I buy the generics myself, but others will make other choices.
The only way for big pharma to profit from selling MMJ is to make it illegal for anyone else to do it.
You are doubting the creativity of big pharma. They only need to change the formulation of a mixture and they have something they can sell as unique. Take a cannabinoid, add aspirin and now you have a product that can be patented. Put it in a gel cap with no additives and you can patent it as well. There is no shortage of ways to do it. Market it as something that has the pain relief properties of pot without requiring one to smoke it and you have a gold mine. Market it as something that won't be detected by standard drug tests for THC and you won't be able to keep it on the shelf.
Big pharma is just waiting for a clearly defined market. Right now it is too messy for them to warrant spending money to get involved. They most certainly don't want to kill it, though - and they know it is coming soon.
It's easy to reach that conclusion. However there are some important facts to consider that the conclusion conveniently passes on.
One, opiod prescription rates are down significantly in nearly all states, largely due to new regulations that are meant to discourage their use.
Two, opiods are often amongst the smallest and easiest to synthesize molecules in pharma today. A lot of companies can easily make them, which makes them cheap and low-profit. The big pharma companies don't even want to bother making them.
Three, big pharma could make lots of money selling pot if they wanted to. There are plenty of people who would prefer to be able to buy it in a way that does not require smoking it. Imagine how much money Bayer and others could make selling cannabinoid chewable tablets at the pharmacy; it is not in their own best interest to kill off development of such products. Even if small time shops sell the same, the scale at which the big companies could produce it would be a huge win for them.
In other words, big pharma doesn't want to kill medical marijuana. They are just waiting for the greenlight to start selling retail products based on it. It is worth more to them to be able to do it in all 50 states than to do it 20 different ways in 20 different states while waiting for the other 30 to decide what they want to do.
The job market is still very strongly titled to the employers, in spite of what various news sources claim. If one employee doesn't want to do it, the employer will find a convenient reason to fire them and replace them with someone who does.
I've been on the job market - while employed and with my employer fully aware that I am searching - for well over a year now. I hold an advanced STEM degree. The job market quite simply sucks giant blue whale testicles. Yeah, there are lots of jobs out there but in the geographic region I'm in they are looking mostly for engineers while I am a scientist (I try to convince them otherwise and they ignore me). The biggest problem is getting my resume read by an actual living breathing human being; many people know that the vast overwhelming majority of employers do their initial screening with a commercial algorithm that their own HR department doesn't being to know the first thing about. If I manage to hit the right key works to get past there, I find that I applied to a position that the employer already had a candidate for.
In other words, an applicant faces so many hurdles beyond their control right now that it would be a poor idea for them to place any more in their own way. I've had employers in the past with whom I gave 2 weeks notice to and they accepted it and allowed me to leave earlier to start my new job; this is not terribly uncommon. It is far better to give the notice to retain the positive reference if at all possible.
What's happening is that Facebook is paying ISPs to make Facebook and Wikipedia available without charge, while billing people for data when accessing any other site. It's a paywall imposed by the ISP to which the viewer subscribes, not by the operators of completing sites.
I suspect that would not be as helpful for facebook as they like to think. Sure, they get the brownie points for helping people see their site for free, but facebook is not the reason why facebook exists. They don't actually exist to help you stay on top of your cousin's favorite coffee drink and your high school best friend's uncle's neighbor's dog groomer's dentist's son's favorite public restroom. The purpose of facebook is, of course, to sell personal data to vendors and advertisers. Hence if the users aren't accessing the sites that are paying to advertise on facebook - because they have to pay data charges to do it - facebook isn't getting paid by those vendors and advertisers.
The problem is that too many people are using it and expecting it to conform to whatever they want it to be. It is their website, they can do what they want with it. Similarly if you created a video that you want people to see, you have the right to take it wherever you want. If one site doesn't want to show it the way you want it shown, take it somewhere else. People treat facebook as if it is the entire fucking web; they have this power only because people have given it to them (intentionally or not).
Slashdot Mirror
The implied choice is between MS and Sony
I disagree. The question was "Would You Buy or Recommend One?". I don't see how this makes "none of the above" an invalid choice. For me the WiiU is a vastly superior choice to either, though I still prefer none of the above right now.
So you recomend against all consoles. Then why not lead with that, and leave the rest out.
Because I started by answering the question that was posed by the title of the article.
XBone is for people, especially families
I think you have that confused with the Wii and WiiU. Just because XBOne has a component that allows you to play a dozen or so games without the traditional controller does not mean they are actively trying to get families involved in gaming. Look no further than the game sales volumes and you'll see where their real interests are; the top selling titles for both the Sony and MS consoles are of the same genre, and with the exception of the console-exclusive titles they are the same games.
But picking PS4 because you like
Maybe someone else preferred the PS4 in this thread, but not me. I don't want the MS or Sony consoles, period. No generation of either has ever been in my home, and I can't see a reason to change that.
That is a different matter, there. Those have been offenses that one could be fired on-the-spot for even back when workers did have rights, and they deserve that status. The problem is that now the employer has so much power over the worker that they can can them at a moment's (or less) notice for no real offense at all. Not long ago the idea of a career was almost guaranteed to any hard-working skilled employee. Now it is devolving into the realm of pure mythology.
Few people - including those of us too old to be millenials - have truly stable employment any more. Long ago we signed away our rights to contest being fired or laid off. If one job pulls in enough money to keep you afloat, you need the second in order to put money away for when the first one is no longer there.
The OP asked if HE should get an Xbone, not if YOU should get one. But, of course, everything is about YOU.
Did you read the subject line here? It reads
Would You Buy or Recommend One?
And I would neither buy nor recommend one.
It's still a Microsoft product. It still mostly plays games of a genre that I don't care about (doom clones). Maybe if I was a single guy with money to burn and time to kill, I would be interested but there is no room in my life for a Microsoft or Sony console right now at any price.
I guess that depends on how you define that arena. I credit Apple with killing the floppy drive (arguably not just the 3.5 with the Imac but also the 5.25 with the original Mac) and leading the way towards killing the optical drive as well. They were also a big developer for CUPS.
Yeah, their market share is slim, but their followers are astonishingly devout. Even though the hardware is no longer unique you still have a better chance of converting a windows person to mac than the other way around.
Doesn't anyone remember the G4 cube? I do. Maybe the current crop of Apple execs and designers don't - or they just really don't want to - but it also was released with no headphone/speaker jack. While that was not the sole reason for its failure, it was a contributing part.
The G4 cube was cute - similar to how the SGI O2 (the "toaster") was cute, but cute did not equate to functionality.
They can make patent-able and marketable products from natural pot and still make a killing.
Like I said, I don't think that they can. I think that there is too much prior art.
Again, I don't think you're being creative enough here. Sure, they can't just ground it up into a pill and expect to patent it; that's a given. But once they do something more than that - say isolate a particular compound, or use a novel carrier with it, or a different delivery system, or compound it with an OTC medication - then they have something they almost certainly can patent.
demonstrate hundreds to thousands of years of prior art.
Again, that comes down to what they patent. They wouldn't be dumb enough to try to patent the plant (or at least a common variety of it) directly; that would fail quickly. Such a thing would be like Toyota attempting to patent the wheel. However when they do something clever with pot extracts, then it changes significantly and it is more like Toyota patenting the circuitry for the solar roof in a Prius.
Actually, it's not clear that the tobacco industry will even be the ones to get there before big pharma. There's a lot of big investors lurking around to see how this comes out.
So then who are the investors going to invest in? The investors want to put their money in businesses with solid potential, not just scattered head shops. No businesses strike me as better positioned to make money off legalized pot than tobacco and pharm, as they have the most similar products to it currently.
Sure, although I suspect that for both parties the bigger driving force for the vote is the fear of the other candidate winning. A President Drumpf would likely be disastrously bad for me. From the other side there is nothing that stirs up anger from the GOP as much as the name Clinton.
Worst of all would be if there's something bad in there but not bad enough to hand Sanders the nomination, that could threaten to hand Trump the win over Hillary.
I have a hard time imagining many voters who are on the fence between Trump and Hillary at this point. If the results are bad - though not bad enough to drive Hillary out of the race - I could expect it to maybe drive some people who would vote for her to vote third party instead. It doesn't seem real likely that such people would occur in large enough numbers in battleground states to flip the election to Trump, though.
When Assange previously was given front-page status on slashdot for having a cache of Hillary emails to release, I said I figured he was going to do it to help Bernie Sanders win the election. After all, if Hillary were to actually fall out somehow before November, Sanders would be the only choice the party could present. Being as every poll that ever asked voters about Sanders vs Trump showed Sanders completely wiping the floor with Trump, this strongly suggests that Assange has a favorite here.
I know we love to cater to conservative critiques of government here, but that was not even slightly useful in the realm of criticism. If you don't like the EPA tests, then propose a better one that would be usable across all the cars sold in the US today. Yeah, there are certainly problems with it but the EPA numbers - even if they are not particularly useful on their own - can at least be useful to compare two cars to each other. They are particularly useful for some of the 4 cylinder cars out there that have wildly variable MPG depending on their configurations... compare say a Ford Focus to a Subaru Impreza and you'll see what I mean.
Don't hold your breath. It's been more than 40 years since the last person walked on the moon. The US has no program started to get anyone up there again in the foreseeable future. Russia is happy just making money as a taxi service to the ISS. The private initiatives don't have the resources to make it happen either. Unless China pulls off a huge upset on the matter, I'd be surprised to see someone on the moon again in my lifetime.
I don't see anyone telling you that you will be forced to live in a small place.
In fact, if you have $325k you can go buy the home of your lord and savior , although if that seems a little too small for you there may be larger homes for sale in the same area. Maybe with all the money you've made by not paying employees you could buy your Lord's place, turn it into a museum of his greatness, and then buy another place for yourself at the same time?
They aren't hired for their solid grip on reality, they are hired because they are narcissistic types who will tell the shareholders what they want to hear regardless of the actual situation. She probably isn't even allowed to look at the books; it would be bad practice for any CEO to actually know the state of the company they are tasked with managing.
If big pharma could produce a product with the therapeutic benefits of pot without the high and the effects of the high (or the smoke) that would be something that would have a very large market.
They have, and it has been incredibly foolish.
That crap was not made by big pharma. That shit comes from seedy chemists from all over the world who either don't understand or don't care about QC. At least half the time those "bath salts" don't have the ingredients they claim to have in anywhere near the quantities they claim to have, and the rest of the crap in them has never been tested on anything. Basically some joker who thinks he remembers something about high school chemistry reads the wikipedia entry on THC and thinks they can make it, and this is what you get.
Again, there is plenty wrong with big pharma as it is. You don't need to lie about their problems to make them look bad.
Big Pharma is a failure at making synthetic marijuana
They don't need to make synthetic pot, that is the point I've been trying to make here. They can make patent-able and marketable products from natural pot and still make a killing. They are well aware of this. Do you really think nobody in pharma has read any of the predictions of the value of the marijuana market (both medical and recreational)? Once it becomes legal in all 50 states pharma will be at war with the likes of RJ Reynolds (or whatever they are calling themselves this week) to try for market dominance. They will compete for who can put the first collection of OTC pot-based products on the shelves at your local drug store.
No: The research quoted in TFA says that prescriptions for painkillers and other classes of drugs fell compared with states that did not have a medical-marijuana law. This is a comparison study, not a "opiod use dropped, therefore it must be medical marijuana" correlation=causation study.
States across the country have seen reductions in prescriptions for opioids, including ones that have no medical marijuana laws. A non-trivial part of this is due to the VA passing a regulation across their system calling for prescribers to reduce their prescribing rates of opioids, though many other health systems are following suit.
Faulty thinking: "cheap to make" means high profit, not low.
That would be the case if you were the only one who could make said item. Virtually none of the opioids that are commonly prescribed today are covered by patents, though. Synthesis of many of them is very easy compared to many other commonly prescribed drugs - even easier than some NSAIDs - which makes it very hard for the big companies to make money on these.
Three, big pharma could make lots of money selling pot if they wanted to. There are plenty of people who would prefer to be able to buy it in a way that does not require smoking it.
They can't patent it, so they'll be up against the low cost competitors
There are plenty of patent opportunities there. Just because it starts as a natural component doesn't mean nothing can be patented from it; the companies can easily patent it by compounding it with something else, purifying a specific component of it, or changing the delivery system (to name just a few ways).
Sure, they will be competing with drug dealers on the street corner but there will be plenty of market for alternative administration and dosing methods. After all, even if we made pot legal for all uses this afternoon across all 50 states your employer could still fire you for testing positive on a drug test (or violating their anti-drug policy in any other manner).
Bayer still make aspirin... but it's not much of a profit center any more.
If they aren't making money on it, then why are they paying retailers for so much shelf space? Same applies to Advil (Ibuprofen) and Tylenool (Acetaminophen).
There is plenty wrong with big pharma and with the system. But all that big pharma is doing against generics is marketing.
False.
Your article is about big pharma in respect to prescription medications. I am particularly looking at big pharma with regrads to OTC medications. I fully expect that once there is a 50-state law regarding medical marijuana, it will be an OTC product of some sort. In fact I expect it will rapidly become a large number of OTC products; that would be the only way big pharma could compete with the pot dealers on the streets.
You are doubting the creativity of big pharma. They only need to change the formulation of a mixture and they have something they can sell as unique.
Something nobody wants. Unless they can keep the other stuff illegal, they won't be able to sell it.
I disagree. There are still down sides to buying pot and smoking it. Even if it became 50-state legal starting this afternoon to smoke as much pot as you want, there would still be stigma attached to it. Employers would still be free to fire employees who fail drug tests for it. If big pharma could produce a product with the therapeutic benefits of pot without the high and the effects of the high (or the smoke) that would be something that would have a very large market.
big pharma could make lots of money selling pot if they wanted to.
They can't make big money on anything they can't patent.
That is very much untrue. If that were the case then we wouldn't see any name brand Tylenol, Advil, etc being sold at retail. There are plenty of other drugs that have gone off-patent (and OTC as well) that the big pharma companies are still making lots of money on. Go to your local drug store, and look in the NSAID aisle. Compare how much of the shelf space is name-brand Advil to store-brand Ibuprofen; this is based on how much money the company behind the name brand is making, as they are paying the store for that shelf space. You can do the same comparison with Claritin, Prilosec, and any number of other medications.
That's why they engage in so much skullduggery against generics.
There is plenty wrong with big pharma and with the system. But all that big pharma is doing against generics is marketing. I buy the generics myself, but others will make other choices.
The only way for big pharma to profit from selling MMJ is to make it illegal for anyone else to do it.
You are doubting the creativity of big pharma. They only need to change the formulation of a mixture and they have something they can sell as unique. Take a cannabinoid, add aspirin and now you have a product that can be patented. Put it in a gel cap with no additives and you can patent it as well. There is no shortage of ways to do it. Market it as something that has the pain relief properties of pot without requiring one to smoke it and you have a gold mine. Market it as something that won't be detected by standard drug tests for THC and you won't be able to keep it on the shelf.
Big pharma is just waiting for a clearly defined market. Right now it is too messy for them to warrant spending money to get involved. They most certainly don't want to kill it, though - and they know it is coming soon.
It's easy to reach that conclusion. However there are some important facts to consider that the conclusion conveniently passes on.
One, opiod prescription rates are down significantly in nearly all states, largely due to new regulations that are meant to discourage their use.
Two, opiods are often amongst the smallest and easiest to synthesize molecules in pharma today. A lot of companies can easily make them, which makes them cheap and low-profit. The big pharma companies don't even want to bother making them.
Three, big pharma could make lots of money selling pot if they wanted to. There are plenty of people who would prefer to be able to buy it in a way that does not require smoking it. Imagine how much money Bayer and others could make selling cannabinoid chewable tablets at the pharmacy; it is not in their own best interest to kill off development of such products. Even if small time shops sell the same, the scale at which the big companies could produce it would be a huge win for them.
In other words, big pharma doesn't want to kill medical marijuana. They are just waiting for the greenlight to start selling retail products based on it. It is worth more to them to be able to do it in all 50 states than to do it 20 different ways in 20 different states while waiting for the other 30 to decide what they want to do.
The job market is still very strongly titled to the employers, in spite of what various news sources claim. If one employee doesn't want to do it, the employer will find a convenient reason to fire them and replace them with someone who does.
I've been on the job market - while employed and with my employer fully aware that I am searching - for well over a year now. I hold an advanced STEM degree. The job market quite simply sucks giant blue whale testicles. Yeah, there are lots of jobs out there but in the geographic region I'm in they are looking mostly for engineers while I am a scientist (I try to convince them otherwise and they ignore me). The biggest problem is getting my resume read by an actual living breathing human being; many people know that the vast overwhelming majority of employers do their initial screening with a commercial algorithm that their own HR department doesn't being to know the first thing about. If I manage to hit the right key works to get past there, I find that I applied to a position that the employer already had a candidate for.
In other words, an applicant faces so many hurdles beyond their control right now that it would be a poor idea for them to place any more in their own way. I've had employers in the past with whom I gave 2 weeks notice to and they accepted it and allowed me to leave earlier to start my new job; this is not terribly uncommon. It is far better to give the notice to retain the positive reference if at all possible.
What's happening is that Facebook is paying ISPs to make Facebook and Wikipedia available without charge, while billing people for data when accessing any other site. It's a paywall imposed by the ISP to which the viewer subscribes, not by the operators of completing sites.
I suspect that would not be as helpful for facebook as they like to think. Sure, they get the brownie points for helping people see their site for free, but facebook is not the reason why facebook exists. They don't actually exist to help you stay on top of your cousin's favorite coffee drink and your high school best friend's uncle's neighbor's dog groomer's dentist's son's favorite public restroom. The purpose of facebook is, of course, to sell personal data to vendors and advertisers. Hence if the users aren't accessing the sites that are paying to advertise on facebook - because they have to pay data charges to do it - facebook isn't getting paid by those vendors and advertisers.
The problem is that too many people are using it and expecting it to conform to whatever they want it to be. It is their website, they can do what they want with it. Similarly if you created a video that you want people to see, you have the right to take it wherever you want. If one site doesn't want to show it the way you want it shown, take it somewhere else. People treat facebook as if it is the entire fucking web; they have this power only because people have given it to them (intentionally or not).