in real, every-day practice, libertarianism in the U.S. is about property rights, not personal freedom. Individual libertarians will cast aspersions on particular laws centered on codifiying personal speech and actions that they individually don't find objectionable, but are generally silent about government regulating the actions they do find objectionable. What libertarians focus on as a political group are property rights and business/tax regulation.
If they used a robocaller it would annoy people (it's what robocallers do best) and they would end up resenting their pharmacy and their scrip. The study just told the public what the pharma companies had already known (and utilized) for years.
I'm all for better and tighter regulation of the Pharma industry, but I don't see a way of replacing the profit motive with pure benevolence.
furthermore, applying the rule of "you can't patent an algorithm" would rule out patents on genetic tests. The technology necessary for doing the sequencing or other identification (SNP, etc) has been in the public domain for years. The patents really only cover using that public domain tech to generate data and then checking the data against a database of alleles known to have medical implications - i.e., an algorithm.
you sell less drugs, and there's less money for R&D. Pharma doesn't spend money on marketing unless it generates more revenue than it costs: they have the guys with calculators to figure that out. Spending money on buying back shares, private jets, or buying out Sirtris: yeah, that hurts R&D. Marketing the drugs to people who shouldn't be taking them (Vioxx) and then losing 3x as much in the inevitable lawsuits: yeah, that hurts R&D. Someone did a study a while back, and found that the biggest effect that direct to consumer advertising of drugs had on sales wasn't to get people to bug their doctors to write them a scrip, it was in reminding people to refill the prescriptions they already had.
Myriad found alleles (mutations) associated with a higher risk of breast cancer, and then patented a medical test to detect those alleles.
If you patented a breathalyzer, would you call it a patent on alcohol?
Someone upthread mentioned that mobile devices won't interfere with amateur radio because of the inconvenience of carrying around a 100ft antenna... any guesses on what you've made when you send broad spectrum RF signals through all of the power lines in a neighborhood?
questions for you:
Does BPA get whizzed out pretty quickly, or does the liver get a chance to turn it into all sorts of other nasty stuff first?
If a baby mouse is dosed with BPA, is it still in its system when it hits puberty?
As opposed to drinking soda, how about people (adults, hopefully) who work with epoxy? Epoxy generally starts as two liquids you mix together, one of them is generally practically pure BPA or a related compound. Would skin exposure be an issue - likesay molding that JB weld using your hands? Or dripping the stuff while you're doing the 'glassing' step of making fiberglass? How about inhalation of partly cured epoxy sanding dust?
Inquiring surf board makers want to know. (this one wears gloves, a respirator, long sleeves, etc)
I'd say that the pharma industry is no more corrupt than any other regulated industry - it's just that pharma corruption is so much more asinine.
Also, the reason pharma companies do marketing directly to consumers: it works. People see the ads and actually do pester their doctors about getting switched to the spiffy new medicine they saw on TV. There's also a more subtle reason: according to a marketing study I read about, the ads remind people to take their pills and then buy more.
Re: coasting in neutral vs coasting in gear
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
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· Score: 1
well, the 'puter in my Mazda puts me at ~ 70 mpg when coasting in neutral at 20 mph, and something similar when in gear. At 65 mph that would put me at over 200 mpg for neutral(the 'puter goes offscale at 99mpg). If I was driving over mountain passes each day it might be worth it to figure out which is more efficient, but for normal commuting the difference in fuel consumption will be negligable. It's all burned while accelerating/maintaining speed, not while coasting and braking. If I coast for 2 miles a day in neutral at an average of 100mpg, vs the engine burning NO gas at all for those same miles it would save me all of 7 gallons a year. A new clutch will cost me close to a grand, putting extra wear on it to save 20 or 40 dollars a year is penny wise/pound foolish. For braking moderately I let the engine brake the car til the rpms get low, then just take it out of gear.
I'm not sure about shifting at lower RPMs either. It means shifting well below the torque peak when your engine is not at its most efficient for accelerating. You end up having to put your foot down further to accelerate at all, and then you have to keep it there longer to get up to speed. The 'puter says I do better when I use a lighter foot and stay in a lower gear a bit longer, shifting in the high 2000's rather than the low 2000's (2.3l 4 cyl, 5sp manual). It might be more applicable if you're driving 6+cylinders.
try explaining to your shareholders why the drug that was supposed to earn $5billion a year just cratered and you'll now have to write off a billion dollars in development costs. Just cause thirty lousy extra people died in a clinical trial. sheesh.
I get the idea Grove didn't actually look at the pharma industry before giving that talk
FTA:
"But in pharma, if a clinical trial doesn't work--which means the average of all the patient responses is not better than the average of a placebo treatment--they just throw [the drug] away, when in fact the averages may hide stuff that did work, and something that made patients different [such as genetics]."
Flat out wrong. If the drug still has promise for a certain subpopulation, or if they find an unexpected but desirable side effect, they run another trial. And billions of dollars of biotech capital has been burned trying to match genotypes to drug efficacy. Those numbers are just now starting to come out.
"But you never hear an executive from a pharmaceutical company say, "Before the end of the year I'm going to have xyz drug," the way Steve Jobs said the iPhone would be out on schedule."
Flat out wrong. Pfizer's CEO said they would have six new drugs approved by 2010. Of course he said that while trying to head off the crash in Pfizer's stock after Torcetrapib failed - what I was writing about above.
Executives say stuff like that all the time, roughly in proportion to both how close they are to the shareholders and how distanced they are from the actual science.
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in real, every-day practice, libertarianism in the U.S. is about property rights, not personal freedom. Individual libertarians will cast aspersions on particular laws centered on codifiying personal speech and actions that they individually don't find objectionable, but are generally silent about government regulating the actions they do find objectionable. What libertarians focus on as a political group are property rights and business/tax regulation.
If they used a robocaller it would annoy people (it's what robocallers do best) and they would end up resenting their pharmacy and their scrip. The study just told the public what the pharma companies had already known (and utilized) for years. I'm all for better and tighter regulation of the Pharma industry, but I don't see a way of replacing the profit motive with pure benevolence.
furthermore, applying the rule of "you can't patent an algorithm" would rule out patents on genetic tests. The technology necessary for doing the sequencing or other identification (SNP, etc) has been in the public domain for years. The patents really only cover using that public domain tech to generate data and then checking the data against a database of alleles known to have medical implications - i.e., an algorithm.
Plus, a lot of the sequencing was done by a private for-profit company, Celera, at a fraction of the cost of the public effort.
you sell less drugs, and there's less money for R&D. Pharma doesn't spend money on marketing unless it generates more revenue than it costs: they have the guys with calculators to figure that out. Spending money on buying back shares, private jets, or buying out Sirtris: yeah, that hurts R&D. Marketing the drugs to people who shouldn't be taking them (Vioxx) and then losing 3x as much in the inevitable lawsuits: yeah, that hurts R&D. Someone did a study a while back, and found that the biggest effect that direct to consumer advertising of drugs had on sales wasn't to get people to bug their doctors to write them a scrip, it was in reminding people to refill the prescriptions they already had.
Myriad found alleles (mutations) associated with a higher risk of breast cancer, and then patented a medical test to detect those alleles. If you patented a breathalyzer, would you call it a patent on alcohol?
Someone upthread mentioned that mobile devices won't interfere with amateur radio because of the inconvenience of carrying around a 100ft antenna ... any guesses on what you've made when you send broad spectrum RF signals through all of the power lines in a neighborhood?
questions for you: Does BPA get whizzed out pretty quickly, or does the liver get a chance to turn it into all sorts of other nasty stuff first? If a baby mouse is dosed with BPA, is it still in its system when it hits puberty? As opposed to drinking soda, how about people (adults, hopefully) who work with epoxy? Epoxy generally starts as two liquids you mix together, one of them is generally practically pure BPA or a related compound. Would skin exposure be an issue - likesay molding that JB weld using your hands? Or dripping the stuff while you're doing the 'glassing' step of making fiberglass? How about inhalation of partly cured epoxy sanding dust? Inquiring surf board makers want to know. (this one wears gloves, a respirator, long sleeves, etc)
I'd say that the pharma industry is no more corrupt than any other regulated industry - it's just that pharma corruption is so much more asinine. Also, the reason pharma companies do marketing directly to consumers: it works. People see the ads and actually do pester their doctors about getting switched to the spiffy new medicine they saw on TV. There's also a more subtle reason: according to a marketing study I read about, the ads remind people to take their pills and then buy more.
well, the 'puter in my Mazda puts me at ~ 70 mpg when coasting in neutral at 20 mph, and something similar when in gear. At 65 mph that would put me at over 200 mpg for neutral(the 'puter goes offscale at 99mpg). If I was driving over mountain passes each day it might be worth it to figure out which is more efficient, but for normal commuting the difference in fuel consumption will be negligable. It's all burned while accelerating/maintaining speed, not while coasting and braking. If I coast for 2 miles a day in neutral at an average of 100mpg, vs the engine burning NO gas at all for those same miles it would save me all of 7 gallons a year. A new clutch will cost me close to a grand, putting extra wear on it to save 20 or 40 dollars a year is penny wise/pound foolish. For braking moderately I let the engine brake the car til the rpms get low, then just take it out of gear. I'm not sure about shifting at lower RPMs either. It means shifting well below the torque peak when your engine is not at its most efficient for accelerating. You end up having to put your foot down further to accelerate at all, and then you have to keep it there longer to get up to speed. The 'puter says I do better when I use a lighter foot and stay in a lower gear a bit longer, shifting in the high 2000's rather than the low 2000's (2.3l 4 cyl, 5sp manual). It might be more applicable if you're driving 6+cylinders.