It's not that quite simple. The reason drugs cost less outside of US is classic market segmentation. Say you can sell Y of drug X at $1000 in the US. NB The price point at which a drug will be bought is determined either by government fiat (most of the world), or by *national* health insurers (US) - it either sells to the full cohort or none* Then consider Unnamed-But-Poor country with a large population. No way they can afford $1000, so zero sales. Then they negotiate a price of $100. Now the manufacturer gets new sales of (other country cohort)*$100, plus a nice glow of being humanitarian. If you abolish segmentation i.e. drugs freely traded internationally, and we assume the manufacturer needs to recoup the same amount, then the US price becomes (US cohorts*$1000- (Other country cohort)*$100)/US cohorts. Which will be less than the current US price, but a lot more than the current non-US price. And the number of people availing of said drug world wide will fall dramatically.
The interesting thing is why market forces, if we include non-legal ones, aren't capitalising on this. For now I'm presuming it's conservatism on the part of the consumer i.e. most people who *may* need expensive drugs have a complex medical condition. They consider it a better option to candidly engage with doctors who will carefully monitor their symptoms along with provide a quality assured supply of drugs, and vary these drugs appropriately, It's not like the patient is going to think "well, the doc put me on drug X, I'll get that a lot cheaper from Sneaky Pete at the street corner but keep attending to the doc without telling him".
Also, has anyone noticed that no one has mentioned the #1 reason for the growing energy problem and its associated pollution problem? The #1 reason is overpopulation. If we reduced greenhouse-gas emissions by 3% over 10 years but increased the population by 3% over the same period across all nations, then we effectively accomplished nothing.
Can anyone guess why overpopulation is never mentioned by American politicians? Could the concept of overpopulation be too closely tied to illegal immigration?
While I agree wholeheartedly that overpopulation is the elephant in the room, I believe it's political sensitivity is more to do with the nostrum of continual economic growth, and in particular the desire to featherbed ageing populations in the developed world with fresh young worker bees.
So basically, millions of tons of CO2 are acceptable to ensure the (affluent) population has instant access to a schedule of 100s of (crap) programs and doesn't have to get off their arses to press a switch 5 m away? No wonder we're fscked.
I'm as much an idealist eco-weenie as the next European, and much as I aplaud the overall sentiment a recent Economist article (sorry, subscription only, here's third hand quotes: http://www.greenenergyinvestors.com/index.php?showtopic=809&mode=threaded&pid=16254 ) mentioned that the current site of Dongtan, Chongming, is a currently significant carbon sink and ecological habitat due to it's lack of links to the mainland. To summarise, the proposed new city is likely to a weekend resort or dormitory town for the Shanghai rich, with vastly increased traffic to and fro, rather than any self-sustained eco-idyll.
I agree with your point, and also the prior references to Schneier (presume there are also some to Ben Franklin's quote ). But as a nerdy point of fact, handling alternate name spellings and establishing identity based on imprecise data is a well established technology (e.g. weightings for different attributes, key transpositions caused by typos, etc,etc) typically for client / patient databases fed from disparate systems.
Never thought about the civil liberty ramifications till now. I guess the correct course of action for myself is to move out of the low paid health care industry and get a taste of that sweet,sweet Homeland security pork.
Judging by the pictures, this thing will gingerly carry the casualty 1 metre of the ground at a less than zippy pace, with no shielding or no evasive smarts. If the supposed use of these things is extraction from exposed postions, then surely the casualty will be shot to pieces on the way home. If I was lying in the dirt and saw one of those lumbering towards me it'd be "No, no, I'm safe here you metal freak, don't carry me into the open please!". Even with a teddy bear head.
To summarise the gist of their content: 1) the glass was the result of a single event because of the distribution of large quantities of glass (100s of thousands of tons) formed at the same time in small area 2) the event was likely astronomic because analsysis of zircon crystals withni the glass indicated a temperature of 180000K degrees ( cf. lava at c. 100000k ) 3) the absence of a crater matching the glass distribution was not conclusive (there has been significant water flows in the Sahara since the event, so the glass could conceivably have been transported from the area... 4)... but similarities with Tunguska, plus simulations which subsequently matched Shoemaker-Levy's Jupiter impact suggested that the airburst of a low density metorite/comet would not only account for the glass formation, but was statistically probable.
The program was a bit sensationalist, but the references can be googled from TFA.
A few years ago I worked for a long established American firm making 390 mainframes(*). High level management were trying to outsource to India, my senior peers were coincidentally assessing static source code analysis tools.
They used the tool to assess the quality of the Indian code vs their own code. Result was the Indian code was measured to be better. The outcome? Tool was deemed to be broken and not used. Company went out of business a few years later.
Moral? Well the one I took from it was that everyone thinks other peoples' code is worse than their own, because it's different. When that code comes from a different culture, then the differences are going to be greater. But if it gets the job done (which encompasses reliability, maintainability etc), stop whining.
And in Doolin as well. Still, it's a lovely village, but sounds like the organisers have been conned by the Irish governments _comittment_ to being a global internet hub but sadly the implemenation is non-existent.
Granted it would have the kinetic energy to cause massive damage, but this is mitigated by the fact it would be near impossible to aim with sufficient accuracy to hit a specific building.
c.f. Son of Star Wars
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that quite simple.
The reason drugs cost less outside of US is classic market segmentation.
Say you can sell Y of drug X at $1000 in the US. NB The price point at which a drug will be bought is determined either by government fiat (most of the world), or by *national* health insurers (US) - it either sells to the full cohort or none*
Then consider Unnamed-But-Poor country with a large population. No way they can afford $1000, so zero sales. Then they negotiate a price of $100. Now the manufacturer gets new sales of (other country cohort)*$100, plus a nice glow of being humanitarian.
If you abolish segmentation i.e. drugs freely traded internationally, and we assume the manufacturer needs to recoup the same amount, then the US price becomes (US cohorts*$1000- (Other country cohort)*$100)/US cohorts. Which will be less than the current US price, but a lot more than the current non-US price.
And the number of people availing of said drug world wide will fall dramatically.
The interesting thing is why market forces, if we include non-legal ones, aren't capitalising on this. For now I'm presuming it's conservatism on the part of the consumer i.e. most people who *may* need expensive drugs have a complex medical condition. They consider it a better option to candidly engage with doctors who will carefully monitor their symptoms along with provide a quality assured supply of drugs, and vary these drugs appropriately, It's not like the patient is going to think "well, the doc put me on drug X, I'll get that a lot cheaper from Sneaky Pete at the street corner but keep attending to the doc without telling him".
Just look up radiocarbon dating calibration, this has been known since the discovery of said process.
...bet there are some red faces back in the Oort cloud - especially among all the Shoemaker-Levy fanbois.
Also, has anyone noticed that no one has mentioned the #1 reason for the growing energy problem and its associated pollution problem? The #1 reason is overpopulation. If we reduced greenhouse-gas emissions by 3% over 10 years but increased the population by 3% over the same period across all nations, then we effectively accomplished nothing.
Can anyone guess why overpopulation is never mentioned by American politicians? Could the concept of overpopulation be too closely tied to illegal immigration?
While I agree wholeheartedly that overpopulation is the elephant in the room, I believe it's political sensitivity is more to do with the nostrum of continual economic growth, and in particular the desire to featherbed ageing populations in the developed world with fresh young worker bees.
So basically, millions of tons of CO2 are acceptable to ensure the (affluent) population has instant access to a schedule of 100s of (crap) programs and doesn't have to get off their arses to press a switch 5 m away?
No wonder we're fscked.
I'm as much an idealist eco-weenie as the next European, and much as I aplaud the overall sentiment a recent Economist article (sorry, subscription only, here's third hand quotes: http://www.greenenergyinvestors.com/index.php?showtopic=809&mode=threaded&pid=16254 ) mentioned that the current site of Dongtan, Chongming, is a currently significant carbon sink and ecological habitat due to it's lack of links to the mainland.
To summarise, the proposed new city is likely to a weekend resort or dormitory town for the Shanghai rich, with vastly increased traffic to and fro, rather than any self-sustained eco-idyll.
An excellent link to an excellent debunking of this myth from an earlier SUV topic:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=578893&cid=23720543
Basically SUV may have slightly better crash survivability, but they are way more likely to crash.
but time travel too: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19726421.700-2008-does-time-travel-start-here.html
So we may survive the singularity only to be enslaved by giant intelligent wasps from the future. Nice.
I agree with your point, and also the prior references to Schneier (presume there are also some to Ben Franklin's quote ).
But as a nerdy point of fact, handling alternate name spellings and establishing identity based on imprecise data is a well established technology (e.g. weightings for different attributes, key transpositions caused by typos, etc,etc) typically for client / patient databases fed from disparate systems.
Never thought about the civil liberty ramifications till now. I guess the correct course of action for myself is to move out of the low paid health care industry and get a taste of that sweet,sweet Homeland security pork.
Judging by the pictures, this thing will gingerly carry the casualty 1 metre of the ground at a less than zippy pace, with no shielding or no evasive smarts.
If the supposed use of these things is extraction from exposed postions, then surely the casualty will be shot to pieces on the way home. If I was lying in the dirt and saw one of those lumbering towards me it'd be "No, no, I'm safe here you metal freak, don't carry me into the open please!". Even with a teddy bear head.
To summarise the gist of their content: ... but similarities with Tunguska, plus simulations which subsequently matched Shoemaker-Levy's Jupiter impact suggested that the airburst of a low density metorite/comet would not only account for the glass formation, but was statistically probable.
1) the glass was the result of a single event because of the distribution of large quantities of glass (100s of thousands of tons) formed at the same time in small area
2) the event was likely astronomic because analsysis of zircon crystals withni the glass indicated a temperature of 180000K degrees ( cf. lava at c. 100000k )
3) the absence of a crater matching the glass distribution was not conclusive (there has been significant water flows in the Sahara since the event, so the glass could conceivably have been transported from the area...
4)
The program was a bit sensationalist, but the references can be googled from TFA.
A few years ago I worked for a long established American firm making 390 mainframes(*).
High level management were trying to outsource to India, my senior peers were coincidentally assessing static source code analysis tools.
They used the tool to assess the quality of the Indian code vs their own code. Result was the Indian code was measured to be better. The outcome? Tool was deemed to be broken and not used. Company went out of business a few years later.
Moral? Well the one I took from it was that everyone thinks other peoples' code is worse than their own, because it's different. When that code comes from a different culture, then the differences are going to be greater. But if it gets the job done (which encompasses reliability, maintainability etc), stop whining.
(*) Amdahl.
... welcome our vegetable overlords
Just goes to show how unneccessary this QA malarkey is.
http://carnival-in-rethymnon-crete-greece.com/Rabi t2_jp40.jpg
"I'm a fat white guy with a very sloppy apartment, but you can't tell that by reading most of what I type. "
Ermm, one could hazard an educated guess.
And in Doolin as well. Still, it's a lovely village, but sounds like the organisers have been conned by the Irish governments _comittment_ to being a global internet hub but sadly the implemenation is non-existent.
Granted it would have the kinetic energy to cause massive damage, but this is mitigated by the fact it would be near impossible to aim with sufficient accuracy to hit a specific building.
c.f. Son of Star Wars