Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
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Let Them Eat Teslas
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As a university employee in a country with socialized edication (?), I assure you that you would have to worry about the administration being slow, ineffectice and expensive. That seems to be a constant.
Why should God have to build that roof, or cure all diseases for us?
Because it would be a nice thing to do, and immensely lower the total amount of suffering? You know, in line with the whole "benevolent" part? Or are you also a follower of Cthulhu?
Stop demanding proof of God or else you're going to keep going around insisting your life in just an accident of chance.
I'll stop asking for proof when people stop trying to cram their particular brand of god down my throat. And that includes using religious arguments for public policy.
Re:It's "more... THAN", stupid, stupid Americans..
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3D DRAM Spec Published
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I believe the UID for AC is 666, though it isn't shown on his posts.
Doctors spend a lot of time in med school to learn every freaking thing there is to know about the human body, just to specialize and only work on feet. But knowing how the whole body works makes it easier to learn how feet work, as you get a framework for understanding biological systems, plus you never know when it would be really helpful to understand what effect some quirk of circulation or neurology have on the symptoms of foot focused diseases. I assume it is the same way with law.
I'm in favor of partial legalization and regulation. Smoking kills 300k a year. Something like widespread meth use could come in 10x, 20x that. The reason drugs can get banned is because they are so incredibly devastating to individuals to families and to communities when their use becomes common. Pretending they are harmless undermines other points.
The question is whether the benefits of criminalization, the avoidance of widespread use[citation needed], can be achieved without criminalization.
None of these drugs are developed in a vacuum. They are all based on work that has been done before and has been published in journals. Federal tax dollars also go towards drug development. So again, tax payers are paying for alot of this development.
The hard part isn't finding the target, the hard part is making 100.000 molecules that might be useful and test them in vitro, taking the 5.000 that works and testing them in mice, taking the 100 that works and test their toxicity and uptake in healthy humans, taking the 5 that aren't toxic and are taken up on diseased humans, testing the 2 that works in even more diseased humans, and testing the 1 that doesn't have a nasty, but rare side effect in even more humans, finding out it doesn't work as well as the existing drug, dump it all and start over, until one drug comes out.
By DRE, I would estimate the basic research per drug to cost 10 to 30 millions, going from there to the approved drug costs around 1 billion per approved drug. So yes, tax payers might be paying SEVERAL PERCENT of the research leading to a drug.
What does the amount spend on marketing have to do with the price of testing drugs? I am aware of the fact that they spend a lot on marketing, and that it isn't doing anything good, but I never said anything about their total income, only about the price of testing drugs.
Do you have a link to the study you mention? I would like to read it.
accept only 5% of all that money is related to research
Do you have a citation for that number?
Most of the money for drug research comes from the public purse and the average US citizen is getting royally screwed by the drug companies for drug research they paid for already.
I assume you have been misled by the difference between "X looks like a great disease target" and "We now have an FDA-approved drug targeting X", and would like to suggest "In the pipeline":
If you don't mind a lot of people getting hurt because science is hard to understand, and it is hard to understand that it is hard to understand, that system could work. I do care that people get hurt, even if it is by their own lack of insight into science, partly because I know there are areas I do not know enough about to make judgments in, or even to recognize experts. And probably some that I don't know I don't know enough about.
I don't live in the US and am not a doctor, so my knowledge is limited, but I will try to answer the best I can.
1. Because we have decided that the risk of people being swindled by quacks become too large if we allow that. What you can do is enlist in a test of a new drug, which should give you access to less tested drugs.
2. There really aren't two different points of view. In all applications of medicine, the chance of benefit must be weighed against the risk of harm. For tested medicine, we have a good estimate of them both, and a judgment can be made. For untested medicine, the prior plausibility of the harm/benefit ratio is deemed too unfavorable.
3-4. I don't know, as I don't know the American system. But remember that fixed prices moves the risk to the hospital or doctor, and they have to be compensated for taking that risk, so it will mean more expensive treatment.
5. The depends on the rate of false negatives and false positives. Any screening causes someone to experience side effects from unnecessary side effects, and some people to not get the treatment they need.
6. I imagine hearing aids are expensive because they are fiendishly advanced. Out ears are able to pick out sounds with abysmal S/N (next time you are in a crowded, noisy room, try to see how many different conversations you can listen to simply by choosing one over the other), and the hearing aids have to work with that system. Also, sweat and ear wax are not the least corrosive environment, and any leaching might be problematic. For prosthetics, I imagine it could be done, though the list of materials and the way the prosthetic sticks to the body might be a problem.
It seems that most of the money the pharmaceutical industry earns goes to marketing, yes. But it still cost a lot to bring a drug to market. It is difficult to estimate how much the average is, but few estimates are under 100 million.
I have been unclear, then. I merely meant to warn against junking something that works when we don't know what we should put in its place. By all means let's test new systems, I see no reason why several systems for testing drugs couln't run simultaneously, just let's not completely dismantle the current system before we have something else that works.
Is this akin to the "if we don't get unlimited copyright, the music will die"?
If the price of making a track was hundreds of millions dollars and took five to ten years, yes. I guess it is akin to "without copyright, we would get no more blockbuster movies", with the difference that blockbuster movies does not keep people alive. Oh, and patents are for twenty years, not forever minus epsilon.
The price of testing drugs is mostly due to the number of people in the tests, and the number of people determine how certain we can be on the estimates of efficacy and efficiency. You can get cheaper testing, or you can get better testing, but getting both is tricky.
That being said, more transparency would be nice. At least force them to publish all human testing of the drugs. Or even better, remove the testing from the drug companies, though it would be problematic to ensure that they have no power over it.
As for the using government money for testing drugs, it is an intriguing idea, but corruption would still be a problem, given the amount of money at stake. I am not sure whether it would be a larger or smaller problem than today.
People have been saying that the drug companies spend a lot of money on other things for a long time, but that isn't really relevant to my post. Some of the money we spend on drugs today are used to test new drugs. If we are going to end the system we have today, I would prefer if we had a new system in place before that. So, what is your system for testing new drugs, and when can it be implemented? And remember, it really does cost hundreds of millions of dollars to be reasonably sure that a drug works and is safe, so your system had better be somewhat resistant towards corruption.
do you really think they are working on a cure when they can rake in thousands of dollars a month from each and every cancer patient??? Yeah right... think again...
I would expect all of the other drug companies to also want a piece of that pie. That means they have to come up with something that works better.
If they understand the cancer well enough to halt it in it's tracks for 90 to 95% of the patients that are treatable by this drug, and another 90 to 95 of those that take it are alive and in full remission 5+ years later, they certainly know enough to track down a cure if they were so inclined to do so.
Greedy bastards...
You are vastly, massively underestimating the complexity of cancer and of the human biology.
Until we have a better system in place for coming up with the hundreds of millions of dollars it takes to prove the efficacy and safety of a new drug, drug patents are one of few cases where patents make sense.
Most cheap "lasers" you buy are not true lasers, running on LEDs.
How are LED lasers not true lasers?
. I also wonder why it would need a focus lens to stay focused for ~100 ft (as per video from their web site).
because of the size of the lasing medium. Given the smallest radius of the beam, which of course can't be larger than the exit aperture of the optics, or the size of the lasing medium if no optics are used, and the wave length, the minimum dispersion angle can be determined. IIRC, the dispersion angle for a LED laser is something like 30 degrees before the optics, because the lasing medium is roughly the size of the wavelength.
The Oxford dictionary specifies that it only applies to using Google, not just any search engine, so I would imagine it not being a threat. The problem is if googling becomes the generic term for searching.
Is anything I wrote factually wrong? Or can you only accuse me of wrongdoing by wild extrapolation?
I wrote nothing about mental illness. Mental illness is certainly real illness, and the fact that it is looked upon as "not real illness" leads to no end of hurt, like people refusing to get the treatment that could help them because "are you saying I'm CRAZY??!!?!" in addition to "why don't they just get the f*ck over it".
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As a university employee in a country with socialized edication (?), I assure you that you would have to worry about the administration being slow, ineffectice and expensive. That seems to be a constant.
Why should God have to build that roof, or cure all diseases for us?
Because it would be a nice thing to do, and immensely lower the total amount of suffering? You know, in line with the whole "benevolent" part? Or are you also a follower of Cthulhu?
Stop demanding proof of God or else you're going to keep going around insisting your life in just an accident of chance.
I'll stop asking for proof when people stop trying to cram their particular brand of god down my throat. And that includes using religious arguments for public policy.
I believe the UID for AC is 666, though it isn't shown on his posts.
Doctors spend a lot of time in med school to learn every freaking thing there is to know about the human body, just to specialize and only work on feet. But knowing how the whole body works makes it easier to learn how feet work, as you get a framework for understanding biological systems, plus you never know when it would be really helpful to understand what effect some quirk of circulation or neurology have on the symptoms of foot focused diseases. I assume it is the same way with law.
45 million people smoke cigarettes. Maybe around 1 million use meth. The difference is prohibition.
And culture, and effect, both harmful and desired, and how clear the harmful effects are, and social stigma, and...
I'm in favor of partial legalization and regulation. Smoking kills 300k a year. Something like widespread meth use could come in 10x, 20x that. The reason drugs can get banned is because they are so incredibly devastating to individuals to families and to communities when their use becomes common. Pretending they are harmless undermines other points.
The question is whether the benefits of criminalization, the avoidance of widespread use[citation needed], can be achieved without criminalization.
Actually, that isn't fair. Finding the target is hard. Going from there to the approved drug is the EXPENSIVE part.
None of these drugs are developed in a vacuum. They are all based on work that has been done before and has been published in journals. Federal tax dollars also go towards drug development. So again, tax payers are paying for alot of this development.
The hard part isn't finding the target, the hard part is making 100.000 molecules that might be useful and test them in vitro, taking the 5.000 that works and testing them in mice, taking the 100 that works and test their toxicity and uptake in healthy humans, taking the 5 that aren't toxic and are taken up on diseased humans, testing the 2 that works in even more diseased humans, and testing the 1 that doesn't have a nasty, but rare side effect in even more humans, finding out it doesn't work as well as the existing drug, dump it all and start over, until one drug comes out.
By DRE, I would estimate the basic research per drug to cost 10 to 30 millions, going from there to the approved drug costs around 1 billion per approved drug. So yes, tax payers might be paying SEVERAL PERCENT of the research leading to a drug.
What does the amount spend on marketing have to do with the price of testing drugs? I am aware of the fact that they spend a lot on marketing, and that it isn't doing anything good, but I never said anything about their total income, only about the price of testing drugs.
Do you have a link to the study you mention? I would like to read it.
accept only 5% of all that money is related to research
Do you have a citation for that number?
Most of the money for drug research comes from the public purse and the average US citizen is getting royally screwed by the drug companies for drug research they paid for already.
I assume you have been misled by the difference between "X looks like a great disease target" and "We now have an FDA-approved drug targeting X", and would like to suggest "In the pipeline" :
This is going to come across as nastier than I intend it to, but my first response is that the taxpayer's return on this was that they got a new drug where there wasn't one before. And via the NIH-funded discoveries, the taxpayers stimulated Pfizer (and many other companies) to spend huge amounts of money and effort to turn the original discoveries [...] into real therapies. I value knowledge greatly, but no human suffering whatsoever was relieved by the knowledge alone that JAK3 appeared to play a role in inflammation. What was there was the potential to affect the lives of patients, and that potential was realized by Pfizer spending its own money.
If you don't mind a lot of people getting hurt because science is hard to understand, and it is hard to understand that it is hard to understand, that system could work. I do care that people get hurt, even if it is by their own lack of insight into science, partly because I know there are areas I do not know enough about to make judgments in, or even to recognize experts. And probably some that I don't know I don't know enough about.
Do you have a citation for that claim?
I don't live in the US and am not a doctor, so my knowledge is limited, but I will try to answer the best I can.
1. Because we have decided that the risk of people being swindled by quacks become too large if we allow that. What you can do is enlist in a test of a new drug, which should give you access to less tested drugs.
2. There really aren't two different points of view. In all applications of medicine, the chance of benefit must be weighed against the risk of harm. For tested medicine, we have a good estimate of them both, and a judgment can be made. For untested medicine, the prior plausibility of the harm/benefit ratio is deemed too unfavorable.
3-4. I don't know, as I don't know the American system. But remember that fixed prices moves the risk to the hospital or doctor, and they have to be compensated for taking that risk, so it will mean more expensive treatment.
5. The depends on the rate of false negatives and false positives. Any screening causes someone to experience side effects from unnecessary side effects, and some people to not get the treatment they need.
6. I imagine hearing aids are expensive because they are fiendishly advanced. Out ears are able to pick out sounds with abysmal S/N (next time you are in a crowded, noisy room, try to see how many different conversations you can listen to simply by choosing one over the other), and the hearing aids have to work with that system. Also, sweat and ear wax are not the least corrosive environment, and any leaching might be problematic. For prosthetics, I imagine it could be done, though the list of materials and the way the prosthetic sticks to the body might be a problem.
It seems that most of the money the pharmaceutical industry earns goes to marketing, yes. But it still cost a lot to bring a drug to market. It is difficult to estimate how much the average is, but few estimates are under 100 million.
I have been unclear, then. I merely meant to warn against junking something that works when we don't know what we should put in its place. By all means let's test new systems, I see no reason why several systems for testing drugs couln't run simultaneously, just let's not completely dismantle the current system before we have something else that works.
And only diseases relevant to Americans would get drugs, though I suppose that is fair, given that the Americans would be the ones to pay for it all.
Is this akin to the "if we don't get unlimited copyright, the music will die"?
If the price of making a track was hundreds of millions dollars and took five to ten years, yes. I guess it is akin to "without copyright, we would get no more blockbuster movies", with the difference that blockbuster movies does not keep people alive. Oh, and patents are for twenty years, not forever minus epsilon.
The price of testing drugs is mostly due to the number of people in the tests, and the number of people determine how certain we can be on the estimates of efficacy and efficiency. You can get cheaper testing, or you can get better testing, but getting both is tricky.
That being said, more transparency would be nice. At least force them to publish all human testing of the drugs. Or even better, remove the testing from the drug companies, though it would be problematic to ensure that they have no power over it.
As for the using government money for testing drugs, it is an intriguing idea, but corruption would still be a problem, given the amount of money at stake. I am not sure whether it would be a larger or smaller problem than today.
People have been saying that the drug companies spend a lot of money on other things for a long time, but that isn't really relevant to my post.
Some of the money we spend on drugs today are used to test new drugs. If we are going to end the system we have today, I would prefer if we had a new system in place before that. So, what is your system for testing new drugs, and when can it be implemented? And remember, it really does cost hundreds of millions of dollars to be reasonably sure that a drug works and is safe, so your system had better be somewhat resistant towards corruption.
do you really think they are working on a cure when they can rake in thousands of dollars a month from each and every cancer patient??? Yeah right... think again...
I would expect all of the other drug companies to also want a piece of that pie. That means they have to come up with something that works better.
If they understand the cancer well enough to halt it in it's tracks for 90 to 95% of the patients that are treatable by this drug, and another 90 to 95 of those that take it are alive and in full remission 5+ years later, they certainly know enough to track down a cure if they were so inclined to do so.
Greedy bastards...
You are vastly, massively underestimating the complexity of cancer and of the human biology.
Until we have a better system in place for coming up with the hundreds of millions of dollars it takes to prove the efficacy and safety of a new drug, drug patents are one of few cases where patents make sense.
It's a smart move in the short term, in the long term, who knows? If this means less R&D spending on medicine, we might be worse off.
Most cheap "lasers" you buy are not true lasers, running on LEDs.
How are LED lasers not true lasers?
. I also wonder why it would need a focus lens to stay focused for ~100 ft (as per video from their web site).
because of the size of the lasing medium. Given the smallest radius of the beam, which of course can't be larger than the exit aperture of the optics, or the size of the lasing medium if no optics are used, and the wave length, the minimum dispersion angle can be determined. IIRC, the dispersion angle for a LED laser is something like 30 degrees before the optics, because the lasing medium is roughly the size of the wavelength.
The Oxford dictionary specifies that it only applies to using Google, not just any search engine, so I would imagine it not being a threat. The problem is if googling becomes the generic term for searching.
Is anything I wrote factually wrong? Or can you only accuse me of wrongdoing by wild extrapolation?
I wrote nothing about mental illness. Mental illness is certainly real illness, and the fact that it is looked upon as "not real illness" leads to no end of hurt, like people refusing to get the treatment that could help them because "are you saying I'm CRAZY??!!?!" in addition to "why don't they just get the f*ck over it".