You see, a contract requires a "meeting of minds", it is not sufficient for me to offer you something, and for you to accept the offer for the two of us to have a valid contract. I must *INTEND* to make that offer and you must *INTEND* to accept it.
Which is plainly NOT the case when the offer where made trough a simple mistake. It is obvious that they did not INTEND to offer plasma-TVs for $27 or $500-CD-sets for $30. That would perhaps be different if the offers where accompanied by giant banners proclaiming deal of the century, 90% discount ! (or 99% in the first case...)
People make mistakes. Contract-law is this way for a reason; we don't want people to be royally fucked for the reason of making a simple mistake. For example, someone selling their house and accidentally writing the price as $450,000 in a jurisdiction where the comma delimits fraction (so the price is literaly $450 rather than the $450thousand intended) would not be held to that unless you could show likely that he really INTENDED to sell his house for $450.
Seems inane to me to complain about NOT being able to cash-in on other peoples honest mistakes.
People are human, they make mistakes. Deal with it.
No. The number is as high as it is because a number of very large websites support openID, thus everyone signing up at one of these websites get an openid, if they *use* it for anything is a quite different issue.
For example, everyone who uses AIM has an openid, I'm sure 99% of them never used it for anything, but it -does- mean, they could, for example, post a comment on any LiveJournal-blog as openid.aol.com/screenname and have OpenID authenthicate it (i.e. guarantee that the comment really was posted by the holder of that screenname)
More interesting is the number of sites where you -CAN- use openID to authenthicate. If Yahoo, Google and Microsoft implement it on the major sites they run, this alone would be a huge boost. MANY people log in to atleast one site run by one of these giants regularily.
In many countries companies routinely offer "warranties" that are less than the minimum guaranteed by consumer protection, hoping that gullible consumers will believe that the limits in the guarantees has any actual effect.
For example, in Norway Apple also offers "6 months warranty", despite obviously being fully aware that infact there's compulsory 2 years of warranty against defects in materials or workmanship, and even 5 years for items meant to last significantly longer (like cars, refrigerators or tvs)
I do agree that diabetes-treatment is better (in the sense that you can live a MORE normal life with diabetes than with HIV), but I still find them quite similar. The treatment has a lot longer history and is less complicated though. I'd not be surprised if HIV-treatment continued to improve over the next years and decades.
She'd be out of your league anyway. There are such things as girls with looks -AND- brains. This particular one is currently working on her Doctorate in Computer Science at the university of Helsinki, she'd out-nerd you by a mile.
I hate to break it to you, but not only the -quality- of healthcare is important for general health. Also the -accessibility- is important. I agree with your basic idea: US healthcare is probably equal in quality to other top-notch healthsystems in the world today. Where it fails is in -accessibility-.
A much larger percentage of US citizens, compared to many other countries, are without adequate access to the healthcare-system. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is this situation where healthcare is tied to employment. Which is a bad idea because precisely the same people who are unemployed are often the ones in need of healthcare.
Universal healthcare does not magically solve these problems, that is correct. But it *helps*. This ain't theory, there are enough countries that has such systems that we just need to look at the stats. Universal healthcare also is not generally more expensive than the current US system. That is because as you correctly points out: even in the US, if you need emergency help, you -will- get it, even if you can't pay and ain't got insurance.
But the fact that this only happens for emergencies mean that many poor people don't go to a doctor when they should, so what started as a small easily corrected problem escalates until 3 months later they need (much more expensive, and much more risky) emergency treatment.
In Norway, for example, there are precisely 2 conditions to qualify for full healthcare: 1) You must be legally in Norway (otherwise you get only "emergency care" like in the US) and 2) Your stay, actual or planned, must be longer than a year. (so tourists still need travel-insurance if they're from out-of-EU)
We spend a -smaller- part of our GDP for healthcare than you, and still get -more- doctors pro capita, a -higher- life-expectancy, a significantly -lower- child-mortality and basically better grades for any stat you can think of. This tells me you must be doing -something- wrong.
You're world record-holders in spending money for healthcare, yet people still suffer from medical problems to a larger degree than elsewhere. That ain't optimal. Don't be so patriotic that you neglect looking at the facts.
Sure. But living is a death-sentence if you pick your right time-horizon.
Lots of diseases that we don't think of as death-sentences has the effect of seriously shortening your expected lifespan and seriously damaging your well-being. We don't normally think of diabetes as a death-sentence, nevertheless the things you mention for HIV: Getting more serious health-problems at a younger age and dying on the average significantly younger than other people is true for diabetes too.
There's a large difference between: "You've got X, in 5 years you are certainly dead." on the one hand and "You've got X, we can't cure you, the disease will likely, even with the best treatment we can offer, shave years or decades off your lifespan and increase the risk that you'll suffer other health-problems."
True. But even if they are very -likely- right, I think most sensible people would take additional precautions. For example, currently doctors are advising against having sex with HIV, even using a condom. There's always a risk that it'll get a hole somehow and so it amounts to gambling with the life of your partner.
If, however, you are very very likely noninfectious, and in addition to this, you still use a condom, the risk could come down to the level where it's acceptable. Life is risky, yet we all accept to live with a certain level of risk. Normally HIV transmits in something like 1% of the cases by unprotected heterosexual intercourse. If there's a 99.9% chance that you're noninfectios anyway, and a 99% chance that the condom will work as intended, then the combined risk should be in the ballpark of 1:10million.
Which means if the person has sex twice a week from he/she is 20 and until 80, then it's 0.06% likely that someone will get infected. Which would mean that living in a sexual relationship with this person is considerably less risky than driving a car, so I think it's a risk that people would accept.
Currently it is in many jurisdictions a crime for someone with HIV (and other similar diseases) to have sex with someone without informing them that they're carriers. A good question is if this risk is low enough that it would be acceptable for such people to have sex -without- informing their partners. It's a -tiny- risk afterall, and people accept tiny risks all the time, without being explicitly informed about them.
The questions seem designed to evoke alarm more than enligthen. I give out personal information freely every day, dozen of times. Look, I'm named "Eivind", and can be reached at a certain email-adress. Both are true. Both are personal information. Both put me in no risk I can think of.
Besides, the entire "17 year old = kid" thing is stupid.
I've had a 17 year old girl "give out personal details" to an adult online, namely me. Infact she even took an airplane to come visit me where I lived at the time, and the expectation was, from both sides, that we'd probably sleep together, if we liked eachothers as well in real life as online. I was 20, we where a couple and lived together for the next 2 years or something. There's a word for these things, and it's not "online predator" it's "normal".
If you pose as 17 year old female and frequent chatrooms with names like !!!!!!teens on a saturday late evening, yes you *will* receive a lot of indecent proposals in short order. Some of them from young sexually frustrated males, and quite possibly a few from older people posing as young.
You'd have to be severly braindead to not figure that one out though. Infact, unless online sex-fantasies was what you where looking for you'd be monumentally stupid to do this in the first place. (and a lot of young people -are- curious about sex, nothing wrong with that, nor with the fact that online they can discuss hidden behind a curtain of anonymity.)
TV is also made to sell. Don't expect them to show all the normal activity that takes place. They'll focus on the attention-getting stuff, distorting the reality.
Doesn't much matter what is -most- profitable. If you've got two lines of possible investments, one that'll give an expected ROI of 12% one of 15%, then you take -BOTH-, assuming you can convince the guys with the cash that this really is the expected payback.
Setting the amounts isn't that hard. The government could even declare ahead of time that: We *will* buy the first available medicine that fulfills the following criteria, we will pay $X. If that turns out to reduce investments in research, there's nothing stopping them from upping X, is there ?
Even if they did it retroactively, obviously they'd be able to adjust the amounts paid to benefit society. It benefits society that medical research is carried out, so obviously they should pay enough that it is. Simple as that.
Yeah, such research is long-term, or atleast medium-term, predictability is required, when the govt makes a pledge to pay X for medicine Y, the pledge would need to be good for probably atleast 10 years for it to have any effect. They can still -raise- the pledge earlier than that though.
The point of patents working as mine-fields: encouraging competing firms to stay out of the area is an important one. It'd be -good- if many companies could explore the surroundings, perhaps there are other even better medicines to be discovered that are sligth variations of the first patented one ? Today these avenues of research are CLOSED.
With this line of reasoning, why is there laws permitting forcible buying of physical property ? The very same problems arise.
You make a few mistakes though.
First, freeing a patent is NOT even close to the same as buying X doses of patented medicine. Not even a little bit close. Not even if the two end up costing the same.
When a patent is free, this also means that companies are free to make -improvements- to the patented medicine, to make -variants- to find ways to produce the medicine -cheaper-, none of these things are possible if all you bougth is X doses of the medicine.
Your claim is equal to saying that if the government needs X copies of program Y, then buying those copies, or buying the entire source-code and setting it free has the same effect, assuming the two alternatives have equal cost. This is obviously not even close to the truth.
Your 3) is also wrong. Even if the government pays LESS than the company could make today by charging essentially whatever the hell they want to charge, it is still profitable to research these medicines aslong as the government payment is significantly higher than the development-cost.
If development cost 100 million, and has a 25% chance of working out, you could charge 10 billion as a monopolist in the market, but the government forcibly purchases your patent for 4 billion, then what ? Yes, the government paid under "marketprice", but you still got an expected ROI of *10*.
You're essentially claiming that if the max profit from a life-saving drug is in practice capped at 10 times investments, then nobody will bother, that is unlikely since lots of products gets researched today despite never having a chance at makign back more than 10 times investments.
They could -- with new laws. With current law, I'm not aware of anything allowing the government to forcibly buy a patent at ALL.
Please enligthen me, can you point out even ONE case where the government has done any one of the 3 things you suggest ?
Yes, they *SHOULD* be able to do this, that is my entire point. Today they *ARENT* able to do this though.
20% profit is much too low by the way, developing a new drug is a high-risk operation, many lines of research never go anywhere, so you do need significant profit on the ones which work out in the end. No-one would spend a billion researching a new drug if they knew that worst-case they'd lose the billion (if it doesn't work out) and best-case the Government buys it for 1.2 billion.
Probably, if you used cost-of-development as a yardstick, 10x cost would be more like it. But this is details, I'm arguing the general case: There should be a method for freeing up patents vital to society. Just like there IS a method for freeing up land, houses, cars and other objects vital to society.
HIV is insignificant in the USA. Yes.
Globally something like 46 million people live with HIV, that is close to 1% of the world-population, in some areas it is much MUCH higher than that.
This is -not- insignificant. Forcibly buying the patents for the best medicines, and releasing them for free for everyone to use would be a great thing to do. But is not possible, because there are no laws which allow forcibly seizing a patent..
I agree, eminent domain is easily abused and should be used sparingly. Much more sparingly than it is today. When it IS used, I'd be all in favor of laws saying, for example, that the government needs to pay DOUBLE the market-price (this helps guard against abuse, and ensures that the people who have to give up their PROPERTY for the common good is adequately compensated)
I just find it truly bizarre that REAL TANGIBLE property can be seized at will, while foggy "intellectual" ideas are untouchable. They should be treated the same !
You misunderstand me, and compound it by making a mistake of your own.
First, there's a difference between needing the drug and needing the permission to produce the drug. Buying X doses at prize Y is well and dandy, but the patent is still there hindering you next year, I was talking about forcibly purchasing the patent itself, not merely a few dosis medicine made therefrom.
That was the misunderstanding. Now the mistake.
Houses and cars and computers have a market-price, because there are multiple suppliers and competition between them, so if someone tried to sell cars for 5 times the fair prize, all that would happen is you'd buy yours somewhere else.
Patents are, however, by their nature, government granted legal MONOPOLIES.
What, pray tell, is the "market price" of a product for which you are the only legal supplier ? Essentially, market-price is whatever the hell that single supplier decides that it should be. Which is one reason the situation is as bad as it is. Notice that healthcare can't easily say: Screw it, we make do with the second-best medicine which is one TENTH the cost, but only 75% as efficient. If they did, they'd be sued out of existence by patients claiming (correctly!) that they're not receiving optimum treatment.
When the government forcibly buys your house, market-price is determined (by a judge, not by you !) by comparing to similar houses in similar areas and setting a "fair price".
There is no similar method for medicine.
If you invent a medicine that is 20% more efficient than the best on the market for a certain condition, you can demand 10 times the price of that second-best medicine, and there is nothing the government can do about it, other than pay your outrageous price or let people die.
Did you ever wonder why, if the government considers it important to society, they can use eminent domain and forcibly buy your house, tear it down and for example build a railroad there. Real property needs to yield when it is important for society as a whole.
Yet, if some company hold so called "intellectual property", say for a HIV-drug, and millions of people in your country are HIV positive and will DIE if not given the drug, then there is NO similar set of laws that allow the government to forcibly buy the rights to manufacture the drug ?
Notice that with eminent domain the government still has to PAY for the property. But you are forced to sell, even if you would prefer not to, is my point.
I think it would be very sensible to have a similar system for patents: let the government buy them out if they are sufficiently important for society. By all means, make the price such that the company comes out ahead, significantly more than it cost to develop the patent in questions.
It's very strange, I think, that "We want to build a road here" is reason enough to overrule real property while "25% of our population will die if they don't get this treatment" is not reason enough to overrule so-called "intellectual" property.
It is not reasonable to expect, or put in, a warning because some person has at some point managed to hurt themselves by doing something. Often the reason is simply that there are IDIOTS out there. We don't put warnings on forks saying "Do not poke into eye", despite the fact that undoubtedly, someone has at some point managed to do precisely that.
The pool is an inflatable pool, for kids. It is circular, aproximately 4 feet across and aproximately 10 inches deep. I don't doubt that at some point some person has hurt himself trying to dive into such a pool, but that is trough being an idiot, not because he/she had a REASONABLE expectation of the pool being a safe deep diving-area.
We can discuss where the limits are for what people can be expected to already know. But things like "it's bad to hold metallic objects and touch live wires with them" or "it's not a good idea to dive headfirst into 10 inches of water" or "putting metals in a microwave is a bad idea" or "If you jump from a 10 story building, impact may harm you" should be common knowledge. If it isn't the fault is entirely with the knowledge of the person performing this idotic feat, not with the manufacturer of the metallic object, 10inch pool, microwave or 10 story building.
It's reasonable to expect warnings for dangers that are out of the ordinary. You don't expect a flashlight that you leave on and put down on a table to accidentally ignite papers that are also lying on that table, so I'd say that is an out-of-the-ordinary danger.
But US products are ridicolous in putting on warning-labels for "dangers" that are completely ordinary and would be shared by any similar object.
I've got a WIFI-antenna with a large red-yellow warning-sticker on it, with a human skull in a triangle and "risk of DEATH" in huge letters. When you read it more carefully, the actual danger is, the thing is made of -metal- and thus capable of conducting -electricity-. If you where to stand at your roof (say while installing the thing) hold one end, and poke the other end at a nearby high-voltage electricity-line, this could be bad for your health.
I've got a childrens inflatable pool. It's got warnings in 5 languages. Those on German and Scandinawian simply says: "use under adult supervision" (and even that is superfluous really), the warning in english is ten lines long and includes such gems as "not suitable for diving-practice" (the pool is all of 10 inches deep!)
I've got a battery-charger that warns, in big red letters: "Do not microwave".
The US tendency to CYA is ridicolous, and actually it makes people respect warnings less. When there's a gazillion warnings on EVERYTHING, how do you recognize the real dangers as opposed to the useless chaff ?
Hell, we can't even command both hands independently without suffering focus. If you think you can, try the following:
Draw a figure-eigth with a pen held in your left hand. Doable, yeah ?
Draw a triangle with a pen held in your right hand. Also very doable, I'd imagine. Neither task should be very challenging.
Now do both at the same time, draw three figre-eigths with left and three triangles with the right, at the same time.
Most people find this to be nearly completely impossible without significant training. If you're one of the rare people who can, try writing your firstname with the left and your lastname with the right hand, simultaneously. Not that easy, huh ?
When you -don't- know some action well, you need to consciously direct your muscles to perform every step of the sequence. When you've practiced enough, it becomes one automatic atomic action, you need only to activate the action as a whole. Still more practice and even that becomes automatic.
There's nothing mystical about this, and to the degree it involves different parts of the brain, people have known it since long LONG before they had any clue how any part of the brain did anything.
When you walk, you don't need to constantly think about all the myriad muscles that need to be activated to stay upright, nor even "left foot, right foot", you basically just select direction and speed and your training means the rest happens on automatic.
People who -dont- know how drive a stick needs to be conscious: Revs are high, I should shift. Clutch in, gas out, shift, sligth gas on, clutch carefully out, done. People who drive a stick occasionally just need to decide to shift, and the stuff with the pedals and the stick happens by itself. People who drive a stick regularily aren't even aware of what gear they're currently driving, the entire process is a background-task. If you ask me which gear I'm in, then I have to glance at the stick or guesstimate from speed and revs.
Your conscious mind don't "get in the way" of you performing the action. It's the other way around: The fact that the conscious mind needs to be activated to perform a task is an indication that you did not practice this task enough, which probably also means you will perform it poorly. It's not as if your automatic brain KNOWS how to do it, but your conscious mind interferes. The conscious mind enters the action because your automatic does NOT know (well enough anyway) how to do it.
Only in the US. Or well, some other sexually repressed countries too, but in MOST of the world the age of consent is 15 or 16. I guess 16 is about the average.
18 is silly. That means that something like 70-80% of the girls and 50-60% of the boys start their first sexual relationship before they're "legal". So it's essentially down to random chance who is discovered and who isn't. (sligthly more of the girls because it's more common for a girl to have an older boyfriend than the other way around)
You know, I realize you've convinced yourself that this is how the world works. I'm afraid you'll have large problems convincing anyone beside yourself though.
Now you're just moving the goalpsots, and I refuse to play that game.
The original claim to which I responded was: High pay is almost always high because of some factors that make the job less enjoyable.
Now you add the qualifier "than others requiring the same qualifications", which makes it a nobrainer and completely changes the statement. Yes. True. If there are two jobs requiring precisely the same qualifications, then in general you must pay people better to make them take the less attractive job.
So, if you want a job that is both reasonably well paid and reasonably pleasant; you need to get qualified to do something valuable that not everyone is capable of doing. If you want such a job and have no skills, then I agree with you: those jobs just plainly do not exist.
Slashdot Mirror
You're wrong.
You see, a contract requires a "meeting of minds", it is not sufficient for me to offer you something, and for you to accept the offer for the two of us to have a valid contract. I must *INTEND* to make that offer and you must *INTEND* to accept it.
Which is plainly NOT the case when the offer where made trough a simple mistake. It is obvious that they did not INTEND to offer plasma-TVs for $27 or $500-CD-sets for $30. That would perhaps be different if the offers where accompanied by giant banners proclaiming deal of the century, 90% discount ! (or 99% in the first case...)
People make mistakes. Contract-law is this way for a reason; we don't want people to be royally fucked for the reason of making a simple mistake. For example, someone selling their house and accidentally writing the price as $450,000 in a jurisdiction where the comma delimits fraction (so the price is literaly $450 rather than the $450thousand intended) would not be held to that unless you could show likely that he really INTENDED to sell his house for $450.
Seems inane to me to complain about NOT being able to cash-in on other peoples honest mistakes.
People are human, they make mistakes. Deal with it.
No. The number is as high as it is because a number of very large websites support openID, thus everyone signing up at one of these websites get an openid, if they *use* it for anything is a quite different issue.
For example, everyone who uses AIM has an openid, I'm sure 99% of them never used it for anything, but it -does- mean, they could, for example, post a comment on any LiveJournal-blog as openid.aol.com/screenname and have OpenID authenthicate it (i.e. guarantee that the comment really was posted by the holder of that screenname)
More interesting is the number of sites where you -CAN- use openID to authenthicate. If Yahoo, Google and Microsoft implement it on the major sites they run, this alone would be a huge boost. MANY people log in to atleast one site run by one of these giants regularily.
You are right, in principle
In -practice- most people use DMA only device-RAM (like video-card to RAM or network-card to RAM)
TrueCrypt would not interfere with any of that.
You guys ain't got consumer-protection laws ?
In many countries companies routinely offer "warranties" that are less than the minimum guaranteed by consumer protection, hoping that gullible consumers will believe that the limits in the guarantees has any actual effect.
For example, in Norway Apple also offers "6 months warranty", despite obviously being fully aware that infact there's compulsory 2 years of warranty against defects in materials or workmanship, and even 5 years for items meant to last significantly longer (like cars, refrigerators or tvs)
Sure. But these are differences of -degree-.
I do agree that diabetes-treatment is better (in the sense that you can live a MORE normal life with diabetes than with HIV), but I still find them quite similar. The treatment has a lot longer history and is less complicated though. I'd not be surprised if HIV-treatment continued to improve over the next years and decades.
She'd be out of your league anyway. There are such things as girls with looks -AND- brains. This particular one is currently working on her Doctorate in Computer Science at the university of Helsinki, she'd out-nerd you by a mile.
I hate to break it to you, but not only the -quality- of healthcare is important for general health. Also the -accessibility- is important. I agree with your basic idea: US healthcare is probably equal in quality to other top-notch healthsystems in the world today. Where it fails is in -accessibility-.
A much larger percentage of US citizens, compared to many other countries, are without adequate access to the healthcare-system. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is this situation where healthcare is tied to employment. Which is a bad idea because precisely the same people who are unemployed are often the ones in need of healthcare.
Universal healthcare does not magically solve these problems, that is correct. But it *helps*. This ain't theory, there are enough countries that has such systems that we just need to look at the stats. Universal healthcare also is not generally more expensive than the current US system. That is because as you correctly points out: even in the US, if you need emergency help, you -will- get it, even if you can't pay and ain't got insurance.
But the fact that this only happens for emergencies mean that many poor people don't go to a doctor when they should, so what started as a small easily corrected problem escalates until 3 months later they need (much more expensive, and much more risky) emergency treatment.
In Norway, for example, there are precisely 2 conditions to qualify for full healthcare: 1) You must be legally in Norway (otherwise you get only "emergency care" like in the US) and 2) Your stay, actual or planned, must be longer than a year. (so tourists still need travel-insurance if they're from out-of-EU)
We spend a -smaller- part of our GDP for healthcare than you, and still get -more- doctors pro capita, a -higher- life-expectancy, a significantly -lower- child-mortality and basically better grades for any stat you can think of. This tells me you must be doing -something- wrong.
You're world record-holders in spending money for healthcare, yet people still suffer from medical problems to a larger degree than elsewhere. That ain't optimal. Don't be so patriotic that you neglect looking at the facts.
Sure. But living is a death-sentence if you pick your right time-horizon.
Lots of diseases that we don't think of as death-sentences has the effect of seriously shortening your expected lifespan and seriously damaging your well-being. We don't normally think of diabetes as a death-sentence, nevertheless the things you mention for HIV: Getting more serious health-problems at a younger age and dying on the average significantly younger than other people is true for diabetes too.
There's a large difference between: "You've got X, in 5 years you are certainly dead." on the one hand and "You've got X, we can't cure you, the disease will likely, even with the best treatment we can offer, shave years or decades off your lifespan and increase the risk that you'll suffer other health-problems."
True. But even if they are very -likely- right, I think most sensible people would take additional precautions. For example, currently doctors are advising against having sex with HIV, even using a condom. There's always a risk that it'll get a hole somehow and so it amounts to gambling with the life of your partner.
If, however, you are very very likely noninfectious, and in addition to this, you still use a condom, the risk could come down to the level where it's acceptable. Life is risky, yet we all accept to live with a certain level of risk. Normally HIV transmits in something like 1% of the cases by unprotected heterosexual intercourse. If there's a 99.9% chance that you're noninfectios anyway, and a 99% chance that the condom will work as intended, then the combined risk should be in the ballpark of 1:10million.
Which means if the person has sex twice a week from he/she is 20 and until 80, then it's 0.06% likely that someone will get infected. Which would mean that living in a sexual relationship with this person is considerably less risky than driving a car, so I think it's a risk that people would accept.
Currently it is in many jurisdictions a crime for someone with HIV (and other similar diseases) to have sex with someone without informing them that they're carriers. A good question is if this risk is low enough that it would be acceptable for such people to have sex -without- informing their partners. It's a -tiny- risk afterall, and people accept tiny risks all the time, without being explicitly informed about them.
The questions seem designed to evoke alarm more than enligthen. I give out personal information freely every day, dozen of times. Look, I'm named "Eivind", and can be reached at a certain email-adress. Both are true. Both are personal information. Both put me in no risk I can think of.
Besides, the entire "17 year old = kid" thing is stupid.
I've had a 17 year old girl "give out personal details" to an adult online, namely me. Infact she even took an airplane to come visit me where I lived at the time, and the expectation was, from both sides, that we'd probably sleep together, if we liked eachothers as well in real life as online. I was 20, we where a couple and lived together for the next 2 years or something. There's a word for these things, and it's not "online predator" it's "normal".
It depends heavily on what you're doing.
If you pose as 17 year old female and frequent chatrooms with names like !!!!!!teens on a saturday late evening, yes you *will* receive a lot of indecent proposals in short order. Some of them from young sexually frustrated males, and quite possibly a few from older people posing as young.
You'd have to be severly braindead to not figure that one out though. Infact, unless online sex-fantasies was what you where looking for you'd be monumentally stupid to do this in the first place. (and a lot of young people -are- curious about sex, nothing wrong with that, nor with the fact that online they can discuss hidden behind a curtain of anonymity.)
TV is also made to sell. Don't expect them to show all the normal activity that takes place. They'll focus on the attention-getting stuff, distorting the reality.
Sure. If you never "meet strangers" you will never have new friends at all, will you ?
Doesn't much matter what is -most- profitable. If you've got two lines of possible investments, one that'll give an expected ROI of 12% one of 15%, then you take -BOTH-, assuming you can convince the guys with the cash that this really is the expected payback.
Setting the amounts isn't that hard. The government could even declare ahead of time that: We *will* buy the first available medicine that fulfills the following criteria, we will pay $X. If that turns out to reduce investments in research, there's nothing stopping them from upping X, is there ?
Even if they did it retroactively, obviously they'd be able to adjust the amounts paid to benefit society. It benefits society that medical research is carried out, so obviously they should pay enough that it is. Simple as that.
Yeah, such research is long-term, or atleast medium-term, predictability is required, when the govt makes a pledge to pay X for medicine Y, the pledge would need to be good for probably atleast 10 years for it to have any effect. They can still -raise- the pledge earlier than that though.
The point of patents working as mine-fields: encouraging competing firms to stay out of the area is an important one. It'd be -good- if many companies could explore the surroundings, perhaps there are other even better medicines to be discovered that are sligth variations of the first patented one ? Today these avenues of research are CLOSED.
With this line of reasoning, why is there laws permitting forcible buying of physical property ? The very same problems arise.
You make a few mistakes though.
First, freeing a patent is NOT even close to the same as buying X doses of patented medicine. Not even a little bit close. Not even if the two end up costing the same.
When a patent is free, this also means that companies are free to make -improvements- to the patented medicine, to make -variants- to find ways to produce the medicine -cheaper-, none of these things are possible if all you bougth is X doses of the medicine.
Your claim is equal to saying that if the government needs X copies of program Y, then buying those copies, or buying the entire source-code and setting it free has the same effect, assuming the two alternatives have equal cost. This is obviously not even close to the truth.
Your 3) is also wrong. Even if the government pays LESS than the company could make today by charging essentially whatever the hell they want to charge, it is still profitable to research these medicines aslong as the government payment is significantly higher than the development-cost.
If development cost 100 million, and has a 25% chance of working out, you could charge 10 billion as a monopolist in the market, but the government forcibly purchases your patent for 4 billion, then what ? Yes, the government paid under "marketprice", but you still got an expected ROI of *10*.
You're essentially claiming that if the max profit from a life-saving drug is in practice capped at 10 times investments, then nobody will bother, that is unlikely since lots of products gets researched today despite never having a chance at makign back more than 10 times investments.
They could -- with new laws. With current law, I'm not aware of anything allowing the government to forcibly buy a patent at ALL.
Please enligthen me, can you point out even ONE case where the government has done any one of the 3 things you suggest ?
Yes, they *SHOULD* be able to do this, that is my entire point. Today they *ARENT* able to do this though.
20% profit is much too low by the way, developing a new drug is a high-risk operation, many lines of research never go anywhere, so you do need significant profit on the ones which work out in the end. No-one would spend a billion researching a new drug if they knew that worst-case they'd lose the billion (if it doesn't work out) and best-case the Government buys it for 1.2 billion.
Probably, if you used cost-of-development as a yardstick, 10x cost would be more like it. But this is details, I'm arguing the general case: There should be a method for freeing up patents vital to society. Just like there IS a method for freeing up land, houses, cars and other objects vital to society.
HIV is insignificant in the USA. Yes. Globally something like 46 million people live with HIV, that is close to 1% of the world-population, in some areas it is much MUCH higher than that. This is -not- insignificant. Forcibly buying the patents for the best medicines, and releasing them for free for everyone to use would be a great thing to do. But is not possible, because there are no laws which allow forcibly seizing a patent..
I agree, eminent domain is easily abused and should be used sparingly. Much more sparingly than it is today. When it IS used, I'd be all in favor of laws saying, for example, that the government needs to pay DOUBLE the market-price (this helps guard against abuse, and ensures that the people who have to give up their PROPERTY for the common good is adequately compensated)
I just find it truly bizarre that REAL TANGIBLE property can be seized at will, while foggy "intellectual" ideas are untouchable. They should be treated the same !
You misunderstand me, and compound it by making a mistake of your own.
First, there's a difference between needing the drug and needing the permission to produce the drug. Buying X doses at prize Y is well and dandy, but the patent is still there hindering you next year, I was talking about forcibly purchasing the patent itself, not merely a few dosis medicine made therefrom.
That was the misunderstanding. Now the mistake.
Houses and cars and computers have a market-price, because there are multiple suppliers and competition between them, so if someone tried to sell cars for 5 times the fair prize, all that would happen is you'd buy yours somewhere else.
Patents are, however, by their nature, government granted legal MONOPOLIES.
What, pray tell, is the "market price" of a product for which you are the only legal supplier ? Essentially, market-price is whatever the hell that single supplier decides that it should be. Which is one reason the situation is as bad as it is. Notice that healthcare can't easily say: Screw it, we make do with the second-best medicine which is one TENTH the cost, but only 75% as efficient. If they did, they'd be sued out of existence by patients claiming (correctly!) that they're not receiving optimum treatment.
When the government forcibly buys your house, market-price is determined (by a judge, not by you !) by comparing to similar houses in similar areas and setting a "fair price".
There is no similar method for medicine.
If you invent a medicine that is 20% more efficient than the best on the market for a certain condition, you can demand 10 times the price of that second-best medicine, and there is nothing the government can do about it, other than pay your outrageous price or let people die.
Did you ever wonder why, if the government considers it important to society, they can use eminent domain and forcibly buy your house, tear it down and for example build a railroad there. Real property needs to yield when it is important for society as a whole.
Yet, if some company hold so called "intellectual property", say for a HIV-drug, and millions of people in your country are HIV positive and will DIE if not given the drug, then there is NO similar set of laws that allow the government to forcibly buy the rights to manufacture the drug ?
Notice that with eminent domain the government still has to PAY for the property. But you are forced to sell, even if you would prefer not to, is my point.
I think it would be very sensible to have a similar system for patents: let the government buy them out if they are sufficiently important for society. By all means, make the price such that the company comes out ahead, significantly more than it cost to develop the patent in questions.
It's very strange, I think, that "We want to build a road here" is reason enough to overrule real property while "25% of our population will die if they don't get this treatment" is not reason enough to overrule so-called "intellectual" property.
No it is not reasonable. Not in the least.
It is not reasonable to expect, or put in, a warning because some person has at some point managed to hurt themselves by doing something. Often the reason is simply that there are IDIOTS out there. We don't put warnings on forks saying "Do not poke into eye", despite the fact that undoubtedly, someone has at some point managed to do precisely that.
The pool is an inflatable pool, for kids. It is circular, aproximately 4 feet across and aproximately 10 inches deep. I don't doubt that at some point some person has hurt himself trying to dive into such a pool, but that is trough being an idiot, not because he/she had a REASONABLE expectation of the pool being a safe deep diving-area.
We can discuss where the limits are for what people can be expected to already know. But things like "it's bad to hold metallic objects and touch live wires with them" or "it's not a good idea to dive headfirst into 10 inches of water" or "putting metals in a microwave is a bad idea" or "If you jump from a 10 story building, impact may harm you" should be common knowledge. If it isn't the fault is entirely with the knowledge of the person performing this idotic feat, not with the manufacturer of the metallic object, 10inch pool, microwave or 10 story building.
I -halfway- agree with you.
It's reasonable to expect warnings for dangers that are out of the ordinary. You don't expect a flashlight that you leave on and put down on a table to accidentally ignite papers that are also lying on that table, so I'd say that is an out-of-the-ordinary danger.
But US products are ridicolous in putting on warning-labels for "dangers" that are completely ordinary and would be shared by any similar object.
I've got a WIFI-antenna with a large red-yellow warning-sticker on it, with a human skull in a triangle and "risk of DEATH" in huge letters. When you read it more carefully, the actual danger is, the thing is made of -metal- and thus capable of conducting -electricity-. If you where to stand at your roof (say while installing the thing) hold one end, and poke the other end at a nearby high-voltage electricity-line, this could be bad for your health.
I've got a childrens inflatable pool. It's got warnings in 5 languages. Those on German and Scandinawian simply says: "use under adult supervision" (and even that is superfluous really), the warning in english is ten lines long and includes such gems as "not suitable for diving-practice" (the pool is all of 10 inches deep!)
I've got a battery-charger that warns, in big red letters: "Do not microwave".
The US tendency to CYA is ridicolous, and actually it makes people respect warnings less. When there's a gazillion warnings on EVERYTHING, how do you recognize the real dangers as opposed to the useless chaff ?
Hell, we can't even command both hands independently without suffering focus. If you think you can, try the following:
Draw a figure-eigth with a pen held in your left hand. Doable, yeah ?
Draw a triangle with a pen held in your right hand. Also very doable, I'd imagine. Neither task should be very challenging.
Now do both at the same time, draw three figre-eigths with left and three triangles with the right, at the same time.
Most people find this to be nearly completely impossible without significant training. If you're one of the rare people who can, try writing your firstname with the left and your lastname with the right hand, simultaneously. Not that easy, huh ?
No, that's just plain old-fashioned training.
When you -don't- know some action well, you need to consciously direct your muscles to perform every step of the sequence. When you've practiced enough, it becomes one automatic atomic action, you need only to activate the action as a whole. Still more practice and even that becomes automatic.
There's nothing mystical about this, and to the degree it involves different parts of the brain, people have known it since long LONG before they had any clue how any part of the brain did anything.
When you walk, you don't need to constantly think about all the myriad muscles that need to be activated to stay upright, nor even "left foot, right foot", you basically just select direction and speed and your training means the rest happens on automatic.
People who -dont- know how drive a stick needs to be conscious: Revs are high, I should shift. Clutch in, gas out, shift, sligth gas on, clutch carefully out, done. People who drive a stick occasionally just need to decide to shift, and the stuff with the pedals and the stick happens by itself. People who drive a stick regularily aren't even aware of what gear they're currently driving, the entire process is a background-task. If you ask me which gear I'm in, then I have to glance at the stick or guesstimate from speed and revs.
Your conscious mind don't "get in the way" of you performing the action. It's the other way around: The fact that the conscious mind needs to be activated to perform a task is an indication that you did not practice this task enough, which probably also means you will perform it poorly. It's not as if your automatic brain KNOWS how to do it, but your conscious mind interferes. The conscious mind enters the action because your automatic does NOT know (well enough anyway) how to do it.
Only in the US. Or well, some other sexually repressed countries too, but in MOST of the world the age of consent is 15 or 16. I guess 16 is about the average.
18 is silly. That means that something like 70-80% of the girls and 50-60% of the boys start their first sexual relationship before they're "legal". So it's essentially down to random chance who is discovered and who isn't. (sligthly more of the girls because it's more common for a girl to have an older boyfriend than the other way around)
You know, I realize you've convinced yourself that this is how the world works. I'm afraid you'll have large problems convincing anyone beside yourself though.
Now you're just moving the goalpsots, and I refuse to play that game.
The original claim to which I responded was: High pay is almost always high because of some factors that make the job less enjoyable.
Now you add the qualifier "than others requiring the same qualifications", which makes it a nobrainer and completely changes the statement. Yes. True. If there are two jobs requiring precisely the same qualifications, then in general you must pay people better to make them take the less attractive job.
So, if you want a job that is both reasonably well paid and reasonably pleasant; you need to get qualified to do something valuable that not everyone is capable of doing. If you want such a job and have no skills, then I agree with you: those jobs just plainly do not exist.