No problem. Just come up with a solution to the free rider problem and we won't need patents or copyright. A Nobel prize in economics awaits your brilliance.
As we've seen from countries with lax IP enforcement (AKA China), if you have a quality product, the knock-offs can't compete.
Knockoffs compete just fine. Ask any drug manufacturer if generics (a knock off even though a legal one) hurt their business.
The entire point of patents is to add to public knowledge, but that isn't happening. So really, we need shorter patent protection times, or just eliminate it all together.
Sure it is. The laws and patent system just have loop holes and faults that are creating unintended problems. The problem isn't with the idea of patents it's with the implementation.
The patent system was originally designed to protect the small inventor from a large business entity...
That's a nice little piece of half truth there. The patent system was not designed with just that in mind. It protects ANY inventor from the free rider problem. Size can be a factor but it is a second order effect. The patent system is designed to promote innovation - it wasn't designed to protect any individual or corporation regardless of size.
We don't need to eliminate patents and copyright; We need to restore them to their proper place and purpose, which is to protect individuals from corporations
Patents and copyright are not fundamentally about protecting either individuals OR corporations. It is about protecting incentives to innovate regardless of who is doing the innovating. I'll agree that the patent system needs a serious improvement but misplaced populism really doesn't help.
Fair enough. I see hardly any medical advertising,
I doubt that. You might not have paid any attention to it but it's there. In my town each of the hospitals has rented billboards, has TV ads, and has print ads too. Little private practice groups do the same. I see ads in the paper for family health care and dentists every week. I get direct mailings from health care providers and doctors.
If you live anywhere but the most rural parts of the US the only way you could miss the advertising is if you aren't paying attention. Not that ignoring advertising is a bad thing...
, so a hospital advertising itself seems strange to me.
It does seem a little odd at first. Mostly it is for brand recognition and to advertise specific specialties. Not all hospitals do all procedures and some have definite areas of expertise. Hospitals compete against private groups, outpatient clinics, other hospitals, surgery centers, and more. Advertising is a proven way to increase business even in health care.
He works in a hospital, why would they have a marketing department?
Because hospitals are businesses with competitors. They need to bring in customers (patients) the same as any other business. Every hospital has a marketing department in some form or another even if it isn't explicitly labeled as such.
(Even in the US, I assume it's the insurance and drug companies that do all the marketing, and the government that does the public awareness stuff.)
And you would be wrong to assume that. Every medical practice has to market its services just like any other business. The fact that the business is treating disease is irrelevant. Hospitals need to market their services the same as IBM needs to market theirs. If this is unsettling to you, you need to check your high horse at the door. Did you think the laws of economics suddenly vanish when it's health care?
In large businesses, profit is reinvested in the company.
Not necessarily. It is often distributed as a dividend or used to repurchase stock. Very substantial sums are used for these purposes in many cases.
A few percent might go to bonuses for executives
That is by definition not profit. A bonus is an expense. The company does not in any way have to make a profit to pay a large bonus to an executive. (Disclosure: I'm a certified accountant)
In the case of a drug research company, much of the profit probably goes into R&D, since that's probably their biggest expense
"Probably"? Why not look at an actual income statement? The largest expense for large drug companies is sales and administration (SG&A). In the case of Pfizer. SG&A for Pfizer in their most recent quarterly report is almost double their R&D costs.
Furthermore it's not actually accurate to call R&D reinvested profits. R&D is a cost just like salaries. It's one with a lot of discretion in it but it is an expense and does not require profits to incur that expense. In fact most drug companies incur substantial loses due to R&D until they have one or more salable products. Ultimately the company must be profitable to sustain R&D expenses but that doesn't change the accounting treatment.
So the high drug costs are funding more drug research. Where do they get R&D money from, after all, if not from drug sale profits?
Careful - you can fund R&D with low cost drugs too, you just have to sell larger quantities. It's easier with a high profit margin but not absolutely required. However in NO large pharmaceutical company is all the profit plowed back into R&D. For Pfizer their Net Income after tax in 2009 was almost double their R&D costs. That means there is plenty of room for prices to come down without Pfizer actually needing to touch $1 of their R&D expense.
Put another way: if you cut drug company profits, are they going to make up for it by cutting dividends and executive salaries, or by cutting R&D and releasing fewer innovative drugs?
The fact that drug companies might choose to overpay executives and hurt their future prospects is an issue I'm willing to let the shareholders deal with. A drug company that makes a habit of cutting R&D as a percentage of revenue is going to find itself in trouble sooner or later.
If you want to cut drug costs, you have to cut R&D costs – like by making drug approval trials much, much cheaper.
No, sorry your logic doesn't hold. An executive MIGHT chose to cut R&D but as I've established before, profits greatly outweigh R&D expenditures for large pharma companies so there is plenty of room to cut prices before there is an actual need to cut R&D. If a drug company cuts R&D, then they are running the risk of having no future products to sell - basically trading future profits for immediate profits.
Look, I don't actually have a problem with pharma companies making a handsome profit. They're taking a lot of risk and should be rewarded for success. But don't pretend that the drug industry isn't highly profitable and some of those profits come at the expense of people's lives. To some degree that is necessary but at the end of the day treatment of disease is the goal, not profits.
For those of us who are not intimate with American politics -- why is this moderated insightful, flamebait and troll? And which Kennedy would that be?
Because it is true and simultaneously embarrassing to parts of the electorate. Ted Kennedy is who we are talking about here though the Kennedy family in general matters for this story - Ted until his death was merely the most prominent member of the family in recent years. He ostensibly supported green energy but when it was proposed to put a wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts (his home state) he opposed it or at least opposed this particular wind farm. The opposition is more complicated than many here represent but there appears to be some credibility to the claim that significant opposition came from rich people (including the Kennedy family) opposed the wind farm on the grounds it would "ruin" ocean views from their properties.
Regulate the US Market and its bye bye medical research.
While it is true that the US does a good bit of the heavy lifting in medical research, it is FAR from true that all medical research depends on the US. Many medical companies and research institutions exist and are headquartered outside the US including some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies. Plenty of research goes on across the world without the US being involved.
Please note that I'm not dismissing your general thesis completely - price controls are something to be approached with great caution. However it is not fair to say that all price regulation is a bad idea. Access to medicine is a moral issue as much as it is an economic one. Many medicines are sold for profit margins that are hard to justify to anyone with a conscience. It's fine for drug companies to make a profit, a handsome profit even. But resources for medical care are finite and just because a drug company is able to charge a lot doesn't always mean they should.
I really hope a single cruise missile can't take out an aircraft carrier...
This has been possible for ages since there have been nuclear cruise missiles. I believe there are some conventional missiles that can do the job as well.
They or their escorts should have the defenses to evade or destroy most missile types.
Carrier battle groups as I understand it have lots of missile defense systems. There are questions regarding their ongoing viability but such debates (sensibly) exist for many weapons systems. Unless some major military power gets into a shooting war with another major military power (US, Russia, China, India, France, Britain, etc) we are unlikely to find out the answer to how vulnerable carriers are to cruise missiles.
In civil law countries (like Italy too) the judges have little choice in applying the law.
Hogwash. Civil law does depend heavily on codes and statutes but that does not mean there is no room for rational judgment on the part of the judge.
If I yell in the streets something libelous I am responsible, even if someone else told me first. The same applies to Google...
Google didn't yell anything. Google provided a forum. Since we are so fond of analogies this is like holding the paving company that built the street responsible for what someone said on the street. You might as well hold the maker of a megaphone responsible for whatever anyone says through one.
If you are a doctor, you should put the well being of your patient before your ability to get clean data.
My wife is a doctor and she would say your ideals are commendable but naive and damaging. Clinical trials are incredibly important and with most clinical trials you are necessarily putting "clean data" ahead of the well being of any individual patient. Without doing these studies it is impossible for medicine to progress. It's not enough to know that a drug works, we need to know how it works or we are condemning future patients to suffer needlessly.
To use another example, how do you think doctors get trained? There are no substitutes for learning to to procedures on actual humans. Every time you go into a hospital you are being used as a learning tool. Young doctors don't get to be experienced doctors without working on a lot of humans and making many mistakes on the way. Ideally we'd all like to be worked on by the most experienced surgeon in the world but that's not possible or realistic or even desirable. We have to train the next generation and the only way to train them is on us. It's an uncomfortable truth but there is no other way to learn medicine. We have to put learning ahead of individual patient needs from time to time.
This is where you are wrong. You have one fact. The fact that this drugs cures 1/3 of the people taking it in the tests.
That doesn't make him wrong. He has correctly noted that we know very little about this drug and it would be highly irresponsible to wantonly permit its use until we know more about it. It also means you are looking at a single patient and he is looking at the entire population. The FDA isn't charged with saving your individual life. The FDA is charged with ensuring that drugs and medical treatments are effective, reasonably safe and have known and tested side effects. The gold standard for doing this is to conduct double blind tests. The unfortunate side effect is that some individuals are absolutely going to lose their lives so that others may live.
The FDA is acutely aware of the problem of denying treatments of unknown efficacy to terminal patients. They have expanded access rules (with more likely to come) to deal with this exact situation. They aren't blind to the problem but there are very good reasons why they are careful about creating exceptions to allow use of unproven treatments.
You do not have the fact that it kills any one. You just think it could. If we are talking about terminal cancer patients, they should be given it.
Even the safest drugs kill some people. There are complex side effects, interactions with other drugs and dosage issues. The question isn't will it kill someone, the question is how many people will it kill if it is shown to be more effective than placebo and is that number small enough to justify widespread use? There also is the question of whether a terminal cancer patient's life today is worth more than the multiple lives that might be saved by learning about a drug and how it affects the human body. These are serious, difficult questions and there is more at stake than one single life. You are literally asking if the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
In my mind it is morally wrong for the government to tell me that I can't make an informed decision with the information at hand and take the drug.
I'd agree with that in principle but there is more to the problem. I'm assuming you are relatively bright, interested in your health, and willing to accept risks. Not everyone fits that description. Many patients are not very bright and informed consent for them is a bit of wishful thinking. There is no way in hell my own mother would really understand the risks of even many basic medical treatments. She is however relatively susceptible to listening to people who sound like they know what they are talking about. The FDA isn't in the business of preventing *you* specifically from taking a drug - they are in the business of preventing snake oil salesmen. One only has to look at the "alternative medicine" industry to see that there is plenty of snake oil out there. The only tool we currently have to establish the efficacy of drugs is medical trials. If we just throw those out every time because we found a hint that a new drug might work in a mouse model, then we have ground medical science to a halt.
Yes, the FDA policies cost lives for the sake of knowledge. Snake oil salesmen if left unchecked would cost more.
Let the cows WALK to gather GRASS instead. Then use the corn for ethanol! Why we insist on feeding 75% of our grain production to ruminants baffles me.
Because it is more economically efficient to feed cattle a corn diet that promotes/induces rapid growth in a feed lot and gets them to the slaughterhouse faster. Next time you go to a fast food restaurant (and the data says you probably do) and pay $1 for a hamburger, think about the economies of scale required to support that sort of price point. Yes there are significant environmental, health and economic consequences to providing meat cheaply.
Never mind that switchgrass is more efficient for making ethanol. Why would you use corn for ethanol when grass will literally get you more bang for your buck?
But then students from other countries don't resort to cheating.
If you think this you are incredibly naive or racist and possibly both. Cheating is far more widespread than just students of any one ethnic group. Don't take my word for it, there is plenty of data out there supporting me.
Even in business, from what I've heard, you really, really want to be careful dealing with them.
This is true of doing business in any developing nation. Yes China is a difficult place to do business. I've seen it myself first hand. But it's not easier in India, Vietnam, Sub-Saharan Africa, parts of the Middle East etc. Severe corruption and bad policing exists in all these places. If you go to any of these places to do business you had better know what you are doing and who you are dealing with.
On the flip side of that argument, someone stands to make a lot of money by entering the market and challenging Visa with the selling point of increased security.
Theoretically true but it would take someone with VERY deep pockets. Visa and the other large credit card vendors have a the very powerful asset of network effects on their side. Virtually every merchant takes Visa and Mastercard. Somewhat fewer take Discover and Amex. Very few merchants have the equipment to handle more secure cards. This means that even though there are safer cards available, there is no network to handle them and it would cost a sizable fortune to get enough merchants to carry them. From the consumer's point of view there is little incentive to carry a card that is not widely accepted especially if they are protected against loss anyway. Visa can simply promise to cover any losses which makes it uneconomical for someone to build a more secure network. In other words, ain't gonna happen.
Only way I can see a secure card network being installed in the US is if it is mandated by Congress. I've seen some efforts by Amex and some others but unless somehow we can convince Congress to get involved (unlikely in my opinion) I just don't see it happening any time soon.
Apple cannot make money by first deploying the A4 processor then switching away after another chip beats it, they'd lose that massive investment in chip development.
Read up on sunk costs. Once the investment is already done it is not factored into future investment decisions. Apparently the A4 currently makes sense as an investment and Apple's balance sheet indicates that it does. The fact that they have already sunk development costs will (or rather should) not be a factor in future chipset decisions. That money is already spent and gone. Only future cash flows matter, not past ones.
It's a common irrational mistake people make saying "but I've already spent so much on this technology - it would be wasteful to dump it" when in fact that is irrelevant to whether a new investment is worthwhile. Consumers don't care how much Apple has invested in a technology and won't pay for it if something better is available. If some supplier were to come out with a much better chip tomorrow, Apple would have to decide whether there is a better forward looking return on investment with their in-house tech or outsourcing it. If the outsourced tech has the better expected ROI, they should outsource it regardless of how much money they have already sunk into the A4.
The Japanese company celebrated its 50th anniversary last year by using this machine to carve... a full-scale motorcycle helmet out of one piece of aluminum. No breaks, no joints, the 5-Axis mill simply pivots and rotates to carve metal at some absurd angles.
This has been possible for a very long time. I've seen 5, 6 and even virtual axis mills decades ago that could do this. The software is easier now and the machines have improved tolerances and speeds but the basic technology has been widely used for ages. Multi-axis CNC mills are absurdly useful but not even remotely new.
Say what you do, and do what you say. I don't think you need software for that.
That depends entirely on what you are doing. I've done IS09000 audits and for pretty much any businesses of any sophistication or size, some sort of software document management is more or less "required". Not in the sense that it is mandated but in the sense that you'll find your life impossibly hard without it. Too much paperwork to shuffle and too many parties needing it to make it reasonable to not computerize. Strictly speaking it isn't required, but you can do drafting with a pencil too and there are good reasons no one does that anymore.
Lower it to 0% and they'll come running. No reason to tax corporate income at all.
Naively optimistic.
For that matter, no reason to tax income at all.
There are alternatives to be sure but ANY tax scheme you come up with will have trade offs. There is no perfect tax system.
Tax something that can't run to another country like real estate. That'll become a lot more valuable with 0% taxes on income.
Your argument is that we should inflate the price of and tax burden on real estate instead of having an income tax? It would solve some problems but create many more.
Some places do most of their taxation based on real estate. Hong Kong for instance which manages to do it because of their somewhat unique circumstances but not without problems. Problem is you are basically tying your nation's ability to tax to a single cyclical industry (real estate) instead of the entire economy. Works great when the real estate market is hot and tax revenues crater massively when the real estate market cools off. Asset price bubbles become a HUGE problem. Our current fiscal crisis would be FAR worse if the US relied solely on tax revenues from real estate. There is a reason you diversify your stock portfolio and the same thing applies to sources of government revenue. Do you really want to eliminate that much diversification in sources of tax revenues? I think you haven't really thought this through.
Another problem is that it is very easy these days to locate facilities elsewhere. There is a reason not a lot of manufacturing takes place in Hong Kong or Manhattan any more. Price of land is too expensive. Admittedly those are extreme examples but companies will make decisions about where to locate because of a single dollar per square foot in cost. Drive up the price of real estate and companies will locate where real estate is cheap. Companies will decentralize massively if there is enough tax savings to do so. Remember that labor in the US isn't especially cheap either.
I am protected against unreasonable searches; how does that not explicitly protect privacy?
If it was so obvious, why did it take until 1967 for the Supreme Court to interpret the law to include a "reasonable expectation of privacy"? Fact is that the 4th amendment could be interpreted a number of ways other than how it has been.
Always remember you have rights because you are a person , not because the constitution says so.
Ideally true but not in reality. If what you were saying was true then why do dictatorships exist? After all I "have rights because I am a person". It's a nice dream but it's not reality.
If the law isn't written in such a way as to afford you a right, you don't have it. The Declaration of Independence declared all men are created equal, yet few would argue that was actually true under the law for most of the history of the US. The basis of US law is the Constitution so ultimately any discussion of US law will start there.
Flawed analogy. When you send your postal mail, you contracted with the postal service that they won't open your letter.
All analogies are flawed. Doesn't mean they are useless. To address your criticism however, you missed the point of my analogy which is that just because you don't own a network does not mean you have no expectation of privacy at any time. It's just not that simple.
Most corps that I know/heard of pretty much explicitly state they they can and will monitor their network.
That's a FAR different thing from saying the corporations have a right to monitor anything they want without limitation. Companies generally don't have a right to install a camera to watch me take a crap. It violates the principle of reasonableness. There are limits to how intrusive monitoring can get. This ruling says that this company violated one of those limits.
As long as the job is getting done, the so called time lost is irrelevant.
Possibly though we don't really know enough about the situation to say for certain.
Why these people believe that the companies rights are so superior to the individual is rather pathetic.
It has nothing to do with "superior" rights. Most employment in the US is "at will" meaning you can leave any time you like for any reason and the company can fire you any time they like for any reason. It doesn't even have to be a good reason with certain notable exceptions (mostly discrimination against a protected class of peoples). This lady probably violated a company policy and it's entirely reasonable that the company could elect to fire her for doing so. That doesn't mean the company has carte-blanche to do whatever they want to her. The extent of their powers is basically to fire her and possibly seek restitution for any damages they might have incurred by her actions (apparently none in this case).
Especially since the Constitution was really set up to protect the individuals right to privacy, that the government seems so willing to defer that right because a business is involved is very scary.
First of all there is NOTHING in the Constitution explicitly protecting privacy. Nothing. Everything relating to privacy in the Constitution has been inferred. Go ahead and read it. You won't find the word privacy or anything like it mentioned even once.
Second, I can switch employers if I find a particular one odious or intrusive. It is MUCH harder to switch governments even in a voting democracy. That's why we need more protections from the government than from corporations in most circumstances and that starts with the Constitution. Regulating corporations is much easier than regulating governments.
A person has no reason to expect anonymity on a computer or network that is not their own.
That's rather like saying you have no reason to expect privacy because you rent an apartment instead of owning a house. You send letters through the postal service which is a network you don't own either but you still have an expectation of privacy in many cases. I'm not sure the logic of your argument is on solid footing there.
I agree that she was probably naive in assuming that the company couldn't read her correspondence. Many people assume email is much more private than it actually is. Ignorant but probably nothing worse.
But if what she did was wrong "regardless of the content", why did the employer have to read them?
They didn't. That was just stupid on their part - at least according to the judge. Unless they didn't have their usage policies written out (also stupid) they could have fired her, without reading the content, for violating corporate policy on acceptable use of company assets.
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Quite honestly, it is time to eliminate patents.
No problem. Just come up with a solution to the free rider problem and we won't need patents or copyright. A Nobel prize in economics awaits your brilliance.
As we've seen from countries with lax IP enforcement (AKA China), if you have a quality product, the knock-offs can't compete.
Knockoffs compete just fine. Ask any drug manufacturer if generics (a knock off even though a legal one) hurt their business.
The entire point of patents is to add to public knowledge, but that isn't happening. So really, we need shorter patent protection times, or just eliminate it all together.
Sure it is. The laws and patent system just have loop holes and faults that are creating unintended problems. The problem isn't with the idea of patents it's with the implementation.
The patent system was originally designed to protect the small inventor from a large business entity...
That's a nice little piece of half truth there. The patent system was not designed with just that in mind. It protects ANY inventor from the free rider problem. Size can be a factor but it is a second order effect. The patent system is designed to promote innovation - it wasn't designed to protect any individual or corporation regardless of size.
We don't need to eliminate patents and copyright; We need to restore them to their proper place and purpose, which is to protect individuals from corporations
Patents and copyright are not fundamentally about protecting either individuals OR corporations. It is about protecting incentives to innovate regardless of who is doing the innovating. I'll agree that the patent system needs a serious improvement but misplaced populism really doesn't help.
Fair enough. I see hardly any medical advertising,
I doubt that. You might not have paid any attention to it but it's there. In my town each of the hospitals has rented billboards, has TV ads, and has print ads too. Little private practice groups do the same. I see ads in the paper for family health care and dentists every week. I get direct mailings from health care providers and doctors.
If you live anywhere but the most rural parts of the US the only way you could miss the advertising is if you aren't paying attention. Not that ignoring advertising is a bad thing...
, so a hospital advertising itself seems strange to me.
It does seem a little odd at first. Mostly it is for brand recognition and to advertise specific specialties. Not all hospitals do all procedures and some have definite areas of expertise. Hospitals compete against private groups, outpatient clinics, other hospitals, surgery centers, and more. Advertising is a proven way to increase business even in health care.
He works in a hospital, why would they have a marketing department?
Because hospitals are businesses with competitors. They need to bring in customers (patients) the same as any other business. Every hospital has a marketing department in some form or another even if it isn't explicitly labeled as such.
(Even in the US, I assume it's the insurance and drug companies that do all the marketing, and the government that does the public awareness stuff.)
And you would be wrong to assume that. Every medical practice has to market its services just like any other business. The fact that the business is treating disease is irrelevant. Hospitals need to market their services the same as IBM needs to market theirs. If this is unsettling to you, you need to check your high horse at the door. Did you think the laws of economics suddenly vanish when it's health care?
In large businesses, profit is reinvested in the company.
Not necessarily. It is often distributed as a dividend or used to repurchase stock. Very substantial sums are used for these purposes in many cases.
A few percent might go to bonuses for executives
That is by definition not profit. A bonus is an expense. The company does not in any way have to make a profit to pay a large bonus to an executive. (Disclosure: I'm a certified accountant)
In the case of a drug research company, much of the profit probably goes into R&D, since that's probably their biggest expense
"Probably"? Why not look at an actual income statement? The largest expense for large drug companies is sales and administration (SG&A). In the case of Pfizer. SG&A for Pfizer in their most recent quarterly report is almost double their R&D costs.
Furthermore it's not actually accurate to call R&D reinvested profits. R&D is a cost just like salaries. It's one with a lot of discretion in it but it is an expense and does not require profits to incur that expense. In fact most drug companies incur substantial loses due to R&D until they have one or more salable products. Ultimately the company must be profitable to sustain R&D expenses but that doesn't change the accounting treatment.
So the high drug costs are funding more drug research. Where do they get R&D money from, after all, if not from drug sale profits?
Careful - you can fund R&D with low cost drugs too, you just have to sell larger quantities. It's easier with a high profit margin but not absolutely required. However in NO large pharmaceutical company is all the profit plowed back into R&D. For Pfizer their Net Income after tax in 2009 was almost double their R&D costs. That means there is plenty of room for prices to come down without Pfizer actually needing to touch $1 of their R&D expense.
Put another way: if you cut drug company profits, are they going to make up for it by cutting dividends and executive salaries, or by cutting R&D and releasing fewer innovative drugs?
The fact that drug companies might choose to overpay executives and hurt their future prospects is an issue I'm willing to let the shareholders deal with. A drug company that makes a habit of cutting R&D as a percentage of revenue is going to find itself in trouble sooner or later.
If you want to cut drug costs, you have to cut R&D costs – like by making drug approval trials much, much cheaper.
No, sorry your logic doesn't hold. An executive MIGHT chose to cut R&D but as I've established before, profits greatly outweigh R&D expenditures for large pharma companies so there is plenty of room to cut prices before there is an actual need to cut R&D. If a drug company cuts R&D, then they are running the risk of having no future products to sell - basically trading future profits for immediate profits.
Look, I don't actually have a problem with pharma companies making a handsome profit. They're taking a lot of risk and should be rewarded for success. But don't pretend that the drug industry isn't highly profitable and some of those profits come at the expense of people's lives. To some degree that is necessary but at the end of the day treatment of disease is the goal, not profits.
For those of us who are not intimate with American politics -- why is this moderated insightful, flamebait and troll? And which Kennedy would that be?
Because it is true and simultaneously embarrassing to parts of the electorate. Ted Kennedy is who we are talking about here though the Kennedy family in general matters for this story - Ted until his death was merely the most prominent member of the family in recent years. He ostensibly supported green energy but when it was proposed to put a wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts (his home state) he opposed it or at least opposed this particular wind farm. The opposition is more complicated than many here represent but there appears to be some credibility to the claim that significant opposition came from rich people (including the Kennedy family) opposed the wind farm on the grounds it would "ruin" ocean views from their properties.
Regulate the US Market and its bye bye medical research.
While it is true that the US does a good bit of the heavy lifting in medical research, it is FAR from true that all medical research depends on the US. Many medical companies and research institutions exist and are headquartered outside the US including some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies. Plenty of research goes on across the world without the US being involved.
Please note that I'm not dismissing your general thesis completely - price controls are something to be approached with great caution. However it is not fair to say that all price regulation is a bad idea. Access to medicine is a moral issue as much as it is an economic one. Many medicines are sold for profit margins that are hard to justify to anyone with a conscience. It's fine for drug companies to make a profit, a handsome profit even. But resources for medical care are finite and just because a drug company is able to charge a lot doesn't always mean they should.
I really hope a single cruise missile can't take out an aircraft carrier...
This has been possible for ages since there have been nuclear cruise missiles. I believe there are some conventional missiles that can do the job as well.
They or their escorts should have the defenses to evade or destroy most missile types.
Carrier battle groups as I understand it have lots of missile defense systems. There are questions regarding their ongoing viability but such debates (sensibly) exist for many weapons systems. Unless some major military power gets into a shooting war with another major military power (US, Russia, China, India, France, Britain, etc) we are unlikely to find out the answer to how vulnerable carriers are to cruise missiles.
In civil law countries (like Italy too) the judges have little choice in applying the law.
Hogwash. Civil law does depend heavily on codes and statutes but that does not mean there is no room for rational judgment on the part of the judge.
If I yell in the streets something libelous I am responsible, even if someone else told me first. The same applies to Google...
Google didn't yell anything. Google provided a forum. Since we are so fond of analogies this is like holding the paving company that built the street responsible for what someone said on the street. You might as well hold the maker of a megaphone responsible for whatever anyone says through one.
If you are a doctor, you should put the well being of your patient before your ability to get clean data.
My wife is a doctor and she would say your ideals are commendable but naive and damaging. Clinical trials are incredibly important and with most clinical trials you are necessarily putting "clean data" ahead of the well being of any individual patient. Without doing these studies it is impossible for medicine to progress. It's not enough to know that a drug works, we need to know how it works or we are condemning future patients to suffer needlessly.
To use another example, how do you think doctors get trained? There are no substitutes for learning to to procedures on actual humans. Every time you go into a hospital you are being used as a learning tool. Young doctors don't get to be experienced doctors without working on a lot of humans and making many mistakes on the way. Ideally we'd all like to be worked on by the most experienced surgeon in the world but that's not possible or realistic or even desirable. We have to train the next generation and the only way to train them is on us. It's an uncomfortable truth but there is no other way to learn medicine. We have to put learning ahead of individual patient needs from time to time.
This is where you are wrong. You have one fact. The fact that this drugs cures 1/3 of the people taking it in the tests.
That doesn't make him wrong. He has correctly noted that we know very little about this drug and it would be highly irresponsible to wantonly permit its use until we know more about it. It also means you are looking at a single patient and he is looking at the entire population. The FDA isn't charged with saving your individual life. The FDA is charged with ensuring that drugs and medical treatments are effective, reasonably safe and have known and tested side effects. The gold standard for doing this is to conduct double blind tests. The unfortunate side effect is that some individuals are absolutely going to lose their lives so that others may live.
The FDA is acutely aware of the problem of denying treatments of unknown efficacy to terminal patients. They have expanded access rules (with more likely to come) to deal with this exact situation. They aren't blind to the problem but there are very good reasons why they are careful about creating exceptions to allow use of unproven treatments.
You do not have the fact that it kills any one. You just think it could. If we are talking about terminal cancer patients, they should be given it.
Even the safest drugs kill some people. There are complex side effects, interactions with other drugs and dosage issues. The question isn't will it kill someone, the question is how many people will it kill if it is shown to be more effective than placebo and is that number small enough to justify widespread use? There also is the question of whether a terminal cancer patient's life today is worth more than the multiple lives that might be saved by learning about a drug and how it affects the human body. These are serious, difficult questions and there is more at stake than one single life. You are literally asking if the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
In my mind it is morally wrong for the government to tell me that I can't make an informed decision with the information at hand and take the drug.
I'd agree with that in principle but there is more to the problem. I'm assuming you are relatively bright, interested in your health, and willing to accept risks. Not everyone fits that description. Many patients are not very bright and informed consent for them is a bit of wishful thinking. There is no way in hell my own mother would really understand the risks of even many basic medical treatments. She is however relatively susceptible to listening to people who sound like they know what they are talking about. The FDA isn't in the business of preventing *you* specifically from taking a drug - they are in the business of preventing snake oil salesmen. One only has to look at the "alternative medicine" industry to see that there is plenty of snake oil out there. The only tool we currently have to establish the efficacy of drugs is medical trials. If we just throw those out every time because we found a hint that a new drug might work in a mouse model, then we have ground medical science to a halt.
Yes, the FDA policies cost lives for the sake of knowledge. Snake oil salesmen if left unchecked would cost more.
(ie: I have no use for environmentalists as I want to USE the resources we protect)
There is value in many things other than how much they can increase your bank account. If you can't see that I truly pity you.
Let the cows WALK to gather GRASS instead. Then use the corn for ethanol! Why we insist on feeding 75% of our grain production to ruminants baffles me.
Because it is more economically efficient to feed cattle a corn diet that promotes/induces rapid growth in a feed lot and gets them to the slaughterhouse faster. Next time you go to a fast food restaurant (and the data says you probably do) and pay $1 for a hamburger, think about the economies of scale required to support that sort of price point. Yes there are significant environmental, health and economic consequences to providing meat cheaply.
Never mind that switchgrass is more efficient for making ethanol. Why would you use corn for ethanol when grass will literally get you more bang for your buck?
But then students from other countries don't resort to cheating.
If you think this you are incredibly naive or racist and possibly both. Cheating is far more widespread than just students of any one ethnic group. Don't take my word for it, there is plenty of data out there supporting me.
Even in business, from what I've heard, you really, really want to be careful dealing with them.
This is true of doing business in any developing nation. Yes China is a difficult place to do business. I've seen it myself first hand. But it's not easier in India, Vietnam, Sub-Saharan Africa, parts of the Middle East etc. Severe corruption and bad policing exists in all these places. If you go to any of these places to do business you had better know what you are doing and who you are dealing with.
On the flip side of that argument, someone stands to make a lot of money by entering the market and challenging Visa with the selling point of increased security.
Theoretically true but it would take someone with VERY deep pockets. Visa and the other large credit card vendors have a the very powerful asset of network effects on their side. Virtually every merchant takes Visa and Mastercard. Somewhat fewer take Discover and Amex. Very few merchants have the equipment to handle more secure cards. This means that even though there are safer cards available, there is no network to handle them and it would cost a sizable fortune to get enough merchants to carry them. From the consumer's point of view there is little incentive to carry a card that is not widely accepted especially if they are protected against loss anyway. Visa can simply promise to cover any losses which makes it uneconomical for someone to build a more secure network. In other words, ain't gonna happen.
Only way I can see a secure card network being installed in the US is if it is mandated by Congress. I've seen some efforts by Amex and some others but unless somehow we can convince Congress to get involved (unlikely in my opinion) I just don't see it happening any time soon.
Apple cannot make money by first deploying the A4 processor then switching away after another chip beats it, they'd lose that massive investment in chip development.
Read up on sunk costs. Once the investment is already done it is not factored into future investment decisions. Apparently the A4 currently makes sense as an investment and Apple's balance sheet indicates that it does. The fact that they have already sunk development costs will (or rather should) not be a factor in future chipset decisions. That money is already spent and gone. Only future cash flows matter, not past ones.
It's a common irrational mistake people make saying "but I've already spent so much on this technology - it would be wasteful to dump it" when in fact that is irrelevant to whether a new investment is worthwhile. Consumers don't care how much Apple has invested in a technology and won't pay for it if something better is available. If some supplier were to come out with a much better chip tomorrow, Apple would have to decide whether there is a better forward looking return on investment with their in-house tech or outsourcing it. If the outsourced tech has the better expected ROI, they should outsource it regardless of how much money they have already sunk into the A4.
The Japanese company celebrated its 50th anniversary last year by using this machine to carve ... a full-scale motorcycle helmet out of one piece of aluminum. No breaks, no joints, the 5-Axis mill simply pivots and rotates to carve metal at some absurd angles.
This has been possible for a very long time. I've seen 5, 6 and even virtual axis mills decades ago that could do this. The software is easier now and the machines have improved tolerances and speeds but the basic technology has been widely used for ages. Multi-axis CNC mills are absurdly useful but not even remotely new.
In other words, nothing to see here. Moving on...
Say what you do, and do what you say. I don't think you need software for that.
That depends entirely on what you are doing. I've done IS09000 audits and for pretty much any businesses of any sophistication or size, some sort of software document management is more or less "required". Not in the sense that it is mandated but in the sense that you'll find your life impossibly hard without it. Too much paperwork to shuffle and too many parties needing it to make it reasonable to not computerize. Strictly speaking it isn't required, but you can do drafting with a pencil too and there are good reasons no one does that anymore.
Lower it to 0% and they'll come running. No reason to tax corporate income at all.
Naively optimistic.
For that matter, no reason to tax income at all.
There are alternatives to be sure but ANY tax scheme you come up with will have trade offs. There is no perfect tax system.
Tax something that can't run to another country like real estate. That'll become a lot more valuable with 0% taxes on income.
Your argument is that we should inflate the price of and tax burden on real estate instead of having an income tax? It would solve some problems but create many more.
Some places do most of their taxation based on real estate. Hong Kong for instance which manages to do it because of their somewhat unique circumstances but not without problems. Problem is you are basically tying your nation's ability to tax to a single cyclical industry (real estate) instead of the entire economy. Works great when the real estate market is hot and tax revenues crater massively when the real estate market cools off. Asset price bubbles become a HUGE problem. Our current fiscal crisis would be FAR worse if the US relied solely on tax revenues from real estate. There is a reason you diversify your stock portfolio and the same thing applies to sources of government revenue. Do you really want to eliminate that much diversification in sources of tax revenues? I think you haven't really thought this through.
Another problem is that it is very easy these days to locate facilities elsewhere. There is a reason not a lot of manufacturing takes place in Hong Kong or Manhattan any more. Price of land is too expensive. Admittedly those are extreme examples but companies will make decisions about where to locate because of a single dollar per square foot in cost. Drive up the price of real estate and companies will locate where real estate is cheap. Companies will decentralize massively if there is enough tax savings to do so. Remember that labor in the US isn't especially cheap either.
I am protected against unreasonable searches; how does that not explicitly protect privacy?
If it was so obvious, why did it take until 1967 for the Supreme Court to interpret the law to include a "reasonable expectation of privacy"? Fact is that the 4th amendment could be interpreted a number of ways other than how it has been.
Always remember you have rights because you are a person , not because the constitution says so.
Ideally true but not in reality. If what you were saying was true then why do dictatorships exist? After all I "have rights because I am a person". It's a nice dream but it's not reality.
If the law isn't written in such a way as to afford you a right, you don't have it. The Declaration of Independence declared all men are created equal, yet few would argue that was actually true under the law for most of the history of the US. The basis of US law is the Constitution so ultimately any discussion of US law will start there.
Flawed analogy. When you send your postal mail, you contracted with the postal service that they won't open your letter.
All analogies are flawed. Doesn't mean they are useless. To address your criticism however, you missed the point of my analogy which is that just because you don't own a network does not mean you have no expectation of privacy at any time. It's just not that simple.
Most corps that I know/heard of pretty much explicitly state they they can and will monitor their network.
That's a FAR different thing from saying the corporations have a right to monitor anything they want without limitation. Companies generally don't have a right to install a camera to watch me take a crap. It violates the principle of reasonableness. There are limits to how intrusive monitoring can get. This ruling says that this company violated one of those limits.
As long as the job is getting done, the so called time lost is irrelevant.
Possibly though we don't really know enough about the situation to say for certain.
Why these people believe that the companies rights are so superior to the individual is rather pathetic.
It has nothing to do with "superior" rights. Most employment in the US is "at will" meaning you can leave any time you like for any reason and the company can fire you any time they like for any reason. It doesn't even have to be a good reason with certain notable exceptions (mostly discrimination against a protected class of peoples). This lady probably violated a company policy and it's entirely reasonable that the company could elect to fire her for doing so. That doesn't mean the company has carte-blanche to do whatever they want to her. The extent of their powers is basically to fire her and possibly seek restitution for any damages they might have incurred by her actions (apparently none in this case).
Especially since the Constitution was really set up to protect the individuals right to privacy, that the government seems so willing to defer that right because a business is involved is very scary.
First of all there is NOTHING in the Constitution explicitly protecting privacy. Nothing. Everything relating to privacy in the Constitution has been inferred. Go ahead and read it. You won't find the word privacy or anything like it mentioned even once.
Second, I can switch employers if I find a particular one odious or intrusive. It is MUCH harder to switch governments even in a voting democracy. That's why we need more protections from the government than from corporations in most circumstances and that starts with the Constitution. Regulating corporations is much easier than regulating governments.
A person has no reason to expect anonymity on a computer or network that is not their own.
That's rather like saying you have no reason to expect privacy because you rent an apartment instead of owning a house. You send letters through the postal service which is a network you don't own either but you still have an expectation of privacy in many cases. I'm not sure the logic of your argument is on solid footing there.
I agree that she was probably naive in assuming that the company couldn't read her correspondence. Many people assume email is much more private than it actually is. Ignorant but probably nothing worse.
But if what she did was wrong "regardless of the content", why did the employer have to read them?
They didn't. That was just stupid on their part - at least according to the judge. Unless they didn't have their usage policies written out (also stupid) they could have fired her, without reading the content, for violating corporate policy on acceptable use of company assets.