Then name me five non-exotic diseases for which Big Pharma has provided actual cures. I'll wait.
Tuberculosis, pneumonia, lyme disease (treatment and vaccine), leprosy, and gonorrhea.
With regard to chronic diseases like arthritis, diabetes, etc. Those diseases are extremely difficult to cure. Most of those diseases are genetic or are the result of age-related damage. Take arthritis for example; it's caused by joint cartilege having been worn away over years, faster than it could heal.
Most chronic diseases are the result of age-related damage (arthritis, atherosclerosis, dementia, others), or have ultimate causes which are not understood (asthma, allergies, chrohn's, alzheimers, rheumatoid arthritis, others), or are genetic (tay-sachs, others). Those diseases could not be cured by a drug. No small-molecule drug could selectively repair genetic defects, or regenerate lost tissue in the correct places to youthful levels. Drugs can only interfere with ongoing biological process, and as such can only slow down or halt disease progression, or interfere with symptoms.
This is not because of a plot by big pharma. It's just the nature of the beast.
Thanks for your thoughtful post. I'm glad someone had the courage to dissent and to do so intelligently.
With that said, I will disagree with a few things you posted.
The fact remains that the world has a growing stockpile of material which requires careful storage and monitoring for hundreds of thousands of years.
Nuclear waste loses most of it's radioactivity fairly quickly. It loses 99.99% of its radioactivity within 500 years. After which, the remaining waste is so weakly radioactive that it's comparatively benign. After 500 years, the radioactivity from the waste is so weak that the primary danger from that waste is heavy metal poisoning, not radiation. In other words, after 500 years the waste is a health hazard similar to mercury or lead, except it's buried under a mountain in casks.
None of this cost is calculated into the cost of price of electricity generated.
The cost for permanent storage of nuclear waste is imposed on the industry as a surcharge. That surcharge paid for Yucca Mountain and will pay for the next permanent storage facility, although it will take some time to save up enough money again.
I find it unconscionable that we are willing dump such a tremendous problem in the laps of our children
Our children would be totally unaffected by a single small area of radiation buried deeply within a single mountain in the middle of a remote arid desert.
Solar and wind ARE sufficient to take care of our energy needs,
Solar is nowhere near to being cost-competitive.
Wind is fairly cost-competitive, but only if it's accompanied with natural gas plants for when the wind isn't blowing. Those natural gas plants still emit carbon dioxide. Granted, the wind+gas combination would reduce CO2 emissions by about 80% compared to a coal-fired plant. However, the remaining 20% CO2 emissions are still far more damaging than nuclear waste.
Don't get me wrong, the wind+gas combination is much better than what we're doing now, but it's not the best option.
You were flagged troll for your content-free angry pro-American karma pandering... You thought you'd get a quick karma boost from anti-socialist, libertarian, and pro-American moderators, which you may yet get if you stop whining and present some actual facts... stop whining... your butt-hurt position...
Speaking of "content-free". He did actually post one fact--not much, but more than all your posts put together.
Your posts are verbal diarrhea. All of them. You have said absolutely nothing substantive. I can't imagine why anyone is modding you up.
By the way, the article was not about the merits of various healthcare systems. It was about antitrust reviews of the Sun/Oracle merger. Granted, it did mention Europe. Apparently, mentioning Europe is all it takes to trigger this kind of reaction out of you...
[from your sig:]You wanted an argument? Oh, I'm sorry, but this is abuse, you want room 12A
The philosophy of "good enough" has driven most open source projects. From linux 1.x kernels to MySQL, from GIMP to KDE, many OSS projects are clones of earlier commercial projects, but with less features and for free. By saying that, I'm not insulting OSS. Most of the time, fewer features (but free) is the best value for most companies and people. That is why OSS is so influential.
Recently, I read an article on slashdot that OSS UI development should stop imitating Mac and Windows, and should start innovating. Also, I've read various things from Eric Raymond and others that OSS should be prized for its innovativeness. But I think that's all wrong. OSS is most valuable when it's not innovative. The most successful OSS projects (like Linux, gcc, mysql, OpenSSL, and others) have been shameless clones, while the innovative OSS projects (like Hurd) died off. Of course there are exceptions, but usually OSS software is the generic drug of the software industry.
Two things in the article summary require clarification:
62% of Sun's stockholders voted for the acquisition
First, 62% refers to the number of shares, and not the number of stockholders as the summary claims. Probably, the 62% mostly represents 30 or 40 large shareholders, made up of pension funds, stock funds, and rich people.
Second, 62% refers to the number of outstanding shares, not the number of shares for which there was a vote. Very small shareholders rarely bother to vote their shares and do not vote one way or the other. I doubt very many shareholders voted in opposition to this deal, which would be very silly because Sun's prospects without this deal are very dim.
You mean just scanning 7 million of them and putting them online, then getting sued, and throwing enough lawyers at all the publishers to get a settlement
That's actually a fairly low barrier to entry for competitors.
To compete with google, you would need to hire 950 low-wage people to scan books for a few years. If the average person can scan 4 books per day, then they can scan 1 million books per year. You would also need some lawyers to negotiate a settlement, however you would presumably need far fewer lawyers than scanners in order to write a single 160-page agreement like the kind google has written. You could even make it easier for the publishers to reach an agreement with your company by offering the publishers better terms than those which google has offered, so they would stand to make more money than they make off google and would be inclined to agree to your contract without too much trouble.
All of those things could be done by a typical medium-sized company if google demonstrates that book scanning is a profitable venture by making money off it.
If google starts charging "unbearably high prices" for orphan books, as someone in the NYT article claims, then competitors will spring up because the barrier to entry is so low and because so many enterpreneurs are searching for ways to make money and would be motivated by even less than "unbearably high prices".
This book is one of the most concise and descriptive computer books I've read. The book gets right to the point and explains things in an understandable yet compact way. Every paragraph of this book contains real content, which is unusual; and which spares the reader the necessity of skipping over, filtering through, and disregarding superfluous material as is necessary with so many other books.
Despite being concise, the book is remarkably thorough. It explains things about the C language (like parsing complex type declarations) which most books on the C language do not explain.
In addition to being concise, it was written with an admirable prose style which is rare among computer books. Apparently, its author (Kernighan) could write in the English language.
After typing "homeopathy" in the search box on drugstore.com, I found this.
It appears to be a homeopathic remedy for head lice. The remedy is administered on your head and is ingested by the lice. Immediately, I was intrigued. How would a homeopathic remedy kill head lice? What kind of homeopathic remedy would kill things?
I clicked on the "ingredients" tab which lists one active ingredient: sodium chloride (table salt) in a 1X dilution (10% dilution). In other words, brine. Not even an extremely dilute brine.
This brine costs $20 and comes with a free comb.
So I clicked on the "review" tab and found some satisfied customers:
[My daughter got lice, and] in one treatment - GOODBYE disgusting LICE! My daughter's head even had live lice in it along with nits (eggs) - and this product killed them all. Of course I had to pick out nits for a week...
This reviewer picked out nits from her daughter's hair, for a week straight. But she doesn't think that's what reduced the lice population. No. It was the brine that did it.
This is worth every penny.
Brine is worth every penny if you pay about 5 pennies for a gallon.
I also object to the claim that this study is "the first quantitative, scientific comparison of alternative energy solutions". That statement is clearly mistaken.
The topic of alternative energy generation has been the subject of intense study and interest for the last decade. As a result, there have been many papers published which include models for power generation and which compare the various kinds of power generation. Not only is this paper not the first, but it probably is not even within the first 100.
It's very easy to throw together a model with a few equations. You can do that in a couple of days. As a result, it's been done many, many times already.
Some of the other models which were done before this one, use much more realistic assumptions, and arrive at very different conclusions.
This "study" is not really a study, but a model. As such, it's only as good as its assumptions. Unfortunately, many of its assumptions are completely wrong or totally implausible.
For example, the model predicts that nuclear power emits 25x as much carbon as wind power. You may wonder how that could be possible. It's possible because that conclusion follows from the model's assumptions which are all wrong, as follows.
First, the model compares the carbon output of new windmills, versus the carbon output of obsolete ways of refining uranium as an average over the last 40 years. Since refining uranium is far less carbon-intensive than it was, we should use the new figures only. It does not matter how much carbon was emitted by uranium enrichment for plants in the 1960s. Nobody is suggesting building those. We are debating whether we should build new nuclear power plants, or new windmills. As such, we should compare the carbon output of new uranium enrichment against new windmills. In this case the author clearly commits the "sunk cost fallacy", and the assumption is totally wrong.
Another mistaken assumption behind carbon emissions of nuclear plants, is carbon emissions from delays in plant constructions. The author assumes that nuclear power plants will take 10+ years to construct, and in the mean time, we will continue to generate electricity by burning coal. On the other hand, he assumes that the delay associated with windmills is "zero". However, that assumption is totally wrong. Windmills will lead to "zero delay" only if the United States throws away every coal-burning plant we have and replaces them with windmills this year. Since that will never happen, the assumption is wrong. In actuality, those coal plants will be decomissioned at the end of their useful lives and will be replaced by either wind, nuclear, or something else. So, the delay associated with nuclear or wind would probably be quite similar. Since this factor alone accounts for most of the "25x as much carbon" which nuclear is said to produce, that figure is refuted.
And there are other assumptions which are wrong. For example, the model assumes that nuclear power will lead to nuclear weapons which will cause a nuclear war with a resulting environmental catastrophe. Since nuclear power cannot be used to construct nuclear weapons, this assumption is mistaken. Unfortunately, the author makes many errors when he discusses the relationship between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. In actuality, nuclear power has almost no probability of starting a nuclear war.
The paper states that "Worldwide, nine countries have known nuclear weapons stockpiles (US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea)" and shortly thereafter concludes that "Thus, the ability of states to produce nuclear weapons today follows directly from their ability to produce nuclear power". But that is entirely wrong. It's a spurious correlation. The reason some countries have nuclear power plants, and the same countries have nuclear weapons, is because those countries are technologically advanced, which causes both nuclear weapons and nuclear power; not because nuclear power causes nuclear weapons.
And there are other assumptions about nuclear (not related to carbon emissions) which are equally unrealistic. For example, the model claims that nuclear "produces fuel rods that are usually stored on site for several years in cooling ponds pending transport to a permanent site" and somehow concludes that nuclear has as much of a detrimental effect on wildlife as coal power. I honestly have no idea how he derived that conclusion (he doesn't say). It seems to me that mass strip-mining of the countryside (including mass-strip mining for serpentine rock if we intend to use that for mineral sequestration) every year, would greatly outweigh nuclear power's single kilometer of radioactivity buried deep beneath a single mountain in an isolated arid desert in Nevada, once. In fa
I seem to be one of the few people on this forum that favors a bailout, although I think the current bailout is far from ideal for various reasons.
I noticed your post was entitled "I know you're scared, but please think." However, a similar comment would apply to many of the opponents of a bailout (not necessarily you). To some of those opponents, we could say: "I know you're angry, but please think."
Nobody has ever suggested spending $700B on bailing out wall st executives. The bill provides $700B to buy distressed assets which will be re-sold at a later time. The assets will be purchased at a price higher than the market will pay for them right now; probably they'll be purchased for around $0.35 on the dollar. When the assets are re-sold, if they have lost value, then the gov't automatically gains a large equity position in the company which originally held the assets in order to offset the loss (the gov't gains warrants in exchange for buying the crappy assets).
This plan would not cost anywhere near $700B. Since the plan would purchase assets for $700B that have a non-zero value, the plan would ultimately cost a fraction of $700B, realistically $50-200B.
I have read through various polls now, where pollsters contacted random people in the population and asked them their opinion about the bailout. None of the people contacted held anything like a correct idea of the bailout. All of them thought something like: "we're going to SPEND $700B of MY money and GIVE it to wall st fat cats who caused this mess in the first place?!?!?!". Those people have a absolutely no idea of what the bailout consists of. They read the headlines ("$700B bailout for wall st") and misinterpreted it, then reacted with rage, then called their congressmen.
At present, the credit market is seizing up. That is not a fiction invented by Paulson to scare people. Two days ago, the LIBOR rate increased by 2% and the TED spread increased to 3%. That has two implications: 1) lowering the fed funding rate no longer has any effect whatsoever; 2) the interest rates on practically every ARM in this country went up by 2% on that day, as well as the interest rates on many credit cards, student loans, and so on.
We have a heavily indebted population. If the interest rates on their debt remains at elevated levels because of a credit crunch, then the cost of that to our economy would greatly, greatly exceed the fraction of $700B that a bailout would cost.
Not to mention, we have several heavily indebted corporations that will not survive a credit crisis (like ford and GM, probably). Some of those corporations will not have access to lending and will go under, all at once, triggering a severe recession with higher unemployment. The cost of that would be far higher than the fraction of $700B that the bailout costs.
It's quite possible to engineer a bailout which saves the economy far more money than the bailout would cost. It would be a big mistake not to do so. I'm not necessarily endorsing the Paulson plan, and I'm not saying that any plan has to be passed this very day, and I'm not saying we should just hand Paulson $700B with no oversight. But it's very important that something is passed within the next month or so.
I have had the chance to speak with other business owners and some executives of, let's just say, large, corporations.
Even if they're in business, it's possible they're mistaken.
- ~500 billion USD given to the Fed. Allow the Fed to disperse the money through the discount window with loans at 1% fixed for 18 months then reset to Prime-0.5%
The fed does not need $500B from anyone. The fed can open the discount window as far as it likes by generating money at will, at the cost of further inflation months down the road. The unique thing about the fed is this: when it writes a check, the money does not come out of any account, but is created out of thin air, as an accounting practice.
At present, the "TED spread" has increased to 3% which implies that fed lending is now completely ineffective. It would not matter how much the fed lends, or at what interest rates. The fed is already basically giving away money for free to banks, but they still do not lend.
First, all the people that thought houses were investments whose price could never go down. Wrong.
The belief that an investment "cannot possibly go down" is a self-denying prophecy, meaning that people believing in it causes it not to be true.
If people find an investment which has never gone down, then they believe the investment pays them good money with no risk whatsoever. As a result, they bid that investment up into the stratosphere. They are not concerned with the unrealistic price because the investment has no risk (in their opinion).
In other words, peoples' belief that an investment has no risk causes that investment to become overvalued and to generate massive risk where there may have been none previously.
Oddly enough, things which are said to have "NEVER gone down" often crash terribly.
Back in the 1970s there was an investment book which recommended a portfolio of 50 of the largest corporations in America. The strategy was called "the nifty fifty." These fifty large corporations were negatively correlated, meaning that when one went up, the other went down. The author of the book calculated that these 50 companies had never gone down as a group. Shortly thereafter, those companies were trading at 3x their normal value, then they all crashed at the same time.
I'll begin with an aside/rant: I wonder what companies can do to *demotivate* the verbizing of perfectly fine nouns like "incentive" -- perhaps a nice cock-punch for each use of the word "incentivize" would be appropriate.
What a silly rant. Just so you know, the word "incentivize" is legitimate English usage, whereas the term "cock-punch" is not.
There are thousands of cases in English where the suffix "-ize" is used to create a verb. Some common examples are: "summarize" and "realize." Of course it can be taken too far. But the word "incentivize" was added to various dictionaries in the 1960s after it had been in common usage for years. If you wanted to protest it then you're a bit late now.
Usually the process begins with someone filing a record of invention with the intellectual property department -- they then send it to their internal patent review board (made up of various experts) to determine if the invention is patentable and relevant to the company business and worth the 20 to 30 thousand it costs to get a patent... but many pickets will create a fence that encloses some worthwhile territory.
The original poster works for a one year-old startup that I doubt has an intellectual property department or would be able to use a portfolio of patents to fend off legal attacks. I see your point when it comes to large corporations but I doubt his company could assemble enough patents in one domain to fence off anything.
Your company sounds like a bunch of idiots, get out now.
For better or for worse, it wasn't just my company--it was the norm. Outsourcing patent legal issues was happening everywhere. I never encountered a company with fewer than 50 employees that had even one dedicated patent attorney on staff as part of their legal department. I presume your experience was with larger companies where that might have been the case and they may have been patent attorneys. However I doubt that a smallish company could justify having patent attorneys on staff.
[Companies] churn out inventions. The incentive is to get them to talk to the IP group at the company before publication. What the company decides to patent is its own business.
Thus far I have never encountered a single company that "churns out" significant inventions. Even companies that invest massively in R&D, like IBM and google, only come up with meaningful inventions once in awhile. However, the original poster did not claim that he works for google or IBM. He claimed that he works for a "one-year old startup". My point is this: if a one-year-old startup thinks they're "churning out" inventions, then they're probably sadly deluded. The chances of them having even one invention worth patenting is probably close to zero. A one-year-old company should focus their scarce money on generating intellectual property and should have at most one or two patents; and those patents were probably created by the founders. But the businesspeople who run that company may just think they'll just hire some programmers, pay them $5000 per major invention, then suddenly have tons of breakthrough innovations. They're probably kidding themselves and wasting their money.
1) The utility ratio ("useful" patent out of the total number of patents) depends on how good the IP group is at identifying inventions worth pursuing. Yes, a company that tries to patent everything will get socked with a mountain of fees in exchange for very little valuable IP. But a good triage process can greatly extend the value of the IP dollar.
I recently spent a long time reviewing the hundreds of patents related to compression. Compression is one of the areas of software which has significant patent activity. Nevertheless, almost all the patents were farcical, absurd, or provably wrong. In fact, there was exactly one company (IBM) that had generated any patents in the last 20 years of any value at all. The other patents were from small companies who believed that their 3-4 silly programmers were churning out brilliant ideas worth millions.
How about drug companies that are simultaneously researching therapeutic agents for dozens or hundreds of diseases? I think they probably generate a steady stream of patentable remedies.
Drug patents are not analogous to software patents. Drug patents cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and bring to market, so they are worth protecting. The amount of money invested per drug patent is immense, so a patent is reasonable.
Drugs are generated by professional scientists who spend years or decades on one drug or condition, plus thousands of employees that run clinical trials. Drugs are not generated by lone drug scientists who cavalierly spit out major drug discoveries rapidly by themselves at 1-year-old startups because they're paid $5000 every time they do so.
2) Most companies that produce products aren't trying to sell their patents - they're trying to protect the value of their R&D. It's practically impossible to put a dollar figure on that,
I agree with you that most companies don't try to sell their patents. I also agree that it's difficult to put a dollar value on their R&D. However, it has been my experience that almost all one-year-old startups vastly exaggerate the value of their intellectual portfolio. Many founders of small companies have the conceit that any idea of theirs or their programmers will be important or even revolutionary. As a result, many of them end up wasting lots of money on patent attorneys.
You'd have a pretty hard time convincing legal that they should waste their budget on filing stupid patents.
Were I have worked, the legal department of a company is not involved in the patent process. That's because the legal department only has attorneys that specialize in corporate law, not patent law.
Where I have worked, the company trying to acquire a patent will bypass its legal department and will hire an outside law firm with attorneys who specialize in patent law. The patent attorneys charge something like $450/hr. They do not offer advice on whether the patent is worthwhile. If they did offer advice on whether the patent is worthwhile, they would alienate most of their clients.
The entire idea of a "patent incentive program" seems preposterous to me. Why on earth would a company want to incentivize employees to churn out patents? Patents are usually worthless. The vast majority of patents (like 99%) have absolutely no value. Most patents will not yield enough money to recover the $5000 spent on incentivizing the employee, to say nothing about the many thousands spent on patent attorneys.
Generating valuable intellectual property is enormously more difficult, and far more valuable, than patenting things. I could come up with 10 patentable ideas off the top of my head (and I have patents from various employers).
I would also have grave concerns about any company that focused on patents. In almost every such company I've dealt with, they did not have any intellectual property worth patenting. It is an absurd presumption for any company that they will turn out discovery after discovery which warrants protection, or that they will turn out discovery after discovery if they institute an incentive to do so. Instead of worrying about patents, their concern should be having one discovery or one program that is worth anything at all. If they manage that, then they'll be ahead of 90% of startups. But if they concern themselves with protecting intellectual property rather than generating it then they're in big trouble.
However, if the company is insistent on offering incentives for patents, then it should offer incentives based upon how much money others will pay to license the intellectual property and use the patent. If the amount others are willing to pay for a given patent is "$0" (most likely) then the incentive to employees should be nothing.
In other words, if they offer a monetary incentive per patent, then the employee is paid to produce any kind of patent. The idea is absurd. Happily, the USPTO no longer accepts patents for perpetual motion machines, otherwise I as an employee would generate 20 patents just for that.
I'm always extremely skeptical when a scientific outsider claims that his scientific discoveries are being suppressed by conspiracies and totalitarian forces.
Not to mention, Purdey's hypotheses seem to be based on nothing more than coincidences and selective correlations.
But Purdey seems to pay attention only to some correlations. He ignores the correlations which would destroy his hypothesis. For example, he ignores that Kuru disease (a prion disease affecting humans) has only been found in cannibal tribes in the South Pacific, and has never occurred near nuclear waste facilities or anywhere else. Furthermore, he ignores the fact that variable crutzfeld-jacob disease occurred almost exclusively in Great Britain where feeding cows to other cows was widespread; the disease occurred only rarely anywhere else, and it almost never occurred in the Ukraine around Pripyat/Chernobyl where the radioisotopes like strontium-90 are much more common.
...It seems that Purdey's method of "total environmental analysis" could easily lead to spurious correlations. If you look carefully through thousands of factors to find correlations, you will always find some by chance. In some fields, that method is called "torturing the data until it confesses".
Prions don't self replicate, it's a substance that catalyzes (speeds up) the reaction of refolding an existing protein into another shape...I believe the word 'toxin' is a better description.
You're mistaken. Prions self-replicate by inducing other proteins to fold into prions like themselves. Prions thereby replicate and increase their numbers exponentially until they damage the organism. When symptoms appear, this process of exponential growth is already 95% complete and the organism will soon be dead. At that point, the organism is much more infectious because the number of prions is far higher than originally.
Because prions replicate themselves, they bio-accumulate over time. Since organisms can "inherit" the prions of other organisms by ingesting them, the prions can accumulate across generations. Which means that you can feed cows to other cows continuously, and the number of prions in the cow population will increase over generations. It may take several generations of cow cannibalism before disease will become apparent.
The prion hypothesis was interesting precisely because it proposed a mechanism of replication and infectivity which was not based upon DNA or RNA.
i.e. Certain to lose c. $5000
1*$5000=$5000
Might win jackpot
1/8*10^7 * -$1*10^6 =(approx) -$0.01
Total losses weighted for jackpot=$5000.
The situation is even worse than that.
Generally, investors are compensated for assuming additional risk. That's why the average returns are higher for stocks than bonds--because stocks pay a risk premium.
With lotteries, on the other hand, the investor pays money to assume risk, rather than being paid for it. (It defies logic that people will pay money to assume risk when they would be paid for assuming risk in an alternative investment).
If people wanted to take incredible risks, then they could do so in the stock market by using derivatives and leverage. They could easily set up investments where the chances of failure are very high and the payouts are also very high. But the stock market investment would have a risk-adjusted payout that's positive, whereas the lottery has a risk-adjusted payout that's a 90% loss.
How can a company with $24B in sales, $3B in profit, and $40B in cash and assets (2007 figures) have a market cap of $160B?
Actually, Apple has $4.6 billion in profit.
Usually, market caps are much greater than yearly profits. If they were the same, then that would mean the investment could yield 100% per year in earnings, which is much higher than usual.
Right now, Apple would pay about 3% per year if they distributed all their earnings as dividends to investors. That figure isn't very high, so why is Apple's stock price (and market cap) so high?
Apple's stock price is high because wall street expects that Apple's profits will increase substantially in the future. The high stock price is based on anticipated future returns. If Apple were a "no-growth" company then it's market cap would be about half what it is.
(If you subtract the cash and assets from the market cap, you have $120B, which is what wall street thinks the risk-adjusted discounted net present value of all future earnings from Apple will be. Wall street expects those earnings to increase.)
I'm not sure I would invest in Apple at current prices. I'd rather put my money in intel or even microsoft.
The difference between Microsoft and Apple, is that Microsoft is seen as a NECESSITY for business, whereas Apple's products are seen as COOL. But cool is fleeting. I could see young people dropping their iPods 5 years from now the same way young people dropped acid-washed jeans, Doc Martens, and Walkmans. But businesses will never drop Wintel. Never.
I'm not sure that the risk of "suddenly uncool" has been adequately factored into Apple's share price.
Apple is also larger than oracle, sap, and cisco, and nearly as large as IBM. The only tech company larger than Apple by any significant margin is Microsoft; but even then, Apple is more than 60% as large as Microsoft and is growing considerably faster.
Slashdot Mirror
Tuberculosis, pneumonia, lyme disease (treatment and vaccine), leprosy, and gonorrhea.
With regard to chronic diseases like arthritis, diabetes, etc. Those diseases are extremely difficult to cure. Most of those diseases are genetic or are the result of age-related damage. Take arthritis for example; it's caused by joint cartilege having been worn away over years, faster than it could heal.
Most chronic diseases are the result of age-related damage (arthritis, atherosclerosis, dementia, others), or have ultimate causes which are not understood (asthma, allergies, chrohn's, alzheimers, rheumatoid arthritis, others), or are genetic (tay-sachs, others). Those diseases could not be cured by a drug. No small-molecule drug could selectively repair genetic defects, or regenerate lost tissue in the correct places to youthful levels. Drugs can only interfere with ongoing biological process, and as such can only slow down or halt disease progression, or interfere with symptoms.
This is not because of a plot by big pharma. It's just the nature of the beast.
Thanks for your thoughtful post. I'm glad someone had the courage to dissent and to do so intelligently.
With that said, I will disagree with a few things you posted.
Nuclear waste loses most of it's radioactivity fairly quickly. It loses 99.99% of its radioactivity within 500 years. After which, the remaining waste is so weakly radioactive that it's comparatively benign. After 500 years, the radioactivity from the waste is so weak that the primary danger from that waste is heavy metal poisoning, not radiation. In other words, after 500 years the waste is a health hazard similar to mercury or lead, except it's buried under a mountain in casks.
The cost for permanent storage of nuclear waste is imposed on the industry as a surcharge. That surcharge paid for Yucca Mountain and will pay for the next permanent storage facility, although it will take some time to save up enough money again.
Our children would be totally unaffected by a single small area of radiation buried deeply within a single mountain in the middle of a remote arid desert.
Solar is nowhere near to being cost-competitive.
Wind is fairly cost-competitive, but only if it's accompanied with natural gas plants for when the wind isn't blowing. Those natural gas plants still emit carbon dioxide. Granted, the wind+gas combination would reduce CO2 emissions by about 80% compared to a coal-fired plant. However, the remaining 20% CO2 emissions are still far more damaging than nuclear waste.
Don't get me wrong, the wind+gas combination is much better than what we're doing now, but it's not the best option.
Maybe I'm getting hot under the collar over nothing. I'm not meaning to carry on with some kind of flame war.
Perhaps I'm being overly feisty.
Are you totally incapable of even reading?
I said the article mentioned Europe.
You started your absurd rant about healthcare before networkBoy even posted.
You did post nothing but verbal diarrhea. Who knows why you were modded up. Sometimes it seems that mods are almost at random.
Crimony, chill out buddy.
Speaking of "content-free". He did actually post one fact--not much, but more than all your posts put together.
Your posts are verbal diarrhea. All of them. You have said absolutely nothing substantive. I can't imagine why anyone is modding you up.
By the way, the article was not about the merits of various healthcare systems. It was about antitrust reviews of the Sun/Oracle merger. Granted, it did mention Europe. Apparently, mentioning Europe is all it takes to trigger this kind of reaction out of you...
Recently, I read an article on slashdot that OSS UI development should stop imitating Mac and Windows, and should start innovating. Also, I've read various things from Eric Raymond and others that OSS should be prized for its innovativeness. But I think that's all wrong. OSS is most valuable when it's not innovative. The most successful OSS projects (like Linux, gcc, mysql, OpenSSL, and others) have been shameless clones, while the innovative OSS projects (like Hurd) died off. Of course there are exceptions, but usually OSS software is the generic drug of the software industry.
There's nothing wrong with that.
First, 62% refers to the number of shares, and not the number of stockholders as the summary claims. Probably, the 62% mostly represents 30 or 40 large shareholders, made up of pension funds, stock funds, and rich people. Second, 62% refers to the number of outstanding shares, not the number of shares for which there was a vote. Very small shareholders rarely bother to vote their shares and do not vote one way or the other. I doubt very many shareholders voted in opposition to this deal, which would be very silly because Sun's prospects without this deal are very dim.
That's actually a fairly low barrier to entry for competitors.
To compete with google, you would need to hire 950 low-wage people to scan books for a few years. If the average person can scan 4 books per day, then they can scan 1 million books per year. You would also need some lawyers to negotiate a settlement, however you would presumably need far fewer lawyers than scanners in order to write a single 160-page agreement like the kind google has written. You could even make it easier for the publishers to reach an agreement with your company by offering the publishers better terms than those which google has offered, so they would stand to make more money than they make off google and would be inclined to agree to your contract without too much trouble.
All of those things could be done by a typical medium-sized company if google demonstrates that book scanning is a profitable venture by making money off it.
If google starts charging "unbearably high prices" for orphan books, as someone in the NYT article claims, then competitors will spring up because the barrier to entry is so low and because so many enterpreneurs are searching for ways to make money and would be motivated by even less than "unbearably high prices".
This book is one of the most concise and descriptive computer books I've read. The book gets right to the point and explains things in an understandable yet compact way. Every paragraph of this book contains real content, which is unusual; and which spares the reader the necessity of skipping over, filtering through, and disregarding superfluous material as is necessary with so many other books.
Despite being concise, the book is remarkably thorough. It explains things about the C language (like parsing complex type declarations) which most books on the C language do not explain.
In addition to being concise, it was written with an admirable prose style which is rare among computer books. Apparently, its author (Kernighan) could write in the English language.
After typing "homeopathy" in the search box on drugstore.com, I found this.
It appears to be a homeopathic remedy for head lice. The remedy is administered on your head and is ingested by the lice. Immediately, I was intrigued. How would a homeopathic remedy kill head lice? What kind of homeopathic remedy would kill things?
I clicked on the "ingredients" tab which lists one active ingredient: sodium chloride (table salt) in a 1X dilution (10% dilution). In other words, brine. Not even an extremely dilute brine.
This brine costs $20 and comes with a free comb.
So I clicked on the "review" tab and found some satisfied customers:
This reviewer picked out nits from her daughter's hair, for a week straight. But she doesn't think that's what reduced the lice population. No. It was the brine that did it.
Brine is worth every penny if you pay about 5 pennies for a gallon.
I also object to the claim that this study is "the first quantitative, scientific comparison of alternative energy solutions". That statement is clearly mistaken.
The topic of alternative energy generation has been the subject of intense study and interest for the last decade. As a result, there have been many papers published which include models for power generation and which compare the various kinds of power generation. Not only is this paper not the first, but it probably is not even within the first 100.
It's very easy to throw together a model with a few equations. You can do that in a couple of days. As a result, it's been done many, many times already.
Some of the other models which were done before this one, use much more realistic assumptions, and arrive at very different conclusions.
This "study" is not really a study, but a model. As such, it's only as good as its assumptions. Unfortunately, many of its assumptions are completely wrong or totally implausible.
For example, the model predicts that nuclear power emits 25x as much carbon as wind power. You may wonder how that could be possible. It's possible because that conclusion follows from the model's assumptions which are all wrong, as follows.
First, the model compares the carbon output of new windmills, versus the carbon output of obsolete ways of refining uranium as an average over the last 40 years. Since refining uranium is far less carbon-intensive than it was, we should use the new figures only. It does not matter how much carbon was emitted by uranium enrichment for plants in the 1960s. Nobody is suggesting building those. We are debating whether we should build new nuclear power plants, or new windmills. As such, we should compare the carbon output of new uranium enrichment against new windmills. In this case the author clearly commits the "sunk cost fallacy", and the assumption is totally wrong.
Another mistaken assumption behind carbon emissions of nuclear plants, is carbon emissions from delays in plant constructions. The author assumes that nuclear power plants will take 10+ years to construct, and in the mean time, we will continue to generate electricity by burning coal. On the other hand, he assumes that the delay associated with windmills is "zero". However, that assumption is totally wrong. Windmills will lead to "zero delay" only if the United States throws away every coal-burning plant we have and replaces them with windmills this year. Since that will never happen, the assumption is wrong. In actuality, those coal plants will be decomissioned at the end of their useful lives and will be replaced by either wind, nuclear, or something else. So, the delay associated with nuclear or wind would probably be quite similar. Since this factor alone accounts for most of the "25x as much carbon" which nuclear is said to produce, that figure is refuted.
And there are other assumptions which are wrong. For example, the model assumes that nuclear power will lead to nuclear weapons which will cause a nuclear war with a resulting environmental catastrophe. Since nuclear power cannot be used to construct nuclear weapons, this assumption is mistaken. Unfortunately, the author makes many errors when he discusses the relationship between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. In actuality, nuclear power has almost no probability of starting a nuclear war.
The paper states that "Worldwide, nine countries have known nuclear weapons stockpiles (US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea)" and shortly thereafter concludes that "Thus, the ability of states to produce nuclear weapons today follows directly from their ability to produce nuclear power". But that is entirely wrong. It's a spurious correlation. The reason some countries have nuclear power plants, and the same countries have nuclear weapons, is because those countries are technologically advanced, which causes both nuclear weapons and nuclear power; not because nuclear power causes nuclear weapons.
And there are other assumptions about nuclear (not related to carbon emissions) which are equally unrealistic. For example, the model claims that nuclear "produces fuel rods that are usually stored on site for several years in cooling ponds pending transport to a permanent site" and somehow concludes that nuclear has as much of a detrimental effect on wildlife as coal power. I honestly have no idea how he derived that conclusion (he doesn't say). It seems to me that mass strip-mining of the countryside (including mass-strip mining for serpentine rock if we intend to use that for mineral sequestration) every year, would greatly outweigh nuclear power's single kilometer of radioactivity buried deep beneath a single mountain in an isolated arid desert in Nevada, once. In fa
I seem to be one of the few people on this forum that favors a bailout, although I think the current bailout is far from ideal for various reasons.
I noticed your post was entitled "I know you're scared, but please think." However, a similar comment would apply to many of the opponents of a bailout (not necessarily you). To some of those opponents, we could say: "I know you're angry, but please think."
Nobody has ever suggested spending $700B on bailing out wall st executives. The bill provides $700B to buy distressed assets which will be re-sold at a later time. The assets will be purchased at a price higher than the market will pay for them right now; probably they'll be purchased for around $0.35 on the dollar. When the assets are re-sold, if they have lost value, then the gov't automatically gains a large equity position in the company which originally held the assets in order to offset the loss (the gov't gains warrants in exchange for buying the crappy assets).
This plan would not cost anywhere near $700B. Since the plan would purchase assets for $700B that have a non-zero value, the plan would ultimately cost a fraction of $700B, realistically $50-200B.
I have read through various polls now, where pollsters contacted random people in the population and asked them their opinion about the bailout. None of the people contacted held anything like a correct idea of the bailout. All of them thought something like: "we're going to SPEND $700B of MY money and GIVE it to wall st fat cats who caused this mess in the first place?!?!?!". Those people have a absolutely no idea of what the bailout consists of. They read the headlines ("$700B bailout for wall st") and misinterpreted it, then reacted with rage, then called their congressmen.
At present, the credit market is seizing up. That is not a fiction invented by Paulson to scare people. Two days ago, the LIBOR rate increased by 2% and the TED spread increased to 3%. That has two implications: 1) lowering the fed funding rate no longer has any effect whatsoever; 2) the interest rates on practically every ARM in this country went up by 2% on that day, as well as the interest rates on many credit cards, student loans, and so on.
We have a heavily indebted population. If the interest rates on their debt remains at elevated levels because of a credit crunch, then the cost of that to our economy would greatly, greatly exceed the fraction of $700B that a bailout would cost.
Not to mention, we have several heavily indebted corporations that will not survive a credit crisis (like ford and GM, probably). Some of those corporations will not have access to lending and will go under, all at once, triggering a severe recession with higher unemployment. The cost of that would be far higher than the fraction of $700B that the bailout costs.
It's quite possible to engineer a bailout which saves the economy far more money than the bailout would cost. It would be a big mistake not to do so. I'm not necessarily endorsing the Paulson plan, and I'm not saying that any plan has to be passed this very day, and I'm not saying we should just hand Paulson $700B with no oversight. But it's very important that something is passed within the next month or so.
Even if they're in business, it's possible they're mistaken.
The fed does not need $500B from anyone. The fed can open the discount window as far as it likes by generating money at will, at the cost of further inflation months down the road. The unique thing about the fed is this: when it writes a check, the money does not come out of any account, but is created out of thin air, as an accounting practice.
At present, the "TED spread" has increased to 3% which implies that fed lending is now completely ineffective. It would not matter how much the fed lends, or at what interest rates. The fed is already basically giving away money for free to banks, but they still do not lend.
The belief that an investment "cannot possibly go down" is a self-denying prophecy, meaning that people believing in it causes it not to be true.
If people find an investment which has never gone down, then they believe the investment pays them good money with no risk whatsoever. As a result, they bid that investment up into the stratosphere. They are not concerned with the unrealistic price because the investment has no risk (in their opinion).
In other words, peoples' belief that an investment has no risk causes that investment to become overvalued and to generate massive risk where there may have been none previously.
Oddly enough, things which are said to have "NEVER gone down" often crash terribly.
Back in the 1970s there was an investment book which recommended a portfolio of 50 of the largest corporations in America. The strategy was called "the nifty fifty." These fifty large corporations were negatively correlated, meaning that when one went up, the other went down. The author of the book calculated that these 50 companies had never gone down as a group. Shortly thereafter, those companies were trading at 3x their normal value, then they all crashed at the same time.
What a silly rant. Just so you know, the word "incentivize" is legitimate English usage, whereas the term "cock-punch" is not.
There are thousands of cases in English where the suffix "-ize" is used to create a verb. Some common examples are: "summarize" and "realize." Of course it can be taken too far. But the word "incentivize" was added to various dictionaries in the 1960s after it had been in common usage for years. If you wanted to protest it then you're a bit late now.
The original poster works for a one year-old startup that I doubt has an intellectual property department or would be able to use a portfolio of patents to fend off legal attacks. I see your point when it comes to large corporations but I doubt his company could assemble enough patents in one domain to fence off anything.
For better or for worse, it wasn't just my company--it was the norm. Outsourcing patent legal issues was happening everywhere. I never encountered a company with fewer than 50 employees that had even one dedicated patent attorney on staff as part of their legal department. I presume your experience was with larger companies where that might have been the case and they may have been patent attorneys. However I doubt that a smallish company could justify having patent attorneys on staff.
Thus far I have never encountered a single company that "churns out" significant inventions. Even companies that invest massively in R&D, like IBM and google, only come up with meaningful inventions once in awhile. However, the original poster did not claim that he works for google or IBM. He claimed that he works for a "one-year old startup". My point is this: if a one-year-old startup thinks they're "churning out" inventions, then they're probably sadly deluded. The chances of them having even one invention worth patenting is probably close to zero. A one-year-old company should focus their scarce money on generating intellectual property and should have at most one or two patents; and those patents were probably created by the founders. But the businesspeople who run that company may just think they'll just hire some programmers, pay them $5000 per major invention, then suddenly have tons of breakthrough innovations. They're probably kidding themselves and wasting their money.
I recently spent a long time reviewing the hundreds of patents related to compression. Compression is one of the areas of software which has significant patent activity. Nevertheless, almost all the patents were farcical, absurd, or provably wrong. In fact, there was exactly one company (IBM) that had generated any patents in the last 20 years of any value at all. The other patents were from small companies who believed that their 3-4 silly programmers were churning out brilliant ideas worth millions.
Drug patents are not analogous to software patents. Drug patents cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and bring to market, so they are worth protecting. The amount of money invested per drug patent is immense, so a patent is reasonable.
Drugs are generated by professional scientists who spend years or decades on one drug or condition, plus thousands of employees that run clinical trials. Drugs are not generated by lone drug scientists who cavalierly spit out major drug discoveries rapidly by themselves at 1-year-old startups because they're paid $5000 every time they do so.
I agree with you that most companies don't try to sell their patents. I also agree that it's difficult to put a dollar value on their R&D. However, it has been my experience that almost all one-year-old startups vastly exaggerate the value of their intellectual portfolio. Many founders of small companies have the conceit that any idea of theirs or their programmers will be important or even revolutionary. As a result, many of them end up wasting lots of money on patent attorneys.
Were I have worked, the legal department of a company is not involved in the patent process. That's because the legal department only has attorneys that specialize in corporate law, not patent law.
Where I have worked, the company trying to acquire a patent will bypass its legal department and will hire an outside law firm with attorneys who specialize in patent law. The patent attorneys charge something like $450/hr. They do not offer advice on whether the patent is worthwhile. If they did offer advice on whether the patent is worthwhile, they would alienate most of their clients.
The entire idea of a "patent incentive program" seems preposterous to me. Why on earth would a company want to incentivize employees to churn out patents? Patents are usually worthless. The vast majority of patents (like 99%) have absolutely no value. Most patents will not yield enough money to recover the $5000 spent on incentivizing the employee, to say nothing about the many thousands spent on patent attorneys.
Generating valuable intellectual property is enormously more difficult, and far more valuable, than patenting things. I could come up with 10 patentable ideas off the top of my head (and I have patents from various employers).
I would also have grave concerns about any company that focused on patents. In almost every such company I've dealt with, they did not have any intellectual property worth patenting. It is an absurd presumption for any company that they will turn out discovery after discovery which warrants protection, or that they will turn out discovery after discovery if they institute an incentive to do so. Instead of worrying about patents, their concern should be having one discovery or one program that is worth anything at all. If they manage that, then they'll be ahead of 90% of startups. But if they concern themselves with protecting intellectual property rather than generating it then they're in big trouble.
However, if the company is insistent on offering incentives for patents, then it should offer incentives based upon how much money others will pay to license the intellectual property and use the patent. If the amount others are willing to pay for a given patent is "$0" (most likely) then the incentive to employees should be nothing.
In other words, if they offer a monetary incentive per patent, then the employee is paid to produce any kind of patent. The idea is absurd. Happily, the USPTO no longer accepts patents for perpetual motion machines, otherwise I as an employee would generate 20 patents just for that.
I read some of Purdey's stuff.
I'm always extremely skeptical when a scientific outsider claims that his scientific discoveries are being suppressed by conspiracies and totalitarian forces.
Not to mention, Purdey's hypotheses seem to be based on nothing more than coincidences and selective correlations.
But Purdey seems to pay attention only to some correlations. He ignores the correlations which would destroy his hypothesis. For example, he ignores that Kuru disease (a prion disease affecting humans) has only been found in cannibal tribes in the South Pacific, and has never occurred near nuclear waste facilities or anywhere else. Furthermore, he ignores the fact that variable crutzfeld-jacob disease occurred almost exclusively in Great Britain where feeding cows to other cows was widespread; the disease occurred only rarely anywhere else, and it almost never occurred in the Ukraine around Pripyat/Chernobyl where the radioisotopes like strontium-90 are much more common.
...It seems that Purdey's method of "total environmental analysis" could easily lead to spurious correlations. If you look carefully through thousands of factors to find correlations, you will always find some by chance. In some fields, that method is called "torturing the data until it confesses".
You're mistaken. Prions self-replicate by inducing other proteins to fold into prions like themselves. Prions thereby replicate and increase their numbers exponentially until they damage the organism. When symptoms appear, this process of exponential growth is already 95% complete and the organism will soon be dead. At that point, the organism is much more infectious because the number of prions is far higher than originally.
Because prions replicate themselves, they bio-accumulate over time. Since organisms can "inherit" the prions of other organisms by ingesting them, the prions can accumulate across generations. Which means that you can feed cows to other cows continuously, and the number of prions in the cow population will increase over generations. It may take several generations of cow cannibalism before disease will become apparent.
The prion hypothesis was interesting precisely because it proposed a mechanism of replication and infectivity which was not based upon DNA or RNA.
The situation is even worse than that.
Generally, investors are compensated for assuming additional risk. That's why the average returns are higher for stocks than bonds--because stocks pay a risk premium.
With lotteries, on the other hand, the investor pays money to assume risk, rather than being paid for it. (It defies logic that people will pay money to assume risk when they would be paid for assuming risk in an alternative investment).
If people wanted to take incredible risks, then they could do so in the stock market by using derivatives and leverage. They could easily set up investments where the chances of failure are very high and the payouts are also very high. But the stock market investment would have a risk-adjusted payout that's positive, whereas the lottery has a risk-adjusted payout that's a 90% loss.
Actually, Apple has $4.6 billion in profit.
Usually, market caps are much greater than yearly profits. If they were the same, then that would mean the investment could yield 100% per year in earnings, which is much higher than usual.
Right now, Apple would pay about 3% per year if they distributed all their earnings as dividends to investors. That figure isn't very high, so why is Apple's stock price (and market cap) so high?
Apple's stock price is high because wall street expects that Apple's profits will increase substantially in the future. The high stock price is based on anticipated future returns. If Apple were a "no-growth" company then it's market cap would be about half what it is.
(If you subtract the cash and assets from the market cap, you have $120B, which is what wall street thinks the risk-adjusted discounted net present value of all future earnings from Apple will be. Wall street expects those earnings to increase.)
I'm not sure I would invest in Apple at current prices. I'd rather put my money in intel or even microsoft.
The difference between Microsoft and Apple, is that Microsoft is seen as a NECESSITY for business, whereas Apple's products are seen as COOL. But cool is fleeting. I could see young people dropping their iPods 5 years from now the same way young people dropped acid-washed jeans, Doc Martens, and Walkmans. But businesses will never drop Wintel. Never.
I'm not sure that the risk of "suddenly uncool" has been adequately factored into Apple's share price.
Apple is also larger than oracle, sap, and cisco, and nearly as large as IBM. The only tech company larger than Apple by any significant margin is Microsoft; but even then, Apple is more than 60% as large as Microsoft and is growing considerably faster.