Round Two: Tow the rig to international waters near the bay area. Run cables to barges hosting data centers and immigrant IT labor working without visas?
Peter's got the money to pull an Uber on the energy industry
Nuclear power plants and electrical distribution are slightly more expensive than writing an app. "breaking the law" to set up your own nuclear power generation and distribution network would also be less than successful, especially when, unlike roads that Uber depends on, your competition owns the grid.
But OK, I'll bite: Buy an oil drilling rig and tow it to international waters near a city that controls its own grid. Build a nuclear power plant on the rig, run cables to connect the city's grid.
What makes anyone think they have a right to an accounting?
Tax laws. As a tax exempt organization, they have to release their 990 at a minimum. Here you go:
http://www.gatesfoundation.org...
People who donate should expect more information, but the Gates foundation does not solicit donations.
Since no one has addressed McGooey's concerns on Gates' spending on public health:
As McGoey briefly acknowledges, the foundation’s investment of more than $15 billion in this field “has done considerable good.” That seems an understatement. Thanks in part to the Gateses’ strong investment in vaccines for infectious diseases, deaths from measles in Africa have dropped by 90 percent since 2000. Over the last quarter century, tuberculosis mortality worldwide has fallen by 45 percent, while over the last dozen years the number of new malaria cases has dropped by 30 percent. And polio, which in 1988 was endemic in 125 countries, is today endemic in only two. The foundation has also played an important part in fighting the spread of HIV and helping those infected with the virus to lead productive lives. For this, Bill and Melinda Gates deserve much credit.
The question is, has this been the best use of their money? As McGoey notes, chronic diseases, as opposed to communicable ones, exact a staggering toll worldwide, yet the foundation has invested less than 4 percent of its funding in research on them, and the global health community has largely followed suit. “The failure to combat obesity, cancer and heart disease epidemics in poor nations,” she observes, “has been one of the most glaring mistakes of global development efforts in recent years.”
So she agrees they have spent their money very effectively, but criticize them for not trying to fix problems in third world countries that have proven to be intractable in first world countries.
Hokeydokey.
The Gates Foundation hasn't cured cancer, heart disease, or the obesity epidemic, therefore it is ineffective. Then she criticizes them for not creating primary care infrastructure in third world countries. Until recently, that is, when they started spending money on creating primary care infrastructure.
I'd say that this century corporate greed in Pharma has improved efficiency in giving back revenue to the stockholders and bankers (stock buybacks, M&A) but hasn't done much at all for R&D. I don't see how the picture would improve if the incentive (market exclusivity) to throw money into a hole for a decade or more before finding out if there will be be a payout (typical for pharmaceutical R&D) is removed.
Didn't you read the follow-up story?. The free market fixed that problem, and the medicine is selling for a buck now.
Not quite that simple: many folks won't have access to a compounding pharmacy, the drug isn't for sale yet that I can tell, and for many or most drugs a compounding pharmacy won't be able to help. I think the real answer is pretty similar to your answer about money: not all monopolies are evil and we shouldn't abandon all monopolies. When rent seekers like Actelion and Turing learn to game the system it's time to reform the rules on restricted distribution and returning generic drugs to exclusive status; it's not time to blow up the FDA.
I think a good answer would be a combination of transparency, delays, and being fully subject to insider trading and other financial laws (no more "speech and debate" defenses). I don't think it would be too much to ask that elected officials give up much more of their financial privacy during their term of office, especially if a delay in the release of the information is incorporated. I also think it would make sense for public officials (and in some cases their staff) to be forced to wait to buy or sell securities for at least two full trading days after publicly announcing the order. Once they announce the intent they have to follow through: they can protect themselves from swings in the market during the delay by placing limit orders. For quid pro quos that execute a year or more after they leave office, PACs, etc.: heck if I know.
Drugs have to treat a disease to get approved, and aging isn't considered a disease. But if it is proven to treat memory loss or cardiovascular conditions it could get breakthrough status and sail through ASAP.
It's a good sized city with plenty of city things to do
Yes, cities are generic that way. Go to city, go to House Of Blues, catch a travelling broadway show, leave city. Seriously - if you can't name 5 amazing and important (to you) things about where you live you aren't living there - you're stuck there.
Diesel trucks are not designed to carry people, they are designed to carry freight
Around me they are marketed as capable of towing yachts and carrying other trucks, but designed to carry the American Dream of being Bigger, Louder, and Shinier than the next guy. A few do have contractor toolboxes in the back, but most are commuting to work or class with an empty cooler and a bungee cord in the bed. At least the genuine freight haulers aren't so fucking loud.
Thumbing your nose at burdensome regulations is all very nice until your car is impounded for not being registered, something you may not be able to do in the future if you don't get your car fixed.
One: support contracts are rarely, if ever, perpetual.
Read the comment I responded to:
Instead, an open source product should always be offered for the smallest amount that constitutes a legal sale, and then income generated by supporting it for perpetuity.
Two: does the phrase "bid out separately" ring a bell, and if so, do you understand what it means?
Yes and yes, but congratulations on going ad hominem.
If the offer is exposure - put exposure in the contract. The link to your company goes on their landing page for X months with a guaranteed minimum number of genuine clicks, you get introductions to Y of their clients that meet your criteria, etc. Or just a straight up guarantee of so much new business through the exposure or the contract reverts to cash + 5%.
If they aren't paying in cash, make certain their payment to you is more valuable to you than the cash price.
The support contract would either be bid out separately or part of the original contract. So: Congratulations! You owe the federal government perpetual support for $1.
Explain the syntheses of 2-(1H-benzotriazol-1-yl)-1,1,3,3-tetramethyluronium hexauorophosphate) and 1-[Bis-(dimethylamino)methyliumyl]-1H-1,2,3-triazolo[4,5- b]pyridine-3-oxide hexafluorophosphate , then explain which coupling agent should be used in which situations.
Those two were certainly great communicators, but they had the advantage of describing very general phenomena, as opposed to things that have to be classified based on ten different axes of minute differences. If Einstein had studied the role of the central lateral nucleus of the thalamus vs the paracentral nucleus of the thalamus he would have used jargon when speaking to neuroscientists.
Poor scientists use a lot of complexity and jargon to camouflage the fact that they aren't actually saying anything important.
I think excessive jargon is much more a problem in the humanities than it is in most sciences. To get published in most journals you need to be able to condense your work down to an "elevator speech" for the abstract and the conclusions. You may also have to condense that down even further to a simple cartoon for the graphical abstract. You also generally have to be able to intelligibly present a poster of your work to people who are only tangentially involved in your field.
We use jargon to avoid ambiguity. If you want your work to be replicated, or in many cases even understood, you have to be specific. The term "coupling agent" makes sense and is almost self explanatory in chemistry, but it could refer to (1-[Bis-(dimethylamino)methyliumyl]-1H-1,2,3-triazolo[4,5- b]pyridine-3-oxide hexafluorophosphate) or maybe (2-(1H-benzotriazol-1-yl)-1,1,3,3-tetramethyluronium hexauorophosphate), or maybe just dicyclohexylcarbodiimide. You can use the acronyms instead, but both the author and the audience still need to know what the molecules are if they are going to understand why a specific one was used.
1. The vast majority of dollars for training people in biomedical chemistry in the US is NIH/NSF. State funding comes next. If you are trained in the US you may have gotten a private scholarship, or if you are on a J-1 a scholarship from a foreign government, but in that case the lab training you is still running on an NIH grant, the equipment you are using was purchased on an NIH grant, the building you are in was built with state/fed dollars...
2. Many of the most productive researchers in Europe and Asia did a PhD or postdoc in the US. A stint at a major US university lab gives you a huge leg up in the job market back home - as well as a better chance of getting a job at a US university, biotech, or pharma. So drugs invented outside the US often have some US training dollars involved. Plenty of US invented drugs will have contributions from scientists from Europe and Asia - but again, they are likely to have been partially trained in the US.
3. Have a look at this chart of where drugs are invented.
50-75% (I don't have numbers for Canada/Mexico but their contributions are relatively tiny) are still invented in the US, vs ~15-40% in Europe, 5-20% from Asia.
Easy to poke holes in, but short of spending a few weeks digging through patent filings and economic reports to figure out if the US governments (Fed and state) fund a majority or just a plurality, it's what I've got.
Slashdot Mirror
So for both Amazon's and your neighbor's drones: how about limiting drones transiting private residential property to an altitude of 200-400 feet?
Yes! I only have time for games ... that make me build things.
If you have time to play games on a PC, you have time to build a PC. If you read Slashdot, you would probably enjoy building one. So build it.
Round Two: Tow the rig to international waters near the bay area. Run cables to barges hosting data centers and immigrant IT labor working without visas?
Peter's got the money to pull an Uber on the energy industry
Nuclear power plants and electrical distribution are slightly more expensive than writing an app. "breaking the law" to set up your own nuclear power generation and distribution network would also be less than successful, especially when, unlike roads that Uber depends on, your competition owns the grid.
But OK, I'll bite: Buy an oil drilling rig and tow it to international waters near a city that controls its own grid. Build a nuclear power plant on the rig, run cables to connect the city's grid.
Then what happens?
"Both the right's fear of government and the left's fear of technology have jointly stunted our nuclear energy policy,"
If we ease the regulations for making new reactors, can we also lift the liability cap and force the owners to pool responsibility?
What makes anyone think they have a right to an accounting?
Tax laws. As a tax exempt organization, they have to release their 990 at a minimum. Here you go: http://www.gatesfoundation.org... People who donate should expect more information, but the Gates foundation does not solicit donations. Since no one has addressed McGooey's concerns on Gates' spending on public health:
As McGoey briefly acknowledges, the foundation’s investment of more than $15 billion in this field “has done considerable good.” That seems an understatement. Thanks in part to the Gateses’ strong investment in vaccines for infectious diseases, deaths from measles in Africa have dropped by 90 percent since 2000. Over the last quarter century, tuberculosis mortality worldwide has fallen by 45 percent, while over the last dozen years the number of new malaria cases has dropped by 30 percent. And polio, which in 1988 was endemic in 125 countries, is today endemic in only two. The foundation has also played an important part in fighting the spread of HIV and helping those infected with the virus to lead productive lives. For this, Bill and Melinda Gates deserve much credit.
The question is, has this been the best use of their money? As McGoey notes, chronic diseases, as opposed to communicable ones, exact a staggering toll worldwide, yet the foundation has invested less than 4 percent of its funding in research on them, and the global health community has largely followed suit. “The failure to combat obesity, cancer and heart disease epidemics in poor nations,” she observes, “has been one of the most glaring mistakes of global development efforts in recent years.”
So she agrees they have spent their money very effectively, but criticize them for not trying to fix problems in third world countries that have proven to be intractable in first world countries.
Hokeydokey.
The Gates Foundation hasn't cured cancer, heart disease, or the obesity epidemic, therefore it is ineffective. Then she criticizes them for not creating primary care infrastructure in third world countries. Until recently, that is, when they started spending money on creating primary care infrastructure.
I'd say that this century corporate greed in Pharma has improved efficiency in giving back revenue to the stockholders and bankers (stock buybacks, M&A) but hasn't done much at all for R&D. I don't see how the picture would improve if the incentive (market exclusivity) to throw money into a hole for a decade or more before finding out if there will be be a payout (typical for pharmaceutical R&D) is removed.
Didn't you read the follow-up story?. The free market fixed that problem, and the medicine is selling for a buck now.
Not quite that simple: many folks won't have access to a compounding pharmacy, the drug isn't for sale yet that I can tell, and for many or most drugs a compounding pharmacy won't be able to help. I think the real answer is pretty similar to your answer about money: not all monopolies are evil and we shouldn't abandon all monopolies. When rent seekers like Actelion and Turing learn to game the system it's time to reform the rules on restricted distribution and returning generic drugs to exclusive status; it's not time to blow up the FDA.
I think a good answer would be a combination of transparency, delays, and being fully subject to insider trading and other financial laws (no more "speech and debate" defenses). I don't think it would be too much to ask that elected officials give up much more of their financial privacy during their term of office, especially if a delay in the release of the information is incorporated. I also think it would make sense for public officials (and in some cases their staff) to be forced to wait to buy or sell securities for at least two full trading days after publicly announcing the order. Once they announce the intent they have to follow through: they can protect themselves from swings in the market during the delay by placing limit orders. For quid pro quos that execute a year or more after they leave office, PACs, etc.: heck if I know.
Why in the world do you think he should react any differently when you ask him to give you his money for free?
You are the only one talking about getting something for free. For everyone else it's quid pro quo.
Drugs have to treat a disease to get approved, and aging isn't considered a disease. But if it is proven to treat memory loss or cardiovascular conditions it could get breakthrough status and sail through ASAP.
Being a firefighter is dangerous; damned dangerous.
In the US it is actually a safer (2.5 deaths per 100,000 workers) than average (3.5 deaths per 100,000 workers) job.
It's either that, or get NO service during a disaster. Think very, very carefully before you decide which option is better.
or just give emergency services first priority, text messaging 2nd, email 3rd, ...
It's a good sized city with plenty of city things to do
Yes, cities are generic that way. Go to city, go to House Of Blues, catch a travelling broadway show, leave city. Seriously - if you can't name 5 amazing and important (to you) things about where you live you aren't living there - you're stuck there.
Those emissions regulatory requirements are safety tests - for everyone with asthma, COPD, CV problems, etc.
Diesel trucks are not designed to carry people, they are designed to carry freight
Around me they are marketed as capable of towing yachts and carrying other trucks, but designed to carry the American Dream of being Bigger, Louder, and Shinier than the next guy. A few do have contractor toolboxes in the back, but most are commuting to work or class with an empty cooler and a bungee cord in the bed. At least the genuine freight haulers aren't so fucking loud.
Thumbing your nose at burdensome regulations is all very nice until your car is impounded for not being registered, something you may not be able to do in the future if you don't get your car fixed.
One: support contracts are rarely, if ever, perpetual.
Read the comment I responded to:
Instead, an open source product should always be offered for the smallest amount that constitutes a legal sale, and then income generated by supporting it for perpetuity.
Two: does the phrase "bid out separately" ring a bell, and if so, do you understand what it means?
Yes and yes, but congratulations on going ad hominem.
If they aren't paying in cash, make certain their payment to you is more valuable to you than the cash price.
The support contract would either be bid out separately or part of the original contract. So: Congratulations! You owe the federal government perpetual support for $1.
Explain the syntheses of 2-(1H-benzotriazol-1-yl)-1,1,3,3-tetramethyluronium hexauorophosphate) and 1-[Bis-(dimethylamino)methyliumyl]-1H-1,2,3-triazolo[4,5- b]pyridine-3-oxide hexafluorophosphate , then explain which coupling agent should be used in which situations.
Using short words.
Poor scientists use a lot of complexity and jargon to camouflage the fact that they aren't actually saying anything important.
I think excessive jargon is much more a problem in the humanities than it is in most sciences. To get published in most journals you need to be able to condense your work down to an "elevator speech" for the abstract and the conclusions. You may also have to condense that down even further to a simple cartoon for the graphical abstract. You also generally have to be able to intelligibly present a poster of your work to people who are only tangentially involved in your field.
We use jargon to avoid ambiguity. If you want your work to be replicated, or in many cases even understood, you have to be specific. The term "coupling agent" makes sense and is almost self explanatory in chemistry, but it could refer to (1-[Bis-(dimethylamino)methyliumyl]-1H-1,2,3-triazolo[4,5- b]pyridine-3-oxide hexafluorophosphate) or maybe (2-(1H-benzotriazol-1-yl)-1,1,3,3-tetramethyluronium hexauorophosphate), or maybe just dicyclohexylcarbodiimide. You can use the acronyms instead, but both the author and the audience still need to know what the molecules are if they are going to understand why a specific one was used.
1. The vast majority of dollars for training people in biomedical chemistry in the US is NIH/NSF. State funding comes next. If you are trained in the US you may have gotten a private scholarship, or if you are on a J-1 a scholarship from a foreign government, but in that case the lab training you is still running on an NIH grant, the equipment you are using was purchased on an NIH grant, the building you are in was built with state/fed dollars ...
2. Many of the most productive researchers in Europe and Asia did a PhD or postdoc in the US. A stint at a major US university lab gives you a huge leg up in the job market back home - as well as a better chance of getting a job at a US university, biotech, or pharma. So drugs invented outside the US often have some US training dollars involved. Plenty of US invented drugs will have contributions from scientists from Europe and Asia - but again, they are likely to have been partially trained in the US.
3. Have a look at this chart of where drugs are invented.
http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v9/n11/fig_tab/nrd3298_F1.html
50-75% (I don't have numbers for Canada/Mexico but their contributions are relatively tiny) are still invented in the US, vs ~15-40% in Europe, 5-20% from Asia.
Easy to poke holes in, but short of spending a few weeks digging through patent filings and economic reports to figure out if the US governments (Fed and state) fund a majority or just a plurality, it's what I've got.