Sometimes it is an obscenity. Price of your asthma inhaler (albuterol) goes up 1000% because of a patent on a new CFC-free formulation that's no better (for the patients) than the now banned version that has CFCs? Run a quick trial on a generic drug (colchicine) and run the price up 1500% for three years because the FDA gave you exclusivity? Use FDA legal gamesmanship to prevent generic manufacturers from getting the samples of your drugs (Lenalidomide, Bosentan) necessary for them to get approval of their generic version of your drugs?
#1. If the drug would theoretically save many lives (in the US) at all, it would be profitable.
#2. So Congress, with its great respect for science, will be a great arbiter for deciding which drug research projects should get billions of dollars?
#3. NO. This is a common fallacy. A cure for any serious ailment would be an absolute goldmine for a pharma. They would price it much higher than any treatment and drive out almost all competition in the market (the ones selling treatments, not cures) in months. Plus, they would get all of their revenue NOW, as opposed to having to sell it for a decade or more.
Want to book $10B in revenue in five years? invent a good diabetes treatment. Want book two trillion dollars in revenue? Invent a cure for type II diabetes. Seriously. It would have a stated price of $50k+, sell for an average price of ~$25K, and easily sell 80 million doses in five years.
You are discounting the Wisdom of Crowds. Just hand 10000 people the data and ask them "Does this drug show efficacy for non-Hodgkins Lymphoma?". The answer will surely be correct to within +/- 10 jellybeans.
The summary and the article don't entirely impress.
But these companies focus exclusively on drugs that can be sold at high prices to large populations
The FDA created incentives for Pharmas to pursue orphan drug indications and guess what? Pharmas pursued orphan drugs:
http://blogs.wsj.com/pharmalot...
Specifically, there were 467 requests for orphan designation last year by the pharmaceutical industry, which represented a nearly 35% increase from 2013, and 293 drugs were granted orphan status by the FDA Office of Orphan Product Development. This amounted to a nearly 13% increase. Ultimately, 49 orphan drugs were approved by the agency, up 53% from 2013. A designation, by the way, means the FDA has decided a drug qualifies for orphan status.
The article:
Most of this anecdotal evidence ends up going nowhere, because there is no easy way for overworked physicians to post and aggregate such possibly random, but occasionally very significant observations. The possibilities here are enormous, because so many of these drugs are already generic, and they have already been approved by the appropriate authorities. Such “off label” uses of very inexpensive, repurposed drugs can be immediate, and lifesaving.
Be very careful what you wish for. For one thing, as you can read everywhere, the aggregate of anecdotes != data. It is very hard to separate the signal from the noise, especially when you are desperate to see a signal in the noise. Andy Groves is infamous for not realizing this and many other differences between the semiconductor and the pharma industries.
For another, if the open source effort succeeds in datamining a possible new indication for a generic drug the prime beneficiary will be (Surprise!) the most predatory pharma companies. Exclusive marketing rights don't start or end with a patent. In the US, you can get exclusive rights by running a trial that finds a new indication for a generic drug. So while the open source folks are begging on GoFundMe, some outfit like URL Pharma will have looked at the open source data, run a trial, gotten approval, and run up the price on the drug 1500% while preventing anyone else from selling it for at least three years. See: Colchicine
Big Pharma is both much more asinine and much more useful than folks give them credit for.
Woodworking is a perfect example: pick a cabinetry project that requires perfectly square edges, exact lengths, and absolutely perfect joints with no gaps. A great craftsman could eventually get the job done with crap tools. But in the same amount of time he could have made three (and a profit!) using good ones.
An expert craftsman might demonstrate mastery using crappy tools - by choosing a project that hides the inaccuracies caused by using crappy tools. Then they will go back to using the best tools they have because time is fucking money.
The interesting question for me is: Will humans actually be flying CAS missions in 10 years or will drones on the one hand and surface to air missiles on the other be so much more cheap and easily obtained that F-35s and A-10s will both just be doing airshows?
Lets track the jobs instead. Next time you apply for a job, you first go to a govt office have to have your I-9 updated to include your biometric data (fingerprint or iris scan: your pick). The biometric data kept will not be enough to uniquely identify you, just good enough so that subsequent fingerprint/iris scans have a false positive rate of ~1% of identifying someone else as you and a false negative rate of less than 0.01% (chance of not identifying you as you.)
Now: apply for your job. State your name and address and get your iris scanned. The employer's scanner encrypts the info and sends it off to the feds. The Feds match you correctly (99.99% of the time), sends back your taxpayer ID and starts the correct W2 or 1099 paperwork for your employer. The employer checks that you gave the correct taxpayer ID and hires you. The Feds can subsidize cell phone sized scanners that work on current cell phone networks, so if folks can send a text they can check whether farmworkers or babysitters are eligible on the spot and within seconds.
Sure, it could be hacked and people would still be hired under the table. But so long as the penalties for hacking or hiring under the table are steep enough most employers won't want to mess with it.
I remember telling a law student this idea and she said that it was awesome. Then I emphasized that it wasn't just for immigrant labor: for it to be useful it would be for CEOs, lawyers: all jobs. Her expression turned sour and she said it wouldn't work.
Depending on when you claim the non-existence of Germany to have begun, you may also be denying the holocaust by extension. To be safe, say Germany ceased to exist last wednesday.
The personally owned ones were bought for hunting and their owners were probably decent shots at well over 50 yards. Without trying to see through giant clouds of smoke and people shooting at them, that is.
So the two foot steel pipe I kept under the driver's seat was legally a cheater bar so long as I had a socket wrench in the trunk that it would fit on?
I was never a big gamer - probably because what I want most from a game is to be amazed, or at least surprised. The vertigo from stepping onto the bridge in Half Life 2 - stuff like that. Some of those moments do require a moderately decent setup, and for that the ~$150 price point for GPUs has generally fit the bill for FPS games for quite some time now.
If the society you belong to has not released its legacy content, ask your leadership, Why not?
Probable answer: Because we gave an exclusive license (with an option to renew) to that content to the publisher, and because the society gets some of that $30 to $50 per article that no one actually pays.
Peer review is free, the people haranguing the reviewers to actually submit reviews (peer review coordinators) are paid. So are the editors, the admin assistants, the multimedia, web design, and IT staff , the rights and permissions managers, the advertising staff...
And count the number of cross-references to increase an article's score (like Google's index). Instead of promoting people based on the number of articles published in some magazine, base it on the score they get on their published articles.
I don't understand why universities haven't taken things into their own hands yet. It's not like they haven't got any smart people to figure this out.
That already happens: things like impact factor and citation numbers are used alongside the number of publications when ranking professors. And University of California did take things into their own hands - they get a big fat discount from publishers like Elsevier. So do other large universities.
The (reputable) journals are typically founded by experts in their fields (the editors on the masthead), when they retire they are replaced by other experts in their fields. Those editors are typically paid. If you go to a kick-ass research university or institute, you will run into quite a few journal editors on the faculty.
Are you kidding? If a scientist could actually make a good case that the current model is wrong his career would be made and he would rapidly become so rich he wouldn't need government funding to continue his work. Nothing succeeds in science like upsetting the old paradigm. Ask Marshall and Warren (Nobel prize in Medicine).
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1. Your first paragraph doesn't inform your second paragraph at all.
All seem pretty obscene to me.
Year in, year out, about 25% of new drugs (NCEs) are invented by public research. 75% are invented by pharmas/biotechs.
Want to book $10B in revenue in five years? invent a good diabetes treatment. Want book two trillion dollars in revenue? Invent a cure for type II diabetes. Seriously. It would have a stated price of $50k+, sell for an average price of ~$25K, and easily sell 80 million doses in five years.
You are discounting the Wisdom of Crowds. Just hand 10000 people the data and ask them "Does this drug show efficacy for non-Hodgkins Lymphoma?". The answer will surely be correct to within +/- 10 jellybeans.
But these companies focus exclusively on drugs that can be sold at high prices to large populations
The FDA created incentives for Pharmas to pursue orphan drug indications and guess what? Pharmas pursued orphan drugs: http://blogs.wsj.com/pharmalot...
Specifically, there were 467 requests for orphan designation last year by the pharmaceutical industry, which represented a nearly 35% increase from 2013, and 293 drugs were granted orphan status by the FDA Office of Orphan Product Development. This amounted to a nearly 13% increase. Ultimately, 49 orphan drugs were approved by the agency, up 53% from 2013. A designation, by the way, means the FDA has decided a drug qualifies for orphan status.
The article:
Most of this anecdotal evidence ends up going nowhere, because there is no easy way for overworked physicians to post and aggregate such possibly random, but occasionally very significant observations. The possibilities here are enormous, because so many of these drugs are already generic, and they have already been approved by the appropriate authorities. Such “off label” uses of very inexpensive, repurposed drugs can be immediate, and lifesaving.
Be very careful what you wish for. For one thing, as you can read everywhere, the aggregate of anecdotes != data. It is very hard to separate the signal from the noise, especially when you are desperate to see a signal in the noise. Andy Groves is infamous for not realizing this and many other differences between the semiconductor and the pharma industries.
For another, if the open source effort succeeds in datamining a possible new indication for a generic drug the prime beneficiary will be (Surprise!) the most predatory pharma companies. Exclusive marketing rights don't start or end with a patent. In the US, you can get exclusive rights by running a trial that finds a new indication for a generic drug. So while the open source folks are begging on GoFundMe, some outfit like URL Pharma will have looked at the open source data, run a trial, gotten approval, and run up the price on the drug 1500% while preventing anyone else from selling it for at least three years. See: Colchicine
Big Pharma is both much more asinine and much more useful than folks give them credit for.
And the rest are for adults that have no time to actually play games, so they are hibernating 23/7 and not really burning any electricity to speak of.
Woodworking is a perfect example: pick a cabinetry project that requires perfectly square edges, exact lengths, and absolutely perfect joints with no gaps. A great craftsman could eventually get the job done with crap tools. But in the same amount of time he could have made three (and a profit!) using good ones.
An expert craftsman might demonstrate mastery using crappy tools - by choosing a project that hides the inaccuracies caused by using crappy tools. Then they will go back to using the best tools they have because time is fucking money.
The interesting question for me is: Will humans actually be flying CAS missions in 10 years or will drones on the one hand and surface to air missiles on the other be so much more cheap and easily obtained that F-35s and A-10s will both just be doing airshows?
Lets track the jobs instead. Next time you apply for a job, you first go to a govt office have to have your I-9 updated to include your biometric data (fingerprint or iris scan: your pick). The biometric data kept will not be enough to uniquely identify you, just good enough so that subsequent fingerprint/iris scans have a false positive rate of ~1% of identifying someone else as you and a false negative rate of less than 0.01% (chance of not identifying you as you.)
Now: apply for your job. State your name and address and get your iris scanned. The employer's scanner encrypts the info and sends it off to the feds. The Feds match you correctly (99.99% of the time), sends back your taxpayer ID and starts the correct W2 or 1099 paperwork for your employer. The employer checks that you gave the correct taxpayer ID and hires you. The Feds can subsidize cell phone sized scanners that work on current cell phone networks, so if folks can send a text they can check whether farmworkers or babysitters are eligible on the spot and within seconds.
Sure, it could be hacked and people would still be hired under the table. But so long as the penalties for hacking or hiring under the table are steep enough most employers won't want to mess with it.
I remember telling a law student this idea and she said that it was awesome. Then I emphasized that it wasn't just for immigrant labor: for it to be useful it would be for CEOs, lawyers: all jobs. Her expression turned sour and she said it wouldn't work.
Shotgun pellets? Look up punt guns. At over 50 mm bore and mounted on boats instead of fired from the shoulder, they should qualify as cannons.
Depending on when you claim the non-existence of Germany to have begun, you may also be denying the holocaust by extension. To be safe, say Germany ceased to exist last wednesday.
So long as RaGaPa doesn't try to inject ads into Google search results pages they will probably be fine.
There *IS* a reason I spend $200/mo for LTE Internet access for my devices.
Your work pays for it?
The personally owned ones were bought for hunting and their owners were probably decent shots at well over 50 yards. Without trying to see through giant clouds of smoke and people shooting at them, that is.
So the two foot steel pipe I kept under the driver's seat was legally a cheater bar so long as I had a socket wrench in the trunk that it would fit on?
I was never a big gamer - probably because what I want most from a game is to be amazed, or at least surprised. The vertigo from stepping onto the bridge in Half Life 2 - stuff like that. Some of those moments do require a moderately decent setup, and for that the ~$150 price point for GPUs has generally fit the bill for FPS games for quite some time now.
Hundreds of billions of machines will be sensing, processing and transmitting data without direct human control and intervention."
Cell phones, cars, kettles from China that come with hidden hardware for plugging into botnets ... we'll be up to a hundred billion easy.
If the society you belong to has not released its legacy content, ask your leadership, Why not?
Probable answer: Because we gave an exclusive license (with an option to renew) to that content to the publisher, and because the society gets some of that $30 to $50 per article that no one actually pays.
Peer review is free, the people haranguing the reviewers to actually submit reviews (peer review coordinators) are paid. So are the editors, the admin assistants, the multimedia, web design, and IT staff , the rights and permissions managers, the advertising staff ...
And count the number of cross-references to increase an article's score (like Google's index). Instead of promoting people based on the number of articles published in some magazine, base it on the score they get on their published articles.
I don't understand why universities haven't taken things into their own hands yet. It's not like they haven't got any smart people to figure this out.
That already happens: things like impact factor and citation numbers are used alongside the number of publications when ranking professors. And University of California did take things into their own hands - they get a big fat discount from publishers like Elsevier. So do other large universities.
The (reputable) journals are typically founded by experts in their fields (the editors on the masthead), when they retire they are replaced by other experts in their fields. Those editors are typically paid. If you go to a kick-ass research university or institute, you will run into quite a few journal editors on the faculty.
winches, Maine ... fallen trees or pulling cars out of ditches?
Are you kidding? If a scientist could actually make a good case that the current model is wrong his career would be made and he would rapidly become so rich he wouldn't need government funding to continue his work. Nothing succeeds in science like upsetting the old paradigm. Ask Marshall and Warren (Nobel prize in Medicine).