Would you rather earn $100k today or $833 a month for ten years? Pharmas would much rather sell cures, even if they couldn't price them for substantially more than the total price for a decade of treatments.
There's less incentive to work on PROFITABLE drugs and work on IMPORTANT drugs. (Think cures for cancer instead of Viagra.)
And that's what Pharmas spend the most R&D money on: oncology drugs. After that it's CNS (neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimers), and then cardiovascular. Which is what viagra was originally being developed for: cardiovascular problems like angina and hypertension.
Horseshit. A cure for any major disease would be worth much more than the entire market of treatments it would displace. Want to make a few trillion dollars in less than a decade? Cure Type II Diabetes. The reason Pharmas aren't making cures is because it's a lot harder to create a cure than it is to create a treatment.
Year in, year out, about 25% of drugs are invented by academic labs (read taxpayers). The rest are invented by industry. Industry is also the source of the majority of funds spent on drug research. I think they are actually the source of the majority of life science funding in the US these days (Republican congresses haven't been too interested in increasing NIH funding for a while now).
As to unreasonable profits: What rate of return would convince you to put your money in an investment if you knew it was going to be 10 years before you received the first dollar back - and there was a 90%+ chance of failure to boot?
How would the market reward quicker smaller innovations in drug development? You don't know if it is a viable treatment or not until you finish phase III clinical trials. There's no revenue until after phase III clinical trials.
If Company B cures the disease, then Company B gets paid until nobody has the disease then Company B has to invent a new cure or go out of business.
At that point company B has made more money than all of the treatment manufacturers were making combined. It set a high price for its cure, everyone bought the cure. If the disease was Diabetes, they grossed 2 trillion dollars, easy. At that point B could just buy Google or a medium size country if they still felt like they needed something to do.
Why would A get to market first? B would get much more love from the FDA: breakthrough status and accelerated approval. Plus since it's a cure (only taken once, not forever) it wouldn't have to jump over as many hoops to prove that it is safe. All else being equal, B would get to market months or years ahead of A.
Let me ask you this - You're a pharma with two different Diabetes drugs. They've both made it through phase II clinical trials and have the same side effect/risk profiles. Now you have to pick one to push forward.
Drug A, a cure. Drug B, treatment Time til profit: Since it offers benefits far above a treatment, the cure gets gets a breakthrough therapy designation and accelerated approval from the FDA review panel, leading it to be approved months or years earlier than the treatment. Once in the market, the cure earns all of its revenue FAST. Everyone takes it as soon as they can get it. The treatment takes longer to approve, slowly pulls in market share, and slowly earns revenue over a decade until generic competition kills the margin. Competition: A cure for diabetes would displace all existing treatments as fast as it could be manufactured. It wouldn't even face competition from "me too" cures - by the time they came out every existing diabetic with insurance has already been cured, so you're only fighting over new cases. A treatment would face stiff competition from all of the existing drugs - and thus have huge marketing costs. The situation would only get worse as "me too" therapies showed up a few years later. And marketing costs for the cure would be limiting to hitting "send" on the press releases. Price: Insurance companies wouldn't compare the cost of a cure to the cost of a decade of diabetes drugs, they would compare it to the cost of a decade of diabetes care: hospitalizations, diagnostics, office visits, everything. A pharma could price a cure at $100K and insurance companies would actually save money.
Basically, A good new Diabetes treatment would make a shit ton of money. But by the time it made it to market a cure would have already made its manufacturer the richest company in the world, and probably over 2 trillion dollars in revenue ($25k per dose x 50 million diabetics in the US and the EU) within 5 years.
And why are we eschewing or overlooking treatments—real, honest-to-god treatments—that can let patients lead longer, more normal lives?
They take a pretty narrow view of "we". Once you get past the basic science phase of identifying the cause, the vast majority of funding and FTEs goes to researching treatments. Even though cures would be much more profitable for most diseases, it is very rare for cures to be attainable.
That's great for simple stories. But this further kills the incentive to follow long, complicated stories that take months of investigation of multiple sources. Like say, most government corruption investigations. Still it would be a fair rule, unlike Scott Walker trying to carve out FOIA exemptions to hide embarrassing and potentially corrupt practices.
This argument reminds me of a few years ago when private weather forecasters were trying to kill off the National Weather Service's websites and public forecasts so that they wouldn't have public competition when presenting NWS data and analysis.
For short haul flights many folks will accept folding, thinly padded seats. For long haul flights this will be a great way to force people to "upgrade" to the old, worn, traditional seats without legroom in the front half of the cabin for an extra $35 each. Heads airlines win, tails passengers lose.
FTA: This bubble has been building for less than 1 year, stocks are still up 83% over last year, most of the companies with solid reputations trade on indexes in other countries instead of China. On it's own this correction might wipe out 1 year of market gains, but as mentioned in comments below: if it combines with real estate bubble and the level of debt things could get messy.
1."OCA ownership is transferred to an ISP" Transferred before or after installation? Laws in IL and IN are set up so that once you have a physical presence you don't have to keep it to be subject to sales/use taxes. My company is likely to start having to charge sales tax in IL because we will have a booth in a conference in Chicago for a few days, even though we won't actually sell anything there. Ditto for Indiana once we show up to install equipment.
2. If a chain of stores transferred ownership of stores to the malls they're in on the proviso that the stores are still to be used primarily to distribute the chain's products, I don't think that would exempt them.
And you don't need a better plane to win - just hypersonic missiles, drones, and UHF radar systems that are essentially disposable when you compare the costs. Also - even if we end up with a bigger fleet over all, how many F35s could actually fight in a theatre simultaneously? It doesn't sound like any individual plane will be able to fly many sorties per week with all the maintenance time and $$ required. What would the Iraq war have cost if every sortie flown by an A-10, F-16, or other plane that is being replaced by the F35 was actually flown by an F-35? How big a fleet of F35s would it have taken to actually produce that many sorties on that schedule?
Versions of the F35 are supposed to replace the F16 and the F/A 18 so if the altitude was one that was valid for those planes, it should be valid for the test. Also, in the test the F16:
The F-35 was flying “clean,” with no weapons in its bomb bay or under its wings and fuselage. The F-16, by contrast, was hauling two bulky underwing drop tanks, putting the older jet at an aerodynamic disadvantage.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you rather earn $100k today or $833 a month for ten years? Pharmas would much rather sell cures, even if they couldn't price them for substantially more than the total price for a decade of treatments.
There's less incentive to work on PROFITABLE drugs and work on IMPORTANT drugs. (Think cures for cancer instead of Viagra.)
And that's what Pharmas spend the most R&D money on: oncology drugs. After that it's CNS (neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimers), and then cardiovascular. Which is what viagra was originally being developed for: cardiovascular problems like angina and hypertension.
Horseshit. A cure for any major disease would be worth much more than the entire market of treatments it would displace. Want to make a few trillion dollars in less than a decade? Cure Type II Diabetes. The reason Pharmas aren't making cures is because it's a lot harder to create a cure than it is to create a treatment.
As to unreasonable profits: What rate of return would convince you to put your money in an investment if you knew it was going to be 10 years before you received the first dollar back - and there was a 90%+ chance of failure to boot?
How would the market reward quicker smaller innovations in drug development? You don't know if it is a viable treatment or not until you finish phase III clinical trials. There's no revenue until after phase III clinical trials.
Would you rather be paid $10K today all at once or $83 a month for 10 years?
The industry would just recapitulate the rest of the country: all of the profit would go to the top 0.1%. On average it would do great :)
If Company B cures the disease, then Company B gets paid until nobody has the disease then Company B has to invent a new cure or go out of business.
At that point company B has made more money than all of the treatment manufacturers were making combined. It set a high price for its cure, everyone bought the cure. If the disease was Diabetes, they grossed 2 trillion dollars, easy. At that point B could just buy Google or a medium size country if they still felt like they needed something to do.
But the cure is worth much more money than the treatment. It's like saying Yahoo should buy Google to shelve the competition.
Why would A get to market first? B would get much more love from the FDA: breakthrough status and accelerated approval. Plus since it's a cure (only taken once, not forever) it wouldn't have to jump over as many hoops to prove that it is safe. All else being equal, B would get to market months or years ahead of A.
Drug A, a cure. Drug B, treatment Time til profit: Since it offers benefits far above a treatment, the cure gets gets a breakthrough therapy designation and accelerated approval from the FDA review panel, leading it to be approved months or years earlier than the treatment. Once in the market, the cure earns all of its revenue FAST. Everyone takes it as soon as they can get it. The treatment takes longer to approve, slowly pulls in market share, and slowly earns revenue over a decade until generic competition kills the margin. Competition: A cure for diabetes would displace all existing treatments as fast as it could be manufactured. It wouldn't even face competition from "me too" cures - by the time they came out every existing diabetic with insurance has already been cured, so you're only fighting over new cases. A treatment would face stiff competition from all of the existing drugs - and thus have huge marketing costs. The situation would only get worse as "me too" therapies showed up a few years later. And marketing costs for the cure would be limiting to hitting "send" on the press releases. Price: Insurance companies wouldn't compare the cost of a cure to the cost of a decade of diabetes drugs, they would compare it to the cost of a decade of diabetes care: hospitalizations, diagnostics, office visits, everything. A pharma could price a cure at $100K and insurance companies would actually save money.
Basically, A good new Diabetes treatment would make a shit ton of money. But by the time it made it to market a cure would have already made its manufacturer the richest company in the world, and probably over 2 trillion dollars in revenue ($25k per dose x 50 million diabetics in the US and the EU) within 5 years.
And why are we eschewing or overlooking treatments—real, honest-to-god treatments—that can let patients lead longer, more normal lives?
They take a pretty narrow view of "we". Once you get past the basic science phase of identifying the cause, the vast majority of funding and FTEs goes to researching treatments. Even though cures would be much more profitable for most diseases, it is very rare for cures to be attainable.
That's great for simple stories. But this further kills the incentive to follow long, complicated stories that take months of investigation of multiple sources. Like say, most government corruption investigations. Still it would be a fair rule, unlike Scott Walker trying to carve out FOIA exemptions to hide embarrassing and potentially corrupt practices.
This argument reminds me of a few years ago when private weather forecasters were trying to kill off the National Weather Service's websites and public forecasts so that they wouldn't have public competition when presenting NWS data and analysis.
Is the name of the requester also going to be published, or just the documents requested?
For short haul flights many folks will accept folding, thinly padded seats. For long haul flights this will be a great way to force people to "upgrade" to the old, worn, traditional seats without legroom in the front half of the cabin for an extra $35 each. Heads airlines win, tails passengers lose.
"the Net treats advertising as damage and routes around it"
Actually 7-8 is optimal. More or less than that is associated with increases in all-cause mortality.
FTA: This bubble has been building for less than 1 year, stocks are still up 83% over last year, most of the companies with solid reputations trade on indexes in other countries instead of China. On it's own this correction might wipe out 1 year of market gains, but as mentioned in comments below: if it combines with real estate bubble and the level of debt things could get messy.
For supporting elderly relatives: Macs are great. More recipes, fewer puzzles.
range/cost/ AND charging station availability. None at my work, no way to set one up at my condo.
2. If a chain of stores transferred ownership of stores to the malls they're in on the proviso that the stores are still to be used primarily to distribute the chain's products, I don't think that would exempt them.
Why buy an F-16 for $100M you could spend it on Chinese UHF radar systems and missiles instead? You don't need a plane to shoot down a plane.
And you don't need a better plane to win - just hypersonic missiles, drones, and UHF radar systems that are essentially disposable when you compare the costs. Also - even if we end up with a bigger fleet over all, how many F35s could actually fight in a theatre simultaneously? It doesn't sound like any individual plane will be able to fly many sorties per week with all the maintenance time and $$ required. What would the Iraq war have cost if every sortie flown by an A-10, F-16, or other plane that is being replaced by the F35 was actually flown by an F-35? How big a fleet of F35s would it have taken to actually produce that many sorties on that schedule?
The F-35 was flying “clean,” with no weapons in its bomb bay or under its wings and fuselage. The F-16, by contrast, was hauling two bulky underwing drop tanks, putting the older jet at an aerodynamic disadvantage.