There's your fail. Resources are always scarce. And Star Trek is not a 'solution', it is a non-existence of the problem. As in 'hand-waving over it'.
In Star Trek, everybody uses deuterium to create everything (or at least, an episode of Voyager seems to indicate so.) Deuterium is likely the most abundant resource in existence. Every kind of star (including primitive pop III stars) have lots of it.
Your assumption seems to be that the fruits of automation, owned by the few, will somehow be shared by the many. Perhaps they will be, and we'll live in the Star Trek utopia. But I think more dystopian outcomes (extreme wealth inequality sustained through violent repression; revolution and war) to be more likely.
Well picture this: Robots that can make *anything*, including other robots that can make anything.
All it would take is for one person who owns one of these robots to instruct it to make an extra robot for himself, and have the other robot continue producing new copies of itself that he just gives away for free.
I've had the unfortunate experience of using Yahoo in firefox, and I changed it almost immediately because Yahoo search is stupidly slow. It's slowness mainly comes from when you click a link in their search results, the link just points to a yahoo.com redirect page, making it so that hitting your intended target page takes another 4 seconds.
I get why they're doing it, they just want to know what pages you're hitting so that they can improve their search results. But competing search engines have a much better way of doing this: They just use asynchronous javascript to read the click before you actually leave the page.
Even if you turn off all of the phone home settings in Windows 10, it still sends information to Microsoft. It's not fully known what kind of information this is, but it's suspected that it's three things (based on Microsoft's EULA)
- How you configure your UI elements (taskbar and start menu pinning) and when and how often you click on them. - If you use IE or Edge to search with a non-Microsoft owned search engine, your search terms are sent to Bing; that includes private search engines such as duckduckgo. (This alone is huge; it's meant to improve bing, but it basically exposes your every intent online to Microsoft.) - Information about what wifi access points you use (turning the setting for this off only disables password sharing.)
You can't filter this at the network level within the machine either, as the kernel sends this information and ignores proxy, hosts file, and firewall settings to get the information out if it fails while using the user settings. If you want to block this information from being sent, then you need to do something like configure a firewall setting in your router.
Don't forget, many early TNG episodes were originally either TOS episodes or Phase II episodes that were not produced in their intended shows and were adapted for TNG characters/setting, which mainly worked because early TNG was still in its infancy as far as developing that setting and those characters.
IMO Star Trek didn't truly take off until TNG. Also he TNG staff (including the writers) said that the first two seasons were unwatchable. And you know? After having watched the series again in HD recently, I agree. The first season was super boring, and the second season almost as bad. It's probably not a coincidence that the third season was basically the first one that escaped Gene Roddenberry's influence (he had a hand in the second season, but only passively, and had no interaction with the staff during the third season.)
His formula probably worked better for TOS than it did for TNG because TOS was during a whole different era of television.
Well the problem is obviously religion. Notice that in Star Trek, there really isn't any
Actually in TOS I remember there being a lot of Christian theme in it relative to any other Star Trek series. For example, one episode featured a Christian wedding (with cross and all) and another episode (where they found a planet that was like Earth only the Romans continued to exist in the 1960's) and they (Kirk et al) praised the rise of a new cult on that planet that worshiped the sun of God (aka Jesus on Earth) as a sign that the planet was maturing.
However in no other series do I recall any such allusions to Christianity.
Well as somebody who is very anti-communist and pro capitalist, I could see it star trek economics becoming reality without all of the problems inherent to communism. What any economic system sorts out is how you allocate resources to whom. Where communism ultimately fails is that it assumes that people will just always be willing to produce out of the goodness of their hearts for just any old need that somebody wants (which includes jobs that aren't fun and nobody wants to do them unless they're paid, such as being a garbage man or a janitor.)
In Star Trek economics however, there's two problems that are solved without even needing an economy: There are no scarce resources, and there's no need for somebody to be a producer. Why? Because you've got replicators to handle your everyday goods, holodecks to entertain you, and if you want a vacation to florida, either you can holodeck there or beam over there. And since everything is made out of deuterium, there's basically an infinite supply of everything.
We're already starting to see some of that happen. Namely, we're already starting to see "free" production in the form of robots taking over certain jobs. We're a long way off from a star trek economy because a few other things need to be solved (we don't have replicators yet, and not everything can be automatically created) but in terms of making everyday goods out of cheap materials, we're getting pretty close.
Luddites are usually fighting this tooth and nail, but if having a lot of wealth for free (keep in mind, wealth is not money, wealth is material goods) then it's definitely better to just let automation take over anyways.
Reasons for government to do all drug research: #1-drug companies do research for profit only, unprofitable drugs don't get developed no matter how many lives it would save. #2-high cost and risk of developing new drugs. #3-developing a cure is less profitable than a treatment, so corporations would only make the treatment. The drug companies should only do production and distribution.
Ok I'll need you to take off your rose tinted government issue glasses for a minute. Consider the fact that the US has a smaller GDP than the combined EU, and the EU governments take in more taxes than the US government.
Now ask yourself, why is it that the world's most advanced medications always come from for profit corporations in the US, and nowhere else? Why is it that the US is by far the most popular destination for medical tourism, even though in the US, hospitals are owned by private, for profit corporations?
Clearly because government run medicine is so much better, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Reality disagrees with you.
For labeling purposes, maybe, but there is no specific formula like you said there was; this leaves a lot of room for interpretation as to what a fruit cocktail actually is. You could even use the minimum values there and add grapefruit.
Still, this in no way fits the definition of socialism. In fact, since you used wikipedia, let's use it to reinforce what I said earlier:
Socialism is a social and economic system characterised by social ownership and/or social control[1] of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy,[2][3] as well as a political theory and movement that aims at the establishment of such a system.
Now a lot of socialists will tell you that "the people" own the means of production and vote on what the prices of goods will be, but in reality it almost never ends up that way; it's usually governed by political leaders who claim to represent "the people" but never do and just grant themselves favors, and silence anybody who opposes them. In the few cases where it does end up that way, either the production is limited or some other bigger controlled entity takes it over.
A free market is a market economy system in which the prices for goods and services are set freely by consent between vendors and consumers, in which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority.
Now this doesn't mean that government can't regulate what a business does, and contrary to what a lot of trolls post in the slashdot comments it doesn't eliminate the rule of law. However it does mean that the government can't set price controls (i.e. price floors and/or price ceilings) and true to its name, prices are determined by the forces of supply and demand.
Sure, some people are going to get divorced, but I'm still sticking to my idea of 1.5 times for married couples. Not everyone will get divorced. Do you think people would get divorced over $3k/year for the couple?
You see, this is exactly why I vehemently oppose political leaders who espouse socialism and universal welfare: They always have these ideas on paper that they think will work out perfectly, but then they fail to take into account many many variables such as what you're missing here, and after they're elected and their policies get implemented, they discover the hard way that they made shit a lot worse (See Francoise Hollande and what happened after his brilliant idea for a 75% tax on the rich was implemented: He later ended up lobbying against his own tax hikes because it resulted in a mass exodus of wealthy individuals, and their GDP took a shit, the unemployment rate never recovered along with the rest of the world (hint: poor people don't create jobs) and best of all? Their tax revenue actually declined dramatically; read about the Laffer Curve.)
Now in your particular case, here's why it won't work: Yes, if people think they can get a 33% pay increase, they'll get a divorce and still live together as if they weren't divorced.
Here's another problem you're forgetting: Who is going to pay for all of this? Tax the rich and the corporations, right? With what, a 75% tax rate? We've already seen what happens when you do that.
And yet another problem: Giving redistributing money in massive numbers like that creates inflation, making that money worth less. It comes down to how people value their money, and they value it less when it's just given to them.
But if you really like this kind of thing, go move to Venezuela or Cuba, they agree with you there. I'd say China or Russia as well, but they've already seen why ideas like yours don't work, and have since moved away from that rut.
Correct, they had that in their name, but when you look at the things their political leaders said, they always self identified as communist. For example, the governing party during the USSR days was the CPSU, or Communist Party Soviet Union.
You can reject it all you'd like. You can reject that the color of the night sky is black and argue that it is white too, but the fact remains otherwise. What the USSR had was socialism; the government owned all of the factories and other means of production, and everybody in the country worked for the government.
Capitalism means a free market economy, and a free market simply means that prices are determined by the forces of supply and demand.
If you choose to make Fruit Cocktail, and are required to make it to a specific formula,
No, there is no such requirement in the US. Though typically it's beneficial to your product if its name at least somewhat describes what it is. You might get sued by your customers if you call it chicken soup and they don't find any chicken in it however. There are also certain guidelines for what levels of foreign material may be found in food products you sell (for example, the FDA has certain guidelines for the limit for the number of insect eggs and body parts that may be found in different types of vegetables) but that's a safety guideline and not an economic one.
So again, your understanding of socialism is incorrect.
If you can choose to make anything you want, however you want (including stealing competitors formulas and logos), then you are pure capitalist.
You're confusing capitalism with anarchy. Again, capitalism just means free markets, and a free market is one where prices are determined by supply and demand. Anarchy means there are no rules and you just do whatever the hell you want.
All systems in existence today are hybrid.
No, they're not. Most European countries do have some markets that are socialist, namely they run a health care system where the means of production (the medical staff) is owned and run by the government. THAT is socialism, but everything else in those countries is capitalist. When they take from the rich and give to the poor however, that is not socialism, that's welfare.
Not only that, but what happens when you end up with drugs that work incredibly well, only they include a very nasty (and deadly) side effect that wasn't found in the clinical trials? (See Fen-Phen.) Who pays in that case? This is why drug companies want patents. They HAVE to charge a high price and make big profits, otherwise the risk is NOT worth the reward.
I'm not opposed this kind of movement, but I'm going to remain skeptical about its viability until the above two problems can be solved. Not only that, but in many cases you're looking at costs that range in the billions of dollars before you'll see even a dime worth of profit, and even then, profit isn't guaranteed.
Open source tends to work because just anybody can pick up a programming book and learn to code, and know really quickly whether or not it will work. But nobody can very quickly tell if a drug they're developing has no dangerous side effects, and doing so often involves risking somebody else's life and not necessarily your own. Medical professionals don't experiment like this because it goes against their code of ethics.
The first sentence in your statement defines socialism, not communism, and pretty well at that (often times people may have money but nothing worth buying.) It's understandable because most people confuse the two, but in communism there indeed is no money. The USSR identified themselves as communist, but they in fact fit the economic definition of socialism.
As far as the second sentence in your statement, capitalism tends to be very well self correcting in that regard. Namely, if you don't have money, then nobody would have any reason to put anything on the shelves. Though usually what ends up happening is somebody figures out a way to capitalize on a given market, even the super low price ones. Take for example the recent slashdot article talking about how a lot of manufacturers were selling Android smartphones in the US for under $50.
With communism there is no money at all...in theory of course. Basically you have to force people to work for free, and eventually people get pissed off because some people feel that they do more work than other people, and aren't justly rewarded, and so they leave. Then your GDP goes to shit and you turn to socialism just to try to maintain the status quo of your local political leadership, which is where everybody works for the government as the government owns the means of production for every single industry, and indeed there is a return to currency, and you pretend to work while the government pretends to pay you.
At least, this is what has happened to every single commune to ever exist anyways. The only ones to have emerged from that rut eventually just returned to full blown capitalism.
As for industry curing things, not so much. Most cures come about from publicly funded research, which industry then gets patents for. The public of course get screwed by high prescription prices due to guaranteed monopolies granted by the same government that gave these bastards the research to make the products in the first place.
The publicly funded research just finds a cause and effect. That's it. The process of formulating a chemical that both A) Target's the cause and B) doesn't kill the patient is a process that costs perhaps billions to do, and even more if there's a deadly side effect and it's necessary not only to recall, but to compensate those who took the drug (i.e. fen-phen.) Clinical trials are NOT cheap; hell just getting to the point of a clinical trial is not cheap. The chemical that results from this process is what gets patented. If they didn't get a patent on it, chances are they'd never bother with it because they'd never recoup their investment.
You're almost funny if I didn't think you're a right wing troll when it comes to inventing one's own cure.
Well you talk like a cure is so damn easy but "they just won't make one" so either put up or shut the fuck up.
Look at how they react to medical marijuana
"They" aren't the pharmaceutical industry. "They" are the federal government. Actually pharma would love for that to be legal. Why? More product to sell. There are literally hundreds of different ways you can formulate treatments based on cannabis, because different parts of the plant are used for different treatment (and contrary to popular belief, these don't involve the psychoactive component, THC.) And you know what else? There are plenty of them likely yet to be discovered, and when they are, patented. So if you want medical marijuana legalized across the whole US, you're pointing your hippie cannon at the wrong people.
If that was true, then people born into wealthy families would never grow up poor, and people who win the lottery would never spend it all and end up poor.
The reality is that some people know how to manage money and make money really well, whereas most people aren't terribly successful at either one or both of those things.
This kind of solution is really the only kind that drug companies are actively researching and bringing to market.
They have no interest in one-pill fixes, because they don't make nearly the profit that 'forever' pills do.
Honestly the whole "drug companies only make treatments" conspiracy theory is a big load of uneducated horse shit. If there's a cure that "they" don't want you to know about, then go invent it yourself. There are a LOT of diseases that the pharmaceutical industry has cured, and continues to cure. Unfortunately these are mostly just bacterial infections. As it turns out, bacteria are a lot easier to fight than viruses. Same with cancer, which curing it effectively means killing tissue that's part of your own body. And our knowledge of the immune system isn't good enough to be able to cure autoimmune diseases.
So what would you prefer? People just go untreated while we wait for a cure that may never come?
I guess it must be effective to a much larger class of virus, but don't worry: they will adapt. After all there is no real need to infect the nucleus, RNA is enough for some viruses, ad far as I understand
That would require quite a mutation, I would imagine; not likely something that would happen in only a few generations, or even a few thousand. From what I understand about HIV, the biggest problem with treating it is that unlike most viruses, it mutates VERY quickly. That said, if somebody does get infected with HIV while on this drug, they should completely abstain from sex, or else it's back to the drawing board.
How does it eventually die? AFAIK all it requires to just survive is homeostasis, which your blood provides. Unless its protein jacket has a very short chemical half-life or something.
My guess is similar to how the virus that causes chickenpox (varicella) remains in your body permanently even after your symptoms are gone. Usually that's areas where there's no blood but there is fluidic tissue that provides homeostasis that it can survive in. For example, spinal fluid, brain tissue, etc.
Given that HIV is a really small virus (that is, smaller than most viruses) I'm sure there are plenty of areas that it can reside in.
Actually that's been one of the real concerns of the drug. Apparently people on the drug are seeing higher incidences of HPV (genital warts), herpes, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis.
I am curious though -- why isn't this drug able to effectively shut down the virus in infected patients? I understand why it could never cure it (there would be plenty of hiding places for the virus that the drug likely wouldn't end up) but not why it can't remove all of the symptoms. It's not a vaccine, so it doesn't rely on your immune system to remove an early infection, hence you'd figure it would work on somebody already infected. Can somebody explain the biochemistry on that? I'd like to know.
#1 There are more trees now in the U.S. than in 1776.
This is true.
#2 The Amazon tropical rain forest never was just a "jungle" like in "Predator". Most of you nit wits don't understand that. You should read the journals of the early explorers to the region. Vast plains areas dotted with trees, not a "jungle" by any means. Like #1 there are more trees in the Amazon now than there were in 1776.
When I say tropical regions, I'm not just referring to the Amazon. Even so, I doubt the Amazon has more now than previously.
Slashdot Mirror
There's your fail. Resources are always scarce. And Star Trek is not a 'solution', it is a non-existence of the problem. As in 'hand-waving over it'.
In Star Trek, everybody uses deuterium to create everything (or at least, an episode of Voyager seems to indicate so.) Deuterium is likely the most abundant resource in existence. Every kind of star (including primitive pop III stars) have lots of it.
Your assumption seems to be that the fruits of automation, owned by the few, will somehow be shared by the many. Perhaps they will be, and we'll live in the Star Trek utopia. But I think more dystopian outcomes (extreme wealth inequality sustained through violent repression; revolution and war) to be more likely.
Well picture this: Robots that can make *anything*, including other robots that can make anything.
All it would take is for one person who owns one of these robots to instruct it to make an extra robot for himself, and have the other robot continue producing new copies of itself that he just gives away for free.
I've had the unfortunate experience of using Yahoo in firefox, and I changed it almost immediately because Yahoo search is stupidly slow. It's slowness mainly comes from when you click a link in their search results, the link just points to a yahoo.com redirect page, making it so that hitting your intended target page takes another 4 seconds.
I get why they're doing it, they just want to know what pages you're hitting so that they can improve their search results. But competing search engines have a much better way of doing this: They just use asynchronous javascript to read the click before you actually leave the page.
Even if you turn off all of the phone home settings in Windows 10, it still sends information to Microsoft. It's not fully known what kind of information this is, but it's suspected that it's three things (based on Microsoft's EULA)
- How you configure your UI elements (taskbar and start menu pinning) and when and how often you click on them.
- If you use IE or Edge to search with a non-Microsoft owned search engine, your search terms are sent to Bing; that includes private search engines such as duckduckgo. (This alone is huge; it's meant to improve bing, but it basically exposes your every intent online to Microsoft.)
- Information about what wifi access points you use (turning the setting for this off only disables password sharing.)
You can't filter this at the network level within the machine either, as the kernel sends this information and ignores proxy, hosts file, and firewall settings to get the information out if it fails while using the user settings. If you want to block this information from being sent, then you need to do something like configure a firewall setting in your router.
Don't forget, many early TNG episodes were originally either TOS episodes or Phase II episodes that were not produced in their intended shows and were adapted for TNG characters/setting, which mainly worked because early TNG was still in its infancy as far as developing that setting and those characters.
IMO Star Trek didn't truly take off until TNG. Also he TNG staff (including the writers) said that the first two seasons were unwatchable. And you know? After having watched the series again in HD recently, I agree. The first season was super boring, and the second season almost as bad. It's probably not a coincidence that the third season was basically the first one that escaped Gene Roddenberry's influence (he had a hand in the second season, but only passively, and had no interaction with the staff during the third season.)
His formula probably worked better for TOS than it did for TNG because TOS was during a whole different era of television.
Well the problem is obviously religion. Notice that in Star Trek, there really isn't any
Actually in TOS I remember there being a lot of Christian theme in it relative to any other Star Trek series. For example, one episode featured a Christian wedding (with cross and all) and another episode (where they found a planet that was like Earth only the Romans continued to exist in the 1960's) and they (Kirk et al) praised the rise of a new cult on that planet that worshiped the sun of God (aka Jesus on Earth) as a sign that the planet was maturing.
However in no other series do I recall any such allusions to Christianity.
Well as somebody who is very anti-communist and pro capitalist, I could see it star trek economics becoming reality without all of the problems inherent to communism. What any economic system sorts out is how you allocate resources to whom. Where communism ultimately fails is that it assumes that people will just always be willing to produce out of the goodness of their hearts for just any old need that somebody wants (which includes jobs that aren't fun and nobody wants to do them unless they're paid, such as being a garbage man or a janitor.)
In Star Trek economics however, there's two problems that are solved without even needing an economy: There are no scarce resources, and there's no need for somebody to be a producer. Why? Because you've got replicators to handle your everyday goods, holodecks to entertain you, and if you want a vacation to florida, either you can holodeck there or beam over there. And since everything is made out of deuterium, there's basically an infinite supply of everything.
We're already starting to see some of that happen. Namely, we're already starting to see "free" production in the form of robots taking over certain jobs. We're a long way off from a star trek economy because a few other things need to be solved (we don't have replicators yet, and not everything can be automatically created) but in terms of making everyday goods out of cheap materials, we're getting pretty close.
Luddites are usually fighting this tooth and nail, but if having a lot of wealth for free (keep in mind, wealth is not money, wealth is material goods) then it's definitely better to just let automation take over anyways.
Reasons for government to do all drug research: #1-drug companies do research for profit only, unprofitable drugs don't get developed no matter how many lives it would save. #2-high cost and risk of developing new drugs. #3-developing a cure is less profitable than a treatment, so corporations would only make the treatment. The drug companies should only do production and distribution.
Ok I'll need you to take off your rose tinted government issue glasses for a minute. Consider the fact that the US has a smaller GDP than the combined EU, and the EU governments take in more taxes than the US government.
Now ask yourself, why is it that the world's most advanced medications always come from for profit corporations in the US, and nowhere else? Why is it that the US is by far the most popular destination for medical tourism, even though in the US, hospitals are owned by private, for profit corporations?
Clearly because government run medicine is so much better, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Reality disagrees with you.
For labeling purposes, maybe, but there is no specific formula like you said there was; this leaves a lot of room for interpretation as to what a fruit cocktail actually is. You could even use the minimum values there and add grapefruit.
Still, this in no way fits the definition of socialism. In fact, since you used wikipedia, let's use it to reinforce what I said earlier:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Socialism is a social and economic system characterised by social ownership and/or social control[1] of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy,[2][3] as well as a political theory and movement that aims at the establishment of such a system.
Now a lot of socialists will tell you that "the people" own the means of production and vote on what the prices of goods will be, but in reality it almost never ends up that way; it's usually governed by political leaders who claim to represent "the people" but never do and just grant themselves favors, and silence anybody who opposes them. In the few cases where it does end up that way, either the production is limited or some other bigger controlled entity takes it over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A free market is a market economy system in which the prices for goods and services are set freely by consent between vendors and consumers, in which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority.
Now this doesn't mean that government can't regulate what a business does, and contrary to what a lot of trolls post in the slashdot comments it doesn't eliminate the rule of law. However it does mean that the government can't set price controls (i.e. price floors and/or price ceilings) and true to its name, prices are determined by the forces of supply and demand.
You're wrong. I don't think it's a big problem.
Sure, some people are going to get divorced, but I'm still sticking to my idea of 1.5 times for married couples. Not everyone will get divorced. Do you think people would get divorced over $3k/year for the couple?
You see, this is exactly why I vehemently oppose political leaders who espouse socialism and universal welfare: They always have these ideas on paper that they think will work out perfectly, but then they fail to take into account many many variables such as what you're missing here, and after they're elected and their policies get implemented, they discover the hard way that they made shit a lot worse (See Francoise Hollande and what happened after his brilliant idea for a 75% tax on the rich was implemented: He later ended up lobbying against his own tax hikes because it resulted in a mass exodus of wealthy individuals, and their GDP took a shit, the unemployment rate never recovered along with the rest of the world (hint: poor people don't create jobs) and best of all? Their tax revenue actually declined dramatically; read about the Laffer Curve.)
Now in your particular case, here's why it won't work: Yes, if people think they can get a 33% pay increase, they'll get a divorce and still live together as if they weren't divorced.
Here's another problem you're forgetting: Who is going to pay for all of this? Tax the rich and the corporations, right? With what, a 75% tax rate? We've already seen what happens when you do that.
And yet another problem: Giving redistributing money in massive numbers like that creates inflation, making that money worth less. It comes down to how people value their money, and they value it less when it's just given to them.
But if you really like this kind of thing, go move to Venezuela or Cuba, they agree with you there. I'd say China or Russia as well, but they've already seen why ideas like yours don't work, and have since moved away from that rut.
Correct, they had that in their name, but when you look at the things their political leaders said, they always self identified as communist. For example, the governing party during the USSR days was the CPSU, or Communist Party Soviet Union.
I reject that definition.
You can reject it all you'd like. You can reject that the color of the night sky is black and argue that it is white too, but the fact remains otherwise. What the USSR had was socialism; the government owned all of the factories and other means of production, and everybody in the country worked for the government.
Capitalism means a free market economy, and a free market simply means that prices are determined by the forces of supply and demand.
If you choose to make Fruit Cocktail, and are required to make it to a specific formula,
No, there is no such requirement in the US. Though typically it's beneficial to your product if its name at least somewhat describes what it is. You might get sued by your customers if you call it chicken soup and they don't find any chicken in it however. There are also certain guidelines for what levels of foreign material may be found in food products you sell (for example, the FDA has certain guidelines for the limit for the number of insect eggs and body parts that may be found in different types of vegetables) but that's a safety guideline and not an economic one.
So again, your understanding of socialism is incorrect.
If you can choose to make anything you want, however you want (including stealing competitors formulas and logos), then you are pure capitalist.
You're confusing capitalism with anarchy. Again, capitalism just means free markets, and a free market is one where prices are determined by supply and demand. Anarchy means there are no rules and you just do whatever the hell you want.
All systems in existence today are hybrid.
No, they're not. Most European countries do have some markets that are socialist, namely they run a health care system where the means of production (the medical staff) is owned and run by the government. THAT is socialism, but everything else in those countries is capitalist. When they take from the rich and give to the poor however, that is not socialism, that's welfare.
This.
Not only that, but what happens when you end up with drugs that work incredibly well, only they include a very nasty (and deadly) side effect that wasn't found in the clinical trials? (See Fen-Phen.) Who pays in that case? This is why drug companies want patents. They HAVE to charge a high price and make big profits, otherwise the risk is NOT worth the reward.
I'm not opposed this kind of movement, but I'm going to remain skeptical about its viability until the above two problems can be solved. Not only that, but in many cases you're looking at costs that range in the billions of dollars before you'll see even a dime worth of profit, and even then, profit isn't guaranteed.
Open source tends to work because just anybody can pick up a programming book and learn to code, and know really quickly whether or not it will work. But nobody can very quickly tell if a drug they're developing has no dangerous side effects, and doing so often involves risking somebody else's life and not necessarily your own. Medical professionals don't experiment like this because it goes against their code of ethics.
I know you're joking, but...
The first sentence in your statement defines socialism, not communism, and pretty well at that (often times people may have money but nothing worth buying.) It's understandable because most people confuse the two, but in communism there indeed is no money. The USSR identified themselves as communist, but they in fact fit the economic definition of socialism.
As far as the second sentence in your statement, capitalism tends to be very well self correcting in that regard. Namely, if you don't have money, then nobody would have any reason to put anything on the shelves. Though usually what ends up happening is somebody figures out a way to capitalize on a given market, even the super low price ones. Take for example the recent slashdot article talking about how a lot of manufacturers were selling Android smartphones in the US for under $50.
That's the thing with grandiose plans for universal welfare: They're never that well thought out.
No, that's just welfare.
With communism there is no money at all...in theory of course. Basically you have to force people to work for free, and eventually people get pissed off because some people feel that they do more work than other people, and aren't justly rewarded, and so they leave. Then your GDP goes to shit and you turn to socialism just to try to maintain the status quo of your local political leadership, which is where everybody works for the government as the government owns the means of production for every single industry, and indeed there is a return to currency, and you pretend to work while the government pretends to pay you.
At least, this is what has happened to every single commune to ever exist anyways. The only ones to have emerged from that rut eventually just returned to full blown capitalism.
As for industry curing things, not so much. Most cures come about from publicly funded research, which industry then gets patents for. The public of course get screwed by high prescription prices due to guaranteed monopolies granted by the same government that gave these bastards the research to make the products in the first place.
The publicly funded research just finds a cause and effect. That's it. The process of formulating a chemical that both A) Target's the cause and B) doesn't kill the patient is a process that costs perhaps billions to do, and even more if there's a deadly side effect and it's necessary not only to recall, but to compensate those who took the drug (i.e. fen-phen.) Clinical trials are NOT cheap; hell just getting to the point of a clinical trial is not cheap. The chemical that results from this process is what gets patented. If they didn't get a patent on it, chances are they'd never bother with it because they'd never recoup their investment.
You're almost funny if I didn't think you're a right wing troll when it comes to inventing one's own cure.
Well you talk like a cure is so damn easy but "they just won't make one" so either put up or shut the fuck up.
Look at how they react to medical marijuana
"They" aren't the pharmaceutical industry. "They" are the federal government. Actually pharma would love for that to be legal. Why? More product to sell. There are literally hundreds of different ways you can formulate treatments based on cannabis, because different parts of the plant are used for different treatment (and contrary to popular belief, these don't involve the psychoactive component, THC.) And you know what else? There are plenty of them likely yet to be discovered, and when they are, patented. So if you want medical marijuana legalized across the whole US, you're pointing your hippie cannon at the wrong people.
If that was true, then people born into wealthy families would never grow up poor, and people who win the lottery would never spend it all and end up poor.
The reality is that some people know how to manage money and make money really well, whereas most people aren't terribly successful at either one or both of those things.
This kind of solution is really the only kind that drug companies are actively researching and bringing to market.
They have no interest in one-pill fixes, because they don't make nearly the profit that 'forever' pills do.
Honestly the whole "drug companies only make treatments" conspiracy theory is a big load of uneducated horse shit. If there's a cure that "they" don't want you to know about, then go invent it yourself. There are a LOT of diseases that the pharmaceutical industry has cured, and continues to cure. Unfortunately these are mostly just bacterial infections. As it turns out, bacteria are a lot easier to fight than viruses. Same with cancer, which curing it effectively means killing tissue that's part of your own body. And our knowledge of the immune system isn't good enough to be able to cure autoimmune diseases.
So what would you prefer? People just go untreated while we wait for a cure that may never come?
I guess it must be effective to a much larger class of virus, but don't worry: they will adapt. After all there is no real need to infect the nucleus, RNA is enough for some viruses, ad far as I understand
That would require quite a mutation, I would imagine; not likely something that would happen in only a few generations, or even a few thousand. From what I understand about HIV, the biggest problem with treating it is that unlike most viruses, it mutates VERY quickly. That said, if somebody does get infected with HIV while on this drug, they should completely abstain from sex, or else it's back to the drawing board.
How does it eventually die? AFAIK all it requires to just survive is homeostasis, which your blood provides. Unless its protein jacket has a very short chemical half-life or something.
My guess is similar to how the virus that causes chickenpox (varicella) remains in your body permanently even after your symptoms are gone. Usually that's areas where there's no blood but there is fluidic tissue that provides homeostasis that it can survive in. For example, spinal fluid, brain tissue, etc.
Given that HIV is a really small virus (that is, smaller than most viruses) I'm sure there are plenty of areas that it can reside in.
Actually that's been one of the real concerns of the drug. Apparently people on the drug are seeing higher incidences of HPV (genital warts), herpes, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis.
I am curious though -- why isn't this drug able to effectively shut down the virus in infected patients? I understand why it could never cure it (there would be plenty of hiding places for the virus that the drug likely wouldn't end up) but not why it can't remove all of the symptoms. It's not a vaccine, so it doesn't rely on your immune system to remove an early infection, hence you'd figure it would work on somebody already infected. Can somebody explain the biochemistry on that? I'd like to know.
#1 There are more trees now in the U.S. than in 1776.
This is true.
#2 The Amazon tropical rain forest never was just a "jungle" like in "Predator". Most of you nit wits don't understand that. You should read the journals of the early explorers to the region. Vast plains areas dotted with trees, not a "jungle" by any means. Like #1 there are more trees in the Amazon now than there were in 1776.
When I say tropical regions, I'm not just referring to the Amazon. Even so, I doubt the Amazon has more now than previously.
Using the wild? Explain.