It's pretty obvious the world would be far better off without religion.
The greatest tragedies of the 20th century were not committed in the name of religion. Maybe you should learn history before spounting such nonsense about religion.
What does that have to do with his point? If I said "I would be better off if I don't drink sulfiric acid", would your response be "but that isn't even a major cause of death in the US"? Because that is exactly the type of irrelevant argument you just made above.
Someone can claim something is bad even if it isn't the only or even worst thing in the world.
You can make claims that religion does more good than harm, but referencing other evils of the world is very irrelevant.
Someday people will look back on the shared delusion of religion and wonder what the fuck was wrong with everyone.
And yet some of the regimes which have the largest murder count of their own populations weren't religious.
I assume JustAnotherOldGuy would agree that people will also look back at things like fascism, totalitarianism, etc. and wonder what the fuck was wrong with everyone. That seems like an unrelated tangent to his original comment though.
How about H1-B Visa holders get paid 110% of the prevailing wage
The corporations would try to game it by using job titles that don't fit the job. Like "junior apprentice programmer" requiring 20 years of experience.
Just enforce the rules. The IRS can take the time to determine if a company is abusing tax law during an audit, so a government agency should be able to determine in a company is gaming the H1-B program. I think most people would be willing to accept some small abuses would happen, as long as blatant abuses are prosecuted.
in a democracy, laymen aren't obligated to just do whatever a group of "scientists"** tell them to.
This is not to mention the fact the the scientists themselves can only posit the possible PROBLEM, not offer any practical solutions.
I agree with both of these statements. Well, I do believe scientists are integral parts of coming up with potential technological solutions, but agree they should not be the ones proscribing solutions.
No one is arguing that scientists should have carte blanche powers to identify, proscribe, and enact solutions for global climate change. I have only been discussing the identification of a problem, and contending that laymen should take no part in this identification. Determining which steps to take to fix the problem is up to policy makers.
We can declare with confidence that CO2 contributes, and back it up with evidence, so much less risk there. On the other hand if you go about proclaiming with certainty that 2050 will see catastrophic death, science has spoken, that's worse.
Strawman arguments are not helpful. No one is claiming such catastrophies with certainty. There are certainly those who claim it is a possibility, but no reputable scientist is claiming they know with certainty what the exact results of global climate change will be.
When somebody questions carbon taxation as really being valid or not, consensus is not an appropriate retort. When somebody questions the severity of future warming, consensus is not an appropriate retort. Heck, when somebody questions if CO2 contributes to warming, consensus is not an appropriate retort.
The appropriate response in every case is to point to the evidence first.
There are two different types of debates you are touching upon in those statements.
One is a debate of the science itself. Here asking for evidence first is the clear approach. This debate can be done by anyone with requisite knowledge. In this case it would akin to a doctoral level of understanding of the science being discussed. There are plenty of institutions which can provide this level of knowledge, and it can be gained without formal education. But a few hundred hours of reading relevant scientific journals is not even close to enough prior knowledge. Experience doing actual peer reviewed research on the subject would be the only hard prerequisite I can think of before your opinions hold some merit.
The second is a debate of public policy. Here asking for evidence first is a waste of time, as it would not be understood and could be easily misconstrued. People are going to have their own opinions here, and a debate of the merits of those opinions is meaningless. At this point scientific consensus is the only guide. People are free to fund or partake in research to add to the body of evidence used to come to scientific consensus, but that is it.
Our planet is warming as per 100+ years of instrumental data. Agreed, and I don't see anyone sane questioning this. CO2 is a greenhouse and it contributes to warming. Agreed, and I don't see anyone sane questioning this. Mankind is emitting CO2, and CO2 concentrations in air are increasing. Agreed, and I don't see anyone sane questioning this.
You left out the most important fourth statement:
Mankind's emissions of greenhouse gasses are a significant contributor to global climate change.
In truth the consensus of scientists even identifies humans as the primary contributor, but even the above statement is enough.
What will things look like in 2100, or in 2050? What reduction in CO2 emissions is worthwhile? What should we do? The last 3 I don't exactly see the strong consensus on, and those are the points on which decisions like policy hinge.
I completely agree with this. There is very credible debate on what policies to enact to combat global climate change. No one knows these answers. All we do know is that global climate change is happening and our inaction is making it much worse.
Yes you are. Every person that shouts "Denier" the second someone doesn't tow the line, is asking for the debate to STOP. There are many many many of you.
This debate has had nothing to do with science for some time now.
Scientific debate is not the same as public debate. Nearly everyone wants scientists to keep debating, but you are correct that there are many many many people who want laymen to stop debating as if they have something important to bring to the discussion.
Your exact argument has been made before. Science was supposed to do away with appeals to authority, lest your argument look like this:
No one is asking for theological debate to stop. I have yet to meet or talk to anyone who wants priests to stop investigating the scriptures in order to better interpret them. This is about unqualified people, myself included, debating religion they know nothing about.
Theology is never settled, but that does not mean you should never act upon theological understanding because it might someday change. When determining which theology to act upon, consensus is very important. In fact it is basically the only important thing. Average citizens and even policy makers could never be expected to understand religion enough to join either side of the debate. Accepting the consensus is the only sane choice in these instances.
That argument would be similar to mine if only 97% of people agreed upon the basic tenants of their religion. Since there is no where near consensus on whether there even is a creator god, how many gods there are, and what the most important commandments of these gods are, this is a red herring. And don't go saying that all major religions agree upon the important stuff either, because many religions such as Buddhism have very little to do with religions such as the Abrahamic ones.
This isn't a situation where there are 3-4 different factions of scientists who agree with 97% of other members in their faction, but only agree on 80% with members of other factions. Then it would be similar to the major religions of the world. Here we have a situation where there is no sizable disagreement among qualified individuals.
Science was supposed to do away with appeals to authority
Science does its best to do away with appeals to authority when actually doing cutting edge scientific research. But research would grind to a halt if no one ever treated agreed upon knowledge as fact (even if it isn't 100% proven) when building upon that research. Engineers would never have the time to apply scientific knowledge if they never trusted the consensus of scientists who made the breakthroughs.
Most knowledge is still gained by trusting authority, even by scientists. Trusting authority is not the same thing as never questioning authority.
New science is where everyone gets together and agrees that X is so, and henceforth X is so and no one is allowed to question X.
No one is asking for scientific debate to stop. I have yet to meet or talk to anyone who wants scientists to stop investigating the causes of global climate change in order to better predict its effects. This is about unqualified people, myself included, debating science they know nothing about.
Science is never settled, but that does not mean you should never act upon scientific knowledge because it might someday change. When determining which science to act upon, consensus is very important. In fact it is basically the only important thing. Average citizens and even policy makers could never be expected to understand the science enough to join either side of the debate. Accepting the consensus is the only sane choice in these instances.
Since AMD does not put any pressure on Intel on the CPU front, 5-10% CPU performance increase per year become the norm.
The Intel of 2015 still has a very solid competitor eating into its profits: the Intel of 2010-13. I am typing this on a 2600K I bought in 2011, and I have no intention of upgrading any time soon. I have went from 8 GB of RAM to 16 GB, from a 128 GB SSD to a 480 GB SSD, and I upgraded my monitor setup. But my desktop processor is still more than twice as fast as my 4300U work laptop, which I never worry about being slow. I wouldn't be that surprised if this processor lasts me until 2020, unless it stops working before then.
But these people aren't investors. An investor has unlimited upside, so that even if a few projects fail, the ones that do succeed will make up for it. The most these project backers can get is the product they ordered. So it's all of the risk with none of the reward.
Kickstarter investors have unlimited upside from the vast number of products they may someday buy that may have never existed without Kickstarter. Any good purchase ends up providing more utility to the buyer than other things they could have spent their money on. Kickstarter investors are not investing in equity, they are investing in the utility gained from owning the product being invested in. Sometimes that utility will be nothing when product development fails. But as long as a reasonable number of investments succeed, the money is still well spent as long as the buyer gains enough utility from the successful products.
Personally I like to buy things that already exist rather than plunk down money on something that doesn't, and would probably suck even (if ever) it does get made.
Or, only spend money on kickstarter that you are willing to lose. It should be treated no differently than spending money on a trip to Vegas. If I give myself a budget of $500 to gamble with, I am perfectly happy if I leave Vegas with $10 of that money left. And if someone spends $500 on 10 kickstarter campaigns, he should be very happy if 5 of them end up sending him a product someday.
Kickstarter is only for pie in the sky dreams that couldn't get traditionally funded, but where people want to give the founders a shot because their products sounds cool. Or at least that is how I think people should treat Kickstarter. People can spend their money however they wish.
If human life had some quantifiable financial value, the market would be able to figure out how to "do the right thing."
Human life does have quantifiable financial value. There are plenty of companies and government agencies that need to give a value to a human life for decision making purposes. It is ridiculous to simply say human life is priceless, since no one in their right mind would spend a trillion dollars to save one human life.
Here is a little more detail on the subject. It seems most US government agencies put the value of a human life at around $8-$10 million. That seems excessively high to me, put it probably has some punitive measures built in when agencies like the EPA and FDA are punishing companies.
When I read your title, I assumed you were going to comment on how cheap the device was because it breaks even after only 40 books. I didn't expect you to think a 40 count book collection would be considered large.
Well, OP made a blanket statement seemingly implying that the government is fully at fault that it is expensive to put medicine on the market.
[From OP:] It's fiendishly expensive and time consuming to get a regulatory approval for a drug for human medical use in the USA, thanks to our government and the nightmares they make companies endure to get to that point.
I don't feel he implied that at all. If I say a company has priced themselves out of the market and made it unlikely their target market can afford their product, I am not implying the company should make their product free. Just like when someone complains about the amount of regulation imposed on the pharmaceutical industry, they are not implying there should be no regulations. Just a reasonable amount that serves the public interest better.
I am not saying I even agree there are too many pharmaceutical regulations. I am not informed enough to have an opinion either way. I just feel it is false to imply everyone who is upset about the amount of regulation is actually arguing for no regulation at all.
but protecting profits is a _means_, not an _end_. In this case there is evidence that we're pushing the means to the detriment of the end.
Only if you believe reducing potential profits would help incentivize companies to invest more in drug development. It's not a ridiculous belief, but it is not very intuitive and it has a high barrier of proof. I find it hard to believe that drug companies would poor more money into antibiotics if there was less potential profit in doing so.
And it appears from a quick Google search that all of the antibiotics I had hear of, like Amoxicillin, are already available as generics. So I don't see how patents are protecting antibiotic profits right now anyway.
thanks to our government and the nightmares they make companies endure to get to that point
As opposed to letting them put out whatever shit they think they can get away with? That doesn't exactly sound like a good idea either.
If only the human brain was capable of easily identifying false dichotomies. Then you wouldn't see comments like this, since everyone would easily identify how poor of an argument they are.
atents exist (see Art. 1, Sec 8 of the US Constitution) to encourage science and the arts. Not to encourage profit.
That is a very odd statement. Patents encourage science and the arts by protecting profits.
So shorten the time that patents are in effect. When the old antibiotics become public domain there will be a strong incentive for the big rich pharma companies to invest in developing the new ones.
Where is the incentive? If they can still profit selling a branded antibiotic with a generic formula, they will do so. Tylenol is still sold even though you can buy cheaper generic acetaminophen.
The incentive to develop new drugs is only the profits the new drug can make. And shortening patent length on future drugs limits those profits. It won't stop drug development, but it certainly would reduce it. It may still be necessary to do this to make drugs cheaper, but that doesn't change the fact it would slow new drug development.
Why are people still surprised by these revelations?
More importantly, why are people still surprised that no one cares about these revelations?
Someone posted yesterday that he felt vindicated for his attempts to keep his company off the cloud after the Snowden story first broke. It just goes to show how disconnected security and privacy minded people are from the general public.
I think your inadvertently highlighting another of the cloud problems. How much does it cost? It's difficult to judge ahead of time and there is risk that you will over utilize and spend a boatload more then you intended. That's not a risk on my own hardware.
You only have to worry about variable pricing if you use spot instances, and there are controls on how much you spend. You reserve a certain amount of computing resources, and if you go over that you run out of hard drive space, max out at 100% CPU utilization, or start paging the hard drive when RAM runs out. Just like with your own hardware. The bonus is you can easily increase or decrease your equipment, as opposed for waiting for new hardware to be delivered.
We're on a large group of X5680's with about 2 times that in storage (SAS), less in CPU.
If this is the case, then your figure of $150k per month seems also way off base. You say you needed about 320 TB of HD space, and considering you said you spent in the order of magnitude of $50k that is obviously not SSD. That comes to 14 d2.4xlarge storage optimized machines, which costs $8600 per month.
Where on earth did you get $150k per month from if your computing needs could be handled by around $50k of hardware?
Also, I'm even curious how you get 320 TB of data with high availability for $50k. Even without thinking about failover or backup, 160 4TB hard drives in RAID 1 in Dell Poweredge R730s would cost about $83k. I'm not sure what their SAS pricing is, but since the hard drives would be $50k if you build the machines yourself I doubt it is much cheaper. That is just for the hard drives, not counting processors, RAM, etc, and certainly not counting cooling, networking equipment, backup, and failover machines.
So should probably get something more than "rough figures" for how much it would cost. because they are way out.
You can add whatever details you want to my rough figures, but it will always end up with AWS not being orders of magnitude more expensive than doing it in house. The only cost savings are going to come from having less availability. My guess is you are not factoring in the cost of fail-over or redundancy because you are not in an environment that needs high availability, and in that case you are comparing apples and oranges.
As an aside. Amazon Web Services would cost $150,000 a MONTH for the computing power we bought about two years ago - with nowhere near that in initial investment. So talking "cost effectiveness" is bullshit to.
Well that is bullshit. $150k a month is about 1000 m3.2 x-large EC2 machines. That is the equivalent of about 800 XEON E-5 2670 v2 processors, 30 TB RAM, and 160 TB SSD. Double that for similar availability, and you are looking at about $4 million to buy equivalent hardware. That comes out to $110k per month amortized over three years (standard for a data center). And considering server cost is about half the cost of running a data center, not counting personnel, that comes closer to $220k per month to do it yourself. I'm not sure how much personnel it takes to maintain 800 servers, but that will probably be at least $50k-$100k per month.
These are all just rough figures and your use case may vary, but there is no way you can provide the same level of service as Amazon for significantly less cost. Not when counting in all costs, such as networking equipment, bandwidth, power distribution and cooling, personnel, etc. Amazon's scale is simply too great for almost any company to compete. If there were great cost savings to be made, there would be far more companies offering cloud systems for a fraction of what Amazon / Microsoft / Google charge. And there aren't.
Someone tell us what the "ton" is that Westlaw and LexisNexis charge.
For a small practice it is in the order of magnitude of $10-20k per year. That only comes from two lawyer friends who I have helped set up IT systems for. They both have very small practices of 2 & 3 lawyers respectively, and this was about 5 years ago. The pricing is hardly a flat and easy to calculate price, however, so different law firms probably pay wildly different amounts based on how they use it.
Think of these companies like Oracle if there was no MySQL for the little guy to use instead.
"As low as mid 1980s" meaning within a FEW PERCENT.
The difference between 10% and 6% U-3 unemployment is only a few percent. It is also the difference between 2000 25-54 participation and today's numbers. A few percentage points can be a big deal.
For Gods sake you people act like everything is falling apart. We are still at historical highs.
Almost every metric of societal advancement is going to be at historical highs if you compare it to the last 100 years. If you start comparing things to the last 30 years, which is far more relevant to our modern economy, we are nowhere near a "high".
That is explained easily by the fact that more women have chosen to drop out of the workforce to raise children, people are staying in college longer, and the tail end of the baby boomers retiring.
I agree these are most of the reasons, but all of these are bad from an economic point of view. The only one I could quickly find strong statistics on was stay at home mothers. The number of stay at home mothers has risen from 4.3 million to 5.4 million in the past 15 years. That is about 25% of the decrease in our workforce. But the number of mothers who stay at home because they cannot find a job has risen from about 200 thousand to 1.1 million. So 90% of those new stay at home mothers are not doing it by choice, but because of a weaker economy. I would not be surprised if the rise in 25+ year old college students and sub-54 year old retirees is also 90% people who feel forced to and not those who want to.
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It's pretty obvious the world would be far better off without religion.
The greatest tragedies of the 20th century were not committed in the name of religion.
Maybe you should learn history before spounting such nonsense about religion.
What does that have to do with his point? If I said "I would be better off if I don't drink sulfiric acid", would your response be "but that isn't even a major cause of death in the US"? Because that is exactly the type of irrelevant argument you just made above.
Someone can claim something is bad even if it isn't the only or even worst thing in the world.
You can make claims that religion does more good than harm, but referencing other evils of the world is very irrelevant.
Someday people will look back on the shared delusion of religion and wonder what the fuck was wrong with everyone.
And yet some of the regimes which have the largest murder count of their own populations weren't religious.
I assume JustAnotherOldGuy would agree that people will also look back at things like fascism, totalitarianism, etc. and wonder what the fuck was wrong with everyone. That seems like an unrelated tangent to his original comment though.
How about H1-B Visa holders get paid 110% of the prevailing wage
The corporations would try to game it by using job titles that don't fit the job. Like "junior apprentice programmer" requiring 20 years of experience.
Just enforce the rules. The IRS can take the time to determine if a company is abusing tax law during an audit, so a government agency should be able to determine in a company is gaming the H1-B program. I think most people would be willing to accept some small abuses would happen, as long as blatant abuses are prosecuted.
in a democracy, laymen aren't obligated to just do whatever a group of "scientists"** tell them to.
This is not to mention the fact the the scientists themselves can only posit the possible PROBLEM, not offer any practical solutions.
I agree with both of these statements. Well, I do believe scientists are integral parts of coming up with potential technological solutions, but agree they should not be the ones proscribing solutions.
No one is arguing that scientists should have carte blanche powers to identify, proscribe, and enact solutions for global climate change. I have only been discussing the identification of a problem, and contending that laymen should take no part in this identification. Determining which steps to take to fix the problem is up to policy makers.
We can declare with confidence that CO2 contributes, and back it up with evidence, so much less risk there. On the other hand if you go about proclaiming with certainty that 2050 will see catastrophic death, science has spoken, that's worse.
Strawman arguments are not helpful. No one is claiming such catastrophies with certainty. There are certainly those who claim it is a possibility, but no reputable scientist is claiming they know with certainty what the exact results of global climate change will be.
When somebody questions carbon taxation as really being valid or not, consensus is not an appropriate retort.
When somebody questions the severity of future warming, consensus is not an appropriate retort.
Heck, when somebody questions if CO2 contributes to warming, consensus is not an appropriate retort.
The appropriate response in every case is to point to the evidence first.
There are two different types of debates you are touching upon in those statements.
One is a debate of the science itself. Here asking for evidence first is the clear approach. This debate can be done by anyone with requisite knowledge. In this case it would akin to a doctoral level of understanding of the science being discussed. There are plenty of institutions which can provide this level of knowledge, and it can be gained without formal education. But a few hundred hours of reading relevant scientific journals is not even close to enough prior knowledge. Experience doing actual peer reviewed research on the subject would be the only hard prerequisite I can think of before your opinions hold some merit.
The second is a debate of public policy. Here asking for evidence first is a waste of time, as it would not be understood and could be easily misconstrued. People are going to have their own opinions here, and a debate of the merits of those opinions is meaningless. At this point scientific consensus is the only guide. People are free to fund or partake in research to add to the body of evidence used to come to scientific consensus, but that is it.
Our planet is warming as per 100+ years of instrumental data. Agreed, and I don't see anyone sane questioning this.
CO2 is a greenhouse and it contributes to warming. Agreed, and I don't see anyone sane questioning this.
Mankind is emitting CO2, and CO2 concentrations in air are increasing. Agreed, and I don't see anyone sane questioning this.
You left out the most important fourth statement:
Mankind's emissions of greenhouse gasses are a significant contributor to global climate change.
In truth the consensus of scientists even identifies humans as the primary contributor, but even the above statement is enough.
What will things look like in 2100, or in 2050?
What reduction in CO2 emissions is worthwhile?
What should we do?
The last 3 I don't exactly see the strong consensus on, and those are the points on which decisions like policy hinge.
I completely agree with this. There is very credible debate on what policies to enact to combat global climate change. No one knows these answers. All we do know is that global climate change is happening and our inaction is making it much worse.
No one is asking for scientific debate to stop.
Yes you are. Every person that shouts "Denier" the second someone doesn't tow the line, is asking for the debate to STOP. There are many many many of you.
This debate has had nothing to do with science for some time now.
Scientific debate is not the same as public debate. Nearly everyone wants scientists to keep debating, but you are correct that there are many many many people who want laymen to stop debating as if they have something important to bring to the discussion.
Your exact argument has been made before. Science was supposed to do away with appeals to authority, lest your argument look like this:
No one is asking for theological debate to stop. I have yet to meet or talk to anyone who wants priests to stop investigating the scriptures in order to better interpret them. This is about unqualified people, myself included, debating religion they know nothing about.
Theology is never settled, but that does not mean you should never act upon theological understanding because it might someday change. When determining which theology to act upon, consensus is very important. In fact it is basically the only important thing. Average citizens and even policy makers could never be expected to understand religion enough to join either side of the debate. Accepting the consensus is the only sane choice in these instances.
That argument would be similar to mine if only 97% of people agreed upon the basic tenants of their religion. Since there is no where near consensus on whether there even is a creator god, how many gods there are, and what the most important commandments of these gods are, this is a red herring. And don't go saying that all major religions agree upon the important stuff either, because many religions such as Buddhism have very little to do with religions such as the Abrahamic ones.
This isn't a situation where there are 3-4 different factions of scientists who agree with 97% of other members in their faction, but only agree on 80% with members of other factions. Then it would be similar to the major religions of the world. Here we have a situation where there is no sizable disagreement among qualified individuals.
Science was supposed to do away with appeals to authority
Science does its best to do away with appeals to authority when actually doing cutting edge scientific research. But research would grind to a halt if no one ever treated agreed upon knowledge as fact (even if it isn't 100% proven) when building upon that research. Engineers would never have the time to apply scientific knowledge if they never trusted the consensus of scientists who made the breakthroughs.
Most knowledge is still gained by trusting authority, even by scientists. Trusting authority is not the same thing as never questioning authority.
New science is where everyone gets together and agrees that X is so, and henceforth X is so and no one is allowed to question X.
No one is asking for scientific debate to stop. I have yet to meet or talk to anyone who wants scientists to stop investigating the causes of global climate change in order to better predict its effects. This is about unqualified people, myself included, debating science they know nothing about.
Science is never settled, but that does not mean you should never act upon scientific knowledge because it might someday change. When determining which science to act upon, consensus is very important. In fact it is basically the only important thing. Average citizens and even policy makers could never be expected to understand the science enough to join either side of the debate. Accepting the consensus is the only sane choice in these instances.
Since AMD does not put any pressure on Intel on the CPU front, 5-10% CPU performance increase per year become the norm.
The Intel of 2015 still has a very solid competitor eating into its profits: the Intel of 2010-13. I am typing this on a 2600K I bought in 2011, and I have no intention of upgrading any time soon. I have went from 8 GB of RAM to 16 GB, from a 128 GB SSD to a 480 GB SSD, and I upgraded my monitor setup. But my desktop processor is still more than twice as fast as my 4300U work laptop, which I never worry about being slow. I wouldn't be that surprised if this processor lasts me until 2020, unless it stops working before then.
But these people aren't investors. An investor has unlimited upside, so that even if a few projects fail, the ones that do succeed will make up for it. The most these project backers can get is the product they ordered. So it's all of the risk with none of the reward.
Kickstarter investors have unlimited upside from the vast number of products they may someday buy that may have never existed without Kickstarter. Any good purchase ends up providing more utility to the buyer than other things they could have spent their money on. Kickstarter investors are not investing in equity, they are investing in the utility gained from owning the product being invested in. Sometimes that utility will be nothing when product development fails. But as long as a reasonable number of investments succeed, the money is still well spent as long as the buyer gains enough utility from the successful products.
Personally I like to buy things that already exist rather than plunk down money on something that doesn't, and would probably suck even (if ever) it does get made.
Or, only spend money on kickstarter that you are willing to lose. It should be treated no differently than spending money on a trip to Vegas. If I give myself a budget of $500 to gamble with, I am perfectly happy if I leave Vegas with $10 of that money left. And if someone spends $500 on 10 kickstarter campaigns, he should be very happy if 5 of them end up sending him a product someday.
Kickstarter is only for pie in the sky dreams that couldn't get traditionally funded, but where people want to give the founders a shot because their products sounds cool. Or at least that is how I think people should treat Kickstarter. People can spend their money however they wish.
If human life had some quantifiable financial value, the market would be able to figure out how to "do the right thing."
Human life does have quantifiable financial value. There are plenty of companies and government agencies that need to give a value to a human life for decision making purposes. It is ridiculous to simply say human life is priceless, since no one in their right mind would spend a trillion dollars to save one human life.
Here is a little more detail on the subject. It seems most US government agencies put the value of a human life at around $8-$10 million. That seems excessively high to me, put it probably has some punitive measures built in when agencies like the EPA and FDA are punishing companies.
When I read your title, I assumed you were going to comment on how cheap the device was because it breaks even after only 40 books. I didn't expect you to think a 40 count book collection would be considered large.
Well, OP made a blanket statement seemingly implying that the government is fully at fault that it is expensive to put medicine on the market.
[From OP:] It's fiendishly expensive and time consuming to get a regulatory approval for a drug for human medical use in the USA, thanks to our government and the nightmares they make companies endure to get to that point.
I don't feel he implied that at all. If I say a company has priced themselves out of the market and made it unlikely their target market can afford their product, I am not implying the company should make their product free. Just like when someone complains about the amount of regulation imposed on the pharmaceutical industry, they are not implying there should be no regulations. Just a reasonable amount that serves the public interest better.
I am not saying I even agree there are too many pharmaceutical regulations. I am not informed enough to have an opinion either way. I just feel it is false to imply everyone who is upset about the amount of regulation is actually arguing for no regulation at all.
but protecting profits is a _means_, not an _end_. In this case there is evidence that we're pushing the means to the detriment of the end.
Only if you believe reducing potential profits would help incentivize companies to invest more in drug development. It's not a ridiculous belief, but it is not very intuitive and it has a high barrier of proof. I find it hard to believe that drug companies would poor more money into antibiotics if there was less potential profit in doing so.
And it appears from a quick Google search that all of the antibiotics I had hear of, like Amoxicillin, are already available as generics. So I don't see how patents are protecting antibiotic profits right now anyway.
thanks to our government and the nightmares they make companies endure to get to that point
As opposed to letting them put out whatever shit they think they can get away with? That doesn't exactly sound like a good idea either.
If only the human brain was capable of easily identifying false dichotomies. Then you wouldn't see comments like this, since everyone would easily identify how poor of an argument they are.
atents exist (see Art. 1, Sec 8 of the US Constitution) to encourage science and the arts. Not to encourage profit.
That is a very odd statement. Patents encourage science and the arts by protecting profits.
So shorten the time that patents are in effect. When the old antibiotics become public domain there will be a strong incentive for the big rich pharma companies to invest in developing the new ones.
Where is the incentive? If they can still profit selling a branded antibiotic with a generic formula, they will do so. Tylenol is still sold even though you can buy cheaper generic acetaminophen.
The incentive to develop new drugs is only the profits the new drug can make. And shortening patent length on future drugs limits those profits. It won't stop drug development, but it certainly would reduce it. It may still be necessary to do this to make drugs cheaper, but that doesn't change the fact it would slow new drug development.
Why are people still surprised by these revelations?
More importantly, why are people still surprised that no one cares about these revelations?
Someone posted yesterday that he felt vindicated for his attempts to keep his company off the cloud after the Snowden story first broke. It just goes to show how disconnected security and privacy minded people are from the general public.
I think your inadvertently highlighting another of the cloud problems. How much does it cost? It's difficult to judge ahead of time and there is risk that you will over utilize and spend a boatload more then you intended. That's not a risk on my own hardware.
You only have to worry about variable pricing if you use spot instances, and there are controls on how much you spend. You reserve a certain amount of computing resources, and if you go over that you run out of hard drive space, max out at 100% CPU utilization, or start paging the hard drive when RAM runs out. Just like with your own hardware. The bonus is you can easily increase or decrease your equipment, as opposed for waiting for new hardware to be delivered.
We're on a large group of X5680's with about 2 times that in storage (SAS), less in CPU.
If this is the case, then your figure of $150k per month seems also way off base. You say you needed about 320 TB of HD space, and considering you said you spent in the order of magnitude of $50k that is obviously not SSD. That comes to 14 d2.4xlarge storage optimized machines, which costs $8600 per month.
Where on earth did you get $150k per month from if your computing needs could be handled by around $50k of hardware?
Also, I'm even curious how you get 320 TB of data with high availability for $50k. Even without thinking about failover or backup, 160 4TB hard drives in RAID 1 in Dell Poweredge R730s would cost about $83k. I'm not sure what their SAS pricing is, but since the hard drives would be $50k if you build the machines yourself I doubt it is much cheaper. That is just for the hard drives, not counting processors, RAM, etc, and certainly not counting cooling, networking equipment, backup, and failover machines.
So should probably get something more than "rough figures" for how much it would cost. because they are way out.
You can add whatever details you want to my rough figures, but it will always end up with AWS not being orders of magnitude more expensive than doing it in house. The only cost savings are going to come from having less availability. My guess is you are not factoring in the cost of fail-over or redundancy because you are not in an environment that needs high availability, and in that case you are comparing apples and oranges.
As an aside.
Amazon Web Services would cost $150,000 a MONTH for the computing power we bought about two years ago - with nowhere near that in initial investment.
So talking "cost effectiveness" is bullshit to.
Well that is bullshit. $150k a month is about 1000 m3.2 x-large EC2 machines. That is the equivalent of about 800 XEON E-5 2670 v2 processors, 30 TB RAM, and 160 TB SSD. Double that for similar availability, and you are looking at about $4 million to buy equivalent hardware. That comes out to $110k per month amortized over three years (standard for a data center). And considering server cost is about half the cost of running a data center, not counting personnel, that comes closer to $220k per month to do it yourself. I'm not sure how much personnel it takes to maintain 800 servers, but that will probably be at least $50k-$100k per month.
These are all just rough figures and your use case may vary, but there is no way you can provide the same level of service as Amazon for significantly less cost. Not when counting in all costs, such as networking equipment, bandwidth, power distribution and cooling, personnel, etc. Amazon's scale is simply too great for almost any company to compete. If there were great cost savings to be made, there would be far more companies offering cloud systems for a fraction of what Amazon / Microsoft / Google charge. And there aren't.
The price I gave was per user per year, not per organization.
Someone tell us what the "ton" is that Westlaw and LexisNexis charge.
For a small practice it is in the order of magnitude of $10-20k per year. That only comes from two lawyer friends who I have helped set up IT systems for. They both have very small practices of 2 & 3 lawyers respectively, and this was about 5 years ago. The pricing is hardly a flat and easy to calculate price, however, so different law firms probably pay wildly different amounts based on how they use it.
Think of these companies like Oracle if there was no MySQL for the little guy to use instead.
"As low as mid 1980s" meaning within a FEW PERCENT.
The difference between 10% and 6% U-3 unemployment is only a few percent. It is also the difference between 2000 25-54 participation and today's numbers. A few percentage points can be a big deal.
For Gods sake you people act like everything is falling apart. We are still at historical highs.
Almost every metric of societal advancement is going to be at historical highs if you compare it to the last 100 years. If you start comparing things to the last 30 years, which is far more relevant to our modern economy, we are nowhere near a "high".
That is explained easily by the fact that more women have chosen to drop out of the workforce to raise children, people are staying in college longer, and the tail end of the baby boomers retiring.
I agree these are most of the reasons, but all of these are bad from an economic point of view. The only one I could quickly find strong statistics on was stay at home mothers. The number of stay at home mothers has risen from 4.3 million to 5.4 million in the past 15 years. That is about 25% of the decrease in our workforce. But the number of mothers who stay at home because they cannot find a job has risen from about 200 thousand to 1.1 million. So 90% of those new stay at home mothers are not doing it by choice, but because of a weaker economy. I would not be surprised if the rise in 25+ year old college students and sub-54 year old retirees is also 90% people who feel forced to and not those who want to.
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