As TFA...TFV points out that this is fundamentally different than all the other technology
Yes, it claims that. Where is the evidence? Past technological revolutions have eliminated 99% of the traditional jobs. Are 99% of our population unemployed? If you want to claim "this time it's different", you need a much more compelling argument than TFV provides.
When people don't have to waste their time on accounting, ghostwriting, long distance driving, clearing tables, whatever, they are free to do other fun stuff: develop space tourism, engineer lemons with high THC content, provide tantric massages, invent and sell new sex toys, whatever.
It should also be noted that historical cases did not go very well. They tended to produce a certain number of middle class benefits and significant upper class benefits, but with each leap forward poverty becomes a bigger and bigger problem.
That's utter bullshit; the so-called poor today are better off than the rich were a century ago. There is no absolute poverty in the US today by 19th and early 20th century standards.
We have not had 'industrial revolution' for all that long, so assuming that everything will work out and new jobs will be created is not that safe. The whole point of the argument was that as robots improve they will displace more and more jobs without creating sufficient new ones.
They don't have to "create new jobs", they can simply reduce the number of hours worked by everybody.
But one way to get other people angry is to start throwing slurs out there, so that is a valid observation as well. It all depends on the context.
You are right that people could use slurs for trolling; my point is that most uses of slurs are not trolling. Slurs are primarily indicative of people actually being angry, not of being trolls.
If you see a lot of slurs and angry responses to an article, chances are the article itself intended to provoke that, i.e., it was the article's author who was "trolling".
TFA didn't target the random goatse cluttering up comment systems, but they've targeted real evil trolls harming people, obviously a reaction to Zelda William's quitting to twitter.
No, they are not. TFA is not about protecting Zelda Williams, it's about angry responses to deliberately provocative political writing on various sites. Trying to pretend that unprovoked abuse of a grieving daughter is the same as angry responses to journalistic trolls is really pretty low.
Perhaps. But usually a genuine troll is discernible by his lack of being willing to debate or defend that opinion, if called on it.
Even that is in the eye of the beholder. In many cases, people will dismiss the arguments of the other side as insincere, propagandistic, or shilling, and then conclude that the other side is "trolling".
Also, a liberal use of slurs and name-calling is sometimes indicative.
Slurs and name-calling are usually an indication that someone is angry, not that they are trolling. By definition, trolls don't act out of anger, but out of a desire to get other people angry. If an article provokes a lot of angry responses, then there's a good chance that the article's author was actually trolling, i.e. deliberately intending for people to get angry, either to gain notoriety or to get more clicks. If people choose to write "provocatively" and "radically", they shouldn't complain if people get angry in response, and these days, instead of angry letters to the editor, they can just vent their anger in the comment section.
If Jezebel or NYT writers receive such communications, it's because mixed in with reasonable articles, they post clickbait, articles that they know are going to be offensive to many. It's both a business strategy (it generates lots of clicks) and an in-your-face political tactic (presenting radical views as if they were mainstream). If you make lots of people angry (i.e. you "cause them emotional damage"), don't be surprised if some people express their anger. This doesn't just happen to feminist and progressive web sites, it also happens to fiscally conservative and Christian websites.
I don't see a problem here that needs fixing. These sites (on the left or right) can choose to stand up for what they believe in and/or engage in a clickbait business strategy; in that case, they have to accept that they are offending many people and people will vent their anger; or they can choose to tone it down and write in dull, rational prose and arguments; in that case, the angry responses will stop.
Which of those are precedents? Almost every president has done or tried to do the same or worse.
Other presidents have attempted to do the same, but in many areas, Obama has pushed the limits considerably further. And that despite promising to reverse course.
If he didn't undo what Bush did, which couldn't have been done anyway
Congress isn't forcing the president to engage in targeted killings, or to spy on Americans, or to engage in crony capitalism beyond the Congressional mandates, all of which Obama has chosen to do.
Furthermore, regardless of what obstacles Congress may or may not have created, Obama knew of the existence of Congress when he made his promises, so if he failed to deliver, it's still his fault.
then he still hasn't established precedent.
Yes, the precedent is now firmly established: prior to Obama, Democrats were opposing the kinds of policies Bush engaged in; Obama has greatly expanded them and Democrats are now defending them publicly.
The fact that the people using red tape and NIMBYism happen to agree with you politically on this issue doesn't make them any less disgusting fucks;
You obviously don't understand how government works; the primary purpose and function of these regulations is precisely to fight against things one doesn't agree with politically. That's how and why regulations get written, get passed, and get enforced in a real democracy. That's government and politics; you should understand it before you start waving your hands about it.
It would be utter foolishness for anybody to stop using red tape and NIMBYism to achieve their political ends, because their political opponents would walk all over them.
Did you read this thread? I am arguing for that explicitly
No, you didn't. You said "the regulations really could use an overhaul in the efficiency department". That is meaningless hot air. The political process in a democracy always and invariably produces inefficient regulations. The only thing we have some influence over is how many of those inefficient regulations we want.
Yes, we frequently have to make a choice between, say, bad air quality and bad, job-killing regulations. Pretending that some magical regulatory fairy will give you good regulations that ensures air quality while not killing jobs is not realistic, even if such regulations could be crafted in theory.
Yes, and it's obvious that they have. The Los Angeles basin has gone from one of the most polluted regions in the world to relatively clean in 30 years
Oh, some environmental regulations are fine. The question is whether California has gone overboard, and you can't show anything about that by showing the success of regulations. And, note how you have shifted from semiconductor fabs to air pollution in the LA basin, something completely different.
California politicians didn't have anything to do with the law; it was voter-initiated.
"The law"? California has numerous causes of fiscal disasters, some voter initiated, many initiated by politicians.
Voter initiatives cause a lot of headaches, especially for politicians who have to live with them
Oh those poor, poor politicians, the people are causing them headaches with their wishes! What is the world coming to!
Seriously, if you're a politician and the voters give you less money to spend, you spend less money; you don't go off wrecking the fiscal future of the state.
but it's largely because of that initiative system that California can boast that it's doing really well for itself, despite getting screwed by our conservative national government (the state only gets back about 50 cents in benefits and funding for every dollar paid in federal taxes
You state that analysis as if it were fact, but it's an interpretation and includes crap most states don't want to "get back". And, furthermore, conservatives have a simple fix to this "problem": reduce federal taxation and federal spending.
California can boast that it's doing really well for itself
You're kidding yourself. California is a basket case. It's a bloody shame what has happened to this state over the past several decades.
Well, another way to look at it is Californians have calculated the real cost.
You're suggesting that dozens of European and Asian countries where semiconductor manufacturing is growing are all run by morons, while California's ridiculous cast of politicians has figured out things perfectly?
About the only reason you'd want a FAB plant in your state that wasn't willing or able to comply with California's environmental laws is if you want to be able to boast about how you 'created more jobs' in the leadup to the next election, and didn't give a shit what the real cost to the state would be over the next 30 years.
You're suggesting that California politicians are acting out of concern over the fiscal health of the state 30 years from now? I haven't heard anything more ridiculous than that in a long time.
In short, California is able to report a balanced budget only by ignoring more than $6 billion in costs, cutting services to the state’s most defenseless people, and imposing temporary taxes that will go away when Brown leaves office in 2018 (assuming he is re-elected). No core issue has been solved. But cash-based budgeting obscures those realities.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons you could oppose the HSR system, but tying it up in red tape and NIMBY lawsuits is not one of them,
People oppose HSR because it's a gigantic and wasteful handout to select unions and corporations. Tying it up in red tape and NIMBY lawsuit is simply the mechanism by which opponents sabotage it. What's wrong with that? It's the same strategy that environmentalists use to tie up things they don't like. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If you don't like these legal mechanisms, get rid of them.
And I imagine there will be even more idiotic chest beating like yours when the next Republican president starts abusing his powers based on the precedents that Obama has set.
That particular regulation (prop 65) was voter initiated, not legislature initiated.
Yes, but the mindset and framework that it passed in is what is hurting California, namely (1) a culture driven by fear, FUD, and sensationlism, (2) fundamental lack of respect for individual liberties, and (3) tyranny of the majority.
The solution to lost jobs isn't to drop regulation so employers can go back to putting employee health at risk, it's to improve the standards of the rest of the world so there isn't an unregulated bolt-hole for fab plant owners to run off to.
Why would the rest of the world care? If Californians eliminate themselves as a competitor through insane regulation, other countries benefit. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the "pro-environmental lobbying" in California isn't sponsored by foreign competitors seeking to harm their rivals.
Except that, assuming that you are the average software developer (so FFS don't anecdote me, bro), Apple
I'm not "anecdoting you", you just don't know what you're talking about. You might notice that Apple isn't at the top of the list, either in pay or quality:
Some of my friends have left Apple to go work for other companies (including where I work) or start startups themselves. Competition for talent in the valley is fierce.
The result is, the context in which Apple/Google/Microsoft/Facebook/etc. hire is *very* different from the context in which Bweezbo.me hires. They have all the qualified applicants they want, and are limited by headcount
Low-level functions in those companies are limited by headcount, but above a certain level of qualification, headcount ceases to be a consideration and there is a scarcity of people. And startups are competitive with places like Apple: they offer higher salaries, better upside potential (but also more risk), and far more control over what you do.
They're probably hurting for "qualified applicants", but that's a tautology: The definition of a "qualified applicant" is an applicant that you're willing to hire, given the talent pool available to you. All of us want our geniuses to be a little bit geniuser.
Just create a sandboxed version of LLVM and put it into the browser. Or maybe Firefox can adopt NaCl. But translating C into LLVM into JavaScript because a small number of vendors can't be bothered to put an open source plugin into their browser is just ridiculous.
I would venture that in many cases where a white male is hired into a technical position, there are equally or better qualified non-whites out there some place.
There are many highly qualified non-whites, and they are getting hired. That's why whites are underrepresented in these statistics.
To find them, you may have to look in different places, - cast a wider net. My point is that making an effort to have a more diverse workforce DOES NOT mean you have to settle for less qualified people.
You're starting from the wrong assumption, namely that there is a shortage of jobs. But there is a shortage of qualified applicants. My company (and others as well) don't go out and hire the best candidate for a job, we hire every candidate that meets our requirements, regardless of race. I expect Apple, Facebook, and Google are doing the same. That's why our and their workforce is simply representative of the applicant pool. In order to change the demographics of their workforce, they'd have to reject qualified applicants solely based on race.
Here's what he is really saying: "We need to spread FUD about another non-issue to make even more funding and power come our way for anti-terrorism efforts."
Perhaps, but this is still addressable by changes in the patent system. In particular, they could change pharmaceutical patents to have three periods: testing, restricted use, open use.
I don't think that fixes the fundamental problem: the high (and somewhat arbitrary) FDA standards for safety and efficacy make new drug development very risky. At the same time, socialized costs for prescription drugs in the US insurance system mean that drug companies can make a fortune by coming up with small variants of existing drugs. Doing what you suggest wouldn't really help; it would make both high-risk and low-risk drug development more profitable, and companies would still choose low-risk drug development.
Ben Goldacre's book Bad Pharma is a good place to start
Good start with what? Learn about the faux outrage over trivial well-known facts? Like any other market, most pharmaceutical products are crap. And like most scientific publications, most publications about new drugs are crap. This is supposed to be news?
What he is complaining about is a mix of pharmaceutical companies responding to markets and regulation. On the market side, they keep developing minor variations of prescription drugs because it's profitable. Why is it profitable? Because they get a new patent, and because they can charge pretty much whatever they want: the people creating the demand (doctors, patients) aren't seeing the costs directly. And because it's low risk: drugs that are small variations of existing drugs sail through approval.
If you want to improve this situation: make most drugs OTC, don't force insurance companies to reimburse drugs, and stop socializing the cost of prescription drugs; that will motivate doctors and patients to pick drugs based on their efficacy and price and will discourage the development of expensive, new patented drugs that are no better than existing low cost drugs.
Second, greatly relax the FDA approval process so that bringing out new drugs gets easier; that makes it your choice whether to pick a risky new drug or not. Some people will die because they stupidly choose a drug that promises too much or hasn't been tested enough, but bringing out good new drugs will get faster and cheaper, and many more lives will get saved. The FDA should focus on ensuring basic safety (is it acutely toxic), not concern itself with efficacy (patients are much better at that), and tracking and publishing large scale trends; that is, it should primarily become a review site for drugs, a resource for doctors and patients to help them make informed choices.
Mind you, with those changes, most drugs would still be crap, but we'd get more innovation, overall better health, and lower prices.
And this article [theguardian.com] explains how, contrary to being great innovators, the big pharmaceuticals are running down their own R&D in favour of cherry picking the work of small biotech outfits and publicly funded researchers and rebranding it as their own.
Yes, smart people do the initial drug development, get rewarded by having their companies bought or get hired, and the big pharmaceuticals do the drudgework of dealing with the FDA, approval, marketing, etc. Works the same in many high tech fields. Why is that bad?
No offense, but you don't know much about the pharmaceutical industry.
No offense, but evidently you don't, and you don't know much about economics either.
pharmaceutical patents
on
Patents That Kill
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Overall, I agree that patents don't help much with innovation. However, I think pharmaceutical patents, unlike most other patents, do, in fact, encourage innovation. The fact that they encourage the wrong kind of innovation (minor variations on existing drugs) is not a problem with patents per se, it's a problem with the costs and risks of FDA approval: it's much safer to develop a small variant of an existing drug than to develop a completely novel drug for untreatable diseases.
Sorry, guys, you can't have it all: lots of innovation, safety, and low cost. Pick any two.
The fact that you seem to think you can't have a natural phenomenon be a disaster is mind boggling.
Where the hell did you get that idea? Something is a "disaster" if it unexpectedly and unpredictably destroys a lot of infrastructure and/or kills a lot of people; earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, wildfires, tornadoes, and hurricanes can all do that. An algal bloom does none of those things.
This knee-jerk reflex to call inconveniences "disasters" is as stupid as the knee-jerk reflex to call crimes "terrorism". Of course the motivation is the same: if it's a "disaster" or "terrorism", money starts flowing.
Also, Red Tide is 10 times stronger then they where 50 years ago specifically due to human activities.
Oh, I'm sure you can dig up some fear mongering web site purporting to show that. In reality, people don't know:
While red tides in the Gulf of Mexico have been occurring since the time of early explorers such as Cabeza de Vaca,[16] it is unclear what initiates these blooms and how large a role anthropogenic and natural factors play in their development. It is also debated whether the apparent increase in frequency and severity of algal blooms in various parts of the world is in fact a real increase or is due to increased observation effort and advances in species identification methods.[17][18]
Solar *has* reached a tipping point, and it *is* cost-competitive, which is why all the financials companies are freaking out:
From that paper:
Certain Alternative Energy generation technologies are cost-competitive with conventional generation technologies under some scenarios, before factoring in environmental and other externalities (e.g., RECs, transmission and back-up generation/system reliability costs) as well as construction and fuel cost dynamics affecting conventional generation technologies... U.S. federal tax subsidies remain an important component of the economics of Alternative Energy generation technologies (and government incentives are, generally, currently important in all regions); future cost reductions in technologies such as solar PV have the potential to enable these technologies to approach “grid parity” without tax subsidies and may currently reach “grid parity” under certain conditions
So, even according to the rather biased paper you point to, alternative energy generation is not cost competitive.
And if you read carefully, you'll notice, by the way, that these calculations don't even exclude local and state subsidies, indirect subsidies, and regulatory advantages. They also don't include any calculations of the additional costs that we would incur if we deployed these technologies at scale, as opposed to piggy-backing onto existing infrastructure.
No, it's not, and the many, many studies on this demonstrate that it's not.
So far, you aren't doing too well, because the paper you point to supports my contention that alternative energy generation is not cost competitive yet.
The president pays lip service to science, but in the end, he obviously cares about other programs more, like handouts to his buddies in industry through "stimulus packages" and "bailouts" and all that crap.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it claims that. Where is the evidence? Past technological revolutions have eliminated 99% of the traditional jobs. Are 99% of our population unemployed? If you want to claim "this time it's different", you need a much more compelling argument than TFV provides.
When people don't have to waste their time on accounting, ghostwriting, long distance driving, clearing tables, whatever, they are free to do other fun stuff: develop space tourism, engineer lemons with high THC content, provide tantric massages, invent and sell new sex toys, whatever.
That's utter bullshit; the so-called poor today are better off than the rich were a century ago. There is no absolute poverty in the US today by 19th and early 20th century standards.
They don't have to "create new jobs", they can simply reduce the number of hours worked by everybody.
You are right that people could use slurs for trolling; my point is that most uses of slurs are not trolling. Slurs are primarily indicative of people actually being angry, not of being trolls.
If you see a lot of slurs and angry responses to an article, chances are the article itself intended to provoke that, i.e., it was the article's author who was "trolling".
No, they are not. TFA is not about protecting Zelda Williams, it's about angry responses to deliberately provocative political writing on various sites. Trying to pretend that unprovoked abuse of a grieving daughter is the same as angry responses to journalistic trolls is really pretty low.
Even that is in the eye of the beholder. In many cases, people will dismiss the arguments of the other side as insincere, propagandistic, or shilling, and then conclude that the other side is "trolling".
Slurs and name-calling are usually an indication that someone is angry, not that they are trolling. By definition, trolls don't act out of anger, but out of a desire to get other people angry. If an article provokes a lot of angry responses, then there's a good chance that the article's author was actually trolling, i.e. deliberately intending for people to get angry, either to gain notoriety or to get more clicks. If people choose to write "provocatively" and "radically", they shouldn't complain if people get angry in response, and these days, instead of angry letters to the editor, they can just vent their anger in the comment section.
If Jezebel or NYT writers receive such communications, it's because mixed in with reasonable articles, they post clickbait, articles that they know are going to be offensive to many. It's both a business strategy (it generates lots of clicks) and an in-your-face political tactic (presenting radical views as if they were mainstream). If you make lots of people angry (i.e. you "cause them emotional damage"), don't be surprised if some people express their anger. This doesn't just happen to feminist and progressive web sites, it also happens to fiscally conservative and Christian websites.
I don't see a problem here that needs fixing. These sites (on the left or right) can choose to stand up for what they believe in and/or engage in a clickbait business strategy; in that case, they have to accept that they are offending many people and people will vent their anger; or they can choose to tone it down and write in dull, rational prose and arguments; in that case, the angry responses will stop.
Other presidents have attempted to do the same, but in many areas, Obama has pushed the limits considerably further. And that despite promising to reverse course.
Congress isn't forcing the president to engage in targeted killings, or to spy on Americans, or to engage in crony capitalism beyond the Congressional mandates, all of which Obama has chosen to do.
Furthermore, regardless of what obstacles Congress may or may not have created, Obama knew of the existence of Congress when he made his promises, so if he failed to deliver, it's still his fault.
Yes, the precedent is now firmly established: prior to Obama, Democrats were opposing the kinds of policies Bush engaged in; Obama has greatly expanded them and Democrats are now defending them publicly.
You obviously don't understand how government works; the primary purpose and function of these regulations is precisely to fight against things one doesn't agree with politically. That's how and why regulations get written, get passed, and get enforced in a real democracy. That's government and politics; you should understand it before you start waving your hands about it.
It would be utter foolishness for anybody to stop using red tape and NIMBYism to achieve their political ends, because their political opponents would walk all over them.
No, you didn't. You said "the regulations really could use an overhaul in the efficiency department". That is meaningless hot air. The political process in a democracy always and invariably produces inefficient regulations. The only thing we have some influence over is how many of those inefficient regulations we want.
Yes, we frequently have to make a choice between, say, bad air quality and bad, job-killing regulations. Pretending that some magical regulatory fairy will give you good regulations that ensures air quality while not killing jobs is not realistic, even if such regulations could be crafted in theory.
Oh, some environmental regulations are fine. The question is whether California has gone overboard, and you can't show anything about that by showing the success of regulations. And, note how you have shifted from semiconductor fabs to air pollution in the LA basin, something completely different.
"The law"? California has numerous causes of fiscal disasters, some voter initiated, many initiated by politicians.
Oh those poor, poor politicians, the people are causing them headaches with their wishes! What is the world coming to!
Seriously, if you're a politician and the voters give you less money to spend, you spend less money; you don't go off wrecking the fiscal future of the state.
You state that analysis as if it were fact, but it's an interpretation and includes crap most states don't want to "get back". And, furthermore, conservatives have a simple fix to this "problem": reduce federal taxation and federal spending.
You're kidding yourself. California is a basket case. It's a bloody shame what has happened to this state over the past several decades.
Some of it are listed here:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
In addition, Obama was elected to undo and reverse some of the damage Bush had done; instead of doing that, Obama built on it.
You're suggesting that dozens of European and Asian countries where semiconductor manufacturing is growing are all run by morons, while California's ridiculous cast of politicians has figured out things perfectly?
You're suggesting that California politicians are acting out of concern over the fiscal health of the state 30 years from now? I haven't heard anything more ridiculous than that in a long time.
http://www.mercurynews.com/cal...
http://www.bloombergview.com/a...
People oppose HSR because it's a gigantic and wasteful handout to select unions and corporations. Tying it up in red tape and NIMBY lawsuit is simply the mechanism by which opponents sabotage it. What's wrong with that? It's the same strategy that environmentalists use to tie up things they don't like. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If you don't like these legal mechanisms, get rid of them.
And I imagine there will be even more idiotic chest beating like yours when the next Republican president starts abusing his powers based on the precedents that Obama has set.
Yes, but the mindset and framework that it passed in is what is hurting California, namely (1) a culture driven by fear, FUD, and sensationlism, (2) fundamental lack of respect for individual liberties, and (3) tyranny of the majority.
Why would the rest of the world care? If Californians eliminate themselves as a competitor through insane regulation, other countries benefit. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the "pro-environmental lobbying" in California isn't sponsored by foreign competitors seeking to harm their rivals.
I'm not "anecdoting you", you just don't know what you're talking about. You might notice that Apple isn't at the top of the list, either in pay or quality:
http://www.businessinsider.com...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
Some of my friends have left Apple to go work for other companies (including where I work) or start startups themselves. Competition for talent in the valley is fierce.
Low-level functions in those companies are limited by headcount, but above a certain level of qualification, headcount ceases to be a consideration and there is a scarcity of people. And startups are competitive with places like Apple: they offer higher salaries, better upside potential (but also more risk), and far more control over what you do.
Nope, sorry, that's not not how it works.
Just create a sandboxed version of LLVM and put it into the browser. Or maybe Firefox can adopt NaCl. But translating C into LLVM into JavaScript because a small number of vendors can't be bothered to put an open source plugin into their browser is just ridiculous.
There are many highly qualified non-whites, and they are getting hired. That's why whites are underrepresented in these statistics.
You're starting from the wrong assumption, namely that there is a shortage of jobs. But there is a shortage of qualified applicants. My company (and others as well) don't go out and hire the best candidate for a job, we hire every candidate that meets our requirements, regardless of race. I expect Apple, Facebook, and Google are doing the same. That's why our and their workforce is simply representative of the applicant pool. In order to change the demographics of their workforce, they'd have to reject qualified applicants solely based on race.
Here's what he is really saying: "We need to spread FUD about another non-issue to make even more funding and power come our way for anti-terrorism efforts."
And what, specifically, does "improve" mean?
I don't think that fixes the fundamental problem: the high (and somewhat arbitrary) FDA standards for safety and efficacy make new drug development very risky. At the same time, socialized costs for prescription drugs in the US insurance system mean that drug companies can make a fortune by coming up with small variants of existing drugs. Doing what you suggest wouldn't really help; it would make both high-risk and low-risk drug development more profitable, and companies would still choose low-risk drug development.
Good start with what? Learn about the faux outrage over trivial well-known facts? Like any other market, most pharmaceutical products are crap. And like most scientific publications, most publications about new drugs are crap. This is supposed to be news?
What he is complaining about is a mix of pharmaceutical companies responding to markets and regulation. On the market side, they keep developing minor variations of prescription drugs because it's profitable. Why is it profitable? Because they get a new patent, and because they can charge pretty much whatever they want: the people creating the demand (doctors, patients) aren't seeing the costs directly. And because it's low risk: drugs that are small variations of existing drugs sail through approval.
If you want to improve this situation: make most drugs OTC, don't force insurance companies to reimburse drugs, and stop socializing the cost of prescription drugs; that will motivate doctors and patients to pick drugs based on their efficacy and price and will discourage the development of expensive, new patented drugs that are no better than existing low cost drugs.
Second, greatly relax the FDA approval process so that bringing out new drugs gets easier; that makes it your choice whether to pick a risky new drug or not. Some people will die because they stupidly choose a drug that promises too much or hasn't been tested enough, but bringing out good new drugs will get faster and cheaper, and many more lives will get saved. The FDA should focus on ensuring basic safety (is it acutely toxic), not concern itself with efficacy (patients are much better at that), and tracking and publishing large scale trends; that is, it should primarily become a review site for drugs, a resource for doctors and patients to help them make informed choices.
Mind you, with those changes, most drugs would still be crap, but we'd get more innovation, overall better health, and lower prices.
Yes, smart people do the initial drug development, get rewarded by having their companies bought or get hired, and the big pharmaceuticals do the drudgework of dealing with the FDA, approval, marketing, etc. Works the same in many high tech fields. Why is that bad?
No offense, but evidently you don't, and you don't know much about economics either.
Overall, I agree that patents don't help much with innovation. However, I think pharmaceutical patents, unlike most other patents, do, in fact, encourage innovation. The fact that they encourage the wrong kind of innovation (minor variations on existing drugs) is not a problem with patents per se, it's a problem with the costs and risks of FDA approval: it's much safer to develop a small variant of an existing drug than to develop a completely novel drug for untreatable diseases.
Sorry, guys, you can't have it all: lots of innovation, safety, and low cost. Pick any two.
Where the hell did you get that idea? Something is a "disaster" if it unexpectedly and unpredictably destroys a lot of infrastructure and/or kills a lot of people; earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, wildfires, tornadoes, and hurricanes can all do that. An algal bloom does none of those things.
This knee-jerk reflex to call inconveniences "disasters" is as stupid as the knee-jerk reflex to call crimes "terrorism". Of course the motivation is the same: if it's a "disaster" or "terrorism", money starts flowing.
Oh, I'm sure you can dig up some fear mongering web site purporting to show that. In reality, people don't know:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
From that paper:
So, even according to the rather biased paper you point to, alternative energy generation is not cost competitive.
And if you read carefully, you'll notice, by the way, that these calculations don't even exclude local and state subsidies, indirect subsidies, and regulatory advantages. They also don't include any calculations of the additional costs that we would incur if we deployed these technologies at scale, as opposed to piggy-backing onto existing infrastructure.
So far, you aren't doing too well, because the paper you point to supports my contention that alternative energy generation is not cost competitive yet.
I suggest you have a look at the US budget process:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
The president pays lip service to science, but in the end, he obviously cares about other programs more, like handouts to his buddies in industry through "stimulus packages" and "bailouts" and all that crap.