So the idea of your kids getting fake (fake = does not actually contain the active ingredient) cipro to fight an infection or your parents getting a fake cancer drug doesn't horrify you? If not, how about the idea of paying real money for fake drugs?
Did I say that? You asked whether the import of fake medicines from India was "a horror". It's not. And it's a problem indirectly caused by US prescription drug policies in the first place, the same way that the war on drugs causes the import of dangerous designer drugs.
Doesn't answer my question. What would this organization be doing differently?
Your question already presumes your conclusion: that these things can be decided ahead of time by a bunch of people sitting in a room.
It would help me understand your complaint if you could provide some examples where the FDA has been too strict
You're asking the wrong question. The bulk of the problem isn't the drugs that got submitted and turned down, the bulk of the problem is the drugs that never were developed or submitted in the first place.
But if you want to focus on just the froth, there are obvious failures: the enormously high price of prescription drugs in the US and many drugs that are OTC elsewhere but not in the US.
But it's not my "complaint" that's at issue here, it's your insistence on continuing these programs in their current form. Justify what the FDA does, with real data and arguments.
Incidentally, where your data that European regulations made European delays smaller than American delays? A quick check shows that over the last year, United has had better on-time performance than Lufthansa, and LGA and JFK beat LHR and FRA handily in on-time performance.
Sounds to me like you fabricated "facts" in order to support your political views.
You act as if that is a problem. In the well-off countries, people generally would not want to trade their better infrastructure for slightly more money.
It's not "slightly more money". It's the majority of the population in many European countries living below the US poverty line. It's half of the under 25 being unemployed in some countries. It's economic stagnation and lack of innovation. The damage isn't primarily the higher taxes, it's the opportunity costs and corruption, the lack of any control of people over their own destinies.
As a member of an intellectual urban elite with an escape hatch to the US, none of that will likely ever touch you. But don't kid yourself: you argue for the European model out of naked self interest, because your social class and profession is valued much more in Europe than in the US. And, of course, for someone who believes in the crap that Orthodox Christianity and Swinburne teach, it's clearly not hard to rationalize their own venal self interest as humanitarianism with economic fairy tales.
In 1936 the American journalist George Seldes complained that when his fellow-countrymen returned home from holidays in Italy they seemed to cry in unison: 'Great is the Duce; the trains now run on time]' And no matter how often they were told about Fascist oppression, injustice and cruelty, they always said the same thing: 'But the trains run on time.' 'It is true,' wrote Seldes, 'that the majority of big expresses, those carrying eye-witnessing tourists, are usually put through to time, but on the smaller lines rail and road-bed conditions frequently cause delays.'
So I guess you ceded my point that the horrors are ongoing
You guessed wrong. I don't consider those things "horrors".
and the FDA is solving them to some extent
Government can solve lots of problems; the question is what price we're paying. In the case of the FDA, the price we are paying for overregulation is likely to be tens of thousands of deaths per year and hundreds of billions of dollars.
For example: I say I have a cure for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. How does your private organization evaluate this claim differently from how the FDA would?
On the one hand, it would have a compelling financial interest in actually bringing the drug to market; on the other hand, it would have a compelling financial interest to avoid making mistakes that it would be held liable for. In different words, unlike the FDA, it is actually strongly motivated to do the right thing.
On the inspection and evaluation end I think the FDA should be doing even more,
Why? You want people to suffer and die unnecessarily?
There's a reason for taxi medallions, registrars of contractors, business licenses, landlord-tenant laws, and other regulation services, and it's to keep those that run those businesses honest and to protect the consumer. A bad-apple can operate for YEARS when new customers in a market don't know to avoid them, even if existing customers have reviewed them as bad.
No economic study I have ever seen supports any of your assertions. Care to back up your handwaving with some facts?
No need to reach back to the 19th century for horrors - Look at the present day drugs imported by the US from India. How do you feel about fake statins and antibiotics?
And government regulation is the only possible answer to this problem because... ?
It is absolutely foolish for you to generalize across Europe, from nearly bankrupt Greece, to highly regulated and comparatively well off Germany. The one thing that is pretty clear across the EU is that most people make a lot less money than they do in the US.
But, in my experience in Germany and France, customer service sucks. Businesses know they have you by the balls, often there is no competition, and they just laugh at "complaining to a government bureaucrat". Thanks, but I don't want the US to become anything like that; I'll take my chances with the unregulated market.
In post-WW2 Germany, especially history class pretty much spends one year telling you that Germany was the bad guy and how horrible your grandparents were, to the point of inciting counter-actions by pupils because really after some months you can't hear it anymore.
Quite true. What it doesn't teach much is actual German history between about 1600 and about 1900. Why? Simple: to prevent a resurgence of German nationalism; quite a reasonable goal after WWII. But that creates a blind spot that lets you maintain comforting fictions like that "at the beginning of the 20th century, Europe was a mess of countries all out for blood, with century-old hatreds" and that Europe was "a powder keg", as if there was nothing unusual about Germany and German culture compared to other European cultures. It's why you're blind to how much your own political and social views today are rooted in the views of 18th and 19th century Germany.
I've talked with people from many, many countries about politics and history, and few of them have such a bad view of Germany as, yes, the Germans do.
I really don't care whether you feel guilty; I certainly don't, and I'm as much of German descent as you are. Your misconceptions about German history and Germany's place in the world today, and how that relates to German history, are what we are talking about, and the fact is that you simply don't know much about it.
Welcome to my library, take a look around. You might notice most of the books are in english. The history section is over there...
Great! If you have actually read them, you should have no trouble pointing out some excellent histories of 18th and 19th century Germany and explaining what makes them so good. I always like finding out about good books. So please go ahead. Any language you're likely to speak is fine.
Please, prey tell, how this will make phone service more expensive.
If you switch phone carriers, that's a big loss to your phone company. Providing locked phones are one of several mechanisms by which a company can insure against that loss and they are willing to give you a discount for that. In different words, they pay you an insurance premium, same way you pay car insurance.
And by further standardizing phone service terms, it will likely also lead to a weeding out of MVNOs, which have been thriving on offering non-standard business models. Some of them offer a small number of locked phones, others specialize in supporting any unlocked phone, meeting different preferences and kinds of demand.
and that when consumers can switch attempting to tack a bit more on to the profit margin will result in current customer loss, but can not result in a loss of current customers when they can't switch
Consumers have been able to buy unlocked phones and switch at will for many years. I haven't had a locked phone or a contract for more than a decade and been with MVNOs for years. So, there is absolutely no reason to create legislation to force companies to make that business model mandatory for everybody.
And, again, when you make it easier for consumers to switch, that increases cost for the operators, and they are just going to pass those costs on to their customers. This whole regulation forces low frequency switchers to subsidize high frequency switchers. Why is that a good thing?
Explain to us all how enabling a free market economy
A free market means that buyers and sellers are free to agree to the terms under which they do business. Imposing additional restrictions on those terms, by definition, does not "enable a free market economy".
Sometimes (rarely) imposing restrictions on the market may be beneficial, but don't try to sell anti-free market policies as pro-free market policies.
Your Verizon phone likely will still only work on Verizon, and this may make phones and phone service a little more expensive down the road, and it may kill some business models that could have brought phones to the poor with no monthly charges, but who cares! Well-off, politically connected geeks can now unlock their phones officially! A victory for democracy!
Biologists and chemists have become quite good at going from genes to treatments; meaning, if you know which gene causes a disease, in many cases, you can come up with a treatment. The holdup for cancer has been that, genetically, it's not one disease but thousands, many of which haven't been characterized. By identifying the genes responsible, people will be able to develop specific drugs and treatments, and many cancers will likely become treatable.
But correlating genetic and medical data will be useful for many other purposes as well: predicting disease progression and treatment outcomes, predicting sensitivity and efficacy of particular drugs, etc.
No they are demanding that Microsoft Ireland give data for a case with Microsoft USA which is a sepert company and in violation of European law, if they fallow through with the warrent they will be commiting a crime
They are demanding that Microsoft USA comply with a US court order or face the consequences. Microsoft may well be in a situation where they are forced to violate the laws of either the US or Ireland. I don't see why either the US court or Americans in general should give a sh*t. If Microsoft doesn't want to be in this situation, they shouldn't set up shop in companies with conflicting legal requirements. And if Ireland wants to continue to attract US corporations, they better figure out how to make their laws compatible with US laws.
Cars are generally not designed to be resistant to 'hacking' by their owner/operators, and should not be
How low we have fallen. People used to build entire cars, and they used to maintain and repair their cars too. And now people get pushed out of shape about, gasp, using a lane following system to follow lanes!
Or by threats of overwhelming violence. A situation that comes close the obliterating the distinction between law and brute force.
There is no violence more "overwhelming" than that possible by a state against an individual citizen, whether in the US, Europe, or Russia; and that is what all law at the national level is backed by. Therefore the "distinction" you want to draw between law and brute force doesn't exist: "law" is always, and can only ever be, what is ultimately backed up by brute force.
Why would "the USA mind"? Any country is free to issue warrants for whatever it wants. But, in practice, it can only enforce them within its jurisdiction or via treaty.
The US can enforce its warrant against Microsoft because Microsoft operates within its jurisdiction. Microsoft has to decide whether it values more operating in the US or whether it values the privacy of its foreign operations more. I think it's pretty clear how that's going to shake out.
You attempt to simplify complex history to one source and one reason and one actor
I'm not doing that at all. I was just pointing out that European views and culture haven't changed as much as you think they have, starting with your assumption that Europe could do without the US economically and militarily.
Maybe you could try history and actual arguments instead of ad hominem attacks.
It's not an "ad hominem" to point out that your views are a typical reflection of the canonical view of history as taught in post-WWII Germany: "a complex diplomatic situation", "it was a powder keg", "irrational hatred". I think that's mainly a consequence of trying to avoid dealing too much with the history of Prussia.
You could have heard about it in history class
I did hear about it in history class, same school system as you, "Leistungskurs" in history actually. That's why I know what you were taught, why you were taught it, and what blind spots you have. You need to do a lot of reading beyond the German Gymnasium if you want to understand what's going on.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Europe was a mess of countries all out for blood, with century-old hatreds.
Oh, I'm sure believing that WWI and WWII happened because of irrational hatred is a comforting thought to Germans, but it's not true. Germans were motivated by the strong conviction that their culture, economy, and system of government was superior, in particular to the Anglo Saxon model, and that they had a moral duty to spread it across Europe. Things only got bloody because other cultures didn't like the idea. And you illustrate that many Germans still hold the same kinds of beliefs.
That's overly defensive. The question, as asked, is not accusing, nor implying, that the notification of the website publishers is wrong. The aim is probably to determine whether they considered doing this and, if they didn't
Google didn't just consider doing it, they did it. And it rubbed European legislators the wrong way because all of a sudden they had to explain themselves to publishers. That's why they are asking this weird question.
And the question is truly weird because notifying people that their content is being removed from Google search results should require no "legal justification"; in fact, given the EU pressure on "fairness" in search results, Google may well have an obligation to tell people when they are removed from search results and why.
The trade volume between the USA and the EU is about 60 billion US$ monthly [census.gov]. However, the USA imports a lot more, while the import/export balance of the EU is almost balanced (http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/eu-position-in-world-trade/). Make a guess who would suffer more..
Both the US and the European economies would suffer greatly in such a trade war. Investments would lose massive amounts of value; banks, pension plans, and governments would be unable to meet their obligations on both sides of the Atlantic; both sides would have difficulties paying for raw materials and energy from abroad.
The ultimate outcome would be unpredictable, though if history is any guide, the US would probably pull through it while Europe would end up in utter political turmoil and possibly war. Americans are still quite a bit more individualistic and self-sufficient than Europeans, investors would have more confidence in the political stability of the US, and the US as a whole has easier access to raw materials and energy domestically and through Canada.
You see, the scenario you outline isn't all that different from what happened at the beginning of the 20th century. Your attitudes are the typical continental (and, in particular, German) attitudes from back then.
I agree completely with what you said. But I think in addition, there are strong economic and political motives for pushing this; it's not just a "non-issue".
European companies are lobbying and spreading anti-Google propaganda in order to gain market share and political favors. European spy agencies hate it when Europeans use US online services because it makes it much harder for them to spy on their own citizens. And European political and intellectual elites have had tight control over information flow and propaganda since the invention of the printing press, and they see that threatened by Google and other US companies (just look at the number of German politicians felled by Internet-based revelations of plagiarism and their attempts to blame the Internet in response).
Anti-Google and anti-US lobbying and politicking isn't just a convenient distraction by European politicians, it's about big money and huge shifts in European political power.
It is absolutely technically possible to filter based on source IP address country. They can do it for advertisement, so there's absolutely no excuse for not doing it for legal compliance.
For advertisements, it doesn't matter much whether they get it wrong and show you some ads from the wrong country, in particular if you choose to go to a different country domain. For search results, that affects the core of their product quality.
Europe would like its laws to be honoured by corporations doing business in the EU.
Europe wants a lot of things, that doesn't make it morally right. Furthermore, I can use the same argument to say that US First Amendment rights should apply to US corporations worldwide, as well as European corporations who happen to do business in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Did I say that? You asked whether the import of fake medicines from India was "a horror". It's not. And it's a problem indirectly caused by US prescription drug policies in the first place, the same way that the war on drugs causes the import of dangerous designer drugs.
Your question already presumes your conclusion: that these things can be decided ahead of time by a bunch of people sitting in a room.
You're asking the wrong question. The bulk of the problem isn't the drugs that got submitted and turned down, the bulk of the problem is the drugs that never were developed or submitted in the first place.
But if you want to focus on just the froth, there are obvious failures: the enormously high price of prescription drugs in the US and many drugs that are OTC elsewhere but not in the US.
But it's not my "complaint" that's at issue here, it's your insistence on continuing these programs in their current form. Justify what the FDA does, with real data and arguments.
Incidentally, where your data that European regulations made European delays smaller than American delays? A quick check shows that over the last year, United has had better on-time performance than Lufthansa, and LGA and JFK beat LHR and FRA handily in on-time performance.
Sounds to me like you fabricated "facts" in order to support your political views.
It's not "slightly more money". It's the majority of the population in many European countries living below the US poverty line. It's half of the under 25 being unemployed in some countries. It's economic stagnation and lack of innovation. The damage isn't primarily the higher taxes, it's the opportunity costs and corruption, the lack of any control of people over their own destinies.
As a member of an intellectual urban elite with an escape hatch to the US, none of that will likely ever touch you. But don't kid yourself: you argue for the European model out of naked self interest, because your social class and profession is valued much more in Europe than in the US. And, of course, for someone who believes in the crap that Orthodox Christianity and Swinburne teach, it's clearly not hard to rationalize their own venal self interest as humanitarianism with economic fairy tales.
But, hey, at least the planes run on time:
You guessed wrong. I don't consider those things "horrors".
Government can solve lots of problems; the question is what price we're paying. In the case of the FDA, the price we are paying for overregulation is likely to be tens of thousands of deaths per year and hundreds of billions of dollars.
On the one hand, it would have a compelling financial interest in actually bringing the drug to market; on the other hand, it would have a compelling financial interest to avoid making mistakes that it would be held liable for. In different words, unlike the FDA, it is actually strongly motivated to do the right thing.
Why? You want people to suffer and die unnecessarily?
No economic study I have ever seen supports any of your assertions. Care to back up your handwaving with some facts?
And government regulation is the only possible answer to this problem because... ?
Do you have any evidence for substantial bias, or are you just pulling that out of your ass?
For something like a cab ride or other small claims disputes, I'd rather take my chances with a private mediator than the legal system.
It is absolutely foolish for you to generalize across Europe, from nearly bankrupt Greece, to highly regulated and comparatively well off Germany. The one thing that is pretty clear across the EU is that most people make a lot less money than they do in the US.
But, in my experience in Germany and France, customer service sucks. Businesses know they have you by the balls, often there is no competition, and they just laugh at "complaining to a government bureaucrat". Thanks, but I don't want the US to become anything like that; I'll take my chances with the unregulated market.
Quite true. What it doesn't teach much is actual German history between about 1600 and about 1900. Why? Simple: to prevent a resurgence of German nationalism; quite a reasonable goal after WWII. But that creates a blind spot that lets you maintain comforting fictions like that "at the beginning of the 20th century, Europe was a mess of countries all out for blood, with century-old hatreds" and that Europe was "a powder keg", as if there was nothing unusual about Germany and German culture compared to other European cultures. It's why you're blind to how much your own political and social views today are rooted in the views of 18th and 19th century Germany.
I really don't care whether you feel guilty; I certainly don't, and I'm as much of German descent as you are. Your misconceptions about German history and Germany's place in the world today, and how that relates to German history, are what we are talking about, and the fact is that you simply don't know much about it.
Great! If you have actually read them, you should have no trouble pointing out some excellent histories of 18th and 19th century Germany and explaining what makes them so good. I always like finding out about good books. So please go ahead. Any language you're likely to speak is fine.
If you switch phone carriers, that's a big loss to your phone company. Providing locked phones are one of several mechanisms by which a company can insure against that loss and they are willing to give you a discount for that. In different words, they pay you an insurance premium, same way you pay car insurance.
And by further standardizing phone service terms, it will likely also lead to a weeding out of MVNOs, which have been thriving on offering non-standard business models. Some of them offer a small number of locked phones, others specialize in supporting any unlocked phone, meeting different preferences and kinds of demand.
Consumers have been able to buy unlocked phones and switch at will for many years. I haven't had a locked phone or a contract for more than a decade and been with MVNOs for years. So, there is absolutely no reason to create legislation to force companies to make that business model mandatory for everybody.
And, again, when you make it easier for consumers to switch, that increases cost for the operators, and they are just going to pass those costs on to their customers. This whole regulation forces low frequency switchers to subsidize high frequency switchers. Why is that a good thing?
A free market means that buyers and sellers are free to agree to the terms under which they do business. Imposing additional restrictions on those terms, by definition, does not "enable a free market economy".
Sometimes (rarely) imposing restrictions on the market may be beneficial, but don't try to sell anti-free market policies as pro-free market policies.
Your Verizon phone likely will still only work on Verizon, and this may make phones and phone service a little more expensive down the road, and it may kill some business models that could have brought phones to the poor with no monthly charges, but who cares! Well-off, politically connected geeks can now unlock their phones officially! A victory for democracy!
Biologists and chemists have become quite good at going from genes to treatments; meaning, if you know which gene causes a disease, in many cases, you can come up with a treatment. The holdup for cancer has been that, genetically, it's not one disease but thousands, many of which haven't been characterized. By identifying the genes responsible, people will be able to develop specific drugs and treatments, and many cancers will likely become treatable.
But correlating genetic and medical data will be useful for many other purposes as well: predicting disease progression and treatment outcomes, predicting sensitivity and efficacy of particular drugs, etc.
They are demanding that Microsoft USA comply with a US court order or face the consequences. Microsoft may well be in a situation where they are forced to violate the laws of either the US or Ireland. I don't see why either the US court or Americans in general should give a sh*t. If Microsoft doesn't want to be in this situation, they shouldn't set up shop in companies with conflicting legal requirements. And if Ireland wants to continue to attract US corporations, they better figure out how to make their laws compatible with US laws.
Well, nobody said it was easy to be a global corporation.
If a company can't comply with conflicting legal requirements in some jurisdictions, it has to make a choice which markets are more important to it.
I don't see that as a bad thing, honestly. Do you?
How low we have fallen. People used to build entire cars, and they used to maintain and repair their cars too. And now people get pushed out of shape about, gasp, using a lane following system to follow lanes!
There is no violence more "overwhelming" than that possible by a state against an individual citizen, whether in the US, Europe, or Russia; and that is what all law at the national level is backed by. Therefore the "distinction" you want to draw between law and brute force doesn't exist: "law" is always, and can only ever be, what is ultimately backed up by brute force.
Why would "the USA mind"? Any country is free to issue warrants for whatever it wants. But, in practice, it can only enforce them within its jurisdiction or via treaty.
The US can enforce its warrant against Microsoft because Microsoft operates within its jurisdiction. Microsoft has to decide whether it values more operating in the US or whether it values the privacy of its foreign operations more. I think it's pretty clear how that's going to shake out.
Let's power it with cold fusion! Alpha Centauri, here we come!
I'm not doing that at all. I was just pointing out that European views and culture haven't changed as much as you think they have, starting with your assumption that Europe could do without the US economically and militarily.
It's not an "ad hominem" to point out that your views are a typical reflection of the canonical view of history as taught in post-WWII Germany: "a complex diplomatic situation", "it was a powder keg", "irrational hatred". I think that's mainly a consequence of trying to avoid dealing too much with the history of Prussia.
I did hear about it in history class, same school system as you, "Leistungskurs" in history actually. That's why I know what you were taught, why you were taught it, and what blind spots you have. You need to do a lot of reading beyond the German Gymnasium if you want to understand what's going on.
Oh, I'm sure believing that WWI and WWII happened because of irrational hatred is a comforting thought to Germans, but it's not true. Germans were motivated by the strong conviction that their culture, economy, and system of government was superior, in particular to the Anglo Saxon model, and that they had a moral duty to spread it across Europe. Things only got bloody because other cultures didn't like the idea. And you illustrate that many Germans still hold the same kinds of beliefs.
Google didn't just consider doing it, they did it. And it rubbed European legislators the wrong way because all of a sudden they had to explain themselves to publishers. That's why they are asking this weird question.
And the question is truly weird because notifying people that their content is being removed from Google search results should require no "legal justification"; in fact, given the EU pressure on "fairness" in search results, Google may well have an obligation to tell people when they are removed from search results and why.
Both the US and the European economies would suffer greatly in such a trade war. Investments would lose massive amounts of value; banks, pension plans, and governments would be unable to meet their obligations on both sides of the Atlantic; both sides would have difficulties paying for raw materials and energy from abroad.
The ultimate outcome would be unpredictable, though if history is any guide, the US would probably pull through it while Europe would end up in utter political turmoil and possibly war. Americans are still quite a bit more individualistic and self-sufficient than Europeans, investors would have more confidence in the political stability of the US, and the US as a whole has easier access to raw materials and energy domestically and through Canada.
You see, the scenario you outline isn't all that different from what happened at the beginning of the 20th century. Your attitudes are the typical continental (and, in particular, German) attitudes from back then.
In that case, the proper response is to get rid of the monpolies/monopsonies, which are almost always artificially created by government.
Destroying people's free speech rights after destroying their rights to engage in free commerce is adding injury on top of injury.
I agree completely with what you said. But I think in addition, there are strong economic and political motives for pushing this; it's not just a "non-issue".
European companies are lobbying and spreading anti-Google propaganda in order to gain market share and political favors. European spy agencies hate it when Europeans use US online services because it makes it much harder for them to spy on their own citizens. And European political and intellectual elites have had tight control over information flow and propaganda since the invention of the printing press, and they see that threatened by Google and other US companies (just look at the number of German politicians felled by Internet-based revelations of plagiarism and their attempts to blame the Internet in response).
Anti-Google and anti-US lobbying and politicking isn't just a convenient distraction by European politicians, it's about big money and huge shifts in European political power.
For advertisements, it doesn't matter much whether they get it wrong and show you some ads from the wrong country, in particular if you choose to go to a different country domain. For search results, that affects the core of their product quality.
Europe wants a lot of things, that doesn't make it morally right. Furthermore, I can use the same argument to say that US First Amendment rights should apply to US corporations worldwide, as well as European corporations who happen to do business in the US.