A lot of negative effects get caught in animal models before going into humans. Not all, certainly, but a lot. DIY gene therapists often don't have access to good animal models, and generally can't run properly controlled experiments anyway (either lack of resources or lack of ability to create them, or both).
More to the point, there's a huge issue of quality control - the process of actually making the stuff for gene therapy is not easy to replicate at home, certainly not without the ability to test it on animals beforehand. There's still considerable variation between different core facilities that make gene therapy material, and these are people who generally do know what they're doing as much as is currently possible. Making vector at home is ludicrous and will introduce so much variation that DIY results will be almost impossible to interpret.
Lastly, there's so much unexplored stuff out there that even the people who have studied this for a long time aren't totally sure what they're doing - from idea to animals to humans often takes a decade or two, and maybe another decade on top of that to bring it to market. There is the potential for human gene therapy to progress rapidly, but the much more likely outcome is that a bunch of people fuck it up royally, public trust goes to near-zero, and academic institutions and drug companies can't make progress because people aren't interested in it any more.
But providers know insurance companies will be buying more, and often negotiate bulk pricing with them - it's one of the reasons for the in network/out of network distinction.
This is, frankly, nonsense. One of the biggest driving factors of high medical costs in America is that the government cannot generally negotiate drug prices with manufacturers, and insurance/private rates are often pegged to the government prices. Allowing the government to negotiate would lower prices for Americans (possibly raising prices elsewhere as companies try to recoup that lost revenue).
Most people want banks to have to disclose rates and fees; criticizing how the CFPB is run or organized isn't the same as saying banks shouldn't have to disclose fees.
Two-tiered pricing is pretty common - bulk discounts are a thing, and negotiation is possible in a lot of settings, including hospital bills.
Posting prices helps a lot for non-emergency or elective procedures. Yes, emergency care has extra limits that make free market solutions difficult, but those don't show up in a lot of other health care situations. Even the anaphylactic shock/EpiPen scenario you presented is flawed - most people aren't buying them on the spot. You buy them ahead of time, when price competition could exist (if the FDA approved more competing products).
Regulations can also put many companies out of business by imposing tariffs, higher taxes, or higher environmental standards. Those things might be worthwhile, but they'll still lead to job losses. Also, even if regulations are written with good intentions, there's the chance that they'll have a completely different effect that costs jobs.
The right likes to find our crazies and give them megaphones. It's easy to do because the American right wing owns the media.
No, it's easy to do because you have so very many of them, and they like having a megaphone. Also, the *American* right wing doesn't own the media; the *American left* owns more. They certainly aren't as left as many left-wing parties in Europe, but they are generally left.
Many of the thing you listed aren't sound economic policy; Medicare needs to be improved before it's extended to everyone, not everyone needs (or is smart enough to benefit from, really) college, and a "Living Wage" policy depends a lot on implementation before I'd support or oppose it.
Regulations, particularly a high minimum wage, means more jobs, not less.
That is certainly not true as an absolute statement, and very likely not true within the context of Uber. Higher-quality jobs, possibly, depending on the regulations.
Do Papa John's delivery drivers get to set their own hours and turn down jobs if they feel like it? Are they paid an hourly rate or is it by number and length of delivery?
For someone who is attacking someone else for making a spelling error, writing "I see your ability to infer accurately is as your spelling." must be pretty embarrassing, no?
Healthcare itself? Maybe, maybe not. There certainly are more complications that prevent normal market forces from working very effectively. But you can't make a profit at the expense of someone's health or life for very long - if you're taking in sick people and discharging sicker or dead people consistently (worse than other options, at least), you will go out of business.
More to the point, R&D isn't really part of the healthcare system itself. Profit motives can be really useful there.
There are some loud people on the Left saying that speech is violence, which I think is what the AC was referring to. We can object to them using that term without saying they're wrong about everything (although I personally think the people who do that are wrong more often than not). We also have to consider whether making hateful speech illegal is the best way to prevent damage through speech; I believe it isn't, unless it's a direct incitement to violence.
Saying that words can have a physical affect on a human's body is fine; there's certainly evidence for that. Saying that they are violence is something else. Hurting someone's feelings is not the same as hitting them.
I don't trust the people in power to use "hate speech" laws any more reasonably than I expect them to use blasphemy laws. They're too easily weaponized to shut down unpopular, but reasonable, speech.
I think flatly rejecting HIV positive people won't work out the way you want it to. Some of them will just lie about it and increase the risk of infecting others. We should be encouraging people to be honest and open, as much as possible. Putting such a huge stigma on it helped make the epidemic worse in the first place.
I don't think the comparison between things that are currently illegal and make up a small percentage of violent crime and things that are legal and make up a small percentage of violent crime makes sense if you're trying to justify making something new illegal.
I don't think large capacity magazines are necessary to hunt, but I also don't think banning them will really have an impact on gun violence or homicides. That being said, I appreciate you being fairly civil about this and taking a fairly moderate stance, both of which are sorely lacking from most public discourse right now.
Rifles - and guns in general - can be sufficient to stop tyranny. They aren't being used to do so right now, and many of the people who have them in the US don't seem to care very much about a lot of other civil liberties, but in principle they could be quite effective.
That depends entirely on whether the facility itself would pay them, or Apple as a whole. Also, it's probably cheaper to make a room with a Faraday cage in it than it is to pay the fines. Apple didn't get to where they are by agreeing to give governments money if they can avoid it.
Why? Rifles are such a small percentage of violent crime, and are used so often to hunt or for protection that it makes no sense to single them out. More to the point, if you train it's not hard to switch magazines quickly.
And for deliveries to restaurants, businesses, etc. and for moving, people should do... what? Have a fleet of mobility scooters carrying produce constantly to a grocery store? Throw all your furniture onto a bike?
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A lot of negative effects get caught in animal models before going into humans. Not all, certainly, but a lot. DIY gene therapists often don't have access to good animal models, and generally can't run properly controlled experiments anyway (either lack of resources or lack of ability to create them, or both).
More to the point, there's a huge issue of quality control - the process of actually making the stuff for gene therapy is not easy to replicate at home, certainly not without the ability to test it on animals beforehand. There's still considerable variation between different core facilities that make gene therapy material, and these are people who generally do know what they're doing as much as is currently possible. Making vector at home is ludicrous and will introduce so much variation that DIY results will be almost impossible to interpret.
Lastly, there's so much unexplored stuff out there that even the people who have studied this for a long time aren't totally sure what they're doing - from idea to animals to humans often takes a decade or two, and maybe another decade on top of that to bring it to market. There is the potential for human gene therapy to progress rapidly, but the much more likely outcome is that a bunch of people fuck it up royally, public trust goes to near-zero, and academic institutions and drug companies can't make progress because people aren't interested in it any more.
You just made one of the best arguments for single-payer health care instead of insurance based health care.
I don't care, as I wasn't arguing the merits of either method.
Also, how is it "bulk pricing" if they're paying for the surgeries one at a time?
If they're buying a lot of them and getting discounts due to high volume, how is it not bulk pricing?
But providers know insurance companies will be buying more, and often negotiate bulk pricing with them - it's one of the reasons for the in network/out of network distinction.
But insurance companies are paying for them in bulk. As purchasing volume rises, so does negotiating ability.
This is, frankly, nonsense. One of the biggest driving factors of high medical costs in America is that the government cannot generally negotiate drug prices with manufacturers, and insurance/private rates are often pegged to the government prices. Allowing the government to negotiate would lower prices for Americans (possibly raising prices elsewhere as companies try to recoup that lost revenue).
Most people want banks to have to disclose rates and fees; criticizing how the CFPB is run or organized isn't the same as saying banks shouldn't have to disclose fees.
Two-tiered pricing is pretty common - bulk discounts are a thing, and negotiation is possible in a lot of settings, including hospital bills.
Posting prices helps a lot for non-emergency or elective procedures. Yes, emergency care has extra limits that make free market solutions difficult, but those don't show up in a lot of other health care situations. Even the anaphylactic shock/EpiPen scenario you presented is flawed - most people aren't buying them on the spot. You buy them ahead of time, when price competition could exist (if the FDA approved more competing products).
Regulations can also put many companies out of business by imposing tariffs, higher taxes, or higher environmental standards. Those things might be worthwhile, but they'll still lead to job losses. Also, even if regulations are written with good intentions, there's the chance that they'll have a completely different effect that costs jobs.
I wasn't talking about minimum wage necessarily, but more about regulations in general.
The right likes to find our crazies and give them megaphones. It's easy to do because the American right wing owns the media.
No, it's easy to do because you have so very many of them, and they like having a megaphone. Also, the *American* right wing doesn't own the media; the *American left* owns more. They certainly aren't as left as many left-wing parties in Europe, but they are generally left.
Many of the thing you listed aren't sound economic policy; Medicare needs to be improved before it's extended to everyone, not everyone needs (or is smart enough to benefit from, really) college, and a "Living Wage" policy depends a lot on implementation before I'd support or oppose it.
Regulations, particularly a high minimum wage, means more jobs, not less.
That is certainly not true as an absolute statement, and very likely not true within the context of Uber. Higher-quality jobs, possibly, depending on the regulations.
Do Papa John's delivery drivers get to set their own hours and turn down jobs if they feel like it? Are they paid an hourly rate or is it by number and length of delivery?
I don't see how "they're employees" follows from "they can't set their own rates when using Uber's platform".
For someone who is attacking someone else for making a spelling error, writing "I see your ability to infer accurately is as your spelling." must be pretty embarrassing, no?
"We can't do this because we'd lose $1B if we did" is really different from "We want there to be more sick people".
Healthcare itself? Maybe, maybe not. There certainly are more complications that prevent normal market forces from working very effectively. But you can't make a profit at the expense of someone's health or life for very long - if you're taking in sick people and discharging sicker or dead people consistently (worse than other options, at least), you will go out of business.
More to the point, R&D isn't really part of the healthcare system itself. Profit motives can be really useful there.
Native speakers or speakers in general? What's the cutoff here?
There are some loud people on the Left saying that speech is violence, which I think is what the AC was referring to. We can object to them using that term without saying they're wrong about everything (although I personally think the people who do that are wrong more often than not). We also have to consider whether making hateful speech illegal is the best way to prevent damage through speech; I believe it isn't, unless it's a direct incitement to violence.
Saying that words can have a physical affect on a human's body is fine; there's certainly evidence for that. Saying that they are violence is something else. Hurting someone's feelings is not the same as hitting them.
I don't trust the people in power to use "hate speech" laws any more reasonably than I expect them to use blasphemy laws. They're too easily weaponized to shut down unpopular, but reasonable, speech.
Americans*. USians is never correct.
I think flatly rejecting HIV positive people won't work out the way you want it to. Some of them will just lie about it and increase the risk of infecting others. We should be encouraging people to be honest and open, as much as possible. Putting such a huge stigma on it helped make the epidemic worse in the first place.
I don't think the comparison between things that are currently illegal and make up a small percentage of violent crime and things that are legal and make up a small percentage of violent crime makes sense if you're trying to justify making something new illegal.
I don't think large capacity magazines are necessary to hunt, but I also don't think banning them will really have an impact on gun violence or homicides. That being said, I appreciate you being fairly civil about this and taking a fairly moderate stance, both of which are sorely lacking from most public discourse right now.
Rifles - and guns in general - can be sufficient to stop tyranny. They aren't being used to do so right now, and many of the people who have them in the US don't seem to care very much about a lot of other civil liberties, but in principle they could be quite effective.
That depends entirely on whether the facility itself would pay them, or Apple as a whole. Also, it's probably cheaper to make a room with a Faraday cage in it than it is to pay the fines. Apple didn't get to where they are by agreeing to give governments money if they can avoid it.
Why are you attributing the GP's grammar and spelling mistakes to cyber-vandal?
Why? Rifles are such a small percentage of violent crime, and are used so often to hunt or for protection that it makes no sense to single them out. More to the point, if you train it's not hard to switch magazines quickly.
And for deliveries to restaurants, businesses, etc. and for moving, people should do... what? Have a fleet of mobility scooters carrying produce constantly to a grocery store? Throw all your furniture onto a bike?
The other AC wasn't saying "get rid of pedestrians", they were saying "people should stop putting themselves in dangerous positions".