Very well said. The OWS movement is a clear example of a group of people bound by an ideology of hate towards a group. Any crimes they commit in the furtherance of that ideology, whether simple vandalism like graffiti, or assaulting people they identify as part of that group, are clearly hate crimes.
It just shows how this country has abandoned the idea of equal protection under the law.
A racist program to benefit blacks has resulted in.. benefit for blacks? "Shocking."
It's offensive that you would even say that. Imagine if someone defended slavery by saying "I have to point out that slavery has helped create prosperous white-owned plantations, and I don't believe that would have happened nearly as fast without slaves." Isn't it still bad to own slaves, even though, yes, some people benefited from slavery??
It isn't worse, and AFAIK, the law as written doesn't make any claim to that effect. If a white hipster moves into a poor black urban neighborhood, and a bunch of black teens beat the shit out of him and tell him "Your kind don't belong on this side of town", then they should -- they must -- be prosecuted under hate-crime legislation. Their lives should be destroyed; they should lose their youth, and a good chunk of their adulthood, to prison; they should be subject to the full power of the penal system.
That may be how the law was written, but it's not how the law is applied. In interracial crime, it's far more likely for a white suspect to be charged with hate crimes than a black suspect.
What you could do is use statistics to show that there are other variables that lead to more precise correlations with crime, and maybe income level is one of them. But that does not allow you to change "in a random robbery, it's 8 times more likely that the crime has been committed by a black than a white" into "black people are 8 times more likely to commit robbery."
Statistics ARE fun, and can be confusing, but this is not such a case. It's very straightforward.
Fair enough, there are still some things that can be kept private, but lack of observation isn't one of them. While one roommate is having sex, the other roommate is perfectly within his rights to open the door, say "What the hell, why are you having sex" really loudly, and walk right in.
I don't know if you're right about recording the room. I'm sure people are allowed to have PCs with webcams in dorm rooms. Whether they're on while the person is there or not seems immaterial to me.. the fact that owner lives there and has every right to be there and observe what the camera is observing is what differentiates this from e.g. bathroom cameras. (The owner of the webcam in a bathroom doesn't have the right to come in and watch you in person, so he shouldn't have the right to do it remotely with a camera either.)
You may be right about the legality of it, but nobody said all laws were intelligent or moral.
Democracy is, at its very core, about creating great people, who can then do great deeds for its own citizens: All the great scientists, engineers, poets, writers, politicians, are a product of this cultural belief.
What garbage! Plenty of non-democratic societies have produced great scientists, engineers, poets, writers, and politicians.
Within that context, hate crime legislation is specifically a response to the behavior of others which is overtly limiting and damaging to this most central of beliefs.
I think you're right in the sense that that's what proponents of hate crime legislation believe. Unfortunately for society, it is wrong.
All in all, this seems very simple. Don't spy on people. Don't violate their privacy. There are consequences for such actions, and those may be legal in nature.
I can't wait to see what charges are filed against the 30 year old sex partner who wasn't even a student. Surely he invaded Ravi's privacy by having sex in his dorm room and tampering with Ravi's personal property? (E.g. the roommate and his sex partner turned off Ravi's computer when they were aware that it had a webcam.)
My state finds "additional harms" when murders are committed if you did it for money (your motivation is, remember, a "mindcrime"), if you kill a cable car operator, if you use poison instead of some other method, and so on, and recognizes those special harms as "special circumstances" which drastically change how someone can be penalized? Why do we never, ever, not frigging once hear about all of these inequalities in the law, and how some are mindcrimes?
Why is that?
I have a pretty easy explanation, which I'm sure is obvious, but seriously, anyone who thinks that hate crimes laws are a travesty of justice,... defend your quiet in regards to hundreds of other laws that fit the pattern you rail at. Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?
Are you kidding? Please tell me you are.
The reason nobody complains about those laws is that they never happen.
Killing a cable car operator?? Seriously??
Hate crimes are in the news all the time. They get a lot of attention. I guarantee you that if someone were charged with an extra offense because their victim was a cable car operator, I would be calling bullshit on that law all day long. Seriously I promise you. But the fact is that will never be national news, and most likely I will never hear about a single case of that ever happening.
So.. things that are more common and have more social impact get more attention.. and that's why the "hundreds of other laws" are largely ignored.
What do the different degrees of murder have to do with hate crime? You know they have nothing to do with each other right?
As in, killing the black guy who slept with your wife in the heat of the moment may be a hate crime, but it doesn't become premeditated murder. It's still a crime of passion, with "hate crime" attached.
he did that and sent out a public message basically saying the roommate deserved the invasion of privacy because he was gay,
He did not justify his action on the basis that his roommate was gay. He made a public message about his roommate's gay acts. That's totally different, hopefully you see that.
This is why hate crimes are hated by so many people. You take a event and by the mere fact that it involves a protected group attribute malice to it.
That doesn't make sense. Even if Ravi didn't understand or like gays, that doesn't mean his actions were targeting gays in general. The gay roommate could be perplexing or irritating to Ravi and that made Ravi want to embarrass him.. maybe behavior like gay sex was perplexing or irritating to Ravi.. but that still doesn't mean he was sending a worldwide message to gays. He could very well have been sending a message to the particular gay man he was sharing a bedroom with.
Living in a dorm doesn't exempt your right to privacy
Obviously it does. You have absolutely no right to privacy from the person sharing your living space. You want to have sex? Too bad, the other person can be right there watching you. You don't like the fact that he has a PC and webcam? Too bad, it's his personal stuff and it has as much of a right to be there as you and your stuff.
I mean you have lived in a dorm I'm assuming? You know there are two different people living in the same space, with no separations, dividing walls, or anything like that?
It's like saying you have a right to privacy while sharing a tent with someone. Makes no sense.
Filming the sexual encounter was no more wrong than the sex itself. How could it be? You don't have the same type of privacy in a dorm room living with someone else as you do in your own personal bedroom. If Ravi was concerned that the 30 year old non-student sex partner was dangerous or might steal his stuff he had every right to set up a webcam to monitor the room. HIS stuff is there too.
You don't share urinals or bathroom stalls with other people, they are divided. And in college nobody owns the bathroom. You aren't even allowed to keep personal items in them - at least at my college we had to keep our toothbrushes etc in our dorm rooms and take them to the bathroom on each use.
But in a dorm room the beds are not divided. Your personal stuff does belong there. It's totally fine to have a PC and a webcam in a dorm room.
You don't understand the difference between motive and intent. Premeditation shows intent to kill, it doesn't ask why someone is killing (motive).
For instance, if you spend 3 months planning the perfect murder and it involves selecting a victim at random to throw off police.. that is premeditated murder, even though you have absolutely no motive for killing the particular person you selected. Whether your motive for the whole thing is because you want to be in the history books, or whether you believe Satan is talking to you... doesn't matter.
Really the only time motive matters off the top of my head is self-defense. You may intend to kill someone or intend to risk killing someone but because you were doing it with the motive of protecting yourself and your family that's ok.
That's weird that you would compare someone speeding with someone who was suicidal and wanted to die.
If you steal a stop sign you can cause people to die who really didn't want to die. But triggering someone's suicide after it's been building for years could be something really and truly minor.
On the other hand, his modification made the statistics sound better than they really are, since only about 12.6% of the population is black compared to 72.4% white (2010 census). If the perpetrator is 8 times more likely to be black than white, then blacks are about 46 times more likely to commit robberies than whites. Of course that's assuming the "8" figure is right to start with.
What is the point of asking who is black? Everybody identifies black people in their own way, usually by visual assessment, not a study of their ancestry. And your point about the judicial system discriminating against blacks proves that the randomness of everybody's individual assessment is actually consistent and focused... it's not possible for the "black kid" to be consistently discriminated against if a large number of people don't all see him as black.
I don't know where you got your anecdotes about the white kid being let off easy and the black kid being sent to jail. That sounds like it may have happened in the 1950s. Today it's often the opposite.. since authorities (schools, police, judges) are constantly being watched for signs of racism and discrimination, a non-racist authority figure is more likely to be harsh on a white person than a black person, just to keep their numbers looking more fair. I don't have a lot of experience with major crimes but I've seen it happen plenty of times in minor situations, like kids acting disrespectfully at school to teachers, cheating, and harassing girls.
Do you think your elementary and middle school teachers are the best voices of reason about new technology, its impact on society, and the best ways to use it?
In the very limited academic world of middle school, the rule makes sense. They want to expose you to primary sources. I still remember my English teacher taking us down to the school library, showing us how to use the card catalog system, etc. It was fun picking a bunch of books, skimming them, and selecting semi-relevant quotes for my papers. It shows you that there is a lot more depth to any given subject than what you find in the condensed encyclopedic entry on it. It makes you less lazy.
But.. after those lessons are learned, sticking to it? Applying it to your whole life? It seems a bit silly. You weren't taught to not cite encyclopedias because they're *wrong*, it was a gimmick to fulfill an educational goal.
Doesn't it bother you that your paying more in your health care costs than rent? 15 years ago $75 a month was considered a lot for health insurance. Wages have remained stagnent since then adjusted for inflation too. Now if you over 40 expect to pay $900 a month if you have a family!
Yeah, so let's do something about it. But let's do something fair and morally acceptable. In our free market driven economy that means relaxing regulations, especially the insane ones like the cap on medical schools, the stranglehold of the AMA and AAMC over medical school accreditation, etc. In other words, we need more doctors! They make too much money and the supply of their services is artificially restricted.
Seriously, look at health care costs sometime, the biggest factor is doctor salaries and hospital administration costs, not all the red herring crap like drug prices and malpractice. Popular Science had a great article about it a few years ago if you're curious and want to search for it.
Good for India. Maybe regulation is needed... oh god forbid that is socialist... as it is obviously a public good
Well here's how I know that's a lie. I can't go down to Walmart and pick up a $4 non-generic, brand new, blockbuster drug developed by the good will of any single socialist society on Earth! They don't exist! And yet there are plenty of socialist and communist countries.
Do you think Indian people are stupid? How about Chinese people? Are they all dumber than greedy evil white people?
Nope! And yet their good will, morally upright, pro-regulation, communist leaning societies have not produced top notch medicines available for free or at cost to the entire world. The best they've got is to copy an existing drug. Why not? Do you think China, which graduates more scientists and engineers than the US, doesn't have the brainpower? Is there no room in India's budget, which allocates $72 billion/year to military spending (about 20 times the R&D budget of a big pharma like Bayer mentioned in the article), to take on this noble, power-to-the-people project? And shit, according to you, if they just cut out the advertising it will only cost $100k, not $1 billion, to develop a blockbuster, world beating drug. Why, you'd think that a country like India would leap at that opportunity. They could increase their GDP by $100 billion a year easily by outcompeting every drug company in the West.
You're full of shit. You see the success of people engaged in capitalism and think you can just regulate it, just say "Make it so" and it will happen for free, or at 2% of the capitalist cost. Do you see how much bullshit that is? The communist/socialist fake good-will approach fails in these kinds of endeavors. You're crazy first of all if you think any socialist government REALLY cares that much about its people and second of all if you think that politicians are able to efficiently organize that kind of thing. So if one day you get what you ask for, you'll be shocked, just shocked, that the people in power don't want to spend money developing new cancer or HIV treatments, and if they claim to try it never works and all the money goes into the party-supporters pockets.
I can only assume that you are from a well-to-do family living in a well-to-do region that has a better-than-average school district that employs many good teachers
Considering every student sees about 10 different teachers per year you'd need extraordinarily bad luck to never have a good teacher, even if you think 90% of teachers are terrible. In one year period the odds of only getting bad teachers would be about 0.9^10, or 34%. In a four year period the odds fall to 0.9^40 or 1.5%. Unless you think significantly more than 90% of teachers are terrible (which is ridiculous) there's no way you can argue that most students never have a good teacher over a multiyear span.
Anyway, I live in North Carolina which has one of the worst education systems in the country. The teachers were okay, some good some bad, a few great ones. For smart kids the teachers don't make much difference unless they're so bad that they actively dissuade students from learning. For average kids the teachers don't seem to make much difference either, unless you have high expectations.. with just a bit of guidance average kids will do averagely. Dumb kids need truly amazing teachers to make the slightest difference in their performance. That's where the common notion of bad teachers come into play.
Look at No Child Left Behind.. nobody is concerned that AP Calculus classes aren't making yearly progress. Even with a bad teacher the kids are smart enough to do well. But when you look at the student population that is multiple grade levels behind on basic reading and math skills, well, suddenly everybody is worried that the teacher isn't making enough of a difference so they must be bad teachers. And yet teachers for years weren't able to make a difference with these students. At some point hopefully people will realize that it's not the teacher, it's the student. Everybody understands that with respect to athletics -- only a few students are good enough to make the varsity football team, and it would be insane to blame the coach that 90% of the school isn't good enough to be on the team.
It's going to be tough. I'm a child of the 80s, and in elementary and middle school I was taught that we're all special, even ugly people are beautiful, nobody is dumb, etc. We have a lot of people who have internalized that garbage. It's going to take a serious system-wide failure that has repercussions to the whole country before people are like "Well uhh maybe we should try another approach.." It hasn't happened yet -- we're still focusing on blaming everybody but the child for poor performance.
And for the people who do not live in rich countries in Europe / North America (like me), we know what we talk about when we talk about really rotten teachers
Teaching professions in many third/fourth world countries are life-long employment - meaning, the teachers do not have any incentive to teach well, and they will never get fired if they failed their students year after year
I don't know where you're from but let's say you're talking about some place like Pakistan, where my wife is from. You're right. You need a basic level of educational resources for students to be successful, and many poor countries do not provide that. You also need parents to have enough resources to send their kids to school instead of making them work. I really don't think bad teachers are the biggest problem they face.
More likely, though, the WTO and the USA will attack India for "stealing"
Yes, this, since that is exactly what is happening. "Stealing" in the IP sense, of course.
While it's great that India is getting something to help Indians, it does nothing for me except keep my costs high by not distributing the burden more widely. Maybe India shouldn't have to pay full price, but I would expect to AT LEAST see something based on purchasing power parity. And based on these tables India is not 33 times poorer in that sense, so the 97% discount rate cannot be morally justified. At that point they are doing it at our expense, not doing it in any sense of equality.
They can take a 97% decrease in price and still remain profitable? What other industry can possibly have that level of markup and keep customers?
That's not markup, it's amortization. The generic producer is able to remain profitable because they are now dealing only with the marginal cost of a new pill, not the costs that led up to the first pill.
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Very well said. The OWS movement is a clear example of a group of people bound by an ideology of hate towards a group. Any crimes they commit in the furtherance of that ideology, whether simple vandalism like graffiti, or assaulting people they identify as part of that group, are clearly hate crimes.
It just shows how this country has abandoned the idea of equal protection under the law.
A racist program to benefit blacks has resulted in.. benefit for blacks? "Shocking."
It's offensive that you would even say that. Imagine if someone defended slavery by saying "I have to point out that slavery has helped create prosperous white-owned plantations, and I don't believe that would have happened nearly as fast without slaves." Isn't it still bad to own slaves, even though, yes, some people benefited from slavery??
It isn't worse, and AFAIK, the law as written doesn't make any claim to that effect. If a white hipster moves into a poor black urban neighborhood, and a bunch of black teens beat the shit out of him and tell him "Your kind don't belong on this side of town", then they should -- they must -- be prosecuted under hate-crime legislation. Their lives should be destroyed; they should lose their youth, and a good chunk of their adulthood, to prison; they should be subject to the full power of the penal system.
That may be how the law was written, but it's not how the law is applied. In interracial crime, it's far more likely for a white suspect to be charged with hate crimes than a black suspect.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen to black kids or latino kids. I'm saying it also happens to white kids.
Absolutely not.
What you could do is use statistics to show that there are other variables that lead to more precise correlations with crime, and maybe income level is one of them. But that does not allow you to change "in a random robbery, it's 8 times more likely that the crime has been committed by a black than a white" into "black people are 8 times more likely to commit robbery."
Statistics ARE fun, and can be confusing, but this is not such a case. It's very straightforward.
Fair enough, there are still some things that can be kept private, but lack of observation isn't one of them. While one roommate is having sex, the other roommate is perfectly within his rights to open the door, say "What the hell, why are you having sex" really loudly, and walk right in.
I don't know if you're right about recording the room. I'm sure people are allowed to have PCs with webcams in dorm rooms. Whether they're on while the person is there or not seems immaterial to me.. the fact that owner lives there and has every right to be there and observe what the camera is observing is what differentiates this from e.g. bathroom cameras. (The owner of the webcam in a bathroom doesn't have the right to come in and watch you in person, so he shouldn't have the right to do it remotely with a camera either.)
You may be right about the legality of it, but nobody said all laws were intelligent or moral.
Democracy is, at its very core, about creating great people, who can then do great deeds for its own citizens: All the great scientists, engineers, poets, writers, politicians, are a product of this cultural belief.
What garbage! Plenty of non-democratic societies have produced great scientists, engineers, poets, writers, and politicians.
Within that context, hate crime legislation is specifically a response to the behavior of others which is overtly limiting and damaging to this most central of beliefs.
I think you're right in the sense that that's what proponents of hate crime legislation believe. Unfortunately for society, it is wrong.
All in all, this seems very simple. Don't spy on people. Don't violate their privacy. There are consequences for such actions, and those may be legal in nature.
I can't wait to see what charges are filed against the 30 year old sex partner who wasn't even a student. Surely he invaded Ravi's privacy by having sex in his dorm room and tampering with Ravi's personal property? (E.g. the roommate and his sex partner turned off Ravi's computer when they were aware that it had a webcam.)
Ah so we're just throwing that whole "equal protection under the law" thing under the bus.
What a country we live in, where your ancestors determine which laws apply to you.
My state finds "additional harms" when murders are committed if you did it for money (your motivation is, remember, a "mindcrime"), if you kill a cable car operator, if you use poison instead of some other method, and so on, and recognizes those special harms as "special circumstances" which drastically change how someone can be penalized? Why do we never, ever, not frigging once hear about all of these inequalities in the law, and how some are mindcrimes?
Why is that?
I have a pretty easy explanation, which I'm sure is obvious, but seriously, anyone who thinks that hate crimes laws are a travesty of justice, ... defend your quiet in regards to hundreds of other laws that fit the pattern you rail at. Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?
Are you kidding? Please tell me you are.
The reason nobody complains about those laws is that they never happen.
Killing a cable car operator?? Seriously??
Hate crimes are in the news all the time. They get a lot of attention. I guarantee you that if someone were charged with an extra offense because their victim was a cable car operator, I would be calling bullshit on that law all day long. Seriously I promise you. But the fact is that will never be national news, and most likely I will never hear about a single case of that ever happening.
So.. things that are more common and have more social impact get more attention.. and that's why the "hundreds of other laws" are largely ignored.
What do the different degrees of murder have to do with hate crime? You know they have nothing to do with each other right?
As in, killing the black guy who slept with your wife in the heat of the moment may be a hate crime, but it doesn't become premeditated murder. It's still a crime of passion, with "hate crime" attached.
See the difference?
he did that and sent out a public message basically saying the roommate deserved the invasion of privacy because he was gay,
He did not justify his action on the basis that his roommate was gay. He made a public message about his roommate's gay acts. That's totally different, hopefully you see that.
This is why hate crimes are hated by so many people. You take a event and by the mere fact that it involves a protected group attribute malice to it.
That doesn't make sense. Even if Ravi didn't understand or like gays, that doesn't mean his actions were targeting gays in general. The gay roommate could be perplexing or irritating to Ravi and that made Ravi want to embarrass him.. maybe behavior like gay sex was perplexing or irritating to Ravi.. but that still doesn't mean he was sending a worldwide message to gays. He could very well have been sending a message to the particular gay man he was sharing a bedroom with.
Living in a dorm doesn't exempt your right to privacy
Obviously it does. You have absolutely no right to privacy from the person sharing your living space. You want to have sex? Too bad, the other person can be right there watching you. You don't like the fact that he has a PC and webcam? Too bad, it's his personal stuff and it has as much of a right to be there as you and your stuff.
I mean you have lived in a dorm I'm assuming? You know there are two different people living in the same space, with no separations, dividing walls, or anything like that?
It's like saying you have a right to privacy while sharing a tent with someone. Makes no sense.
Filming the sexual encounter was no more wrong than the sex itself. How could it be? You don't have the same type of privacy in a dorm room living with someone else as you do in your own personal bedroom. If Ravi was concerned that the 30 year old non-student sex partner was dangerous or might steal his stuff he had every right to set up a webcam to monitor the room. HIS stuff is there too.
You don't share urinals or bathroom stalls with other people, they are divided. And in college nobody owns the bathroom. You aren't even allowed to keep personal items in them - at least at my college we had to keep our toothbrushes etc in our dorm rooms and take them to the bathroom on each use.
But in a dorm room the beds are not divided. Your personal stuff does belong there. It's totally fine to have a PC and a webcam in a dorm room.
You don't understand the difference between motive and intent. Premeditation shows intent to kill, it doesn't ask why someone is killing (motive).
For instance, if you spend 3 months planning the perfect murder and it involves selecting a victim at random to throw off police.. that is premeditated murder, even though you have absolutely no motive for killing the particular person you selected. Whether your motive for the whole thing is because you want to be in the history books, or whether you believe Satan is talking to you... doesn't matter.
Really the only time motive matters off the top of my head is self-defense. You may intend to kill someone or intend to risk killing someone but because you were doing it with the motive of protecting yourself and your family that's ok.
That's weird that you would compare someone speeding with someone who was suicidal and wanted to die.
If you steal a stop sign you can cause people to die who really didn't want to die. But triggering someone's suicide after it's been building for years could be something really and truly minor.
On the other hand, his modification made the statistics sound better than they really are, since only about 12.6% of the population is black compared to 72.4% white (2010 census). If the perpetrator is 8 times more likely to be black than white, then blacks are about 46 times more likely to commit robberies than whites. Of course that's assuming the "8" figure is right to start with.
What is the point of asking who is black? Everybody identifies black people in their own way, usually by visual assessment, not a study of their ancestry. And your point about the judicial system discriminating against blacks proves that the randomness of everybody's individual assessment is actually consistent and focused... it's not possible for the "black kid" to be consistently discriminated against if a large number of people don't all see him as black.
I don't know where you got your anecdotes about the white kid being let off easy and the black kid being sent to jail. That sounds like it may have happened in the 1950s. Today it's often the opposite.. since authorities (schools, police, judges) are constantly being watched for signs of racism and discrimination, a non-racist authority figure is more likely to be harsh on a white person than a black person, just to keep their numbers looking more fair. I don't have a lot of experience with major crimes but I've seen it happen plenty of times in minor situations, like kids acting disrespectfully at school to teachers, cheating, and harassing girls.
Do you think your elementary and middle school teachers are the best voices of reason about new technology, its impact on society, and the best ways to use it?
In the very limited academic world of middle school, the rule makes sense. They want to expose you to primary sources. I still remember my English teacher taking us down to the school library, showing us how to use the card catalog system, etc. It was fun picking a bunch of books, skimming them, and selecting semi-relevant quotes for my papers. It shows you that there is a lot more depth to any given subject than what you find in the condensed encyclopedic entry on it. It makes you less lazy.
But.. after those lessons are learned, sticking to it? Applying it to your whole life? It seems a bit silly. You weren't taught to not cite encyclopedias because they're *wrong*, it was a gimmick to fulfill an educational goal.
Doesn't it bother you that your paying more in your health care costs than rent? 15 years ago $75 a month was considered a lot for health insurance. Wages have remained stagnent since then adjusted for inflation too. Now if you over 40 expect to pay $900 a month if you have a family!
Yeah, so let's do something about it. But let's do something fair and morally acceptable. In our free market driven economy that means relaxing regulations, especially the insane ones like the cap on medical schools, the stranglehold of the AMA and AAMC over medical school accreditation, etc. In other words, we need more doctors! They make too much money and the supply of their services is artificially restricted.
Seriously, look at health care costs sometime, the biggest factor is doctor salaries and hospital administration costs, not all the red herring crap like drug prices and malpractice. Popular Science had a great article about it a few years ago if you're curious and want to search for it.
Good for India. Maybe regulation is needed ... oh god forbid that is socialist ... as it is obviously a public good
Well here's how I know that's a lie. I can't go down to Walmart and pick up a $4 non-generic, brand new, blockbuster drug developed by the good will of any single socialist society on Earth! They don't exist! And yet there are plenty of socialist and communist countries.
Do you think Indian people are stupid? How about Chinese people? Are they all dumber than greedy evil white people?
Nope! And yet their good will, morally upright, pro-regulation, communist leaning societies have not produced top notch medicines available for free or at cost to the entire world. The best they've got is to copy an existing drug. Why not? Do you think China, which graduates more scientists and engineers than the US, doesn't have the brainpower? Is there no room in India's budget, which allocates $72 billion/year to military spending (about 20 times the R&D budget of a big pharma like Bayer mentioned in the article), to take on this noble, power-to-the-people project? And shit, according to you, if they just cut out the advertising it will only cost $100k, not $1 billion, to develop a blockbuster, world beating drug. Why, you'd think that a country like India would leap at that opportunity. They could increase their GDP by $100 billion a year easily by outcompeting every drug company in the West.
You're full of shit. You see the success of people engaged in capitalism and think you can just regulate it, just say "Make it so" and it will happen for free, or at 2% of the capitalist cost. Do you see how much bullshit that is? The communist/socialist fake good-will approach fails in these kinds of endeavors. You're crazy first of all if you think any socialist government REALLY cares that much about its people and second of all if you think that politicians are able to efficiently organize that kind of thing. So if one day you get what you ask for, you'll be shocked, just shocked, that the people in power don't want to spend money developing new cancer or HIV treatments, and if they claim to try it never works and all the money goes into the party-supporters pockets.
I can only assume that you are from a well-to-do family living in a well-to-do region that has a better-than-average school district that employs many good teachers
Considering every student sees about 10 different teachers per year you'd need extraordinarily bad luck to never have a good teacher, even if you think 90% of teachers are terrible. In one year period the odds of only getting bad teachers would be about 0.9^10, or 34%. In a four year period the odds fall to 0.9^40 or 1.5%. Unless you think significantly more than 90% of teachers are terrible (which is ridiculous) there's no way you can argue that most students never have a good teacher over a multiyear span.
Anyway, I live in North Carolina which has one of the worst education systems in the country. The teachers were okay, some good some bad, a few great ones. For smart kids the teachers don't make much difference unless they're so bad that they actively dissuade students from learning. For average kids the teachers don't seem to make much difference either, unless you have high expectations.. with just a bit of guidance average kids will do averagely. Dumb kids need truly amazing teachers to make the slightest difference in their performance. That's where the common notion of bad teachers come into play.
Look at No Child Left Behind.. nobody is concerned that AP Calculus classes aren't making yearly progress. Even with a bad teacher the kids are smart enough to do well. But when you look at the student population that is multiple grade levels behind on basic reading and math skills, well, suddenly everybody is worried that the teacher isn't making enough of a difference so they must be bad teachers. And yet teachers for years weren't able to make a difference with these students. At some point hopefully people will realize that it's not the teacher, it's the student. Everybody understands that with respect to athletics -- only a few students are good enough to make the varsity football team, and it would be insane to blame the coach that 90% of the school isn't good enough to be on the team.
It's going to be tough. I'm a child of the 80s, and in elementary and middle school I was taught that we're all special, even ugly people are beautiful, nobody is dumb, etc. We have a lot of people who have internalized that garbage. It's going to take a serious system-wide failure that has repercussions to the whole country before people are like "Well uhh maybe we should try another approach.." It hasn't happened yet -- we're still focusing on blaming everybody but the child for poor performance.
And for the people who do not live in rich countries in Europe / North America (like me), we know what we talk about when we talk about really rotten teachers
Teaching professions in many third/fourth world countries are life-long employment - meaning, the teachers do not have any incentive to teach well, and they will never get fired if they failed their students year after year
I don't know where you're from but let's say you're talking about some place like Pakistan, where my wife is from. You're right. You need a basic level of educational resources for students to be successful, and many poor countries do not provide that. You also need parents to have enough resources to send their kids to school instead of making them work. I really don't think bad teachers are the biggest problem they face.
More likely, though, the WTO and the USA will attack India for "stealing"
Yes, this, since that is exactly what is happening. "Stealing" in the IP sense, of course.
While it's great that India is getting something to help Indians, it does nothing for me except keep my costs high by not distributing the burden more widely. Maybe India shouldn't have to pay full price, but I would expect to AT LEAST see something based on purchasing power parity. And based on these tables India is not 33 times poorer in that sense, so the 97% discount rate cannot be morally justified. At that point they are doing it at our expense, not doing it in any sense of equality.
They can take a 97% decrease in price and still remain profitable? What other industry can possibly have that level of markup and keep customers?
That's not markup, it's amortization. The generic producer is able to remain profitable because they are now dealing only with the marginal cost of a new pill, not the costs that led up to the first pill.