Basically, anything Trump flavored has had a pretty heavy tilt in its moderation, towards the pro-Trump. I've worked in a lot of rural areas, and the brand of angry conservatism/superlibertarianism is pretty rare among IT/Software guys. But for some reason, it's hyper-represented on Slashdot in the past few years.
Not that folks can't hold that view - it just seems disproportionate, compared to the population.
Now that you mention it I'm a software dev in Alberta, a very conservative part of Canada, and a lot of my co-workers come from an engineering background, one of the more conservative technical fields.
Among this group of co-workers I've met a few global warming skeptics, a handful who were skeptical of hardcore progressives, but among the dozens of people I worked with I can think of only one classic Trump supporter and he wasn't a software guy.
I do know several Trump supporters, I have a few friends in Alberta who would probably vote for Trump, and Ontario might be about to elect their own Trump, so I'm not that unfamiliar with the profile. They tend to be small business people, manual labourers (skilled or unskilled), or people with 2-year technical degrees.
But people with 4-year degrees who work in software, even the conservative ones whom I'd expect to otherwise be sympathetic, really do not like Trump.
I think it's more than ideology, IT people tend to be extra skeptical of bullshit out of necessity, bullshit in your code leads to bugs, bullshit in the backup solution leads to lost data. When IT people choose a political affiliation they tend to focus on calling out bullshit on the other side, which is why even the conservatives ones cannot stand Trump, the King of Bullshit.
Now, I don't know if the pro-Trump element on/. is Russian in origin, there's been a strong Men's Right's Activist (MRA) element here for years, and the MRA's tend to be pretty damn Trumpy. But on the Trump articles you're definitely not getting a representative subset of geeks.
So we're now calling people who dissent to bombing another country without the approval of congress trolls. Isn't this McCarthyism?
Except in this case there's every reason to think that the majority of these people are directly (or indirectly) in the employ of the Russian government and under orders to advance Russian interests by influencing public opinion in the US.
Indoor farms would require artificial light and production costs would be higher than for ordinary farming.
There's a number of possible advantages: - Land is expensive, by increasing the density we can reduce land usage (maybe keeping more land wild). - Transportation is polluting, being closer to cities can save a lot of transportation costs - Harvesting is also polluting, you might be able to do that more efficiently - Eliminating/reducing pests cuts down on nasty pesticides. - People are even more expensive
You'd have to do a ton of number crunching to see if it works, but if it does it could lead to a new green revolution. Of course it could also further decimate farm communities at the same time.
Unlike most blue states, my state is proud of its heritage, culture, low taxes, and self sufficiency. The people aren't soyboy hipsters (except for one city, but we'll forgive them because creatives should get one small haven).
America would cease to exist if state identity disappeared and became a centralized one. Having states allows us the ability to try out quirky programs like school vouchers, genderless bathrooms, and Marijuana decriminalization.
Centralization isn't always a good thing.
Lots of countries have States or Provinces with strong individual identities and lots of autonomy, I'm not claiming the US is any different, nor that every state is the same. But those identities exist in a balance with each other.
But, if you went back to the revolutionary times, or even civil war times, I suspect the state identity would be a lot stronger than the national identity for most people.
Only because you fail to understand the senate exists to represent states. The house is supposed to represent the population / people.
It's the stupid 17th amendment that makes this an issue and it's the main reason our federal government has become some completely disfunctional.
The poster doesn't failed to understand anything, they just recognize that it's a dumb system for the modern US.
It made sense in the early US which was literally envisioned as a union of independent states, a pair of Senators meant that each government had representation at the big table.
But as the national identity became established state identity subsided, and the idea of Senators representing the State government no longer made sense. Senators because just another representative for their national parties. The 17th amendment makes it a bit less weird with direct elections... but really it's just not a great system for the modern nation.
Every system will choose a cure over a treatment, for reasons including cost.
When costs are socialized, who has an incentive to reduce costs? Patients certainly don't, because they don't bear the burden of their treatments. The government or regulated insurers don't, because the more they spend, the more power they have and the higher their revenue. And health care providers don't either because, again, they earn more if they spend more.
This is wrong on a few points: 1) Patients often have co-pays or something which gives them cost exposure, though this system isn't perfect and drug companies can exploit it with rebates. 2) Private insurers (regulated or not) have a HUGE incentive to reduce costs because they can then lower rates and steal clients from their competitors. 3) Government insurers also have a big incentive to reduce costs because government are under constant budgetary pressure.
Now, European nations are a little bit better at cost control in their socialized systems, but not a whole lot: they spend about 1/3-1/2 per capita of what the US spends. To be sure, that's a good thing: at that spending level, we could cover every American with Medicare without any new revenue or any changes to private insurers. But even European healthcare is vastly overpriced, has rapid and unsustainable growth in costs, and also delivers lower service for the lower costs.
As a Canadian I (and most other Canadians) are happy with our healthcare.
The reason the US is so expensive has lot to do with the private hospitals and doctors, not the insurers.
Doctors and hospitals are the ones who are ultimately responsible for deciding how much money to spent on treatment but it's the insurers (and slightly patients) who foot the bill. Since doctors and hospitals really like helping patients and making money they're driven to spend gobs of money on treatment. The only way for the insurers to keep this in check is to insist on piles of paperwork and administration to make sure the treatments are necessary, but this isn't cheap either.
Healthcare is just a problem for which markets are a really poor solution.
Socialized medicine is cheaper because it can control the hospitals and set appropriate treatment levels, and it can cut out a bunch of the administration because you've lost some of the competing interests. This is partially why the VA in the US is generally does a good job.
The incentive structure of publicly financed researchers also don't align with those of patients or the public. Publicly financed researchers want to maximize their career advancement, their reputation, and their incomes.
And privately financed researchers don't?
The real difference you're going to see are: 1) Publicly financed researchers will make less money since public salaries are under much more scrutiny. 2) Publicly financed researchers get more prestige and job security since that's one of the ways you compensate for the crappy salary. 3) Public researchers are going to focus more on things that are really deadly (cancer) or rare diseases that affect only a few people. Private researchers are going to throw out a few more cold remedies and Viagras.
Note that for many diseases we already have cures: a large portion of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer could be eliminated if people lost weight and exercised. But the current US healthcare system provides no incentive for doctors to cure their patients in that simple, effective way.
Sure it does. But that's more a cultural issue than a primary healthcare provider issue.
I think I actually misread Goldman's point too. I don't think they're even talking about choosing to pursue treatable diseases over curable ones, but rather to look at the incidence when figuring out if it's affordable.
For instance, AIDS is really nasty and really expensive to treat. And if you come up with a cure for AIDS you're going to make amazing amounts of money for a few years, and then your revenues will dry up because that existing patient pool is all cured and the incidents of new AIDS patients is actually fairly low.
But if you develop a cure for a specific cancer, even after you cure all the existing patients new ones are constantly popping up.
More realistically we're not looking at AIDS vs Cancer but more like Male Pattern Baldness vs the Common Cold.
There's a lot of bald guys, but once you cure them the generation of new bald guys is relatively rare. But if you cure colds you profit every time someone gets sick.
A back of the envelope calculation for the drug mentioned in TFS indicates that their profit over a 10-year period (including the first 5 years prior to FDA approval) was around ten times the cost of developing the drug. Even if they make no sales ever again, that sounds like a pretty good ROI. Or, to put it another way, with the profits from one cure, they can bring 10 more drugs to market.
The hep C drug in TFS was the absolute best case, a very effective cure for a fairly common and serious disease.
How about this: the insurer funds the development of the cure, and happily takes the 80% profit margin, instead of paying for the 200% ?
Cures and treatments are REALLY expensive to develop, they're only profitable because you're able to sell them to multiple insurers, probably in multiple countries.
If the insurer funds the development of the cure they're basically just becoming a drug company.
You can call it unethical, but if the ROI on the treatment is 200% but only 80% for the cure then you're not going to stay in business making cures all the time.
Why not simply charge more for the cure so that ROI is 210 % ?
Martin Shkreli is that you?
Though in all seriousness I covered this a bit in my other response, drug pricing is fairly arbitrary but at a certain point people simply won't buy it.
I think that might be a bigger problem when dealing with private insurers over public.
If it's a public insurer they may be willing to pay for a cure that costs as much as 20 years of treatments because they expect to be covering the person for another 50 years.
But a private insurer might only expect the patient to be a client for another 10 years, paying for 20 years of treatment in one go will cost them a lot of money.
These guys are what give capitalism a really bad name. Yes, a company can't exist without profits, but it's not like there aren't plenty of diseases we can't cure still. And if you think about it, indefinitely siphoning money from seriously ill people as a business model is pretty sick, no pun intended. We only put up with it as a society because it provides a powerful incentive to actually develop treatments in the first place. But if people start seeing that as a second-best option, I think society will quickly lose patience with them.
Fortunately, there are almost always those willing to offer an improved service that others aren't, if there aren't any significant barriers to doing so. In the end, it doesn't really matter that some slime think it's better NOT to cure people of illnesses outright, letting them suffer for the rest of their lives while bleeding money from them. There will also be those that choose to offer better services, like full cures, for lower overall profits. Because it's the right thing to do.
Sorry, pharmaceutical companies. You'll have to deal with that. If you start deliberately avoiding effective treatment, you invite societal wrath - probably resulting in even more soul-crushing regulation.
I read the motive of the report very differently than you do.
I think you're reading it as "cures are less profitable than treatments, therefore don't try to cure anything! BWAHAHAHA!!!"
I read it as "curing things is really awesome and we wish you could do more! The problem is it's hard to come up with a business model that makes cures viable, and if you go out of business you won't cure anyone, so we suggest you keep developing treatments for things you can't cure at the same time".
You don't need to assume "money-grubbing sociopaths" to get a crappy situation.
"Is curing patients a sustainable business model?" The answer may be "no,"
The answer is "yes" when people have to make price-conscious decisions for their healthcare because people naturally will prefer a one time expense over open ended expensive treatments.
If you socialize costs while maintaining private health providers, however, curing diseases ceases to be an objective for doctors or drug companies.
If you socialize costs and have public healthcare providers, one time cures are preferred to ongoing expensive treatments. That's better than the mixed system the US has right now, but it's still worse than a fully private system.
I thought about this a bit more and realized I was wrong (and you were more wrong than I first realized).
I still don't think the payer, private or socialized, makes a big difference, but to the extent is does make a difference private insurance is the one that prefers treatments instead of cures.
Consider a treatment that costs $100K/year and a cure that costs $1M.
A socialized payment system will obviously choose the $1M since it's going to be caring for that patient for decades.
But a private system may only have a patient for 5 years, meaning that opting for the cure costs them an extra $500K. Sure, the treatment needs to be covered for those remaining decades of life, but that's going to be covered by a different private insurer.
I don't think you understand how this market is working.
The answer is "yes" when people have to make price-conscious decisions for their healthcare because people naturally will prefer a one time expense over open ended expensive treatments.
Every system will choose a cure over a treatment, for reasons including cost.
If you socialize costs while maintaining private health providers, however, curing diseases ceases to be an objective for doctors or drug companies.
If you socialize costs and have public healthcare providers, one time cures are preferred to ongoing expensive treatments. That's better than the mixed system the US has right now, but it's still worse than a fully private system.
This has nothing to do with the socialized vs private on the cost side or the provider side. In each case they will take the best and cheapest available option, a cure if available or a treatment if not.
The motive for treatment over cure comes from market pressures on the R&D side. Drug companies need to decide what projects to fund. Given a choice between developing a treatment or trying to make a cure, they might choose the treatment because it has a better return. The rest of the system needs to make do with what treatment options are given them.
You can call it unethical, but if the ROI on the treatment is 200% but only 80% for the cure then you're not going to stay in business making cures all the time.
Now you could fix this by socializing R&D (public universities do this to an extent), but it's not clear that they'll do a better job of drug development than drug companies.
I don't expect them to be unbiased - that's a human impossibility. What I do expect is that they try to be as unbiased as they can. The recent change (and by no means is this historically unprecedented) is that they have recognized that being biased drives revenue and so they don't even try anymore.
I believe Fox News has fully embraced the role of propagandists, I think MSNBC has started moving that way but I don't think they're quite that far gone, and some new media like Vox are attempting to be intellectually honest progressive advocates.
It makes it very hard for a person who desires dry information to get it. Reuters and the AP seem to still try, and I try to randomize my sources a bit via Google News. But for the most part the reputable news sources have lined up against Trump (and Republicans in general)
The right answer isn't always the middle.
The GOP has had a major problem with facts for years. Remember death panels? Birtherism? Fake voter fraud scares? Palin in '08? The clown convention of Not-Romneys of the 2012 Republican Primary? All of these things should be laughed out of serious consideration, and they all precede Trump.
The problem isn't that the media is getting biased, the problem is that half of the US political establishment has gone so far off the deep end that you can't reach them without an oil rig.
There is two ways out of this. One is Bitcoin depreciating substantially, making mining less profitable. The other is having an alternative market for compute power that pays better. Projects such as Golem and (this author's very own) BitWrk are trying to achieve this.
The two big problems with Bitcoin are the enabling of illegal activity and the high use of energy by miners.
While having an alternative market means that computing power is being used for something more productive it doesn't actually fix either problem.
Whether a Bitcoin is worth $0.01 or $1,000,000 you can transfer $10k in Bitcoin for money laundering or a mob hit just as easily.
And an alternative market that pays better doesn't actually save any power, people will just turn from large-scale mining into large-scale participation in those markets, and if those markets pay better they actually use more power.
You're supposed to keep your bitcoin in your own wallet. If you're against banks but keep your crypto at an exchange for more than the time needed to, you know, exchange it, that goes pretty much against the whole selling point. Even more, you just trust them blindly, because they're not regulated or part of an insurance scheme either.
I'm pretty sure the difficulty of securing millions of dollars in currency is one of the reasons banks were invented.
They don't release anything until a conclusion has been reached
I prefer realtime, incremental data
Except they do release some interim data, that's the "double standard" Musk is complaining about.
In reality I agree with the NTSB here.
The NTSB saying absolutely nothing means that media speculation and rumours take over. Releasing a few facts means you can keep the reporting fairly accurate and grounded while you work on the full report.
Musk's problem is he's trying to release preliminary information in order to spin press coverage, it's not surprising that they gave him the boot.
Yes everyone with a brain knew that and also knew it would have had little impact on the US economy but that it's purpose was to bond all those asian nations to the US economy rather than make them client states of China.
But there's a lot of people that just heard free trade and didn't want it because they KNEW free trade was bad bad bad. These people don't care about facts or logical arguments, they just didn't want free trade and Trump promised them he was against free trade.
Now we see someone has apparently explained what the purpose of the TPP actually was and he's apparently decided it was a good idea. Like all things he'll probably waffle a few more times then betray his constituents and take a position identical to Obama just like he has on every other international issue he's dealt with.
Remember the whole "I won't tell the enemy what we're doing in Syria" statement? yea it and all the others he's followed right exactly in the footsteps of what Obama. It would be funny if it wasn't so SAD!
Except he can't just backtrack, he needs the other countries to make some big sounding concession or change to the deal, and I doubt he has the international political capital or deal-making skills to pull that off.
They're not in the film business anymore than Hallmark is.
There's a huge difference between creating films for the big screen and just pumping out content for your own TV station.
If you want to be a film company then release to theaters.
Not quite, I think TV Films are pure lowest common denominator, they're more about holding the Network audience than pulling in new people. Make 'em cheap and don't alienate people is the model.
Netflix is allowed to be more daring, their size gives them a bigger budget, and their audience has a constant demand for adequate content.
I think the better analogy is direct to video. You can chase a niche audience and drop a moderate budget if you push it, but you'll never get the revenue stream to justify a blockbuster. They need to be good enough to draw an audience, but not so good as to justify a night out.
He doesn't deny knowledge of it, he says they do! And he just doesn't have the data on hand. Sheesh, what a misleading title.
Everyone knows Shadow Profiles are real, that is how they know all the info they do when you sign up.
He is denying that he has any knowledge of the shadow profiles.
Lujan: So these are called shadow profiles, is that what they've been referred to by some? Zuckerberg: Congressman, I'm not, I'm not familiar with that. Lujan: I'll refer to them as shadow profiles for today's hearing. On average, how many data points does Facebook have on each Facebook user? Zuckerberg: I do not know off the top of my head. Lujan: Do you know how many points of data Facebook has on the average non-Facebook user? Zuckerberg: Congressman, I do not know off the top of my head but I can have our team get back to you afterward.
I think the congressman let him off a bit easy, I wouldn't expect him to know much about the number of data points. But for a person who has never signed up does Facebook keep track of their likely friends? Do they build profiles of IPs that browse 3rd party sites that use FB plugins? Does it attempt to associate the names of non-FB users with their IPs?
Even just ask for some examples of data that FB would have on non-FB users.
It took the machine 18 days to complete its work. The article was pretty low on information, but it sounds like its work consisted of something roughly equivalent to framing (no electrical, plumbing, insulation, finish work, etc.). A regular crew could frame a 1000 square foot home much faster. I'm seeing things like this on other sites: "On average, crew of three experienced carpenters and two helpers able to complete framing of a new 1,900 ft2 – 2,100 ft2 two story simple house in 7 – 8 days." (rempros.com).
This is cool and all and I'm always glad to see investment in promising new tech, but it doesn't sound like it's any sort of end-all solution to housing problems.
At this point it's just a prototype so I'm not sure it's fair to compare it on time. And the big money question isn't the time involved but the manpower required.
But yeah, there's a lot more to building a house than just the framing.
This film is equal amounts of FUD and fearmongering. Almost nothing else (except some jobs will be replaced by AI - but that's been happening for over 200 years, except I'd replace "AI" with technology).
Most hardcore AI experts (and Musk is not one of them) don't see AGI happening any time soon. We just have no idea what intelligence and consciousness are. Not a freaking clue.
Go back in time to 1870, shortly after the invention of dynamite, and ask the top physicists of the day about the potential for physics to create a city-destroying super-weapon in the next 50 years.
Now fast-forward to 1920 and ask the top physicists the exact same question. I'm guessing the answers won't be much different.
The thing about the world's top AI experts is they're experts in NNs, SVMs, search algorithms, etc. But they're not experts in AGI because AGI doesn't exist yet.
They're no more qualified to speculate on AGI than Musk, Hawking, or any other reasonably smart person. If anything they're going to be a bit conservative in their speculation because it's bad practise to make pronouncements about things you don't understand in your field. Plus, they don't want to be the ass who's quoted everywhere as the AI expert warning about the dangers of AI.
A few decades ago, this used to be called corruption.
I didn't realize the US had just invented campaign donations.
This has been going on forever, if you're a major corporation you donate as much you can to any legislator who can plausibly influence their company. It is a very corrupt idea, though to be honest it probably doesn't matter. Legislators aren't dumb, they know Google donates to both sides and is limited by legal limits on donations, $7k really isn't that much.
The real cause for concern isn't the $7 million in donations since (2007)*, it's the $52 million Facebook spend lobbying since '09, and the $11 million spent lobbying this year.
A slick lobbyist giving a presentation is way more likely to sway a legislator than a relatively small number on their campaign donations form.
* Is it just me or does the USA Today article massively suck in communicating the numbers. I know both Facebook's PAC and its employees gave donations but there's no indication on whether the article is counting the employee donations in its numbers. And half the numbers don't even include a time range do you don't know if it's a donation in a single year or aggregated over multiple cycles, it's just like the reporter wanted to type "million" as much as they could.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, anything Trump flavored has had a pretty heavy tilt in its moderation, towards the pro-Trump. I've worked in a lot of rural areas, and the brand of angry conservatism/superlibertarianism is pretty rare among IT/Software guys. But for some reason, it's hyper-represented on Slashdot in the past few years.
Not that folks can't hold that view - it just seems disproportionate, compared to the population.
Now that you mention it I'm a software dev in Alberta, a very conservative part of Canada, and a lot of my co-workers come from an engineering background, one of the more conservative technical fields.
Among this group of co-workers I've met a few global warming skeptics, a handful who were skeptical of hardcore progressives, but among the dozens of people I worked with I can think of only one classic Trump supporter and he wasn't a software guy.
I do know several Trump supporters, I have a few friends in Alberta who would probably vote for Trump, and Ontario might be about to elect their own Trump, so I'm not that unfamiliar with the profile. They tend to be small business people, manual labourers (skilled or unskilled), or people with 2-year technical degrees.
But people with 4-year degrees who work in software, even the conservative ones whom I'd expect to otherwise be sympathetic, really do not like Trump.
I think it's more than ideology, IT people tend to be extra skeptical of bullshit out of necessity, bullshit in your code leads to bugs, bullshit in the backup solution leads to lost data. When IT people choose a political affiliation they tend to focus on calling out bullshit on the other side, which is why even the conservatives ones cannot stand Trump, the King of Bullshit.
Now, I don't know if the pro-Trump element on /. is Russian in origin, there's been a strong Men's Right's Activist (MRA) element here for years, and the MRA's tend to be pretty damn Trumpy. But on the Trump articles you're definitely not getting a representative subset of geeks.
So we're now calling people who dissent to bombing another country without the approval of congress trolls. Isn't this McCarthyism?
Except in this case there's every reason to think that the majority of these people are directly (or indirectly) in the employ of the Russian government and under orders to advance Russian interests by influencing public opinion in the US.
But will it be useful and does it make sense?
Indoor farms would require artificial light and production costs would be higher than for ordinary farming.
There's a number of possible advantages:
- Land is expensive, by increasing the density we can reduce land usage (maybe keeping more land wild).
- Transportation is polluting, being closer to cities can save a lot of transportation costs
- Harvesting is also polluting, you might be able to do that more efficiently
- Eliminating/reducing pests cuts down on nasty pesticides.
- People are even more expensive
You'd have to do a ton of number crunching to see if it works, but if it does it could lead to a new green revolution. Of course it could also further decimate farm communities at the same time.
State identity diminished, really?
Unlike most blue states, my state is proud of its heritage, culture, low taxes, and self sufficiency. The people aren't soyboy hipsters (except for one city, but we'll forgive them because creatives should get one small haven).
America would cease to exist if state identity disappeared and became a centralized one. Having states allows us the ability to try out quirky programs like school vouchers, genderless bathrooms, and Marijuana decriminalization.
Centralization isn't always a good thing.
Lots of countries have States or Provinces with strong individual identities and lots of autonomy, I'm not claiming the US is any different, nor that every state is the same. But those identities exist in a balance with each other.
But, if you went back to the revolutionary times, or even civil war times, I suspect the state identity would be a lot stronger than the national identity for most people.
Only because you fail to understand the senate exists to represent states. The house is supposed to represent the population / people.
It's the stupid 17th amendment that makes this an issue and it's the main reason our federal government has become some completely disfunctional.
The poster doesn't failed to understand anything, they just recognize that it's a dumb system for the modern US.
It made sense in the early US which was literally envisioned as a union of independent states, a pair of Senators meant that each government had representation at the big table.
But as the national identity became established state identity subsided, and the idea of Senators representing the State government no longer made sense. Senators because just another representative for their national parties. The 17th amendment makes it a bit less weird with direct elections... but really it's just not a great system for the modern nation.
When costs are socialized, who has an incentive to reduce costs? Patients certainly don't, because they don't bear the burden of their treatments. The government or regulated insurers don't, because the more they spend, the more power they have and the higher their revenue. And health care providers don't either because, again, they earn more if they spend more.
This is wrong on a few points:
1) Patients often have co-pays or something which gives them cost exposure, though this system isn't perfect and drug companies can exploit it with rebates.
2) Private insurers (regulated or not) have a HUGE incentive to reduce costs because they can then lower rates and steal clients from their competitors.
3) Government insurers also have a big incentive to reduce costs because government are under constant budgetary pressure.
Now, European nations are a little bit better at cost control in their socialized systems, but not a whole lot: they spend about 1/3-1/2 per capita of what the US spends. To be sure, that's a good thing: at that spending level, we could cover every American with Medicare without any new revenue or any changes to private insurers. But even European healthcare is vastly overpriced, has rapid and unsustainable growth in costs, and also delivers lower service for the lower costs.
As a Canadian I (and most other Canadians) are happy with our healthcare.
The reason the US is so expensive has lot to do with the private hospitals and doctors, not the insurers.
Doctors and hospitals are the ones who are ultimately responsible for deciding how much money to spent on treatment but it's the insurers (and slightly patients) who foot the bill. Since doctors and hospitals really like helping patients and making money they're driven to spend gobs of money on treatment. The only way for the insurers to keep this in check is to insist on piles of paperwork and administration to make sure the treatments are necessary, but this isn't cheap either.
Healthcare is just a problem for which markets are a really poor solution.
Socialized medicine is cheaper because it can control the hospitals and set appropriate treatment levels, and it can cut out a bunch of the administration because you've lost some of the competing interests. This is partially why the VA in the US is generally does a good job.
The incentive structure of publicly financed researchers also don't align with those of patients or the public. Publicly financed researchers want to maximize their career advancement, their reputation, and their incomes.
And privately financed researchers don't?
The real difference you're going to see are:
1) Publicly financed researchers will make less money since public salaries are under much more scrutiny.
2) Publicly financed researchers get more prestige and job security since that's one of the ways you compensate for the crappy salary.
3) Public researchers are going to focus more on things that are really deadly (cancer) or rare diseases that affect only a few people. Private researchers are going to throw out a few more cold remedies and Viagras.
Sure it does. But that's more a cultural issue than a primary healthcare provider issue.
I think I actually misread Goldman's point too. I don't think they're even talking about choosing to pursue treatable diseases over curable ones, but rather to look at the incidence when figuring out if it's affordable.
For instance, AIDS is really nasty and really expensive to treat. And if you come up with a cure for AIDS you're going to make amazing amounts of money for a few years, and then your revenues will dry up because that existing patient pool is all cured and the incidents of new AIDS patients is actually fairly low.
But if you develop a cure for a specific cancer, even after you cure all the existing patients new ones are constantly popping up.
More realistically we're not looking at AIDS vs Cancer but more like Male Pattern Baldness vs the Common Cold.
There's a lot of bald guys, but once you cure them the generation of new bald guys is relatively rare. But if you cure colds you profit every time someone gets sick.
A back of the envelope calculation for the drug mentioned in TFS indicates that their profit over a 10-year period (including the first 5 years prior to FDA approval) was around ten times the cost of developing the drug. Even if they make no sales ever again, that sounds like a pretty good ROI. Or, to put it another way, with the profits from one cure, they can bring 10 more drugs to market.
The hep C drug in TFS was the absolute best case, a very effective cure for a fairly common and serious disease.
A new drug only has about a 10% success rate.
Fair enough.
How about this: the insurer funds the development of the cure, and happily takes the 80% profit margin, instead of paying for the 200% ?
Cures and treatments are REALLY expensive to develop, they're only profitable because you're able to sell them to multiple insurers, probably in multiple countries.
If the insurer funds the development of the cure they're basically just becoming a drug company.
You can call it unethical, but if the ROI on the treatment is 200% but only 80% for the cure then you're not going to stay in business making cures all the time.
Why not simply charge more for the cure so that ROI is 210 % ?
Martin Shkreli is that you?
Though in all seriousness I covered this a bit in my other response, drug pricing is fairly arbitrary but at a certain point people simply won't buy it.
I think that might be a bigger problem when dealing with private insurers over public.
If it's a public insurer they may be willing to pay for a cure that costs as much as 20 years of treatments because they expect to be covering the person for another 50 years.
But a private insurer might only expect the patient to be a client for another 10 years, paying for 20 years of treatment in one go will cost them a lot of money.
These guys are what give capitalism a really bad name. Yes, a company can't exist without profits, but it's not like there aren't plenty of diseases we can't cure still. And if you think about it, indefinitely siphoning money from seriously ill people as a business model is pretty sick, no pun intended. We only put up with it as a society because it provides a powerful incentive to actually develop treatments in the first place. But if people start seeing that as a second-best option, I think society will quickly lose patience with them.
Fortunately, there are almost always those willing to offer an improved service that others aren't, if there aren't any significant barriers to doing so. In the end, it doesn't really matter that some slime think it's better NOT to cure people of illnesses outright, letting them suffer for the rest of their lives while bleeding money from them. There will also be those that choose to offer better services, like full cures, for lower overall profits. Because it's the right thing to do.
Sorry, pharmaceutical companies. You'll have to deal with that. If you start deliberately avoiding effective treatment, you invite societal wrath - probably resulting in even more soul-crushing regulation.
I read the motive of the report very differently than you do.
I think you're reading it as "cures are less profitable than treatments, therefore don't try to cure anything! BWAHAHAHA!!!"
I read it as "curing things is really awesome and we wish you could do more! The problem is it's hard to come up with a business model that makes cures viable, and if you go out of business you won't cure anyone, so we suggest you keep developing treatments for things you can't cure at the same time".
You don't need to assume "money-grubbing sociopaths" to get a crappy situation.
The answer is "yes" when people have to make price-conscious decisions for their healthcare because people naturally will prefer a one time expense over open ended expensive treatments.
If you socialize costs while maintaining private health providers, however, curing diseases ceases to be an objective for doctors or drug companies.
If you socialize costs and have public healthcare providers, one time cures are preferred to ongoing expensive treatments. That's better than the mixed system the US has right now, but it's still worse than a fully private system.
I thought about this a bit more and realized I was wrong (and you were more wrong than I first realized).
I still don't think the payer, private or socialized, makes a big difference, but to the extent is does make a difference private insurance is the one that prefers treatments instead of cures.
Consider a treatment that costs $100K/year and a cure that costs $1M.
A socialized payment system will obviously choose the $1M since it's going to be caring for that patient for decades.
But a private system may only have a patient for 5 years, meaning that opting for the cure costs them an extra $500K. Sure, the treatment needs to be covered for those remaining decades of life, but that's going to be covered by a different private insurer.
I don't think you understand how this market is working.
The answer is "yes" when people have to make price-conscious decisions for their healthcare because people naturally will prefer a one time expense over open ended expensive treatments.
Every system will choose a cure over a treatment, for reasons including cost.
If you socialize costs while maintaining private health providers, however, curing diseases ceases to be an objective for doctors or drug companies.
If you socialize costs and have public healthcare providers, one time cures are preferred to ongoing expensive treatments. That's better than the mixed system the US has right now, but it's still worse than a fully private system.
This has nothing to do with the socialized vs private on the cost side or the provider side. In each case they will take the best and cheapest available option, a cure if available or a treatment if not.
The motive for treatment over cure comes from market pressures on the R&D side. Drug companies need to decide what projects to fund. Given a choice between developing a treatment or trying to make a cure, they might choose the treatment because it has a better return. The rest of the system needs to make do with what treatment options are given them.
You can call it unethical, but if the ROI on the treatment is 200% but only 80% for the cure then you're not going to stay in business making cures all the time.
Now you could fix this by socializing R&D (public universities do this to an extent), but it's not clear that they'll do a better job of drug development than drug companies.
I don't expect them to be unbiased - that's a human impossibility. What I do expect is that they try to be as unbiased as they can. The recent change (and by no means is this historically unprecedented) is that they have recognized that being biased drives revenue and so they don't even try anymore.
I believe Fox News has fully embraced the role of propagandists, I think MSNBC has started moving that way but I don't think they're quite that far gone, and some new media like Vox are attempting to be intellectually honest progressive advocates.
It makes it very hard for a person who desires dry information to get it. Reuters and the AP seem to still try, and I try to randomize my sources a bit via Google News. But for the most part the reputable news sources have lined up against Trump (and Republicans in general)
The right answer isn't always the middle.
The GOP has had a major problem with facts for years. Remember death panels? Birtherism? Fake voter fraud scares? Palin in '08? The clown convention of Not-Romneys of the 2012 Republican Primary? All of these things should be laughed out of serious consideration, and they all precede Trump.
The problem isn't that the media is getting biased, the problem is that half of the US political establishment has gone so far off the deep end that you can't reach them without an oil rig.
There is two ways out of this. One is Bitcoin depreciating substantially, making mining less profitable. The other is having an alternative market for compute power that pays better. Projects such as Golem and (this author's very own) BitWrk are trying to achieve this.
The two big problems with Bitcoin are the enabling of illegal activity and the high use of energy by miners.
While having an alternative market means that computing power is being used for something more productive it doesn't actually fix either problem.
Whether a Bitcoin is worth $0.01 or $1,000,000 you can transfer $10k in Bitcoin for money laundering or a mob hit just as easily.
And an alternative market that pays better doesn't actually save any power, people will just turn from large-scale mining into large-scale participation in those markets, and if those markets pay better they actually use more power.
You're supposed to keep your bitcoin in your own wallet. If you're against banks but keep your crypto at an exchange for more than the time needed to, you know, exchange it, that goes pretty much against the whole selling point. Even more, you just trust them blindly, because they're not regulated or part of an insurance scheme either.
I'm pretty sure the difficulty of securing millions of dollars in currency is one of the reasons banks were invented.
They do it the old way
They don't release anything until a conclusion has been reached
I prefer realtime, incremental data
Except they do release some interim data, that's the "double standard" Musk is complaining about.
In reality I agree with the NTSB here.
The NTSB saying absolutely nothing means that media speculation and rumours take over. Releasing a few facts means you can keep the reporting fairly accurate and grounded while you work on the full report.
Musk's problem is he's trying to release preliminary information in order to spin press coverage, it's not surprising that they gave him the boot.
Yes everyone with a brain knew that and also knew it would have had little impact on the US economy but that it's purpose was to bond all those asian nations to the US economy rather than make them client states of China.
But there's a lot of people that just heard free trade and didn't want it because they KNEW free trade was bad bad bad. These people don't care about facts or logical arguments, they just didn't want free trade and Trump promised them he was against free trade.
Now we see someone has apparently explained what the purpose of the TPP actually was and he's apparently decided it was a good idea. Like all things he'll probably waffle a few more times then betray his constituents and take a position identical to Obama just like he has on every other international issue he's dealt with.
Remember the whole "I won't tell the enemy what we're doing in Syria" statement? yea it and all the others he's followed right exactly in the footsteps of what Obama. It would be funny if it wasn't so SAD!
Except he can't just backtrack, he needs the other countries to make some big sounding concession or change to the deal, and I doubt he has the international political capital or deal-making skills to pull that off.
They're not in the film business anymore than Hallmark is.
There's a huge difference between creating films for the big screen and just pumping out content for your own TV station.
If you want to be a film company then release to theaters.
Not quite, I think TV Films are pure lowest common denominator, they're more about holding the Network audience than pulling in new people. Make 'em cheap and don't alienate people is the model.
Netflix is allowed to be more daring, their size gives them a bigger budget, and their audience has a constant demand for adequate content.
I think the better analogy is direct to video. You can chase a niche audience and drop a moderate budget if you push it, but you'll never get the revenue stream to justify a blockbuster. They need to be good enough to draw an audience, but not so good as to justify a night out.
That and they sometimes get the big budget films that don't quite turn out.
Does anyone know if Tesla is using a bot to write their Press Releases as well?
The following:
The reason that other families are not on TV is because their loved ones are still alive.
Does not sound like something a human PR Professional would write.
Tesla blames driver for using the Autopilot in exactly the way you'd expect 90% of Autopilot users to use it.
He doesn't deny knowledge of it, he says they do! And he just doesn't have the data on hand. Sheesh, what a misleading title.
Everyone knows Shadow Profiles are real, that is how they know all the info they do when you sign up.
He is denying that he has any knowledge of the shadow profiles.
Lujan: So these are called shadow profiles, is that what they've been referred to by some?
Zuckerberg: Congressman, I'm not, I'm not familiar with that.
Lujan: I'll refer to them as shadow profiles for today's hearing. On average, how many data points does Facebook have on each Facebook user?
Zuckerberg: I do not know off the top of my head.
Lujan: Do you know how many points of data Facebook has on the average non-Facebook user?
Zuckerberg: Congressman, I do not know off the top of my head but I can have our team get back to you afterward.
I think the congressman let him off a bit easy, I wouldn't expect him to know much about the number of data points. But for a person who has never signed up does Facebook keep track of their likely friends? Do they build profiles of IPs that browse 3rd party sites that use FB plugins? Does it attempt to associate the names of non-FB users with their IPs?
Even just ask for some examples of data that FB would have on non-FB users.
It took the machine 18 days to complete its work. The article was pretty low on information, but it sounds like its work consisted of something roughly equivalent to framing (no electrical, plumbing, insulation, finish work, etc.). A regular crew could frame a 1000 square foot home much faster. I'm seeing things like this on other sites: "On average, crew of three experienced carpenters and two helpers able to complete framing of a new 1,900 ft2 – 2,100 ft2 two story simple house in 7 – 8 days." (rempros.com).
This is cool and all and I'm always glad to see investment in promising new tech, but it doesn't sound like it's any sort of end-all solution to housing problems.
At this point it's just a prototype so I'm not sure it's fair to compare it on time. And the big money question isn't the time involved but the manpower required.
But yeah, there's a lot more to building a house than just the framing.
This film is equal amounts of FUD and fearmongering. Almost nothing else (except some jobs will be replaced by AI - but that's been happening for over 200 years, except I'd replace "AI" with technology).
Most hardcore AI experts (and Musk is not one of them) don't see AGI happening any time soon. We just have no idea what intelligence and consciousness are. Not a freaking clue.
Go back in time to 1870, shortly after the invention of dynamite, and ask the top physicists of the day about the potential for physics to create a city-destroying super-weapon in the next 50 years.
Now fast-forward to 1920 and ask the top physicists the exact same question. I'm guessing the answers won't be much different.
The thing about the world's top AI experts is they're experts in NNs, SVMs, search algorithms, etc. But they're not experts in AGI because AGI doesn't exist yet.
They're no more qualified to speculate on AGI than Musk, Hawking, or any other reasonably smart person. If anything they're going to be a bit conservative in their speculation because it's bad practise to make pronouncements about things you don't understand in your field. Plus, they don't want to be the ass who's quoted everywhere as the AI expert warning about the dangers of AI.
A few decades ago, this used to be called corruption.
I didn't realize the US had just invented campaign donations.
This has been going on forever, if you're a major corporation you donate as much you can to any legislator who can plausibly influence their company. It is a very corrupt idea, though to be honest it probably doesn't matter. Legislators aren't dumb, they know Google donates to both sides and is limited by legal limits on donations, $7k really isn't that much.
The real cause for concern isn't the $7 million in donations since (2007)*, it's the $52 million Facebook spend lobbying since '09, and the $11 million spent lobbying this year.
A slick lobbyist giving a presentation is way more likely to sway a legislator than a relatively small number on their campaign donations form.
* Is it just me or does the USA Today article massively suck in communicating the numbers. I know both Facebook's PAC and its employees gave donations but there's no indication on whether the article is counting the employee donations in its numbers. And half the numbers don't even include a time range do you don't know if it's a donation in a single year or aggregated over multiple cycles, it's just like the reporter wanted to type "million" as much as they could.