How about instead of criticizing a company for creating all these jobs, innovating an entire new industry, producing incredible value for customers, and instead praise them for doing so?
Working for low wages sucks. I know plenty of people who do this. Often they are recent immigrants or children of recent immigrants. Both parents may need to work. Grandmother may need to live with them and do child care. Their kids might not have their own bedrooms.
But having wages of this level means they can have a (used) car, refrigerator, microwave, TV, running water and a flush toilet - things they may not have had if they were unable to come to the US. So they are happy about that. But life is still challenging, though they get by and have a life as enjoyable as anyone else (I know unhappy rich people and happy poor people).
Low wages are an important price signal. It says perhaps you should finish high school, or go to college like 66% of high school graduates, or go to a trade school, or become an entrepreneur and start your own business (I know a Central American immigrant who started as a maid, saved up money, and now owns a chain of restaurants). Or perhaps you should move to areas with higher wages, like the Bakken or Eagle Shale areas.
Don't be like Washington DC and destroy thousands of potential jobs by saying Walmart should pay higher wages than the minimum wage. Don't force people to be unemployed.
If you really want to help these people, first let them have jobs (i.e. at the market wage) rather than try to manipulate their wages and making them unemployed. Give them a chance to make some money now. Then they may figure out they need to save to get more skills, move, stay in place and learn how to move into management, etc.
Then ask yourself why our unionized socialized government monopoly schools might not be preparing everyone for high-skill, high-productivity jobs.
The question is whether HEVC will be of use on mobile devices - that is where an increasing amount of video viewing is being done, and the area where bandwidth is most in demand.
Existing smartphones have hardware support for H.264 - it is unclear how soon they will have hardware support for HEVC, which of course is even more computationally intensive.
A speaker from a large company there warned those attending (mainly from Europe) to avoid US cloud companies because of NSA spying. Not just US-based servers, but also any company with SUPPORT STAFF located in the US as well, even if the servers are located outside of the US.
Reason 1 is the risk of private company information flowing to competitors through the NSA either officially or through corruption.
Reason 2 is the legal risk of falling afoul of EU privacy laws by hosting in the US or with US support staff.
That's the report from Europe folks. You can call it FUD, but it is there nonetheless.
A speaker from a large company there warned those attending (mainly from Europe) to avoid US cloud companies because of NSA spying. Not just US-based servers, but also any company with SUPPORT STAFF located in the US as well, even if the servers are located outside of the US.
Reason 1 is the risk of private company information flowing to competitors through the NSA either officially or through corruption.
Reason 2 is the legal risk of falling afoul of EU privacy laws by hosting in the US or with US support staff.
That's the report from Europe folks. You can call it FUD, but it is there nonetheless.
The promise of a short-term monopoly due to patents is what caused Lucius Lyon, Michigan's first U.S. Senator, to invest in its development by Hiram Moore.
It turns out that Cyrus McCormick pirated Moore's innovations and was able to make the most money out of it.
I am not saying that there is not a lot of effort still left to do
Myriad spent about $500 million on the "effort still left to do" by the way.
Pharmaceuticals are even more expensive because of the massive cost of FDA testing.
You are correct - university labs tend to create the basic knowledge, but without that intellectual property right existing to be licensed, Pharma companies would not invest in the testing and manufacture of the drug.
Much of what Myriad owned in IP on BRCA testing came from the owner's lab at the University of Utah, with research money coming from Eli Lilly.
This resulted in a class system where you were born (or married) into one side or the other but the lock in prevented upward mobility.
If you look at any country that went through "land reform", you will see that the class system existed first. Those of high class and thus best connected to the government were far better able to acquire and maintain property rights than the lower class. It was government's lack of protection of the property rights of ordinary people that lead to small clans owning most of the land.
Moreover, in many of those countries, government regulations on the economy made it difficult to establish industries beyond agriculture that could have opened up opportunities for industrial workers and entrepreneurs.
This is the situation in most of Africa today. Small landholders often do not have secure title to their land. Entrepreneurs can not start and grow large companies. Those attached to the government collect rents from the small numbers of monopoly industries allowed by the government.
Look at Egypt where ex-military people get rich from state-owned-enterprises that have a monopoly in such businesses as janitorial services, household appliances, pest control, automobile repair, exercise equipment, and catering. One-third of Egypt's economy is under military control!
Stiglitz does not point out that Myriad spent $500 million developing its BRCA tests. Without assurances of a limited period of patent protection, who would have made this investment?
What else did Myriad do? Myriad entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to provide at cost or below cost testing to the NCI and any researcher working under a NCI funded project. Myriad created a network of health care professionals, service providers and insurers, and hired a large number of genetic counselors to educate physicians on how to identify patients who would benefit from the test. Myriad is not a "patent troll", they actively invested and built the first market for genetic testing.
Stiglitz also makes the argument that "the two genes would likely have been isolated (âoediscovered,â in Myriadâ(TM)s terminology) soon anyway, as part of the global Human Genome Project."
This is complete BS. BRCA1 was linked to chromosome 17 in 1991. That year, Myriad Genetics was founded by Dr. Walter Gilbert, Mark Skolnick, Kevin Kimberlin and Peter Meldrum to develop a test for BRCA1. In 1994, BRCA1 was cloned at the University of Utah in Mark Skolnick's lab. Myriad launched BRACAnalysis in 1996. This was the first molecular diagnostic test for a common disease. This had never been done before.
The Human Genome Project did not publish an initial rough draft of the human genome until June 2000. The Human Genome Project did not clone genes nor did it develop any diagnostic tests.
Even if it did, would it have been better if four years had gone on with 20,000 or so women each year developing cancers due to BRCA who had no opportunity to have the test at any price?
The argument about equality is BS as well. If the government wishes to redistribute money, it should do that through taxing and spending, not manipulating the market. Yes Myriad rejected Medicaid's low-ball price, but they aren't alone in this - fewer than half of U.S. doctors and other health care professionals accept Medicaid patients. If the government really wants to offer BRCA testing to all who may benefit from it, they should tax people more and pay the company.
I can give an example where lack of patent protection is limiting the use of a pharmaceutical. Domperidone is a 5HT-3 receptor antagonist. It is well known by gastrointestinal specialists as an important tool for fighting the debilitating nausea of gastroparesis with many fewer side effects than other drugs. Its developer, Janssen Pharmaceutical, put it through FDA safety testing in the US and passed, but it failed FDA testing for efficacy in enhancing gastrointestinal motility in gastroparesis (we now know that gastric motility and nausea are often not highly correlated in gastroparesis). However it went off-patent before Janssen could bring it back for FDA efficacy testing for anti-nausea properties.
Because Domperidone never passed FDA efficacy testing in the US, it is illegal to prescribe in the US, despite being widely used around the world. Gastroparesis patients in the US must seek technically illegal supplies imported from outside the US because none of the generic makers now can afford to put it through FDA efficacy testing without an assurance of temporary monopoly pricing.
I'm not going to argue that the patent system is perfect, because it isn't. But I believe we are better with it than without. It should ensure that the benefits of temporary monopoly are limited to the specific intellectual contributions of inventors and nothing more. I agree with Stiglitz's amicus brief that it is possible that some types of patents should last longer or shorter than others. And I also believe that major international standards such as video compression should have a "put up or shut up" period to ensure that people developing systems know what patents are applicable and can license them without submarine patents showing up years later.
their prospective lawyers know it and won't take such cases on contingency.
I think you will find that the lawyers will figure out reasons to sue for wrongful termination including:
Discrimination, based on race and ethnicity, age, gender, religion, disabilities or sexual orientation; Retaliation for reporting or threatening to report illegal company activity; Termination after an employee files for workers' compensation benefits; Political disagreements; Unionizing; Failure to follow an employer directive to violate the law; Breach of written, oral or implied employment contracts.
And even if they don't take it on contingency, they can find suckers to pay them up front to at least begin the legal process which means spinning up your lawyers...
why do most of the other countries in the developed world, that do have universal health care, deliver better overall health care outcomes for 60% less
Because they pay their doctors less. When government is the primary employer or leading negotiator with physicians, they can't bargain much.
The bottom line is: U.S. doctors charge 2x-3x the fees received by their peers in France and Germany
But of course doctors in those other countries do sometimes go on strike.
a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.
And according to the NBER, the last recession in the US lasted from 4Q2007 to 2Q2009. We are not currently in a recession.
Afraid is the correct word. If you find out someone doesn't work out after a month or two on the job, you will have to fork out some serious severance to make sure they sign a document that says they won't sue you - otherwise, they will sue you for something.
There is nothing that the government can do to recover jobs short of bringing the manufacturing home by establishing protective tariffs
The US manufacturing sector continues to produce more output with fewer workers. Sweatshops that employ millions are unlikely to return to the US regardless of tariffs, instead we will have a small number of people programming and monitoring robots. Many large manufacturers in the US depend on international trade (such as Boeing) for customers anyway, so you really don't want to shoot that in the foot either.
Germany's unemployment rate was unchanged for the seventh straight month at a relatively low 6.9% in May, after seasonal adjustment.
Yet nearly one in five working Germans, or about 7.4 million people, hold a so-called "minijob," a form of marginal employment that allows someone to earn up to E450($580) a month free of tax.
There is a standard for the delivery of "frame compatible" stereoscopic video (DVB-3DTV). This is what is typically broadcast in a 3D channel today - a signal that uses the top and bottom (or side-by-side) of a typical video channel to carry half-resolution left and right eye, which has the advantage of not requiring any changes to the distribution equipment.
But yes, it is unclear what standard would be for non-glasses based 3D transmission. There was some work by Philips and Dimenco on a technology generically referred to as "2D Plus DOT" which included a base 2D image plus data on depth, occlusion and transparency.
If there is a future for 3D in television, it will be based around non-glasses based 3D displays (aka "autostereoscopic"). For example, see this display by Holografika. Dolby has also been showing a non-glasses 3D TV technology recently.
The challenge of non-glasses 3D is that there needs to be at least an 8K backing 2D display to have enough pixels to effectively get HD resolution in 3D with enough views to have a smooth experience with reasonable depth.
Also for live-shot material, there has to be some kind of mathematical creation of the additional view angles - it is unlikely you will have 16 cameras shooting simultaneously - and unfortunately there often are challenges doing 2D to 3D model extrapolation.
I suspect in the future, we will shoot TV and movies using a 2D camera plus a depth camera (such as flash LIDAR or structured light like Kinect but higher resolution). Then you need the CPU ability to convert the 3D model into the many different views required.
My experience with Crash Space in LA has been that it has created a whole bunch of new stuff:
FlipBookKit, a Kickstarter-funded project, started there.
The bGeigie nano radiation detector (a part of Safecast.Org) was developed there, as well as products from ThingM such as the "blink(1)" USB-connected programmable status LED and the "blinkm" programmable smart 3-color LEDs.
Members of Crash Space have also shown up on TV shows such as Unchained Reaction.
Crash Space has several folks whose full-time job is working on various tech projects.
The H1-B Tata folks I've encountered seem pretty competent and happy. Except for the one whose last H1-B re-up is over, and now his kids, having grown up in the US, have to go back to India. Yes, he's pissed, but they'll send a new H1-B guy to replace him, so we just are throwing out a capable person and his family for stupid bureaucratic reasons, while my great-grandparents just got off a boat and got citizenship in a few years.
I've seen things work best with Tata project managers in the US, with the real work being done in India. But they are best at doing "more simple" coding such as Web GUIs and such rather than back-end coding that is performance-sensitive.
You have millions of people who fully ignored laws they knew existed
But we should be honest that for millions of illegal aliens in the US, there is no legal way for them to enter the country to work. If you are an unskilled worker from Mexico or Central America and have no family in the US, there is no visa program for you to come to the US to be a citizen, and there are very few visas available for guest workers as well.
My (unskilled) great grandparents pretty much just walked off the boat, and they were citizens in a few years.
I work in a niche technology field. There are only about 3000 engineers worldwide in this field, and of those maybe only a few hundred have several years of operational experience (which is a major issue, as minor screw-ups in operation can cost $100,000 or more). Pretty much all the qualified American engineers are in a job already.
I know several folks in the industry who came to the US from other countries (mainly Europe) on H1-B. Also some of those folks got messed up in the bureaucracy and then had to spend less productive time outside the US while the government got its act together.
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How about instead of criticizing a company for creating all these jobs, innovating an entire new industry, producing incredible value for customers, and instead praise them for doing so?
Working for low wages sucks. I know plenty of people who do this. Often they are recent immigrants or children of recent immigrants. Both parents may need to work. Grandmother may need to live with them and do child care. Their kids might not have their own bedrooms.
But having wages of this level means they can have a (used) car, refrigerator, microwave, TV, running water and a flush toilet - things they may not have had if they were unable to come to the US. So they are happy about that. But life is still challenging, though they get by and have a life as enjoyable as anyone else (I know unhappy rich people and happy poor people).
Low wages are an important price signal. It says perhaps you should finish high school, or go to college like 66% of high school graduates, or go to a trade school, or become an entrepreneur and start your own business (I know a Central American immigrant who started as a maid, saved up money, and now owns a chain of restaurants). Or perhaps you should move to areas with higher wages, like the Bakken or Eagle Shale areas.
Don't be like Washington DC and destroy thousands of potential jobs by saying Walmart should pay higher wages than the minimum wage. Don't force people to be unemployed.
If you really want to help these people, first let them have jobs (i.e. at the market wage) rather than try to manipulate their wages and making them unemployed. Give them a chance to make some money now. Then they may figure out they need to save to get more skills, move, stay in place and learn how to move into management, etc.
Then ask yourself why our unionized socialized government monopoly schools might not be preparing everyone for high-skill, high-productivity jobs.
In LA, you can eat insects at Typhoon in Santa Monica or La Guelaguetza.
The question is whether HEVC will be of use on mobile devices - that is where an increasing amount of video viewing is being done, and the area where bandwidth is most in demand.
Existing smartphones have hardware support for H.264 - it is unclear how soon they will have hardware support for HEVC, which of course is even more computationally intensive.
Check this video of a drag race between Model S vs. BMW M5!
I was recently at an IT conference in Geneva.
A speaker from a large company there warned those attending (mainly from Europe) to avoid US cloud companies because of NSA spying. Not just US-based servers, but also any company with SUPPORT STAFF located in the US as well, even if the servers are located outside of the US.
Reason 1 is the risk of private company information flowing to competitors through the NSA either officially or through corruption.
Reason 2 is the legal risk of falling afoul of EU privacy laws by hosting in the US or with US support staff.
That's the report from Europe folks. You can call it FUD, but it is there nonetheless.
I was recently at an IT conference in Geneva.
A speaker from a large company there warned those attending (mainly from Europe) to avoid US cloud companies because of NSA spying. Not just US-based servers, but also any company with SUPPORT STAFF located in the US as well, even if the servers are located outside of the US.
Reason 1 is the risk of private company information flowing to competitors through the NSA either officially or through corruption.
Reason 2 is the legal risk of falling afoul of EU privacy laws by hosting in the US or with US support staff.
That's the report from Europe folks. You can call it FUD, but it is there nonetheless.
You may want to read about the history of the harvester.
The promise of a short-term monopoly due to patents is what caused Lucius Lyon, Michigan's first U.S. Senator, to invest in its development by Hiram Moore.
It turns out that Cyrus McCormick pirated Moore's innovations and was able to make the most money out of it.
I am not saying that there is not a lot of effort still left to do
Myriad spent about $500 million on the "effort still left to do" by the way.
Pharmaceuticals are even more expensive because of the massive cost of FDA testing.
You are correct - university labs tend to create the basic knowledge, but without that intellectual property right existing to be licensed, Pharma companies would not invest in the testing and manufacture of the drug.
Much of what Myriad owned in IP on BRCA testing came from the owner's lab at the University of Utah, with research money coming from Eli Lilly.
This resulted in a class system where you were born (or married) into one side or the other but the lock in prevented upward mobility.
If you look at any country that went through "land reform", you will see that the class system existed first. Those of high class and thus best connected to the government were far better able to acquire and maintain property rights than the lower class. It was government's lack of protection of the property rights of ordinary people that lead to small clans owning most of the land.
Moreover, in many of those countries, government regulations on the economy made it difficult to establish industries beyond agriculture that could have opened up opportunities for industrial workers and entrepreneurs.
This is the situation in most of Africa today. Small landholders often do not have secure title to their land. Entrepreneurs can not start and grow large companies. Those attached to the government collect rents from the small numbers of monopoly industries allowed by the government.
Look at Egypt where ex-military people get rich from state-owned-enterprises that have a monopoly in such businesses as janitorial services, household appliances, pest control, automobile repair, exercise equipment, and catering. One-third of Egypt's economy is under military control!
Stiglitz does not point out that Myriad spent $500 million developing its BRCA tests. Without assurances of a limited period of patent protection, who would have made this investment?
What else did Myriad do? Myriad entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to provide at cost or below cost testing to the NCI and any researcher working under a NCI funded project. Myriad created a network of health care professionals, service providers and insurers, and hired a large number of genetic counselors to educate physicians on how to identify patients who would benefit from the test. Myriad is not a "patent troll", they actively invested and built the first market for genetic testing.
Stiglitz also makes the argument that "the two genes would likely have been isolated (âoediscovered,â in Myriadâ(TM)s terminology) soon anyway, as part of the global Human Genome Project."
This is complete BS. BRCA1 was linked to chromosome 17 in 1991. That year, Myriad Genetics was founded by Dr. Walter Gilbert, Mark Skolnick, Kevin Kimberlin and Peter Meldrum to develop a test for BRCA1. In 1994, BRCA1 was cloned at the University of Utah in Mark Skolnick's lab. Myriad launched BRACAnalysis in 1996. This was the first molecular diagnostic test for a common disease. This had never been done before.
The Human Genome Project did not publish an initial rough draft of the human genome until June 2000. The Human Genome Project did not clone genes nor did it develop any diagnostic tests.
Even if it did, would it have been better if four years had gone on with 20,000 or so women each year developing cancers due to BRCA who had no opportunity to have the test at any price?
The argument about equality is BS as well. If the government wishes to redistribute money, it should do that through taxing and spending, not manipulating the market. Yes Myriad rejected Medicaid's low-ball price, but they aren't alone in this - fewer than half of U.S. doctors and other health care professionals accept Medicaid patients. If the government really wants to offer BRCA testing to all who may benefit from it, they should tax people more and pay the company.
I can give an example where lack of patent protection is limiting the use of a pharmaceutical. Domperidone is a 5HT-3 receptor antagonist. It is well known by gastrointestinal specialists as an important tool for fighting the debilitating nausea of gastroparesis with many fewer side effects than other drugs. Its developer, Janssen Pharmaceutical, put it through FDA safety testing in the US and passed, but it failed FDA testing for efficacy in enhancing gastrointestinal motility in gastroparesis (we now know that gastric motility and nausea are often not highly correlated in gastroparesis). However it went off-patent before Janssen could bring it back for FDA efficacy testing for anti-nausea properties.
Because Domperidone never passed FDA efficacy testing in the US, it is illegal to prescribe in the US, despite being widely used around the world. Gastroparesis patients in the US must seek technically illegal supplies imported from outside the US because none of the generic makers now can afford to put it through FDA efficacy testing without an assurance of temporary monopoly pricing.
I'm not going to argue that the patent system is perfect, because it isn't. But I believe we are better with it than without. It should ensure that the benefits of temporary monopoly are limited to the specific intellectual contributions of inventors and nothing more. I agree with Stiglitz's amicus brief that it is possible that some types of patents should last longer or shorter than others. And I also believe that major international standards such as video compression should have a "put up or shut up" period to ensure that people developing systems know what patents are applicable and can license them without submarine patents showing up years later.
their prospective lawyers know it and won't take such cases on contingency.
I think you will find that the lawyers will figure out reasons to sue for wrongful termination including:
Discrimination, based on race and ethnicity, age, gender, religion, disabilities or sexual orientation; Retaliation for reporting or threatening to report illegal company activity; Termination after an employee files for workers' compensation benefits; Political disagreements; Unionizing; Failure to follow an employer directive to violate the law; Breach of written, oral or implied employment contracts.
And even if they don't take it on contingency, they can find suckers to pay them up front to at least begin the legal process which means spinning up your lawyers...
why do most of the other countries in the developed world, that do have universal health care, deliver better overall health care outcomes for 60% less
Because they pay their doctors less. When government is the primary employer or leading negotiator with physicians, they can't bargain much.
But of course doctors in those other countries do sometimes go on strike.
The National Bureau of Economic Research defines a recession as:
And according to the NBER, the last recession in the US lasted from 4Q2007 to 2Q2009. We are not currently in a recession.
I don't think "afraid" is the right word.
Afraid is the correct word. If you find out someone doesn't work out after a month or two on the job, you will have to fork out some serious severance to make sure they sign a document that says they won't sue you - otherwise, they will sue you for something.
There is nothing that the government can do to recover jobs short of bringing the manufacturing home by establishing protective tariffs
The US manufacturing sector continues to produce more output with fewer workers. Sweatshops that employ millions are unlikely to return to the US regardless of tariffs, instead we will have a small number of people programming and monitoring robots. Many large manufacturers in the US depend on international trade (such as Boeing) for customers anyway, so you really don't want to shoot that in the foot either.
From this source:
Perhaps "full time" includes "full time, temporary" jobs.
There is a standard for the delivery of "frame compatible" stereoscopic video (DVB-3DTV). This is what is typically broadcast in a 3D channel today - a signal that uses the top and bottom (or side-by-side) of a typical video channel to carry half-resolution left and right eye, which has the advantage of not requiring any changes to the distribution equipment.
But yes, it is unclear what standard would be for non-glasses based 3D transmission. There was some work by Philips and Dimenco on a technology generically referred to as "2D Plus DOT" which included a base 2D image plus data on depth, occlusion and transparency.
If there is a future for 3D in television, it will be based around non-glasses based 3D displays (aka "autostereoscopic"). For example, see this display by Holografika. Dolby has also been showing a non-glasses 3D TV technology recently.
The challenge of non-glasses 3D is that there needs to be at least an 8K backing 2D display to have enough pixels to effectively get HD resolution in 3D with enough views to have a smooth experience with reasonable depth.
Also for live-shot material, there has to be some kind of mathematical creation of the additional view angles - it is unlikely you will have 16 cameras shooting simultaneously - and unfortunately there often are challenges doing 2D to 3D model extrapolation.
I suspect in the future, we will shoot TV and movies using a 2D camera plus a depth camera (such as flash LIDAR or structured light like Kinect but higher resolution). Then you need the CPU ability to convert the 3D model into the many different views required.
The problem is the trunks leading to the DSAs
By the way, DSA means "Digital Service Area", the area of customer premises served by a DSLAM (remote/outside plant or inside plant).
My experience with Crash Space in LA has been that it has created a whole bunch of new stuff:
FlipBookKit, a Kickstarter-funded project, started there.
The bGeigie nano radiation detector (a part of Safecast.Org) was developed there, as well as products from ThingM such as the "blink(1)" USB-connected programmable status LED and the "blinkm" programmable smart 3-color LEDs.
Members of Crash Space have also shown up on TV shows such as Unchained Reaction.
Crash Space has several folks whose full-time job is working on various tech projects.
I believe in FREE SOFTWARE and FREE MOVEMENT OF LABOR!
Anyone worked with Tata?
The H1-B Tata folks I've encountered seem pretty competent and happy. Except for the one whose last H1-B re-up is over, and now his kids, having grown up in the US, have to go back to India. Yes, he's pissed, but they'll send a new H1-B guy to replace him, so we just are throwing out a capable person and his family for stupid bureaucratic reasons, while my great-grandparents just got off a boat and got citizenship in a few years.
I've seen things work best with Tata project managers in the US, with the real work being done in India. But they are best at doing "more simple" coding such as Web GUIs and such rather than back-end coding that is performance-sensitive.
You have millions of people who fully ignored laws they knew existed
But we should be honest that for millions of illegal aliens in the US, there is no legal way for them to enter the country to work. If you are an unskilled worker from Mexico or Central America and have no family in the US, there is no visa program for you to come to the US to be a citizen, and there are very few visas available for guest workers as well.
My (unskilled) great grandparents pretty much just walked off the boat, and they were citizens in a few years.
I work in a niche technology field. There are only about 3000 engineers worldwide in this field, and of those maybe only a few hundred have several years of operational experience (which is a major issue, as minor screw-ups in operation can cost $100,000 or more). Pretty much all the qualified American engineers are in a job already.
I know several folks in the industry who came to the US from other countries (mainly Europe) on H1-B. Also some of those folks got messed up in the bureaucracy and then had to spend less productive time outside the US while the government got its act together.