Well, I'm actually surprised they rolled out JB for the Nexus S. They dropped support for the Nexus One after only 18 months, and the Nexus S is older than that. I didn't get a Nexus S at the time because:
1. It was unsubsidized, and I wouldn't have gotten a break on my rates to buy it. I could get a G2 for free at the same time. Free G2 vs $350 Nexus S - hard choice.
2. It lacked a keyboard, which made it less useful than the G2.
However, at the time I was a bit spoiled by the fact that the modding community kept the HTC Dream going for so long, and I figured by getting a G2 I'd be in good shape (since most of the big names in the modding community had bought it). The problem was that the big names have been buying lots of other phones since, so they don't really give as much attention to any phone as the Dream used to get.
Since then I've managed to get a break on an unsubsidized contract, so the playing field will be more level for the next Nexus phone to come along. That said, Google only releases one a year or so, which means that for most of the year their hardware is outdated.
I don't think anybody is suggesting that this is a substitute for in-vivo studies.
However, I suspect we could learn quite a bit through simulations and modelling just the same, as you basically start out.
I think some challenges are going to be spacial partitioning and kinetics. If you just model your cell as a uniform box that makes the math a lot easier, but it completely ignores the fact that cells actively manage their micro-environment (especially as you scale up to eukaryotes). The concentration of some protein isn't going to be the same in two different regions of the cell, and even for small molecules when some membrane protein produces something it won't instantly be binding to some DNA regulator.
For simple cells maybe some of these effects are easier to ignore (no ER, nuclear membrane, etc). Even so, the fact that bacteria can react to chemical gradients clearly demonstrates that there are all kinds of spacial kinetics/etc going on.
I think the best these kinds of simulations will be able to do is modeling the cell in conditions close to the natural ones. Expecting something like this to model what happens when some virus comes in and takes over 90% of the ribosomes in the bacteria just isn't realistic. That would be like taking a really good weather model and then asking what happens if a supervolcano raises the temperature in Wyoming by 500 degrees for 10 years. Only ab-initio models can do this sort of thing accurately, and even those fail of you try to model the big bang or other situations where the physics are unknown.
I agree. I really want to get a Nexus for my next phone, but the Galaxy Nexus is huge, and I'm fearful about what they'll release next. If I want any updates at all after I buy a phone, I really only have two choices - an iPhone or a Nexus.
What harm worse than 45 dead kids and 55 dead adults per year does the vaccine cause (which is neglecting any non-fatalities, and assuming your values are accurate)? Nobody approves vaccines without doing a basic risk/benefit analysis, which is what you're questioning. You would also need to demonstrate clinical evidence for this massive increase in risk of adult death from the vaccine.
Yeah, but a real neocon would get with the program and funnel bribes, err, lobbiests, to their local representative to promote the latest billion-dollar security theater prop their company has come up with.
The term for this is the "Euphemism Treadmill" - in numerous areas words which are made up to be politically correct end up becoming politically incorrect simply by becoming popular.
Well, eventually 99% of the devices will run ICS or later, so time spent developing for it is never going to be a "waste."
However, WHEN you should develop for it is a different matter. An app that REQUIRES ICS is only going to be commercially successful maybe a few months from now when a fair number of phones actually run it - and ICS is already nine months old.
It seems like adoption follows release by around a year or so with Android. Don't get me wrong, I love android, but lack of updates is maddening. I'm actually looking to upgrade my current phone but wouldn't consider anything on sale now. I can either get a Galaxy Nexus which is 9 months old and will probably only see at most one more OS update from Google, or something like a Galaxy S3 which has great hardware, but which probably will get Jelly Bean sometime but likely nothing after that. Being better hardware I suspect that somebody will hack together later OS releases for it, though likely with bugs on the camera/etc and a generally frustrating experience. Then again, it has gotten to the point where most of the big Android modders have just moved to Nexus devices and tend to get new ones every year, so not even the modding community is doing that great a job with older phones now.
I guess I'll just hold off until the next generation of Nexus comes along, and hope I like whatever choices are offered. Feels like Apple, ugh...
I think this is one of the biggest weaknesses with any password-based system. We're too dependent on uncontrolled terminals, and nobody has figured out to do SSL directly to the human brain.
We like to blanket ourselves in feel-good measures like PCI/etc, but the fact is that nobody really knows if that box you're punching a PIN/etc into has been tampered with.
How do you figure? I wasn't suggesting selling off or liquidating any bank assets. The government would have acquired the banks issuing the shareholders IOUs whose value is TBD, since the value of the bank is TBD. The government would operate the bank for a few years while cleaning things up.
By cleaning house I meant replacing executives, not selling off assets.
The banks would have had no capital shortages or credit crunches, since as government-owned institutions they'd have full access to the US Treasury. Of course, any use of this source would be repaid by the former shareholders in the form of those IOUs losing value.
And, if a bunch of poor people need their mortgages written down to reasonable rates/principals that is no big deal either - the government would own 99% of those, and would just write them down. That would be the bank's loss, and would again be paid by the former shareholders.
The end result is that the executives go to jail, the former shareholders lose for having invested in banks that are too big to be controlled by their shareholders, and the US economy recovers.
No doubt some VP of marketing came up with the idea, and nobody has the power to make an exception.
A human's greatest strength over a computer is their ability to adapt to circumstances. However, corporations have gotten obsessed with running their operations completely by procedure. If they could replace the people with computers they would. However, this makes them completely unadaptable, and they perish as a result.
I guess the issue is that braindead stupidity is not illegal or morally wrong. However, misleading an investor is both. Some people are just bad with money, and they should be able to hire others who are good with money to avoid disasters like this one.
I doubt they'll get a billion dollars for it, but GS certainly should be punished.
That depends on the aircraft. On a Cat III approach with an appropriately-equipped aircraft I believe the minimums are zero. As long as the aircraft determines it is capable of autolanding it will happily do so, and usually better than a human. Aircraft capable of this check their navigational accuracy and level of redundancy/etc before OKing an autoland.
I imagine most autopilots will follow a glidescope all the way to the ground, but if it isn't designed for autoland it isn't going to flare and it will be like a carrier landing, minus the specially-designed landing gear. It also won't retard the throttles.
I'm not sure we should be so hard on me-too drugs. People like to bash them, but nobody is forced to buy them, and they're good because they create competition in the market which lowers prices and gives doctors alternatives. Many doctors start with the drug that has the best clinical data, but are forced to switch to some other drug because a patient doesn't tolerate the first-line drug - clinical data is all about averages, and the average person isn't really very average. Without me-too drugs doctors would be forced to make all-or-nothing decisions, and patients are unlikely to continue on some of these therapies.
I think the fundamental issue is that drug safety isn't that easy to measure - especially as the bar has gotten raised higher. We also have so many trials out there it is hard to recruit patients into them. I think there are many reforms that could help, but ultimately you can never expect a trial of 10,000 people to spot all the issues that will arise when millions of people take a drug. Even with millions of people you can't always be sure the issues triggering recalls are real.
As has been pointed out - people die whether you approve or reject a drug, so there needs to be a risk-based balance. Simply slowing down drug approvals results in death sentences for anybody who could have been treated but wasn't due to delay. I'm all for reform, but that can't be translated into simple risk-aversion...
If a scientist feels that something is going to hurt public safety, they have a moral duty to do everything they can to prevent that.
Suppose a scientist thinks that vaccines are dangerous to public safety. Should they be allowed to block approval of any new vaccine, and use government power to harm vaccine manufacturers and get current vaccines off the market? How many people would that harm?
The fact that they are a scientist doesn't make them infallible. Sure, they should raise concerns when they have them, and as a society we should establish regulatory agencies that are responsive to these concerns. However, in the end individual scientists aren't appointed dictators - they are just government employees. Whether they have a moral duty or not does not give them the authority to go on a crusade. Society could not function if anybody who felt they had a moral duty to do something were free to pursue that duty without interference. What happens when your neighbor feels you are imprisoning your poor pets and likely to repeat offend so they feel that killing you in your sleep is the best solution, for the greater good?
There is a problem with risk - if you release a drug people die who wouldn't otherwise, and if you don't release a drug people die who wouldn't otherwise.
The FDA as an institution has to create policies around what kinds of risks are appropriate and what kinds are not. That is a matter of public policy, not personal conscience.
Now, a scientist can evaluate data and say whether it supports the drug being an appropriate risk or not (or is inconclusive), as long as those policies are all well-defined. That doesn't mean that random scientists should be given a veto over the approval of individual drugs, or any reason of personal conscience. That isn't their decision to make - they aren't setting policy, they are informing policymakers and determining how particular decisions should be made in light of these policies.
I would say that stuff like this needs to be kept in the open as much as possible. However, if you give somebody the role of a quality inspector and let them operate however they want, then generally from a personal self-interest standpoint their optimum strategy is to never approve anything, and clearly that doesn't serve the interest. Decisions to not approve something tend not to be questioned as closely as decisions to approve something that later turns out to be dangerous. That is why it can't be up to individuals.
The issue is whether they can breach confidentiality agreements.
Suppose an FDA scientist knows that next week the FDA is likely to recommend that some drug be approved. They tell their friend the stock broker and they buy a few million shares of stock in the company at issue. Then a week later they make a fortune when the price rises. No doubt the friend takes good care of them in return.
This isn't about keeping science secret - this is about trade secrets and insider information. We WANT companies to share info with the FDA so that they can make a well-informed decision. When there are leaks it encourages companies to hide info from the FDA which actually interferes with their ability to look after public safety.
I certainly agree that info that has a bearing on public safety should be disclosed. However, things like manufacturing processes or info on how drugs are labeled to prevent counterfeiting, or other info that has no bearing on the safety of the drug itself should not be made public except as provided by law.
That said, I'm not a big fan of witch hunts either. There needs to be a balance. We need scientists who can evaluate scientific evidence, but that doesn't mean they're working free of constraints.
No need to argue - Bible authorship isn't nearly as unsettled as you make out. In the case of the Old Testament there is a lot more controversy, but in the case of the New Testament (which tends to be much more firm in teaching that the meek will inherit the Earth and all that), authorship is pretty well-known. A few books aren't 100% certain, but there really isn't any reason to doubt the authorship of Paul, or the persecution of much of the early church.
I'd probably buy into your argument more for the Old Testament, although in that case much of the Bible was oral tradition, likely written down sometime around the return from the Babylonian captivity. It likely wasn't written so much by "rich people" but by religious authorities. I suspect their motivations were generally sincere - they no doubt profited from their role in society, but little of the Old Testament teaches that people should just put up with their lot in life. If anything it tends to come down on rich people who don't share their wealth, and even ascribes in part the recent Babylonian exile as the result of the failure to implement a very radical property transfer system in which every 50 years land reverts to traditional family ownership (thus eliminating any concentration of wealth).
Religion might have many of the effects you describe, but I wouldn't assume that this is the reason for its origin. I think that many experts on Biblical scholarship would disagree with your assertion of origins, and many of them are atheists.
Yup, shareholders have little long-term perspective anyway.
Just look at how any company run by a private investor operates compared to almost any mega-corp. The mega-corps largely get by on rent-seeking behavior and barriers to entry.
I've maintained for a few years now that corporate governance tends to generally work like this: 1. Founder starts company and it becomes big and powerful. Company does really well. 2. Founder retires, and hand-picked successor takes over. Company still does really well. 3. Hand-picked successor retires, and board's executive search committee goes into action. Company begins to go downhill.
Companies like MS and Apple are in #2 now, and MS is already struggling. In 20 years, both companies will be a shell of their past glory - just look at HP.
Privately held companies tend to be more stable simply because there is more accountability, but just because somebody is a genius doesn't mean that their children are. I don't think there really is any sustainable way to run a company for the long term. I'm not convinced that corporations are the boon to society that we make them out to be as a result. I don't think we should simply get rid of them, but they need to be reigned in.
They did it because the Fed Chairman and the US Treasury Secretary ordered them to, not because they actually wanted to take the taxpayer's money.
And how is it that the government had this power? They had a shortage of capital, making them unstable. Banks are required to hold sufficient reserves of capital, and thanks to being over-leveraged they no longer met the requirements. That gave the Federal Government the power to do all kinds of things with them.
I wouldn't have given them a loan though. I'd simply have seized the banks, cleaned house, operated and reorganized the banks (likely into more manageable pieces) for the maximum benefit of the US population, collected evidence from the books against the previous officers, and then sold off what is left in various IPOs. Then I would take the IPO profits and any profits made over the time the government operated the bank, and then subtracted from that any money injected by the government to stabilize the bank. Any funds that remain would be dispersed to the previous shareholders as just compensation for their loss of the bank when it was seized. This is just eminent domain, but rather than paying for whatever distorted value wall street had assigned to the bank it would be based on actual value based on costs to clean up and make the books honest and a market valuation of that product.
I'd also pass onerous regulations on any financial services entity doing more than a certain amount of business - ideally such that it is not profitable to operate companies that large. This should result in little loss to shareholders - the entities would simply divest themselves down into small enough pieces to avoid regulation, while also fixing the too-big-to-fail problem for us.
Here is my concern. What fee did GS collect, and what exactly did they do to earn that fee.
Suppose you go skiing and break a leg. You go to a doctor and pay them to treat your leg. You get gangrene a week later and lose your leg, and it turns out the doctor messed up.
Now, if you weren't skiing you wouldn't have broken your leg and needed to go to a doctor, and losing a leg is therefore just an inevitable (small) risk of skiing since it is inevitable that some doctors will mess up. However, that doesn't make the doctor any less liable.
So, sure, the people involved were dumb. However, being bad with money isn't a crime. In fact, if you know you're bad with money, isn't that a good reason to hire a professional to help you manage it? GS is in the business of finance and secures fees by claiming to have expertise. They were paid for their services handsomely and messed up. They should be held liable.
Another analogy - you buy a house and pay for a termite inspection. The inspection comes up clean. You buy the house, and then the next year the house collapses. It is pointed out that you as a homebuyer could have noticed the extensive termite damage before you bought it. Maybe so, but maybe you're just an idiot, and trusted the professional inspection report. Caveat emptor is not a shield for professional malpractice.
So we have an economy inflated at 12% per year, and yet cars don't cost 12% more every year, nor does clothing, or food, or pretty much anything you'd consider actual inflation.
I have no idea what the true rate of money supply increase is, but keep in mind that consumer prices are based on the amount of money in the hands of consumers. It can take a while for money to make its way to consumers. Keep in mind that the US Govt has been giving huge amounts of money to banks/etc - that money doesn't really go to consumers, and much of it just makes good on imaginary money already given out to rich people (ie it keeps people from losing money they already have).
I'm not convinced the US is at the world-will-end stage yet, but total debt as a fraction of GDP is getting very high, and historically that never works out well. At some point either services have to go down, or somebody holding treasury bonds isn't going to get paid. Neither of those is a pretty picture by current standards.
Sure, but that isn't a reason to tolerate this behavior.
Basically it is rent-seeking behavior. They want to make money for their position as a middle-man, not for doing some kind of service.
When you broker some $500M transaction and collect $50M in fees, you should be performing some kind of service worth $50M. The fact that both parties made money in the transaction doesn't in itself justify the fee. Sure, the bank has to make some kind of profit, but a few phone calls and some meetings shouldn't justify the exorbitant fees banks collect.
I see lots of ACs telling you why the newspaper can't give you, the customer, what you want. Well, having an excuse for going out of business is nice, but it won't change the fact that you're going to go out of business.
The way you stay in business is to find SOME way to sell people what they want. If you can't do that, then people won't buy. Nobody cares that you have people you need to pay on Friday and Saturday - they're buying newspapers because they want to read them, not because they want to employ delivery people.
I'm not convinced that obesity is controllable - if anything high body weight is just like high blood sugar and is just a symptom of an underlying problem.
It seems to me that one of two things is true: 1. People today just are psychologically different from generations past and eat way too much food voluntarily. Maybe we all committed too many sins in our childhood or something. I've yet to hear a compelling explanation for why most of the US population voluntarily overeats.
2. There is some underlying physical issue that causes improper regulation of diet. Many proposals have been offered for this, including changes in diet/etc.
While blaming the victim may be convenient you still need to deal with a few issues: A. Whether self-inflicted or not, the majority of the people around you are obsese and are going to get diabetes. B. Those people are going to need a lot more medical care, which is expensive. C. Being the majority, those people have the power to compel you to help pay for their care.
So, whether you think they are morally deficient for C, or helpless victims, it is in everybody's interests to figure out what is going on and find some way of treating it. If the issue is #2 keep in mind that simply making food less available is simply going to make everybody REALLY hungry, and hungry people don't tend to make for a happy society (there is a reason the Romans made bread free).
1. Increase your calorie consumption by making you more active and less tired. 2. Make you feel less inclined to eat the pint of Ben and Jerry's in the first place.
Some people eat more than others, and some of the former gain more weight than others. Perhaps this is a result of genetics, and not moral inferiority. Honestly, I'm surprised we don't try to exorcise the obese the way many carry on these days...
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Well, I'm actually surprised they rolled out JB for the Nexus S. They dropped support for the Nexus One after only 18 months, and the Nexus S is older than that. I didn't get a Nexus S at the time because:
1. It was unsubsidized, and I wouldn't have gotten a break on my rates to buy it. I could get a G2 for free at the same time. Free G2 vs $350 Nexus S - hard choice.
2. It lacked a keyboard, which made it less useful than the G2.
However, at the time I was a bit spoiled by the fact that the modding community kept the HTC Dream going for so long, and I figured by getting a G2 I'd be in good shape (since most of the big names in the modding community had bought it). The problem was that the big names have been buying lots of other phones since, so they don't really give as much attention to any phone as the Dream used to get.
Since then I've managed to get a break on an unsubsidized contract, so the playing field will be more level for the next Nexus phone to come along. That said, Google only releases one a year or so, which means that for most of the year their hardware is outdated.
I don't think anybody is suggesting that this is a substitute for in-vivo studies.
However, I suspect we could learn quite a bit through simulations and modelling just the same, as you basically start out.
I think some challenges are going to be spacial partitioning and kinetics. If you just model your cell as a uniform box that makes the math a lot easier, but it completely ignores the fact that cells actively manage their micro-environment (especially as you scale up to eukaryotes). The concentration of some protein isn't going to be the same in two different regions of the cell, and even for small molecules when some membrane protein produces something it won't instantly be binding to some DNA regulator.
For simple cells maybe some of these effects are easier to ignore (no ER, nuclear membrane, etc). Even so, the fact that bacteria can react to chemical gradients clearly demonstrates that there are all kinds of spacial kinetics/etc going on.
I think the best these kinds of simulations will be able to do is modeling the cell in conditions close to the natural ones. Expecting something like this to model what happens when some virus comes in and takes over 90% of the ribosomes in the bacteria just isn't realistic. That would be like taking a really good weather model and then asking what happens if a supervolcano raises the temperature in Wyoming by 500 degrees for 10 years. Only ab-initio models can do this sort of thing accurately, and even those fail of you try to model the big bang or other situations where the physics are unknown.
I agree. I really want to get a Nexus for my next phone, but the Galaxy Nexus is huge, and I'm fearful about what they'll release next. If I want any updates at all after I buy a phone, I really only have two choices - an iPhone or a Nexus.
What harm worse than 45 dead kids and 55 dead adults per year does the vaccine cause (which is neglecting any non-fatalities, and assuming your values are accurate)? Nobody approves vaccines without doing a basic risk/benefit analysis, which is what you're questioning. You would also need to demonstrate clinical evidence for this massive increase in risk of adult death from the vaccine.
Yeah, but a real neocon would get with the program and funnel bribes, err, lobbiests, to their local representative to promote the latest billion-dollar security theater prop their company has come up with.
The term for this is the "Euphemism Treadmill" - in numerous areas words which are made up to be politically correct end up becoming politically incorrect simply by becoming popular.
Well, eventually 99% of the devices will run ICS or later, so time spent developing for it is never going to be a "waste."
However, WHEN you should develop for it is a different matter. An app that REQUIRES ICS is only going to be commercially successful maybe a few months from now when a fair number of phones actually run it - and ICS is already nine months old.
It seems like adoption follows release by around a year or so with Android. Don't get me wrong, I love android, but lack of updates is maddening. I'm actually looking to upgrade my current phone but wouldn't consider anything on sale now. I can either get a Galaxy Nexus which is 9 months old and will probably only see at most one more OS update from Google, or something like a Galaxy S3 which has great hardware, but which probably will get Jelly Bean sometime but likely nothing after that. Being better hardware I suspect that somebody will hack together later OS releases for it, though likely with bugs on the camera/etc and a generally frustrating experience. Then again, it has gotten to the point where most of the big Android modders have just moved to Nexus devices and tend to get new ones every year, so not even the modding community is doing that great a job with older phones now.
I guess I'll just hold off until the next generation of Nexus comes along, and hope I like whatever choices are offered. Feels like Apple, ugh...
I think this is one of the biggest weaknesses with any password-based system. We're too dependent on uncontrolled terminals, and nobody has figured out to do SSL directly to the human brain.
We like to blanket ourselves in feel-good measures like PCI/etc, but the fact is that nobody really knows if that box you're punching a PIN/etc into has been tampered with.
How do you figure? I wasn't suggesting selling off or liquidating any bank assets. The government would have acquired the banks issuing the shareholders IOUs whose value is TBD, since the value of the bank is TBD. The government would operate the bank for a few years while cleaning things up.
By cleaning house I meant replacing executives, not selling off assets.
The banks would have had no capital shortages or credit crunches, since as government-owned institutions they'd have full access to the US Treasury. Of course, any use of this source would be repaid by the former shareholders in the form of those IOUs losing value.
And, if a bunch of poor people need their mortgages written down to reasonable rates/principals that is no big deal either - the government would own 99% of those, and would just write them down. That would be the bank's loss, and would again be paid by the former shareholders.
The end result is that the executives go to jail, the former shareholders lose for having invested in banks that are too big to be controlled by their shareholders, and the US economy recovers.
No doubt some VP of marketing came up with the idea, and nobody has the power to make an exception.
A human's greatest strength over a computer is their ability to adapt to circumstances. However, corporations have gotten obsessed with running their operations completely by procedure. If they could replace the people with computers they would. However, this makes them completely unadaptable, and they perish as a result.
I guess the issue is that braindead stupidity is not illegal or morally wrong. However, misleading an investor is both. Some people are just bad with money, and they should be able to hire others who are good with money to avoid disasters like this one.
I doubt they'll get a billion dollars for it, but GS certainly should be punished.
That depends on the aircraft. On a Cat III approach with an appropriately-equipped aircraft I believe the minimums are zero. As long as the aircraft determines it is capable of autolanding it will happily do so, and usually better than a human. Aircraft capable of this check their navigational accuracy and level of redundancy/etc before OKing an autoland.
I imagine most autopilots will follow a glidescope all the way to the ground, but if it isn't designed for autoland it isn't going to flare and it will be like a carrier landing, minus the specially-designed landing gear. It also won't retard the throttles.
I'm not sure we should be so hard on me-too drugs. People like to bash them, but nobody is forced to buy them, and they're good because they create competition in the market which lowers prices and gives doctors alternatives. Many doctors start with the drug that has the best clinical data, but are forced to switch to some other drug because a patient doesn't tolerate the first-line drug - clinical data is all about averages, and the average person isn't really very average. Without me-too drugs doctors would be forced to make all-or-nothing decisions, and patients are unlikely to continue on some of these therapies.
I think the fundamental issue is that drug safety isn't that easy to measure - especially as the bar has gotten raised higher. We also have so many trials out there it is hard to recruit patients into them. I think there are many reforms that could help, but ultimately you can never expect a trial of 10,000 people to spot all the issues that will arise when millions of people take a drug. Even with millions of people you can't always be sure the issues triggering recalls are real.
As has been pointed out - people die whether you approve or reject a drug, so there needs to be a risk-based balance. Simply slowing down drug approvals results in death sentences for anybody who could have been treated but wasn't due to delay. I'm all for reform, but that can't be translated into simple risk-aversion...
If a scientist feels that something is going to hurt public safety, they have a moral duty to do everything they can to prevent that.
Suppose a scientist thinks that vaccines are dangerous to public safety. Should they be allowed to block approval of any new vaccine, and use government power to harm vaccine manufacturers and get current vaccines off the market? How many people would that harm?
The fact that they are a scientist doesn't make them infallible. Sure, they should raise concerns when they have them, and as a society we should establish regulatory agencies that are responsive to these concerns. However, in the end individual scientists aren't appointed dictators - they are just government employees. Whether they have a moral duty or not does not give them the authority to go on a crusade. Society could not function if anybody who felt they had a moral duty to do something were free to pursue that duty without interference. What happens when your neighbor feels you are imprisoning your poor pets and likely to repeat offend so they feel that killing you in your sleep is the best solution, for the greater good?
There is a problem with risk - if you release a drug people die who wouldn't otherwise, and if you don't release a drug people die who wouldn't otherwise.
The FDA as an institution has to create policies around what kinds of risks are appropriate and what kinds are not. That is a matter of public policy, not personal conscience.
Now, a scientist can evaluate data and say whether it supports the drug being an appropriate risk or not (or is inconclusive), as long as those policies are all well-defined. That doesn't mean that random scientists should be given a veto over the approval of individual drugs, or any reason of personal conscience. That isn't their decision to make - they aren't setting policy, they are informing policymakers and determining how particular decisions should be made in light of these policies.
I would say that stuff like this needs to be kept in the open as much as possible. However, if you give somebody the role of a quality inspector and let them operate however they want, then generally from a personal self-interest standpoint their optimum strategy is to never approve anything, and clearly that doesn't serve the interest. Decisions to not approve something tend not to be questioned as closely as decisions to approve something that later turns out to be dangerous. That is why it can't be up to individuals.
The issue is whether they can breach confidentiality agreements.
Suppose an FDA scientist knows that next week the FDA is likely to recommend that some drug be approved. They tell their friend the stock broker and they buy a few million shares of stock in the company at issue. Then a week later they make a fortune when the price rises. No doubt the friend takes good care of them in return.
This isn't about keeping science secret - this is about trade secrets and insider information. We WANT companies to share info with the FDA so that they can make a well-informed decision. When there are leaks it encourages companies to hide info from the FDA which actually interferes with their ability to look after public safety.
I certainly agree that info that has a bearing on public safety should be disclosed. However, things like manufacturing processes or info on how drugs are labeled to prevent counterfeiting, or other info that has no bearing on the safety of the drug itself should not be made public except as provided by law.
That said, I'm not a big fan of witch hunts either. There needs to be a balance. We need scientists who can evaluate scientific evidence, but that doesn't mean they're working free of constraints.
No need to argue - Bible authorship isn't nearly as unsettled as you make out. In the case of the Old Testament there is a lot more controversy, but in the case of the New Testament (which tends to be much more firm in teaching that the meek will inherit the Earth and all that), authorship is pretty well-known. A few books aren't 100% certain, but there really isn't any reason to doubt the authorship of Paul, or the persecution of much of the early church.
I'd probably buy into your argument more for the Old Testament, although in that case much of the Bible was oral tradition, likely written down sometime around the return from the Babylonian captivity. It likely wasn't written so much by "rich people" but by religious authorities. I suspect their motivations were generally sincere - they no doubt profited from their role in society, but little of the Old Testament teaches that people should just put up with their lot in life. If anything it tends to come down on rich people who don't share their wealth, and even ascribes in part the recent Babylonian exile as the result of the failure to implement a very radical property transfer system in which every 50 years land reverts to traditional family ownership (thus eliminating any concentration of wealth).
Religion might have many of the effects you describe, but I wouldn't assume that this is the reason for its origin. I think that many experts on Biblical scholarship would disagree with your assertion of origins, and many of them are atheists.
Yup, shareholders have little long-term perspective anyway.
Just look at how any company run by a private investor operates compared to almost any mega-corp. The mega-corps largely get by on rent-seeking behavior and barriers to entry.
I've maintained for a few years now that corporate governance tends to generally work like this:
1. Founder starts company and it becomes big and powerful. Company does really well.
2. Founder retires, and hand-picked successor takes over. Company still does really well.
3. Hand-picked successor retires, and board's executive search committee goes into action. Company begins to go downhill.
Companies like MS and Apple are in #2 now, and MS is already struggling. In 20 years, both companies will be a shell of their past glory - just look at HP.
Privately held companies tend to be more stable simply because there is more accountability, but just because somebody is a genius doesn't mean that their children are. I don't think there really is any sustainable way to run a company for the long term. I'm not convinced that corporations are the boon to society that we make them out to be as a result. I don't think we should simply get rid of them, but they need to be reigned in.
They did it because the Fed Chairman and the US Treasury Secretary ordered them to, not because they actually wanted to take the taxpayer's money.
And how is it that the government had this power? They had a shortage of capital, making them unstable. Banks are required to hold sufficient reserves of capital, and thanks to being over-leveraged they no longer met the requirements. That gave the Federal Government the power to do all kinds of things with them.
I wouldn't have given them a loan though. I'd simply have seized the banks, cleaned house, operated and reorganized the banks (likely into more manageable pieces) for the maximum benefit of the US population, collected evidence from the books against the previous officers, and then sold off what is left in various IPOs. Then I would take the IPO profits and any profits made over the time the government operated the bank, and then subtracted from that any money injected by the government to stabilize the bank. Any funds that remain would be dispersed to the previous shareholders as just compensation for their loss of the bank when it was seized. This is just eminent domain, but rather than paying for whatever distorted value wall street had assigned to the bank it would be based on actual value based on costs to clean up and make the books honest and a market valuation of that product.
I'd also pass onerous regulations on any financial services entity doing more than a certain amount of business - ideally such that it is not profitable to operate companies that large. This should result in little loss to shareholders - the entities would simply divest themselves down into small enough pieces to avoid regulation, while also fixing the too-big-to-fail problem for us.
Here is my concern. What fee did GS collect, and what exactly did they do to earn that fee.
Suppose you go skiing and break a leg. You go to a doctor and pay them to treat your leg. You get gangrene a week later and lose your leg, and it turns out the doctor messed up.
Now, if you weren't skiing you wouldn't have broken your leg and needed to go to a doctor, and losing a leg is therefore just an inevitable (small) risk of skiing since it is inevitable that some doctors will mess up. However, that doesn't make the doctor any less liable.
So, sure, the people involved were dumb. However, being bad with money isn't a crime. In fact, if you know you're bad with money, isn't that a good reason to hire a professional to help you manage it? GS is in the business of finance and secures fees by claiming to have expertise. They were paid for their services handsomely and messed up. They should be held liable.
Another analogy - you buy a house and pay for a termite inspection. The inspection comes up clean. You buy the house, and then the next year the house collapses. It is pointed out that you as a homebuyer could have noticed the extensive termite damage before you bought it. Maybe so, but maybe you're just an idiot, and trusted the professional inspection report. Caveat emptor is not a shield for professional malpractice.
So we have an economy inflated at 12% per year, and yet cars don't cost 12% more every year, nor does clothing, or food, or pretty much anything you'd consider actual inflation.
I have no idea what the true rate of money supply increase is, but keep in mind that consumer prices are based on the amount of money in the hands of consumers. It can take a while for money to make its way to consumers. Keep in mind that the US Govt has been giving huge amounts of money to banks/etc - that money doesn't really go to consumers, and much of it just makes good on imaginary money already given out to rich people (ie it keeps people from losing money they already have).
I'm not convinced the US is at the world-will-end stage yet, but total debt as a fraction of GDP is getting very high, and historically that never works out well. At some point either services have to go down, or somebody holding treasury bonds isn't going to get paid. Neither of those is a pretty picture by current standards.
Sure, but that isn't a reason to tolerate this behavior.
Basically it is rent-seeking behavior. They want to make money for their position as a middle-man, not for doing some kind of service.
When you broker some $500M transaction and collect $50M in fees, you should be performing some kind of service worth $50M. The fact that both parties made money in the transaction doesn't in itself justify the fee. Sure, the bank has to make some kind of profit, but a few phone calls and some meetings shouldn't justify the exorbitant fees banks collect.
Agreed.
I see lots of ACs telling you why the newspaper can't give you, the customer, what you want. Well, having an excuse for going out of business is nice, but it won't change the fact that you're going to go out of business.
The way you stay in business is to find SOME way to sell people what they want. If you can't do that, then people won't buy. Nobody cares that you have people you need to pay on Friday and Saturday - they're buying newspapers because they want to read them, not because they want to employ delivery people.
I'm not convinced that obesity is controllable - if anything high body weight is just like high blood sugar and is just a symptom of an underlying problem.
It seems to me that one of two things is true:
1. People today just are psychologically different from generations past and eat way too much food voluntarily. Maybe we all committed too many sins in our childhood or something. I've yet to hear a compelling explanation for why most of the US population voluntarily overeats.
2. There is some underlying physical issue that causes improper regulation of diet. Many proposals have been offered for this, including changes in diet/etc.
While blaming the victim may be convenient you still need to deal with a few issues:
A. Whether self-inflicted or not, the majority of the people around you are obsese and are going to get diabetes.
B. Those people are going to need a lot more medical care, which is expensive.
C. Being the majority, those people have the power to compel you to help pay for their care.
So, whether you think they are morally deficient for C, or helpless victims, it is in everybody's interests to figure out what is going on and find some way of treating it. If the issue is #2 keep in mind that simply making food less available is simply going to make everybody REALLY hungry, and hungry people don't tend to make for a happy society (there is a reason the Romans made bread free).
Perhaps a treatment would:
1. Increase your calorie consumption by making you more active and less tired.
2. Make you feel less inclined to eat the pint of Ben and Jerry's in the first place.
Some people eat more than others, and some of the former gain more weight than others. Perhaps this is a result of genetics, and not moral inferiority. Honestly, I'm surprised we don't try to exorcise the obese the way many carry on these days...