Yup, although I suspect that linemen take precautions just the same.
At work they have some 33kV supply lines running 3-phase. They needed to do work on expanding the lines, and I noticed that the first thing they did was attach cables to short the three lines together using large fiberglass poles with tools attached (the lack of a spectacular display demonstrated that they had turned off the power successfully). The place I work is actually pretty anal-retentive regarding safety so the chance of a breaker somewhere being closed was going to be astronomically low, but assuming that safeguards fail is part of being anal-retentive about safety.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
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Yup, agreed on all points. There also needs to be some kind of effort to fix the sorts of issues that cause age discrimination in the first place. To the effect that it is cultural (what 30-year-old-boss would prefer a 75-year-old subordinate?) that could be pretty hard to deal with except by regulation.
However, another big part is medical. While it is a bit of a generalization, the fact is that right now we start wearing out as we get older, in just about every way. I once had to take a stress test and found it pretty easy, despite being fairly out of shape. The doctor commented that age was a big part of it - every year your ability to do aerobic exercise declines, and basically exercise only changes the y-intercept of the curve and not the fact that it slopes down. The average 25-year-old of the day probably will be able to out-bike Lance Armstrong if he ever makes it to 90. Now, there are numerous examples where this doesn't fit, but it is true in the average case, and if we want to fix social security and medicare we obviously need to cover the average case.
Unfortunately, it will probably be a while before we have the elixir of youth. Until we do, we have a growing cap between lifespan and productive lifespan. There aren't really any easy answers to this problem that I'm aware of. You can either increasingly tax the younger generations to keep their parents alive, or you have to reduce benefits and put Darwin in charge. There are other measures that will help, like reducing other government spending and increasing taxes on the wealthy, but the fact is that those alone won't solve the problem, and every decade the problem is likely to get worse as lifespans increase.
Medical cost containment also makes sense, as much as people don't like to talk about it. You can do a lot to reduce costs without sacrificing a great deal of care, and you can do even more to reduce costs if you sacrifice care for the terminally ill. The problem is defining "terminally ill" - if you tell 100 people that they have a 99% chance of dying in two weeks, all 100 will be convinced that they'll be the one that is going to make it...
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
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You're not a bee working for the benefit of the hive - you're working for yourself. My proposal is to stop paying people not to work, and instead have them work and pay for their own needs.
Up until 50 years ago, that was basically how it worked for everybody who ever lived, unless you were born an aristocrat or whatever (and I'm all for the inheritance tax too).
I have nothing but compassion for those who through no fault of their own are unable to work. I think that socialism in such cases makes sense. The problem is that we want to take that and extend it to people who are still able to provide for themselves. The problem is that this is EXTREMELY expensive - we don't tax people nearly enough to pay for this, and with the shift in demographics I'm not sure we ever could.
Agreed - I saw a demo of one of these printers at a conference (a DIY model), and if you wanted high resolution then it probably would take an hour to print out a spoon. I'm sure the feedstock isn't free either. That $1 box of spoons probably would take a day to print, and if your computer+printer pulls 200W the whole time you've just spent 50 cents just on electricity. I doubt that the quality or durability/etc is going to be comparable either.
And forget manufacturing metal spoons unless you're willing to invest in blocks of stainless steel and a plasma cutter.
Now, I could see the value in the manufacture of replacement parts. These can be hard to get, and because of stocking costs/etc have quite a mark-up. The problem is that again you need to have pretty high-end equipment to make them. I used to work with a guy who actually used a private machine shop to create a gear for his bike, but they used much older tech to do it.
Now, a company that SELLS replacement parts might find quite a bit of use, since the machine might well cost less than the warehouse, and you don't have to pay somebody to inventory and find all those parts, and throw some out from time to time when they don't sell.
Maybe. But, robots that build cars were expensive in the 80s, and they're still expensive today.
I'm sure costs will drop, but you have to look at the components that make a device expensive. If the expensive components are integrated circuits, then of course the price is going to fall like a rock. If they're expensive due to poor yields, then there is also going to be a lot of room for prices to drop, since yields go up as technology improves. On the other hand, if they're expensive because they rely on rare materials (like lasers), optics that are labor-intensive to produce, or because they just need a fair bit of good old-fashioned steel to be sturdy enough then I wouldn't expect prices to drop like a TV set might.
Right now I see that as the biggest issue around 3D manufacturing. Sure, it is great for solid pieces of plastic that meet certain requirements. However, it is a long way from turning out hardened steel gears and such.
Really. What is the name of the drug they got a marketing license for? All I see is a bunch of press releases about novel concept molecules, which are about $50M and a 1/10-100 chance short of ever making it to market.
I do not deny that lots of small companies and academic labs come up with concept molecules all the time. I've never heard of one being funded all the way to the end.
And finally, a university isn't the government, and does stand to profit from any drugs they do discover. They even profit off of concept molecules that they come up with since they can usually license them to big companies (who then go and spend the $50M and usually find out that they don't work out, but occasionally hit it big). Now, in theory the government can do the same, and to the extent they do they're just being part of the problem, but at least whatever profits they collect go to the general public.
Re:Economist: Republicans are at fault.
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Judging by headlines that came up on a google search, it sounds like maybe $20B or so are missing from Iraq.
So, it sounds like your answer is about 0.04 years or so. As much as I think we waste too much money on the military, it alone is not the solution to social security. That doesn't mean that we can't still reform it.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
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C) Work to privatize social security, but those who've paid in need to get the money that was taken from them by force and promised to them. If the government wants to run social security, make it a voluntary program.
How do you propose to do that? The government doesn't have the money in the bank to pay what was taken already from everybody (for a number of reasons - some good, many bad). So, somebody has to come up with that money. Those people are essentially paying into the system, and thus they are owed too...
At some point we have to wake up and realize that a bunch of people are going to get screwed, and the longer we keep up the charade the more people it will be.
A more practical solution would be to increase the retirement age to above life expectancy, so that once again social security is a safety net for the occasional person who lives long or becomes disabled. The problem is that the average American wants to work for 30 years, and then retire for 30 years. That isn't cheap.
I for one would like to be prompted before audio can be played even from my active tab. An exception list for youtube/pandora/etc would of course be welcome.
Sometimes I need to have audio, but 99% of the time it adds little value.
I use flash blockers which gets rid of most of the bother, but as html5 takes off that will stop working.
I'm thinking the real problem is that there is far too much cash floating around and not enough productive work going on. I think that the concept of retirement is a big part of the problem.
50 years ago, nobody saved for retirement, since nobody retired. You earned money, and for the most part you spent it. Since spending goes to things being produced now, to get you to spend money a company actually has to sell you something, which means they need to employ people and capital to produce it.
Now people dream about spending decades of their life idle (and the fact that we've extended longevity but not quality of life in old age proportionately doesn't help). So, people pile away cash, or get their employers to do it for them. All that cash means a need for investments. Since nobody is buying anything there isn't as much demand for tangible capital or employment. And, there is no shortage of investment schemes that promise double-digit growth, which you'll never get from some big factory somewhere. So, we end up with hedge funds, and complex financial schemes that usually just result in bubbles.
I think the only way we'll see the bubbles go away is if you get rid of some of the extra cash, or otherwise create incentive to spend it on stuff that produces tangible goods or employment or infrastructure. The problem with the modern start-up is that while they supposedly get millions or billions of "capital" in terms of valuation, they tend to occupy an office or two and 25 people. There is little of substance being invested in.
I have - I couldn't find any way to get mail out of the inbox without at least two mouse clicks or a click/drag (which is very annoying on a trackpad).
So, in the US the way a pension basically works is:
1. Employer promises to pay employee some amount of money when they retire. 2. Employer hopefully makes that payment.
Now, that was how it worked until a while back when companies started defaulting on those promises and employees had no recourse (spend 30 years working for a company that goes bankrupt to find out a big part of your total compensation is gone). So, now companies have to actually set aside some amount of money in some kind of fund to try to cover some of these obligations. The problem is that the regulations are pretty weak.
Now, when creating a pension fund a company can either set up a fund that makes a low, safe return, or a high, risky return. Well, the company isn't the one losing their shirt if the investment goes south, but if the return is low the company will be putting a lot more of its own money into the fund. So, companies tend to make risky investments with pension funds.
Now, private retirement accounts do exist in the US. They take the form of IRAs, 401ks, and 403bs, which are all tax-deferred accounts. In these cases the employee actually owns the money and decides (sometimes within limits) how it gets invested. There are usually tax penalties for taking money out early, but the money belongs to the employee and they can cash the whole thing out any time they want to. These tend to be invested in more sane investments, since the employee actually has a stake in the outcome and usually it is illegal for individual of ordinary means to invest in the kinds of financial games that make people millionaires or broke overnight..
Cite please? I'd like an example of a drug approved for market in either the US, EU, or Japan on the basis of an application submitted and paid-for (the R&D - not just the filing fee) by a government agency on a molecule either patent-free or whose patent was owned by the filing government agency. I submit none exists, you merely need to provide a single counterexample. Honestly, I'd be interested in knowing that one exists anyway to see how it worked out...
Soccer is entertainment. The stock market is not. And we're talking about an industry that consumes a huge chunk of our economy on what amounts to gaming a complex financial system.
Oh, and trading as it is practiced today affects the lives of everybody - not just some elite who can afford to get ahead in the game.
Or, we could just collect trades and have them execute every hour on the hour, with the exact time of execution having a standard deviation of a few minutes and being chosen at random and without advance knowledge of anybody. That makes the value of HFT zero. To address your concern about not having enough people pursue physics you then add a one-cent-per-share tax on every trade and give it to the NSF. Now we not only can afford to pay physicists, but we can actually employ them to study, heaven forbid, physics. The only people who lose out in this arrangement are a few insanely rich trading houses.
Employing people to do useless work is not the solution to unemployment. There are plenty of productive things we can have people do instead...
Uh, the pension saver doesn't choose how it is invested at all - this might be a language issue.
In the US the word pension refers to a fund set up by an employer to pay the employee retirement benefits at some point in the future. It isn't an employee-owned account, and the employee has very little control over how it is invested.
And in the US, employers invest their pensions in hedge funds all the time. And where do you think those funds make their money? Hint - it isn't from building factories and selling widgets.
I'm sure everybody working in this industry is doing it for a reason, and it usually has to do with putting food on the table. So are the clerks who mail out RIAA legal threats. That doesn't mean that society doesn't have a problem.
Sure, if there aren't any other jobs, then go ahead and create your ASICs to do HFT. However, society should be looking to:
1. Find some better way to gainfully employ our best and brightest. 2. Eliminate the perverse incentives to optimize our financial markets on the nanosecond timescale. I mean, really, is society really losing something when two markets are out of equilibrium for an entire millisecond, or even an entire hour or even day?
Yes, that is the argument the pharmaceutical companies make, for sure. But first, the costs they quote are largely bunk. They say they spend $50M bringing a drug to market, but it doesn't cost $50M to do a clinical trial. It costs $50M to do their massive advertising campaign, political bribery, and to pay for their lawyers.
No, the trials still cost $50M. They spend $500M on the other things (and they only spend it on the compounds that actually work out - the problem with the $50M bit is that it has to get spent many times on compounds that don't work out). However, even if you somehow eliminated the advertising/etc, you still have to pay for all the trials, and that won't happen without either public funding or patents. Suppose a single clinical trial has 10k patients. Suppose they each see a doctor 10 times, with lab tests each time. You're probably going to pay on the order of $100 per patient just for routine labs, and probably $1k per patient to their doctor for their time. That's $11M right there. Clinical trials involve doctors, and very few doctors do anything without getting paid for it (quite a bit). In fact, one of the biggest areas of fraud in the clinical trial industry is doctors signing up inappropriate patients to collect more money - more than a few but not nearly enough doctors have gotten banned from having anything to do with the Drug Industry as a result of this (and they're usually caught and turned in by companies - inappropriate patients just adds cost and noise to the data)..
Learning how to approach treatments differently requires risk and investment in basic research that drug companies increasingly don't want to do. So here we are, perpetuating a broken system and paying through the nose for it instead of trying to come up with a better way.
I'm sure quite a bit of effort goes into this, and I'm all for public spending to improve the situation. However, this is a bit like pointing to fusion as the solution for the world's energy needs. Sure, it is better than what we have, but we don't have it yet. We need a solution for the future, but we need solutions for the present as well. While we're at it, I'm sure that most diseases are better-treated by just fixing their root causes (bad genes or gene regulation) instead of pumping people full of chemicals that have a myriad of side-effects. Again, it isn't this isn't obvious to everybody - but we work with the tools we have.
My personal feeling is that we should leave the industry alone (well, of course with oversight as it already has), and start funding full end-to-end drug development out of the NIH. Anything the NIH comes up with will be licensed royalty-free to any manufacturer (with manufacturers being not held responsible for problems with the drug itself - only with manufacturing issues), which means the pills will be as cheap as aspirin. The NIH could even outsource some of the effort to the drug industry, but this would be a pure fee-for-service model and the NIH would retain patent rights. We can then let this model run for a while and look at the ultimate costs to society. If in the end it turns out to be cheaper to run the NIH than it costs for everybody to pay for the pills, then we just expand the effort and private industry would gradually transform into a government contracting effort (patents wouldn't be abolished, but it will be very hard to sell pills for $5 when the NIH is coming out with them for $0.05 left and right). If the NIH model doesn't work out, well, we're no worse-off than we are now and we haven't gutted the drug industry in the process.
The problem I have with just banning patents/etc is that the likely industry reaction will be to stop developing drugs almost entirely, aside from low-risk lower-cost things like marketing-driven new formulations, combination pills, etc. Maybe the labs will switch to doing other things, bu
No, government-funded R&D is focused on #0 - come up with an idea for a way to treat a disease.
That also costs a fair bit of money, and is very innovative work.
#1 is about figuring out if a particular molecule works or not. It involves some level of theoretical screening and compound design, killing a LOT of rats, and then paying doctors a not-so-small fortune to convince people to try out a compound and record how it works (usually the answer is not well), and a bunch of clerks and statisticians to figure out what the outcome is.
Most of the cost in drug development is in #1, and that actually is a cost borne by private industry. I've yet to see the NIH fund running compounds through clinical trials, and that is what it would take to have fully-public drug R&D. It is completely routine and relatively boring work, but it is VERY expensive.
Great - can you point to an open-source web-based email solution that works as well as Gmail? That is, with a single key I want to be able to archive or delete a new message.
Unfortunately the state of web-based FOSS apps isn't great, since most of the effort goes into fancy desktop apps that don't work when you're stuck using a phone or have more than one PC.
One exception to this I think is Gallery, which is a picture-sharing app that I'd say is competitive with just about all of the major offerings. The only thing I think it lacks is face recognition.
1. Figure out if a compound cures a disease without killing people. The answer to this is basically "yes" or "no" and costs about $50M. It is "no" about 99.999% of the time, although 99% of the time you can get the "no" for maybe $25k. Sure, there is a lot of other information you learn, but the bottom line comes down to whether the drug helps more than it hurts, and people will pay for it if it does.
2. Once you have a compound and a "yes" you can make the pills for 5 cents each, and sell them for whatever you can get.
So, for any drug ALREADY on the market you know the answer to #1, and so can easily make a profit selling pills for 5 cents each. The problem is that nobody wants to pay for #1, so the way it works is somebody spends the $25k about 10,000 times and the $50M maybe 5-10 times until they find a compound that works, and since they have a patent on it they can make the pills for 5 cents and sell them for $5 each and recoup their initial investment.
So, it really isn't surprising that people can make a profit on unpatented medications, since the initial investment was already recouped and new companies can skip #1. The problem is that you can't get new medications without patents unless somebody wants to fund the full end-to-end R&D. Academic labs currently come up with ideas that ultimately lead to drugs, but they almost never pay the huge costs involved in testing compounds since it is basically boring work. However, somebody has to pay that cost if you want to have drugs.
And for the record, I'm fine with having the government do this, but I'd prefer that until somebody actually spends the money to make it happen that we not dismantle the entire pharmaceutical industry in the meantime.
Well, you don't need to make your own drugs to benefit - we already have some knowledge about the correlation between genetics and response to commercially-available drugs. If this were expanded there would probably be a greater variety of drugs on the market, since it would be easier to get them approved (once you figure out who gets the side-effects vs the benefit you can just make the indication "... in people with SNPs x,y,z").
Home chemical synthesis is an entirely different technology, and might someday be practical. However, if a particular chemical has commercial value, I'm sure some lab somewhere will sell it.
As far as legality goes - you can make any chemical you want as long as it isn't patented. Drugs aren't patented unless commercial companies do the development work (ie they pay for the clinical trials). The easiest way to have patent-free drugs is for national governments to actually start funding drug development (not just basic research). That is to say, after discovering some groundbreaking new biological mechanism the NIH or whatever would actually start testing compounds for activity/etc, and then pay to have tens of thousands of people take the most promising compound and figure out if it works. They could then get marketing approval and never patent the drug, or patent it defensively but license it freely, or perhaps freely to domestic manufacturers or overseas companies whose governments reciprocate and spend a similar amount (per-capita) on R&D. Private companies would still be free to compete, but of course prices will be influenced by the competition. The government could even outsource some of the development to private industry/etc, while retaining patent rights.
I'm not a big fan of just getting rid of drug patents - it seems like killing the goose that laid the golden egg. In order to have new drugs without patents you need a lot more government R&D. However, simply having a lot more government R&D can probably solve the problem without even getting rid of the patents. In a world where we have many competing systems for discovering drugs we can evaluate the costs of all the models and figure out what actually works best.
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Yup, although I suspect that linemen take precautions just the same.
At work they have some 33kV supply lines running 3-phase. They needed to do work on expanding the lines, and I noticed that the first thing they did was attach cables to short the three lines together using large fiberglass poles with tools attached (the lack of a spectacular display demonstrated that they had turned off the power successfully). The place I work is actually pretty anal-retentive regarding safety so the chance of a breaker somewhere being closed was going to be astronomically low, but assuming that safeguards fail is part of being anal-retentive about safety.
Yup, agreed on all points. There also needs to be some kind of effort to fix the sorts of issues that cause age discrimination in the first place. To the effect that it is cultural (what 30-year-old-boss would prefer a 75-year-old subordinate?) that could be pretty hard to deal with except by regulation.
However, another big part is medical. While it is a bit of a generalization, the fact is that right now we start wearing out as we get older, in just about every way. I once had to take a stress test and found it pretty easy, despite being fairly out of shape. The doctor commented that age was a big part of it - every year your ability to do aerobic exercise declines, and basically exercise only changes the y-intercept of the curve and not the fact that it slopes down. The average 25-year-old of the day probably will be able to out-bike Lance Armstrong if he ever makes it to 90. Now, there are numerous examples where this doesn't fit, but it is true in the average case, and if we want to fix social security and medicare we obviously need to cover the average case.
Unfortunately, it will probably be a while before we have the elixir of youth. Until we do, we have a growing cap between lifespan and productive lifespan. There aren't really any easy answers to this problem that I'm aware of. You can either increasingly tax the younger generations to keep their parents alive, or you have to reduce benefits and put Darwin in charge. There are other measures that will help, like reducing other government spending and increasing taxes on the wealthy, but the fact is that those alone won't solve the problem, and every decade the problem is likely to get worse as lifespans increase.
Medical cost containment also makes sense, as much as people don't like to talk about it. You can do a lot to reduce costs without sacrificing a great deal of care, and you can do even more to reduce costs if you sacrifice care for the terminally ill. The problem is defining "terminally ill" - if you tell 100 people that they have a 99% chance of dying in two weeks, all 100 will be convinced that they'll be the one that is going to make it...
You're not a bee working for the benefit of the hive - you're working for yourself. My proposal is to stop paying people not to work, and instead have them work and pay for their own needs.
Up until 50 years ago, that was basically how it worked for everybody who ever lived, unless you were born an aristocrat or whatever (and I'm all for the inheritance tax too).
I have nothing but compassion for those who through no fault of their own are unable to work. I think that socialism in such cases makes sense. The problem is that we want to take that and extend it to people who are still able to provide for themselves. The problem is that this is EXTREMELY expensive - we don't tax people nearly enough to pay for this, and with the shift in demographics I'm not sure we ever could.
Agreed - I saw a demo of one of these printers at a conference (a DIY model), and if you wanted high resolution then it probably would take an hour to print out a spoon. I'm sure the feedstock isn't free either. That $1 box of spoons probably would take a day to print, and if your computer+printer pulls 200W the whole time you've just spent 50 cents just on electricity. I doubt that the quality or durability/etc is going to be comparable either.
And forget manufacturing metal spoons unless you're willing to invest in blocks of stainless steel and a plasma cutter.
Now, I could see the value in the manufacture of replacement parts. These can be hard to get, and because of stocking costs/etc have quite a mark-up. The problem is that again you need to have pretty high-end equipment to make them. I used to work with a guy who actually used a private machine shop to create a gear for his bike, but they used much older tech to do it.
Now, a company that SELLS replacement parts might find quite a bit of use, since the machine might well cost less than the warehouse, and you don't have to pay somebody to inventory and find all those parts, and throw some out from time to time when they don't sell.
Maybe. But, robots that build cars were expensive in the 80s, and they're still expensive today.
I'm sure costs will drop, but you have to look at the components that make a device expensive. If the expensive components are integrated circuits, then of course the price is going to fall like a rock. If they're expensive due to poor yields, then there is also going to be a lot of room for prices to drop, since yields go up as technology improves. On the other hand, if they're expensive because they rely on rare materials (like lasers), optics that are labor-intensive to produce, or because they just need a fair bit of good old-fashioned steel to be sturdy enough then I wouldn't expect prices to drop like a TV set might.
Right now I see that as the biggest issue around 3D manufacturing. Sure, it is great for solid pieces of plastic that meet certain requirements. However, it is a long way from turning out hardened steel gears and such.
Well, no, the lottery benefits people who are good at math, at the expense of those who are bad at math.
Just, in most states they try to have people who are good at math be the ones DESIGNING the lottery...
Really. What is the name of the drug they got a marketing license for? All I see is a bunch of press releases about novel concept molecules, which are about $50M and a 1/10-100 chance short of ever making it to market.
I do not deny that lots of small companies and academic labs come up with concept molecules all the time. I've never heard of one being funded all the way to the end.
And finally, a university isn't the government, and does stand to profit from any drugs they do discover. They even profit off of concept molecules that they come up with since they can usually license them to big companies (who then go and spend the $50M and usually find out that they don't work out, but occasionally hit it big). Now, in theory the government can do the same, and to the extent they do they're just being part of the problem, but at least whatever profits they collect go to the general public.
Well, figure it out:
In June the US government paid out $59B in social security payments.
Judging by headlines that came up on a google search, it sounds like maybe $20B or so are missing from Iraq.
So, it sounds like your answer is about 0.04 years or so. As much as I think we waste too much money on the military, it alone is not the solution to social security. That doesn't mean that we can't still reform it.
C) Work to privatize social security, but those who've paid in need to get the money that was taken from them by force and promised to them. If the government wants to run social security, make it a voluntary program.
How do you propose to do that? The government doesn't have the money in the bank to pay what was taken already from everybody (for a number of reasons - some good, many bad). So, somebody has to come up with that money. Those people are essentially paying into the system, and thus they are owed too...
At some point we have to wake up and realize that a bunch of people are going to get screwed, and the longer we keep up the charade the more people it will be.
A more practical solution would be to increase the retirement age to above life expectancy, so that once again social security is a safety net for the occasional person who lives long or becomes disabled. The problem is that the average American wants to work for 30 years, and then retire for 30 years. That isn't cheap.
I for one would like to be prompted before audio can be played even from my active tab. An exception list for youtube/pandora/etc would of course be welcome.
Sometimes I need to have audio, but 99% of the time it adds little value.
I use flash blockers which gets rid of most of the bother, but as html5 takes off that will stop working.
I'm thinking the real problem is that there is far too much cash floating around and not enough productive work going on. I think that the concept of retirement is a big part of the problem.
50 years ago, nobody saved for retirement, since nobody retired. You earned money, and for the most part you spent it. Since spending goes to things being produced now, to get you to spend money a company actually has to sell you something, which means they need to employ people and capital to produce it.
Now people dream about spending decades of their life idle (and the fact that we've extended longevity but not quality of life in old age proportionately doesn't help). So, people pile away cash, or get their employers to do it for them. All that cash means a need for investments. Since nobody is buying anything there isn't as much demand for tangible capital or employment. And, there is no shortage of investment schemes that promise double-digit growth, which you'll never get from some big factory somewhere. So, we end up with hedge funds, and complex financial schemes that usually just result in bubbles.
I think the only way we'll see the bubbles go away is if you get rid of some of the extra cash, or otherwise create incentive to spend it on stuff that produces tangible goods or employment or infrastructure. The problem with the modern start-up is that while they supposedly get millions or billions of "capital" in terms of valuation, they tend to occupy an office or two and 25 people. There is little of substance being invested in.
Doh! :)
I have - I couldn't find any way to get mail out of the inbox without at least two mouse clicks or a click/drag (which is very annoying on a trackpad).
So, in the US the way a pension basically works is:
1. Employer promises to pay employee some amount of money when they retire.
2. Employer hopefully makes that payment.
Now, that was how it worked until a while back when companies started defaulting on those promises and employees had no recourse (spend 30 years working for a company that goes bankrupt to find out a big part of your total compensation is gone). So, now companies have to actually set aside some amount of money in some kind of fund to try to cover some of these obligations. The problem is that the regulations are pretty weak.
Now, when creating a pension fund a company can either set up a fund that makes a low, safe return, or a high, risky return. Well, the company isn't the one losing their shirt if the investment goes south, but if the return is low the company will be putting a lot more of its own money into the fund. So, companies tend to make risky investments with pension funds.
Now, private retirement accounts do exist in the US. They take the form of IRAs, 401ks, and 403bs, which are all tax-deferred accounts. In these cases the employee actually owns the money and decides (sometimes within limits) how it gets invested. There are usually tax penalties for taking money out early, but the money belongs to the employee and they can cash the whole thing out any time they want to. These tend to be invested in more sane investments, since the employee actually has a stake in the outcome and usually it is illegal for individual of ordinary means to invest in the kinds of financial games that make people millionaires or broke overnight..
Cite please? I'd like an example of a drug approved for market in either the US, EU, or Japan on the basis of an application submitted and paid-for (the R&D - not just the filing fee) by a government agency on a molecule either patent-free or whose patent was owned by the filing government agency. I submit none exists, you merely need to provide a single counterexample. Honestly, I'd be interested in knowing that one exists anyway to see how it worked out...
Soccer is entertainment. The stock market is not. And we're talking about an industry that consumes a huge chunk of our economy on what amounts to gaming a complex financial system.
Oh, and trading as it is practiced today affects the lives of everybody - not just some elite who can afford to get ahead in the game.
Or, we could just collect trades and have them execute every hour on the hour, with the exact time of execution having a standard deviation of a few minutes and being chosen at random and without advance knowledge of anybody. That makes the value of HFT zero. To address your concern about not having enough people pursue physics you then add a one-cent-per-share tax on every trade and give it to the NSF. Now we not only can afford to pay physicists, but we can actually employ them to study, heaven forbid, physics. The only people who lose out in this arrangement are a few insanely rich trading houses.
Employing people to do useless work is not the solution to unemployment. There are plenty of productive things we can have people do instead...
Uh, the pension saver doesn't choose how it is invested at all - this might be a language issue.
In the US the word pension refers to a fund set up by an employer to pay the employee retirement benefits at some point in the future. It isn't an employee-owned account, and the employee has very little control over how it is invested.
And in the US, employers invest their pensions in hedge funds all the time. And where do you think those funds make their money? Hint - it isn't from building factories and selling widgets.
I'm sure everybody working in this industry is doing it for a reason, and it usually has to do with putting food on the table. So are the clerks who mail out RIAA legal threats. That doesn't mean that society doesn't have a problem.
Sure, if there aren't any other jobs, then go ahead and create your ASICs to do HFT. However, society should be looking to:
1. Find some better way to gainfully employ our best and brightest.
2. Eliminate the perverse incentives to optimize our financial markets on the nanosecond timescale. I mean, really, is society really losing something when two markets are out of equilibrium for an entire millisecond, or even an entire hour or even day?
Uh, if you're going to be pedantic, at least try to be correct... :)
Yes, that is the argument the pharmaceutical companies make, for sure. But first, the costs they quote are largely bunk. They say they spend $50M bringing a drug to market, but it doesn't cost $50M to do a clinical trial. It costs $50M to do their massive advertising campaign, political bribery, and to pay for their lawyers.
No, the trials still cost $50M. They spend $500M on the other things (and they only spend it on the compounds that actually work out - the problem with the $50M bit is that it has to get spent many times on compounds that don't work out). However, even if you somehow eliminated the advertising/etc, you still have to pay for all the trials, and that won't happen without either public funding or patents. Suppose a single clinical trial has 10k patients. Suppose they each see a doctor 10 times, with lab tests each time. You're probably going to pay on the order of $100 per patient just for routine labs, and probably $1k per patient to their doctor for their time. That's $11M right there. Clinical trials involve doctors, and very few doctors do anything without getting paid for it (quite a bit). In fact, one of the biggest areas of fraud in the clinical trial industry is doctors signing up inappropriate patients to collect more money - more than a few but not nearly enough doctors have gotten banned from having anything to do with the Drug Industry as a result of this (and they're usually caught and turned in by companies - inappropriate patients just adds cost and noise to the data)..
Learning how to approach treatments differently requires risk and investment in basic research that drug companies increasingly don't want to do. So here we are, perpetuating a broken system and paying through the nose for it instead of trying to come up with a better way.
I'm sure quite a bit of effort goes into this, and I'm all for public spending to improve the situation. However, this is a bit like pointing to fusion as the solution for the world's energy needs. Sure, it is better than what we have, but we don't have it yet. We need a solution for the future, but we need solutions for the present as well. While we're at it, I'm sure that most diseases are better-treated by just fixing their root causes (bad genes or gene regulation) instead of pumping people full of chemicals that have a myriad of side-effects. Again, it isn't this isn't obvious to everybody - but we work with the tools we have.
My personal feeling is that we should leave the industry alone (well, of course with oversight as it already has), and start funding full end-to-end drug development out of the NIH. Anything the NIH comes up with will be licensed royalty-free to any manufacturer (with manufacturers being not held responsible for problems with the drug itself - only with manufacturing issues), which means the pills will be as cheap as aspirin. The NIH could even outsource some of the effort to the drug industry, but this would be a pure fee-for-service model and the NIH would retain patent rights. We can then let this model run for a while and look at the ultimate costs to society. If in the end it turns out to be cheaper to run the NIH than it costs for everybody to pay for the pills, then we just expand the effort and private industry would gradually transform into a government contracting effort (patents wouldn't be abolished, but it will be very hard to sell pills for $5 when the NIH is coming out with them for $0.05 left and right). If the NIH model doesn't work out, well, we're no worse-off than we are now and we haven't gutted the drug industry in the process.
The problem I have with just banning patents/etc is that the likely industry reaction will be to stop developing drugs almost entirely, aside from low-risk lower-cost things like marketing-driven new formulations, combination pills, etc. Maybe the labs will switch to doing other things, bu
No, government-funded R&D is focused on #0 - come up with an idea for a way to treat a disease.
That also costs a fair bit of money, and is very innovative work.
#1 is about figuring out if a particular molecule works or not. It involves some level of theoretical screening and compound design, killing a LOT of rats, and then paying doctors a not-so-small fortune to convince people to try out a compound and record how it works (usually the answer is not well), and a bunch of clerks and statisticians to figure out what the outcome is.
Most of the cost in drug development is in #1, and that actually is a cost borne by private industry. I've yet to see the NIH fund running compounds through clinical trials, and that is what it would take to have fully-public drug R&D. It is completely routine and relatively boring work, but it is VERY expensive.
Great - can you point to an open-source web-based email solution that works as well as Gmail? That is, with a single key I want to be able to archive or delete a new message.
Unfortunately the state of web-based FOSS apps isn't great, since most of the effort goes into fancy desktop apps that don't work when you're stuck using a phone or have more than one PC.
One exception to this I think is Gallery, which is a picture-sharing app that I'd say is competitive with just about all of the major offerings. The only thing I think it lacks is face recognition.
Ok, here's how drugs work in a nutshell:
1. Figure out if a compound cures a disease without killing people. The answer to this is basically "yes" or "no" and costs about $50M. It is "no" about 99.999% of the time, although 99% of the time you can get the "no" for maybe $25k. Sure, there is a lot of other information you learn, but the bottom line comes down to whether the drug helps more than it hurts, and people will pay for it if it does.
2. Once you have a compound and a "yes" you can make the pills for 5 cents each, and sell them for whatever you can get.
So, for any drug ALREADY on the market you know the answer to #1, and so can easily make a profit selling pills for 5 cents each. The problem is that nobody wants to pay for #1, so the way it works is somebody spends the $25k about 10,000 times and the $50M maybe 5-10 times until they find a compound that works, and since they have a patent on it they can make the pills for 5 cents and sell them for $5 each and recoup their initial investment.
So, it really isn't surprising that people can make a profit on unpatented medications, since the initial investment was already recouped and new companies can skip #1. The problem is that you can't get new medications without patents unless somebody wants to fund the full end-to-end R&D. Academic labs currently come up with ideas that ultimately lead to drugs, but they almost never pay the huge costs involved in testing compounds since it is basically boring work. However, somebody has to pay that cost if you want to have drugs.
And for the record, I'm fine with having the government do this, but I'd prefer that until somebody actually spends the money to make it happen that we not dismantle the entire pharmaceutical industry in the meantime.
Well, you don't need to make your own drugs to benefit - we already have some knowledge about the correlation between genetics and response to commercially-available drugs. If this were expanded there would probably be a greater variety of drugs on the market, since it would be easier to get them approved (once you figure out who gets the side-effects vs the benefit you can just make the indication "... in people with SNPs x,y,z").
Home chemical synthesis is an entirely different technology, and might someday be practical. However, if a particular chemical has commercial value, I'm sure some lab somewhere will sell it.
As far as legality goes - you can make any chemical you want as long as it isn't patented. Drugs aren't patented unless commercial companies do the development work (ie they pay for the clinical trials). The easiest way to have patent-free drugs is for national governments to actually start funding drug development (not just basic research). That is to say, after discovering some groundbreaking new biological mechanism the NIH or whatever would actually start testing compounds for activity/etc, and then pay to have tens of thousands of people take the most promising compound and figure out if it works. They could then get marketing approval and never patent the drug, or patent it defensively but license it freely, or perhaps freely to domestic manufacturers or overseas companies whose governments reciprocate and spend a similar amount (per-capita) on R&D. Private companies would still be free to compete, but of course prices will be influenced by the competition. The government could even outsource some of the development to private industry/etc, while retaining patent rights.
I'm not a big fan of just getting rid of drug patents - it seems like killing the goose that laid the golden egg. In order to have new drugs without patents you need a lot more government R&D. However, simply having a lot more government R&D can probably solve the problem without even getting rid of the patents. In a world where we have many competing systems for discovering drugs we can evaluate the costs of all the models and figure out what actually works best.