Most likely the issue is that the Gates foundation can't afford to pay first-world prices for medicines and help huge numbers of people in the third world. So, he goes to Big Pharma companies and asks "hey, can you sell me Lipitor pills for a nickel a pill for use in Ethiopia?" The Pharma company says "sure - we'll even pitch in some of our own money and sell it to you below cost, but we need to make sure those pills are used to help people in Ethiopia and don't end up getting shipped back to New Jersey and sold for half retail."
It isn't an unreasonable request - the purpose of the donations is to help people, not enrich middlemen who want to sell to people who do have the means to pay full retail but would rather save their money for Plasma TVs or whatever they spend it on. If Pharma companies could price drugs in accordance with what people can really afford I'm sure they would do so. The problem is that with open markets the folks who get the discounts will buy more than they need and make a tidy profit selling to those who don't qualify for the discount. Then nobody pays full retail and the drug doesn't turn a profit, which means that when the next opportunity to cure some 3rd world disease comes along nobody bothers since there isn't any money in those sorts of things.
The current health care situation is a mess, and more should be done to help make drugs affordable for those who cannot afford them. However, the idea that you simply shouldn't make any profit at all on refining a drug and putting it through trials just doesn't work in the real world - at least not unless government funding really steps up to the plate. Sure, many modern drugs started out in government labs (at least in concept), but a LOT of effort goes from some PhD's lab in the NIH to pills that anybody can take safely - hundreds of millions of dollars worth. Either the WHO/NIH needs to fund drugs soup to nuts, or we need to stop complaining when those who do make money off of it. That probably means that drugs will neither be $300/month for poor people (at their own expense), nor $10/month for people making $90k/year.
There is certainly no officially-endorsed manner of obtaining root access to a non-developer android phone (the unlocked ADP phone gives you root). However, RC29 of the G1 android image had a gaping local exploit that you can use to obtain root. A signed image of RC29 is available which can be used to downgrade any non-rooted phone back to RC29 so that the exploit can be used. All subsequent updates have been re-issued with root permissions intact - once you have root you can flash your bootloader to not require the google signing keys and install any image you like. In fact, you can create your own image using the android source and a few proprietary drivers off the G1 and put whatever you want on your phone (any anybody else who has rooted their phones can do so as well).
Sure, I'd like it to be more open than this, but I can live with this.
Relax. I agree that it only makes sense to do analysis of some kind to confirm that it is water. And no, it didn't really make sense to line the whole probe with some kind of water detector.
However, I can still appreciate the irony in these jokes...:) I even laugh at computer jokes from time to time...
I think I can expect a little more from my government than cash in my pocket and no occupying forces in my neighborhood. In particular the way the government treats minorities of various kinds (both in terms of physical characteristics and ideological views) is very important - even if the average person ends up better as a result. Should I be happy if the government institutes slavery if it makes me weathier and doesn't cause a war - I should think not!
I can't say I'm surprised by the current administration - it is all working out basically how I thought it would. I'm sure that Obama will right some of Bush's wrongs, and create more than a few wrongs of his own. Republicans will hail him as the antichrist, and Democrats will hail him as the messiah. Eventually the Democrats will make some major blunder and the Republicans will sweep in to save the country. Lather, rinse, repeat... No doubt the promoted special interests will be different, but corruption will be there.
The one thing that gives me hope is that it would be very difficult for the next four years to be as bad as the last four were. It is certainly possible, but I'd think it would be difficult to pull off even by design. That doesn't give the current administration a free pass when they blunder, and it doesn't make any Republican proposal not worth considering...
Just think how much effort has gone into designing screws which underperform conventional designs in every way, and whose only virtue is that it requires a hard-to-find tool to turn...
Actually - the TSA website indicates that saline for contacts is allowed in large volumes. I was allowed to take mine on one flight, and it was then confiscated on the return flight...
To make up for your sins please report to your local GM dealer and buy 3 SUVs and push them off a pier. Ok, now you're caught up. Just buy one more and you can drive it for two years before it is outside of its "useful life."
Actually - they do need probable cause to arrest you at all. They need to bring you before a judge for arraignment within 24 hours.
If you are handcuffed and led off and detained for 24 hours, and there is no probable cause, then somebody is going to be paying you a lot of money when the attourneys are done.
Agreed. If you made some kind of inflatable aerogel or foam wall and put it into orbit then it would be bashed by debris, which would slow the debris down somewhat and speed their re-entry. The foam would have booster rockets to keep it in orbit (and keep it out of the way of active satellites). When those boosters run out of fuel, or something causes them to fail, then the huge mass of foam would rapidly deorbit since it would have a high drag:mass ratio.
You could even put the foam in retrograde orbit if you really wanted to slow down debris, although this might make it harder to keep out of the way of active satellites.
Somehow I doubt that the papers published using this ice pack data included a disclaimer that the measurement technology employed actually couldn't really accurately measure the amount of ice anywhere.:)
Sure, every paper includes a measure of its results and their uncertainties. However, those uncertainties generally are only those that result from random error and known sources of systematic error. If the whole methodology is flawed then the actual result might be 107 when I report that it is 2.323 +/- 0.001. Sometimes the rigor of science can hide big flaws and assumptions.
Yup. I find it ironic that we're advocating these kinds of solutions only a week after the bit about a court ruling that MMR vaccine doesn't cause polio.
I'm all for free market and all that. However, things of this scale really need government standards. Any lawyer who can argue a mechanism of damage and who can find the right venue shouldn't be able to sue anybody and everybody for some form of pollution.
Does CO2 damage the environment? Well, does that make individual citizens liable for exhaling? How about I pick one at random and drag them into a court case on behalf of every human on the planet? Does your local pizza delivery shop become liable for the gas mileage of the car they picked? Did they choose the absolute best pollution option in terms of pounds of CO2 per pizza delivered? What if they did but didn't also optimize in terms of pollutants produced during car manufacture - maybe they should have bought a civic instead of a prius so that they'd be contributing less to strip mining for battery electrode metals? Buy a car and get sued by whatever special interest you forgot to please...
We really need fewer of these kinds of court cases. It isn't like companies try to behave differently to avoid them - they've just become a cost of doing business. If you put a product on the US market you're going to get sued for x% of your revenue on average at some point. You don't do anything dramatic to limit your exposure - you just make sure you price the products appropriately. They know that avoiding US lawsuits is completely impossible if you have money. It isn't about punishing bad behavior - it is about punishing success...
Yup. Look on the PBS Frontline website for their recent episode on Plea Bargains (you can watch it online). It is a real eye-opener.
One woman was clearly falsely accused but was convicted. It became fairly obvious that she was falsely confused, and so the DA offered her a plea bargain for time served if she pled guilty (one of those cases of the DA being more concerned with a win/loss record than justice). Due to her religious convictions she did not want to plea guilty since she would have to lie and confess to a crime she did not commit. She lost her appeals and is still in prison for a crime she professes she did not commit, and she could have been free today if she only confessed to it. What motive could she possibly have for not confessing, other than a desire to be honest? And yet as a society we both punish her and bear the expense of imprisoning her.
Plea bargains are a the natural result of barter between somebody with everything to lose and somebody with nothing to lose. Threaten an innocent person with 30 years in prison and they have tremendous incentive to accept a year or two of punishment for a crime they didn't commit. Sure, in some cases I think that plea bargains are a good concept, but they're being wielded in a fundamentally unfair way. It should be the goal of the DA to seek justice, not convictions.
I've tried it - haven't been impressed. It is a bit limited, and I don't like the fact that it doesn't really allow for procedural programming. It is more of a stimulus-response feedback loop design.
Agreed. The big changes only tend to happen with platform shifts. If you design a new cell phone and you don't care much about compatibility so you get the best theoretical design possible. If you are building a laser printer or a router or a microwave - ditto.
If you're designing another CPU for the desktop then backwards compatibility is everything.
Yup - and I really miss motherboard reviews (they are harder to find these days it seems). Back when they existed they tended to show significant performance differences - you could often spend $30 on a better motherboard and get more improvement than spending $75-100 on a CPU. They really need to test/price the whole package.
I went AMD with my last upgrade - sure the Core2 is faster but at my price point there were lots of options and I found that AMD looked to be the better deal. It helps that with AMD you get to pick one of about 847 motherboards instead of the very limited Intel offerings.
Every federal grant should come with earmarked money for publication. It may not be spent on anything else. Now we don't have to worry about researchers running out of funds and not having money to publish.
Will spending thousands of dollars on publications result in less money for science? Absolutely! However, the status quo is spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on publications - they just show up in a different budget. All of this is money that could have spent on science or any of a multitude of other useful purposes.
As others have pointed out there are better ways to go than a pure ratio requirement if you're trying to promote seeding. The problem with ratio alone is that it is a zero sum game - for every person uploading there is somebody downloading. The average ratio of every person on a private network is exactly 1:1 100% of the time.
The way such a network should be run is:
1. New users get some kind of grace period to get started. Maybe throttle their connections at first so everybody doesn't go creating new accounts all the time, but give them a chance to get established.
2. Go ahead and have a strict ratio requirement, but make it 0.5:1 or 0.8:1 or something like that.
3. Give all kinds of points for seeding torrents - particularly rare ones. You get points for time advertising a torrent even if not a single byte is transferred (provided that it has been downloaded at least so often - no seeding/dev/urandom). Go ahead and randomly spot check advertised torrents to make sure they're really being seeded.
4. Give points for uploading new torrents that become popular.
5. Give points for running mirrors/etc.
6. Above all - remember the goal is to run a healthy network, not to have some elitist organization where the folks with the biggest pipes constantly make life hard for folks who have asymmetric DSL. As long as the network is healthy don't fight over whether 80% of the users are over 1:1 instead of 81%. Sure, you need to keep out leaches, but that can be done effectively without silly rules.
I'm sure that by now hundreds of people have died from planes falling on my house. I'd like the area above and around my home to be a no-fly zone.
This is similar to the argument for mandatory immunization. Suppose my kid has an allergy to a component of the all the vaccines that protect against measels, so he can't be vaccinated. Ten other of his classmates could be vaccinated, but the parents object so they aren't. My kid now as it a huge risk for getting measels, when the risk would be miniscule if the only other unvaccinated children were the very few that are allergic to eggs or whatever.
Vaccination is a legitimate public health concern. It is also a matter concerning the welfare of children, which cannot make informed decisions on their own behalf and depend on their parents (and society at large when their parents are not acting for their welfare). I am the sort of person who tends to lean libertarian on many issues, but on this one I think I have to agree that society needs to put its foot down. Even if vaccines do kill the odd person or two, their beneficial effects are far greater.
Sure, it is lousy to be the parent of the rare child who dies or is crippled from a vaccine shot. It also is lousy to be the parent of a teenager who is killed when a plane falls on the house they were inside of. That doesn't give these parents (or others who fear becoming like them) a right to force major changes upon society at large which are far more detrimental than the problems they themselves suffer.
Uh, if they were fighting for my "right to choose" they would be suing the government, not vaccine manufacturers.
With all of the arguing over drug prices of late the one thing virtually all the medical experts on all sides tend to agree on is that vaccines offer the best bang for the buck. Yet, it seems like policies everywhere are almost designed to get rid of any financial incentive to create new vaccines.
1. They're given to kids which make good plaintiffs. Every time some kid gets a sniffle there is a class-action lawsuit against some vaccine manufacturer. 2. Because they're so beneficial and they're usually given to kids, there is pressure to make them free or nearly free. Why make a $5 one-time vaccine when you can make a $3/pill daily for the rest of your life cholesterol drug?
Sure, clinical trials are criticial for widely-deployed vaccines. The government should require them and even sponsor independent ones since they are so important. However, provided that all data is given to regulators manufacturers should be immunized from lawsuits when it turns out that a vaccine later turns out to be harmful contrary to all the evidence up to that point in time - regulators should be making decisions to put a vaccine on the market or pull it - not lawyers.
And the government should go ahead and pay a reasonable fee per dose. With herd immunity there is a legitimate public interest in universal vaccination - the poor shouldn't have to worry about where to get the money. However, it is in everybody's interest to create incentives to develop new vaccines. Paying $100-200 for a one time shot doesn't seem all that bad considering that society would easily pay most of that if the kid later gets sick and ends up going to the doctor's office even once to get a prescription for penicillian or some other cheap drug. Health care certainly has cost issues, but vaccines aren't it - and that move to shave off every dime is going to be harmful.
1. Strong regulators who are funded to independently research this sort of stuff when needed. 2. To stop fighting out these kinds of issues in lawsuits.
When a medical procedure or drug enters the market the introducer should pay to have it tested to show that it is safe. Once this is accepted, the onus should then be on the government to show that it is not safe (or that there was clear fraud). If a government rules that a product is safe a court should not be able to award damages.
The problem is now that anybody can come up with any theory they'd like and sue for billions of dollars in a class-action. This encourages:
1. Plaintiffs to come out of the woodwork with any crazy theory to make some money. 2. Companies to avoid even researching safety issues - not because the research would cost money but because the outcome would punish them with 20/20 hindsight.
Go ahead and force companies to do safety studies if you must, but the outcome should be products pulled from the market - not lawsuits. And fraud means outright fraud. If a company finds one data point that suggests that there might be a risk, but doesn't pull a product until a study is completed several years later, they shouldn't be punished for this. If you pulled a product every time somebody got sick from it there wouldn't be anything on your pharmacy shelves. Lawyers love 20/20 hindsight. Now, if a company completes a definitive study and buries the results that is fraud. If a company completes a study and there is controversy in the data, and the company honestly reports the data to a regulator and gets the nod to put a product on the market, that isn't fraud.
Re:Who cares how much it costs...
on
Fly Me To Which Moon?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The effect of inflation is to make dollars (in wallets, bank statements, and promissory notes) less significant compared to real goods and work products.
The effect of deflation is the opposite.
So, if you have a huge positive net worth in dollars (cash in the bank or your wallet) deflation helps you out. Those dollars become even more valuable as people desperate for work will do anything to get even a few of them from you.
However, if you have a mortgage and student loans and a big negative net worth in dollars (numbers on promissory notes) inflation is your best friend. Your work product and assets become more valuable, and your debt becomes trivial.
A few years ago my parent's mortgage payment on their 4-bedroom house was lower than my rent for a 1 bedroom apartment. That is inflation for you. Prices and wages went up so that their mortgage became a trivial cost to them since that cost was fixed.
If you are certain deflation is coming the last thing you want to do is take out a loan. The loan payments will become a bigger and bigger share of your income as your wages drop. The best thing you can do is sell your house, pay off your debt, put that cash in the bank, and rent. As your rent drops you'll be much further ahead.
Of course, if you bet on deflation and the government starts printing money look out! Your rent will soar. Just look at anybody who bought their home before the 1970s on a fixed mortgage - they cleaned up!
Agreed - but in practice it only makes a difference if you're generally near an airport. If you're in the middle of the pacific the outcome is the same either way. Since the whole issue is flight under ETOPS conditions that is the main concern.
Slashdot Mirror
Most likely the issue is that the Gates foundation can't afford to pay first-world prices for medicines and help huge numbers of people in the third world. So, he goes to Big Pharma companies and asks "hey, can you sell me Lipitor pills for a nickel a pill for use in Ethiopia?" The Pharma company says "sure - we'll even pitch in some of our own money and sell it to you below cost, but we need to make sure those pills are used to help people in Ethiopia and don't end up getting shipped back to New Jersey and sold for half retail."
It isn't an unreasonable request - the purpose of the donations is to help people, not enrich middlemen who want to sell to people who do have the means to pay full retail but would rather save their money for Plasma TVs or whatever they spend it on. If Pharma companies could price drugs in accordance with what people can really afford I'm sure they would do so. The problem is that with open markets the folks who get the discounts will buy more than they need and make a tidy profit selling to those who don't qualify for the discount. Then nobody pays full retail and the drug doesn't turn a profit, which means that when the next opportunity to cure some 3rd world disease comes along nobody bothers since there isn't any money in those sorts of things.
The current health care situation is a mess, and more should be done to help make drugs affordable for those who cannot afford them. However, the idea that you simply shouldn't make any profit at all on refining a drug and putting it through trials just doesn't work in the real world - at least not unless government funding really steps up to the plate. Sure, many modern drugs started out in government labs (at least in concept), but a LOT of effort goes from some PhD's lab in the NIH to pills that anybody can take safely - hundreds of millions of dollars worth. Either the WHO/NIH needs to fund drugs soup to nuts, or we need to stop complaining when those who do make money off of it. That probably means that drugs will neither be $300/month for poor people (at their own expense), nor $10/month for people making $90k/year.
There is certainly no officially-endorsed manner of obtaining root access to a non-developer android phone (the unlocked ADP phone gives you root). However, RC29 of the G1 android image had a gaping local exploit that you can use to obtain root. A signed image of RC29 is available which can be used to downgrade any non-rooted phone back to RC29 so that the exploit can be used. All subsequent updates have been re-issued with root permissions intact - once you have root you can flash your bootloader to not require the google signing keys and install any image you like. In fact, you can create your own image using the android source and a few proprietary drivers off the G1 and put whatever you want on your phone (any anybody else who has rooted their phones can do so as well).
Sure, I'd like it to be more open than this, but I can live with this.
Relax. I agree that it only makes sense to do analysis of some kind to confirm that it is water. And no, it didn't really make sense to line the whole probe with some kind of water detector.
However, I can still appreciate the irony in these jokes... :) I even laugh at computer jokes from time to time...
I think I can expect a little more from my government than cash in my pocket and no occupying forces in my neighborhood. In particular the way the government treats minorities of various kinds (both in terms of physical characteristics and ideological views) is very important - even if the average person ends up better as a result. Should I be happy if the government institutes slavery if it makes me weathier and doesn't cause a war - I should think not!
I can't say I'm surprised by the current administration - it is all working out basically how I thought it would. I'm sure that Obama will right some of Bush's wrongs, and create more than a few wrongs of his own. Republicans will hail him as the antichrist, and Democrats will hail him as the messiah. Eventually the Democrats will make some major blunder and the Republicans will sweep in to save the country. Lather, rinse, repeat... No doubt the promoted special interests will be different, but corruption will be there.
The one thing that gives me hope is that it would be very difficult for the next four years to be as bad as the last four were. It is certainly possible, but I'd think it would be difficult to pull off even by design. That doesn't give the current administration a free pass when they blunder, and it doesn't make any Republican proposal not worth considering...
Just think how much effort has gone into designing screws which underperform conventional designs in every way, and whose only virtue is that it requires a hard-to-find tool to turn...
Ah, so the secret is to stuff your toothpaste and contact lens cleaning solution into a lighter case...
Actually - the TSA website indicates that saline for contacts is allowed in large volumes. I was allowed to take mine on one flight, and it was then confiscated on the return flight...
Gotta love it...
You're the reason the economy is tanking!
To make up for your sins please report to your local GM dealer and buy 3 SUVs and push them off a pier. Ok, now you're caught up. Just buy one more and you can drive it for two years before it is outside of its "useful life."
Actually - they do need probable cause to arrest you at all. They need to bring you before a judge for arraignment within 24 hours.
If you are handcuffed and led off and detained for 24 hours, and there is no probable cause, then somebody is going to be paying you a lot of money when the attourneys are done.
Agreed. If you made some kind of inflatable aerogel or foam wall and put it into orbit then it would be bashed by debris, which would slow the debris down somewhat and speed their re-entry. The foam would have booster rockets to keep it in orbit (and keep it out of the way of active satellites). When those boosters run out of fuel, or something causes them to fail, then the huge mass of foam would rapidly deorbit since it would have a high drag:mass ratio.
You could even put the foam in retrograde orbit if you really wanted to slow down debris, although this might make it harder to keep out of the way of active satellites.
Somehow I doubt that the papers published using this ice pack data included a disclaimer that the measurement technology employed actually couldn't really accurately measure the amount of ice anywhere. :)
Sure, every paper includes a measure of its results and their uncertainties. However, those uncertainties generally are only those that result from random error and known sources of systematic error. If the whole methodology is flawed then the actual result might be 107 when I report that it is 2.323 +/- 0.001. Sometimes the rigor of science can hide big flaws and assumptions.
Yup. I find it ironic that we're advocating these kinds of solutions only a week after the bit about a court ruling that MMR vaccine doesn't cause polio.
I'm all for free market and all that. However, things of this scale really need government standards. Any lawyer who can argue a mechanism of damage and who can find the right venue shouldn't be able to sue anybody and everybody for some form of pollution.
Does CO2 damage the environment? Well, does that make individual citizens liable for exhaling? How about I pick one at random and drag them into a court case on behalf of every human on the planet? Does your local pizza delivery shop become liable for the gas mileage of the car they picked? Did they choose the absolute best pollution option in terms of pounds of CO2 per pizza delivered? What if they did but didn't also optimize in terms of pollutants produced during car manufacture - maybe they should have bought a civic instead of a prius so that they'd be contributing less to strip mining for battery electrode metals? Buy a car and get sued by whatever special interest you forgot to please...
We really need fewer of these kinds of court cases. It isn't like companies try to behave differently to avoid them - they've just become a cost of doing business. If you put a product on the US market you're going to get sued for x% of your revenue on average at some point. You don't do anything dramatic to limit your exposure - you just make sure you price the products appropriately. They know that avoiding US lawsuits is completely impossible if you have money. It isn't about punishing bad behavior - it is about punishing success...
Yup. Look on the PBS Frontline website for their recent episode on Plea Bargains (you can watch it online). It is a real eye-opener.
One woman was clearly falsely accused but was convicted. It became fairly obvious that she was falsely confused, and so the DA offered her a plea bargain for time served if she pled guilty (one of those cases of the DA being more concerned with a win/loss record than justice). Due to her religious convictions she did not want to plea guilty since she would have to lie and confess to a crime she did not commit. She lost her appeals and is still in prison for a crime she professes she did not commit, and she could have been free today if she only confessed to it. What motive could she possibly have for not confessing, other than a desire to be honest? And yet as a society we both punish her and bear the expense of imprisoning her.
Plea bargains are a the natural result of barter between somebody with everything to lose and somebody with nothing to lose. Threaten an innocent person with 30 years in prison and they have tremendous incentive to accept a year or two of punishment for a crime they didn't commit. Sure, in some cases I think that plea bargains are a good concept, but they're being wielded in a fundamentally unfair way. It should be the goal of the DA to seek justice, not convictions.
I've tried it - haven't been impressed. It is a bit limited, and I don't like the fact that it doesn't really allow for procedural programming. It is more of a stimulus-response feedback loop design.
Agreed. The big changes only tend to happen with platform shifts. If you design a new cell phone and you don't care much about compatibility so you get the best theoretical design possible. If you are building a laser printer or a router or a microwave - ditto.
If you're designing another CPU for the desktop then backwards compatibility is everything.
Yup - and I really miss motherboard reviews (they are harder to find these days it seems). Back when they existed they tended to show significant performance differences - you could often spend $30 on a better motherboard and get more improvement than spending $75-100 on a CPU. They really need to test/price the whole package.
I went AMD with my last upgrade - sure the Core2 is faster but at my price point there were lots of options and I found that AMD looked to be the better deal. It helps that with AMD you get to pick one of about 847 motherboards instead of the very limited Intel offerings.
They mean precisely that, you take a carbohydrate, you introduce it to oxygen, it reduces to water and CO2, and energy is liberated.
Well, if you want to be technical, the carbohydrate is OXIDIZED to water and CO2. The oxygen is what is reduced to water and CO2. :)
And for the mods still not through high school - pay attention when you get to chemistry class and you'll understand...
There is a simple solution to this.
Every federal grant should come with earmarked money for publication. It may not be spent on anything else. Now we don't have to worry about researchers running out of funds and not having money to publish.
Will spending thousands of dollars on publications result in less money for science? Absolutely! However, the status quo is spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on publications - they just show up in a different budget. All of this is money that could have spent on science or any of a multitude of other useful purposes.
Sounds like this game which I loved as a kid.
It is really a timeless concept - it could probably be successful if it were launched again on a more modern platform.
As others have pointed out there are better ways to go than a pure ratio requirement if you're trying to promote seeding. The problem with ratio alone is that it is a zero sum game - for every person uploading there is somebody downloading. The average ratio of every person on a private network is exactly 1:1 100% of the time.
The way such a network should be run is:
1. New users get some kind of grace period to get started. Maybe throttle their connections at first so everybody doesn't go creating new accounts all the time, but give them a chance to get established.
2. Go ahead and have a strict ratio requirement, but make it 0.5:1 or 0.8:1 or something like that.
3. Give all kinds of points for seeding torrents - particularly rare ones. You get points for time advertising a torrent even if not a single byte is transferred (provided that it has been downloaded at least so often - no seeding /dev/urandom). Go ahead and randomly spot check advertised torrents to make sure they're really being seeded.
4. Give points for uploading new torrents that become popular.
5. Give points for running mirrors/etc.
6. Above all - remember the goal is to run a healthy network, not to have some elitist organization where the folks with the biggest pipes constantly make life hard for folks who have asymmetric DSL. As long as the network is healthy don't fight over whether 80% of the users are over 1:1 instead of 81%. Sure, you need to keep out leaches, but that can be done effectively without silly rules.
I'm sure that by now hundreds of people have died from planes falling on my house. I'd like the area above and around my home to be a no-fly zone.
This is similar to the argument for mandatory immunization. Suppose my kid has an allergy to a component of the all the vaccines that protect against measels, so he can't be vaccinated. Ten other of his classmates could be vaccinated, but the parents object so they aren't. My kid now as it a huge risk for getting measels, when the risk would be miniscule if the only other unvaccinated children were the very few that are allergic to eggs or whatever.
Vaccination is a legitimate public health concern. It is also a matter concerning the welfare of children, which cannot make informed decisions on their own behalf and depend on their parents (and society at large when their parents are not acting for their welfare). I am the sort of person who tends to lean libertarian on many issues, but on this one I think I have to agree that society needs to put its foot down. Even if vaccines do kill the odd person or two, their beneficial effects are far greater.
Sure, it is lousy to be the parent of the rare child who dies or is crippled from a vaccine shot. It also is lousy to be the parent of a teenager who is killed when a plane falls on the house they were inside of. That doesn't give these parents (or others who fear becoming like them) a right to force major changes upon society at large which are far more detrimental than the problems they themselves suffer.
Uh, if they were fighting for my "right to choose" they would be suing the government, not vaccine manufacturers.
With all of the arguing over drug prices of late the one thing virtually all the medical experts on all sides tend to agree on is that vaccines offer the best bang for the buck. Yet, it seems like policies everywhere are almost designed to get rid of any financial incentive to create new vaccines.
1. They're given to kids which make good plaintiffs. Every time some kid gets a sniffle there is a class-action lawsuit against some vaccine manufacturer.
2. Because they're so beneficial and they're usually given to kids, there is pressure to make them free or nearly free. Why make a $5 one-time vaccine when you can make a $3/pill daily for the rest of your life cholesterol drug?
Sure, clinical trials are criticial for widely-deployed vaccines. The government should require them and even sponsor independent ones since they are so important. However, provided that all data is given to regulators manufacturers should be immunized from lawsuits when it turns out that a vaccine later turns out to be harmful contrary to all the evidence up to that point in time - regulators should be making decisions to put a vaccine on the market or pull it - not lawyers.
And the government should go ahead and pay a reasonable fee per dose. With herd immunity there is a legitimate public interest in universal vaccination - the poor shouldn't have to worry about where to get the money. However, it is in everybody's interest to create incentives to develop new vaccines. Paying $100-200 for a one time shot doesn't seem all that bad considering that society would easily pay most of that if the kid later gets sick and ends up going to the doctor's office even once to get a prescription for penicillian or some other cheap drug. Health care certainly has cost issues, but vaccines aren't it - and that move to shave off every dime is going to be harmful.
This is also why we need:
1. Strong regulators who are funded to independently research this sort of stuff when needed.
2. To stop fighting out these kinds of issues in lawsuits.
When a medical procedure or drug enters the market the introducer should pay to have it tested to show that it is safe. Once this is accepted, the onus should then be on the government to show that it is not safe (or that there was clear fraud). If a government rules that a product is safe a court should not be able to award damages.
The problem is now that anybody can come up with any theory they'd like and sue for billions of dollars in a class-action. This encourages:
1. Plaintiffs to come out of the woodwork with any crazy theory to make some money.
2. Companies to avoid even researching safety issues - not because the research would cost money but because the outcome would punish them with 20/20 hindsight.
Go ahead and force companies to do safety studies if you must, but the outcome should be products pulled from the market - not lawsuits. And fraud means outright fraud. If a company finds one data point that suggests that there might be a risk, but doesn't pull a product until a study is completed several years later, they shouldn't be punished for this. If you pulled a product every time somebody got sick from it there wouldn't be anything on your pharmacy shelves. Lawyers love 20/20 hindsight. Now, if a company completes a definitive study and buries the results that is fraud. If a company completes a study and there is controversy in the data, and the company honestly reports the data to a regulator and gets the nod to put a product on the market, that isn't fraud.
The effect of inflation is to make dollars (in wallets, bank statements, and promissory notes) less significant compared to real goods and work products.
The effect of deflation is the opposite.
So, if you have a huge positive net worth in dollars (cash in the bank or your wallet) deflation helps you out. Those dollars become even more valuable as people desperate for work will do anything to get even a few of them from you.
However, if you have a mortgage and student loans and a big negative net worth in dollars (numbers on promissory notes) inflation is your best friend. Your work product and assets become more valuable, and your debt becomes trivial.
A few years ago my parent's mortgage payment on their 4-bedroom house was lower than my rent for a 1 bedroom apartment. That is inflation for you. Prices and wages went up so that their mortgage became a trivial cost to them since that cost was fixed.
If you are certain deflation is coming the last thing you want to do is take out a loan. The loan payments will become a bigger and bigger share of your income as your wages drop. The best thing you can do is sell your house, pay off your debt, put that cash in the bank, and rent. As your rent drops you'll be much further ahead.
Of course, if you bet on deflation and the government starts printing money look out! Your rent will soar. Just look at anybody who bought their home before the 1970s on a fixed mortgage - they cleaned up!
Agreed - but in practice it only makes a difference if you're generally near an airport. If you're in the middle of the pacific the outcome is the same either way. Since the whole issue is flight under ETOPS conditions that is the main concern.