USPS also scans every mailpiece. Seriously, they do, and have been doing for almost two decades.
That's right. I was surprised when I first found that out. In fairness to the New York Times, they put it on the front page. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07... The USPS did it under cover of the War on Terror.
The post office has long had a program of "mail covers" (if you want to search Google) where they would copy the sender and addressee of every piece of mail, at the requests of the FBI or other law enforcement agencies, for people like Martin Luther King. They could find out who read the Daily Worker or The Nation. Now the the USPS scans the mail automatically to read the addresse's address, so they can just save the scan permanently. The courts have decided that it doesn't violate the Fourth Amendment, and doesn't require a search warrant or judge's permission. You can easily imagine that it could be subject to abuses, like the ones the NYT gave. It's one thing to use it to track down letters with deadly poison. It's another thing to monitor the owner of a radical bookstore, or for Sheriff Joe Arapaio to use it to monitor his political enemies, or even to use it against victimless crimes like prostitution.
The US is a great country if you're making $200,000 a year.
If you're making $60,000 a year, which is about the median family income, it's not so great. You have to come up with college education for your children, health care, housing, and transportation. A lot of that would be taken care of by your taxes in a northern European social democratic country.
Yeah, it has 9 of the world's 10 best universities (maybe), but how much do you have to pay to go to one of those universities? When I meet kids from a top school, they seem to have one thing in common -- rich parents. And the kids who don't have rich parents and are waiting on tables to get through school don't usually make it, according to the statistics.
The Asian immigrants that I've met who are killing themselves to get their kids into the US are also pretty wealthy in their native countries. There was a story in the New York Times about how Asians were buying $200 million condos in Time Warner Center and, in one case, sending their kids to Columbia University, where you'd wind up spending $100,000 to for an undergraduate degree. Even on a "lower" income level, of a few million a year, if you own an Asian car dealership, for example, your kids can make more money with an MBA in the US than running the family business back home.
But if you're a middle-class person today, and your parents are making under $100,000, you'd be a lot better off in Europe than the US. College education is free in Europe outside the UK. In the US, even a good state university can cost $100,000 to graduate. Which means you'll have an undischargeable debt for the rest of your life. Europe also has a lot of pro-worker policies, like unions and high minimum wages.
For all his talk of doing what's right instead of what's convenient, the actual right way to bring his concerns about the government and the military to the public's eye would have been to find like-minded people, form a group, start some grassroots activism and some protests to get exposure, and work towards getting his issues on a ballot. But, no, that would be too slow and inconvienient, so he decided to go the easy route of instant gratification by smashing some satellites.
That is awfully naive. A presidential election costs each candidate $1 billion, and they raise the money mostly from billionaire contributors and corporate interests. Politicians don't listen to grassroots activists, they listen to $100,000 contributors.
A lot of people did just what you described to try to stop the Iraq war. It didn't work. So we killed 650,000 innocent people and handed over Iraq to ISIS. Good work, Bushie! (BTW, there were no WMDs.)
A lot of people did just what you described, after Obama was elected, to push for a single payer health care system, and when that didn't work, for a public option, but they couldn't match the big lobbying groups, like the drug industry, the hospitals, and the insurance companies. So now you have to pay $8,500 a year for health care.
Even Martin Luther King couldn't get anywhere without some pretty powerful supporters who could raise a lot of money and pull some political strings. (And the FBI was tapping his phones.) I'm not sure MLK could have done it today. He might have wound up with a 20-year sentence for terrorism.
The U.S. is getting economically more unequal, the plutocrats are running the country, the Republicans have figured out a way to fool most of the people most of the time (TV), and I don't see a way out. If some radical wants to take direct action, doing something crazy that seems pointless to me, I can't tell him that I have a better way. If we're going to talk about futile destruction, destroying a $50 million satellite makes a lot more sense than signing up to fight in Iraq.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/kateno... Bernie’s Reasons Why Not The progressive champion weighs running for president. “The situation is fairly dismal.” Kate Nocera and Ben Smith BuzzFeed March 4, 2015 (Bernie Sanders may not run against Hillary Clinton for 2 reasons: (1) It has to be done well, or people will say that the ideas themselves don't have support. (2) It may be impossible to raise enough money to compete with Hillary Clinton, whose network plans to raise $500 million.) “The depressing part about that is that even if you did something phenomenally well — say you have 3 million people giving a $100 contribution each, which would be an enormous achievement — you’d be raising one-third of what the Koch brothers say they are spending.” “The question then occurs whether or not at this point in history you can beat the money folks,” he muses. “It may be that they have too much power and too much money and a real progressive may not be able to take them on.”
They've identified a legitimate problem, although they don't have a solution.
As it turned out, technology has wound up monitoring our daily lives. We have what amounts to a Telescreen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... monitoring everything we read and write.
Except for cash, federal agencies monitor every bank deposit and withdrawal, and every financial transaction.
(That's how Elliot Spitzer got caught hiring an escort -- and he was a multimillionaire governor of New York State.)
And they can seize cash.
If you're ever arrested, you have a police record that you can never escape.
We have license plate scanners and facial identification in the works that will be able to follow every car and every face.
The government is owned by campaign contributors. We spend $1 billion on every presidential candidate, and if you can't pay you don't play.
Maybe when there's a threat to the public welfare that everybody is ignoring, smashing a $50 million satellite will raise the alarm and get some people interested. Sometimes it works. Unfortunately it didn't work this time.
He's lucky he only got 18 months. Today he might have been convicted on a terrorist offense, and gotten 20 years, longer than a lot of murder sentences.
I wish he had touched off a movement to protect our privacy, but it didn't work. Good try, though.
The culture in those days among scientists was not to make a lot of money or bother with the business details. They were scientists first. Alexander Flemming didn't patent penicillin. Jonas Salk didn't patent the polio virus. That's the way they did things back then. Guthrie and his hospital were naive about business, and they trusted Ames to do the right thing.
The NEJM article says that Guthrie produced 500 tests, at a cost of $6 each. That means the $6 covered the costs, including the house and everything else. He presumably hired workers to assemble the kits. It's hard to imagine a principal investigator assembling 500 test kits himself. When the U.S. Children's Bureau found out, they decided that the $262 was too high, and they revoked the deal.
There were congressional hearings, so if you want the details, you can look up the hearings, which might be online.
As Elisabeth Rosenthal said in her New York Times stories about the health industry, drug companies charge the highest prices the market will bear, not because they need the money for R&D or manufacturing costgs, but because they can. And that's what they say in their SEC filings and reports to their investors. You can buy asthma inhalers in the U.S. for $160 and the same inhalers in Europe for $5. This happens all the time. The FDA gave the rights to colchicine, a drug that has been used since the pyramids, to a private company, and they raised the price from 5 cents a pill to a dollar. You could still get it in Canada for 5 cents.
There are very competent people working in government labs, and if they want to, they can manufacture anything. Look at the Manhattan Project and the Apollo space program. The Centers for Disease Control provides testing services that aren't available commercially for rare infections.
Here's the story. It's free text online. tldr: The government paid for the research and development, took all the risks, an academic researcher did all the work, a private company came along, took advantage of a naive scientist, and sold the test back to the taxpayers for 50 times what it actually cost.
(The New York Times just had a series on health care by Elisabeth Rosenthal which gave a dozen examples like this. Asthma inhalers cost about 20 to 50 times as much in the US as they do anywhere else. There are people who go to Europe once a year to buy a year's supply of drugs.)
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... Perspective History of Medicine Patenting the PKU Test — Federally Funded Research and Intellectual Property Diane B. Paul, Ph.D., and Rachel A. Ankeny, Ph.D. N Engl J Med 2013; 369:792-794 August 29, 2013 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1306755
In 1961, the U.S. Children's Bureau (USCB) embarked on a field trial of the test, requiring rapid production of kits to screen more than 400,000 babies. Guthrie, who had a cognitively impaired son and a niece with PKU, was involved in a parents' group, the National Association for Retarded Children (NARC). In consultation with the NARC, he decided that commercial production of test kits would be most efficient.
Guthrie favored the Ames Company, a division of Indiana-based Miles Laboratories, which marketed the earlier PKU tests. Although Guthrie assumed that the government would enter a contract with Ames, the company said it would manufacture the kits only if a patent were issued. In 1962, Guthrie filed a patent application in his own name and signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Miles, under which he would receive no royalties but 5% of net proceeds would be divided among the NARC Research Fund, the Association for Aid of Crippled Children, and the University of Buffalo Foundation (affiliated with the Buffalo Children's Hospital, Guthrie's employer). There was no pricing provision, an omission that Guthrie later deeply regretted.2
Miles, however, couldn't quickly produce test kits in the required quantity. So with financial support from the USCB, Guthrie rented a house in which to produce and assemble kits containing the materials necessary to perform and interpret 500 tests, at a cost of about $6 each. But when Guthrie visited the Ames Company in June 1963, he discovered that it planned to charge $262 for what were essentially the same kits. He was appalled, and when appeals to the company proved futile, he alerted USCB officials. They recommended that Miles not be granted exclusive commercial rights, in light of the large public expenditure on the test, the potential effect on states that planned to manufacture their own materials, and the steep price Miles planned to charge. Although the test had been developed with support from various organizations, the majority of the funds had come from the Public Health Service (PHS), which provided $251,700, and the USCB, which contributed $492,000 plus $250,000 through the states, chiefly for the trial. Given this federal funding, the surgeon general of the PHS determined that the invention belonged to the United States and abrogated the exclusive licensing agreement.
Right now, at this time, people and small business (and thus the economy) are losing a lot of money because unions are closing down the docks in major ports. Why? Because they want their uneducated box-pushers who are already earning 147k a year, to make even more. Did you read that? People who did not invest in any degree, dropped out of high school and got a job at the docks earning 147k a year, and are now demanding more. Demanding more by crippling the rest of the economy. Are you kidding me?
Yes, I read it. It's $83,000 a year, not $147,000. Stop bragging about how smart you are if you can't read a simple newspaper story, realize there are two sides to the story, and do some simple arithmetic.
You say it would be fair for them to make $35/h. Well, $35/h x 40h/wk x 50 wk/yr = $70,000/yr, which is pretty close to $83,000. So they merely drove a good bargain. You have a problem with people making good money?
There are reasons why they make so much money that you resent them.
First, they know how to negotiate. That's something you might learn from them.
When they negotiate, they don't want to match the race to the bottom. They know how much their employer is making and they want a piece of the action. They want job security and they want, in effect, something like an ownership interest in the company. That's not so strange. In Germany, unions have a seat on the board of directors of a company.
Second, they made a grand bargain decades ago. There was new technology that would make their job more labor-saving and efficient. Instead of obstructing it, they agreed to be forward-thinking and go along with it. However, if the company got the benefits of improved efficiency, they wanted the benefits of improved efficiency too. That's why they're making $83,000 a year. Here's a profitable business, where the owners are making millions a year. Why should they settle for $70,000 when their boss is rich and could easily pay $83,000 a year?
My landlord was making at least $300,000 a year, probably more. He inherited the building from his father, like most landlords. He worked hard, just like a longshoreman. Do I envy him? No. That's the free market.
If you live in a rental building, do you envy your landlord if he makes $300,000 a year? Do you envy your maintenance man, who fixes your boiler? Do you envy your auto mechanic? This is a rich country. Why do you want to drag everybody down to the bottom?
Well, you don't see it, but there's likely a 15 point IQ difference between the Soviet Jew and the wetback. Guess which one has more ability to do good.
There's also a 15 point IQ difference between a normal human being and a racist. Guess which one you are.
Thank you. I followed the legal route, filling in countless forms (each one with a high filing fee) and waited, and waited. Stupid me!
I know a lot of immigrants, legal and otherwise.
Most of the "legal" immigrants fall into one of 3 categories: (1) Chinese who got in by lying and saying they were politically persecuted because they opposed the 1-child policy or because they were members of Falun Gong (2) Soviet Jews who got in by lying and saying they suffered anti-Semitism (even though some of them weren't even Jews) (3) Cubans who got in just because.
A lot of crooked immigration lawyers kept copies of standard affidavits for them to sign describing the persecution that never happened but was legally sufficient to get them in. The New York Times has published stories on this, but everybody knows what was going on.
So when I see a Soviet Jewish immigrant who got in because he lied, and a Mexican immigrant who got in because he climbed over a fence, I don't see any reason to favor one over the other.
In America, I meet a lot of people whose parents or grandparents survived in Europe because they climbed over fences and fled through fields running away from people who were trying to kill them. In the 19th century, there were illegal black fugitive slaves who got to a free country by climbing over fences and fleeing through fields.
So yeah, maybe they didn't follow the immigration laws. But I'm still sympathetic. It was people like them that made this country.
Maybe when you learn more American history and politics you'll understand it better.
The working class was making a living wage doing, for the most part, manual unskilled job (pull a lever on a converyor belt or making US flags.
I'd like to know where you got the idea that the working class was doing mostly manual unskilled jobs.
I lived in Brooklyn, where a major industry was manufacturing and repairing electric motors. That all disappeared with cheap (usually lower-quality) Japanese electric motors. We had a big electronics industry in New York. We had a big printing industry, which requires a lot of skilled workers. We had a big garment industry. We had airports with big maintenance shops. Most of the American airlines are now sending their planes out to mechanics in Latin America.
It wasn't because Americans were less efficient, or because foreign workers were willing to do the same job cheaper. German workers kept their industries and kept competitive while they paid their workers the same salaries Americans used to get. It was because the American businesses made a decision that treating their workers well wasn't a factor.
There are a wide range of jobs in an industrial factory, but most of them were skilled and high-paid. We lost them with free trade.
All the benefits of free trade went to the business owners, and none of the benefits went to the workers.
Corporate Greed and Unions are the exact same issue. Both want more than the market can bear, and eventually it all collapses.
Employees can negotiate as individuals with employers. Employees can also join together with other employees and negotiate as a group in a union. In both cases, they're getting what the market can bear, but as a group, they have a better negotiating position. As individuals, they get less.
A free market requires information. Unions are a way for workers to exchange information and get a better market: How much are you making, what's the minimum you'd be willing to take, what do you know about how much the boss earns, how much do you think we can get?
As Adam Smith said, whenever businessmen get together, even for social purposes, the talk turns to pricing. Workers should have a right to do the same.
This is an area where I can sympathize with these companies, we're asking them to fix problems that we largely have brought on to ourselves by popping a pill anytime we get a tickle in the back of our throats thinking we just got Ebola.
Those pills are prescribed by a doctor, and the drug companies were promoting those pills to the doctor, because the more pills they sell the more money they make. Drug company marketing is the problem.
Most people who espouse socialism as the solution to a given humanitarian problem always seem to ignore that socialism tends to grant the most favors to whoever is best connected (read: best friends with) the resident politicians
This is a total fantasy. Paul Krugman said that conservatives read Fredrich Hayek's predictions about what government services would be like, they assume they're true, and they don't look at the actual facts in the real world which contradict Hayek.
The U.K. has a socialist health care system. I'd like you to tell me where anyone got a favor from the socialist U.K. health care system because he was connected with the politicians.
Sweden has a socialist health care system, perhaps the best health care system in the world. I challenge you to show me a Swede who needed health care and didn't get it.
First, the 19th century is the years between 1800 and 1899. In the 19th century, they had no effective medicine. They were still bloodletting. They could amputate limbs, although the patients often died of infection. I think you mean the 20th century, which is the years between 1900 and 1999. We are now in the 21st century.
Second, America never had a cheap, accessible free market capitalist system. I don't know where you get your ideas from. I live here, I work in the health care system, and I know the history and problems with the American health care system.
At the beginning of the 20th century, doctors couldn't do much. If you were shot in the leg, and the leg was infected, they could cut it off, and your chance of survival would go up from zero to maybe 50%. If you had heart disease, they couldn't do much to extend your life. If you had cancer they could give you morphine.
Things were going along like that without much progress until WWII, where the U.S. government (not free market capitalism) systematically studied the problems and came up with innovative new ways of handling surgery. Penicillin (from Alexander Flemming in England, an academic researcher) was a big breakthrough. Adriamycin, the first cancer drug, was discovered on -- guess where -- the Adriatic sea, by Italians.
The U.S. was a center of tremendous innovation after WWII, not because of free market capitalism, but because the U.S. government funded academic researchers, who provided a lot of the basic research that the private drug companies took and made money out of. The area with the most dramatic progress was heart disease, and much of the important research was done by the U.S. government's Veterans Affairs hospitals.
After WWII, there were private doctors, but people who couldn't afford their prices went to government hospitals, which were scattered around the country. What reason would capitalist doctors have to treat people who can't afford to pay a lot of money? By the 1980s, when doctors could finally do something useful, they got very expensive. People who can't afford health care are left to die http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...
Yeah, I was just talking to an Italian girl who broke her wrist in the U.S. An American hospital charged her $1,000 for an x-ray that would have cost $20 in Italy.
She said what the Europeans always say about American medical prices: You have to be kidding.
The New York Times had a series on American health care by Elisabeth Rosenthal. A guy went to France to get a year's supply of asthma inhalers, and the saving paid for the cost of his trip.
As a point of fact, Cuban scientists have developed a new meningitis vaccine, and a new cancer drug. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Communist China developed artemisinin, a new class of malaria drug.
American capitalism in the 19th century created snake oil drugs that did more harm than good. You may be thinking of the 20th century. After a few disasters, we created the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to regulate the drug companies.
The USSR moved from socialism to capitalism. The results make you wonder whether they would have been better off under socialism. Male life expectancy immediately dropped by 10 years. The USSR was a world-class scientific power, that put the first man in space, discovered new trans-uranium elements, and developed urokinase, the first drug of the class that includes tissue plasminogen activator.
The reason you think capitalism is so great is that you don't have to live here.
We had not-for-profit pharmaceutical firms. The New York City Department of Health developed its own vaccines. Even today, the Centers for Disease Control develops its own drugs for rare diseases.
There was an article in the New England Journal of Medicine about the guy who developed the PKU test for babies. He was working in an academic medical center. They contracted the manufacturing and marketing to a private company, because they were just academics and they didn't know how to sell a product in the real world.
Then the private company had startup problems and couldn't deliver the test kids in time. So the doctor started assembling them in his (FDA-approved) basement. He was charging about $5 a kit.
Then the private company fixed their problems and started manufacturing the kits themselves. They charged about $100 a kit.
Moral: The private market isn't as great as they think they are.
Or as that notorious socialist Adam Smith said, those who benefit most from society should pay a disproportionate share of the costs of running society.
Actually teachers in developing countries don't cost much money. In a country with a median income of $500 a year, you can hire pretty good teachers for $1,000 a year.
I don't know if you could supply a class with laptops for $1,000.
Has this ever worked before? Has anyone ever shown that it's possible for children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic? And have they published their results in peer-reviewed journals?
I thought that most of the research found that computers weren't too useful in teaching basic reading, writing and arithmetic, even when students had assistance.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10... Inflating the Software Report Card By TRIP GABRIEL and MATT RICHTEL October 8, 2011 (United States Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse review of 10 major software products for teaching algebra and elementary and middle school math and reading found that 9 “did not have statistically significant effects on test scores.”)
those signs don't have the force of law in many states in any case, so many people simply ignore them.
I understand the general mindset that leads towards gun control. But given that guns are out there anyway, under the current legal regime, how are "gun free zones" doing anything helpful at all?
Actually, we never answered your (reasonable) question.
If I go into a bar in Texas or Colorado (which I did), I would feel more comfortable knowing that the good law-abiding guys aren't taking their guns inside. I don't even want the good guys to have guns when they get drunk and get into fights.
If I were running the University of Colorado health services department, I would know that a gun owner with a gun is more likely to use it for suicide than for self-defense.
If they want to have a rifle and hunting club, or ROTC, and keep their firearms locked up until they're used under supervision, fine. I've gone hunting myself.
But I know that suicide is a high risk for college students, and the presence of a gun makes a suicide more successful.
Slashdot Mirror
USPS also scans every mailpiece. Seriously, they do, and have been doing for almost two decades.
That's right. I was surprised when I first found that out. In fairness to the New York Times, they put it on the front page. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07... The USPS did it under cover of the War on Terror.
The post office has long had a program of "mail covers" (if you want to search Google) where they would copy the sender and addressee of every piece of mail, at the requests of the FBI or other law enforcement agencies, for people like Martin Luther King. They could find out who read the Daily Worker or The Nation. Now the the USPS scans the mail automatically to read the addresse's address, so they can just save the scan permanently. The courts have decided that it doesn't violate the Fourth Amendment, and doesn't require a search warrant or judge's permission. You can easily imagine that it could be subject to abuses, like the ones the NYT gave. It's one thing to use it to track down letters with deadly poison. It's another thing to monitor the owner of a radical bookstore, or for Sheriff Joe Arapaio to use it to monitor his political enemies, or even to use it against victimless crimes like prostitution.
The US is a great country if you're making $200,000 a year.
If you're making $60,000 a year, which is about the median family income, it's not so great. You have to come up with college education for your children, health care, housing, and transportation. A lot of that would be taken care of by your taxes in a northern European social democratic country.
Yeah, it has 9 of the world's 10 best universities (maybe), but how much do you have to pay to go to one of those universities? When I meet kids from a top school, they seem to have one thing in common -- rich parents. And the kids who don't have rich parents and are waiting on tables to get through school don't usually make it, according to the statistics.
The Asian immigrants that I've met who are killing themselves to get their kids into the US are also pretty wealthy in their native countries. There was a story in the New York Times about how Asians were buying $200 million condos in Time Warner Center and, in one case, sending their kids to Columbia University, where you'd wind up spending $100,000 to for an undergraduate degree. Even on a "lower" income level, of a few million a year, if you own an Asian car dealership, for example, your kids can make more money with an MBA in the US than running the family business back home.
But if you're a middle-class person today, and your parents are making under $100,000, you'd be a lot better off in Europe than the US. College education is free in Europe outside the UK. In the US, even a good state university can cost $100,000 to graduate. Which means you'll have an undischargeable debt for the rest of your life. Europe also has a lot of pro-worker policies, like unions and high minimum wages.
For all his talk of doing what's right instead of what's convenient, the actual right way to bring his concerns about the government and the military to the public's eye would have been to find like-minded people, form a group, start some grassroots activism and some protests to get exposure, and work towards getting his issues on a ballot. But, no, that would be too slow and inconvienient, so he decided to go the easy route of instant gratification by smashing some satellites.
That is awfully naive. A presidential election costs each candidate $1 billion, and they raise the money mostly from billionaire contributors and corporate interests. Politicians don't listen to grassroots activists, they listen to $100,000 contributors.
A lot of people did just what you described to try to stop the Iraq war. It didn't work. So we killed 650,000 innocent people and handed over Iraq to ISIS. Good work, Bushie! (BTW, there were no WMDs.)
A lot of people did just what you described, after Obama was elected, to push for a single payer health care system, and when that didn't work, for a public option, but they couldn't match the big lobbying groups, like the drug industry, the hospitals, and the insurance companies. So now you have to pay $8,500 a year for health care.
Even Martin Luther King couldn't get anywhere without some pretty powerful supporters who could raise a lot of money and pull some political strings. (And the FBI was tapping his phones.) I'm not sure MLK could have done it today. He might have wound up with a 20-year sentence for terrorism.
The U.S. is getting economically more unequal, the plutocrats are running the country, the Republicans have figured out a way to fool most of the people most of the time (TV), and I don't see a way out. If some radical wants to take direct action, doing something crazy that seems pointless to me, I can't tell him that I have a better way. If we're going to talk about futile destruction, destroying a $50 million satellite makes a lot more sense than signing up to fight in Iraq.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/kateno...
Bernie’s Reasons Why Not
The progressive champion weighs running for president. “The situation is fairly dismal.”
Kate Nocera and Ben Smith
BuzzFeed
March 4, 2015
(Bernie Sanders may not run against Hillary Clinton for 2 reasons: (1) It has to be done well, or people will say that the ideas themselves don't have support. (2) It may be impossible to raise enough money to compete with Hillary Clinton, whose network plans to raise $500 million.)
“The depressing part about that is that even if you did something phenomenally well — say you have 3 million people giving a $100 contribution each, which would be an enormous achievement — you’d be raising one-third of what the Koch brothers say they are spending.”
“The question then occurs whether or not at this point in history you can beat the money folks,” he muses. “It may be that they have too much power and too much money and a real progressive may not be able to take them on.”
They've identified a legitimate problem, although they don't have a solution.
As it turned out, technology has wound up monitoring our daily lives. We have what amounts to a Telescreen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... monitoring everything we read and write.
Except for cash, federal agencies monitor every bank deposit and withdrawal, and every financial transaction.
(That's how Elliot Spitzer got caught hiring an escort -- and he was a multimillionaire governor of New York State.)
And they can seize cash.
If you're ever arrested, you have a police record that you can never escape.
We have license plate scanners and facial identification in the works that will be able to follow every car and every face.
The government is owned by campaign contributors. We spend $1 billion on every presidential candidate, and if you can't pay you don't play.
Maybe when there's a threat to the public welfare that everybody is ignoring, smashing a $50 million satellite will raise the alarm and get some people interested. Sometimes it works. Unfortunately it didn't work this time.
He's lucky he only got 18 months. Today he might have been convicted on a terrorist offense, and gotten 20 years, longer than a lot of murder sentences.
I wish he had touched off a movement to protect our privacy, but it didn't work. Good try, though.
The culture in those days among scientists was not to make a lot of money or bother with the business details. They were scientists first. Alexander Flemming didn't patent penicillin. Jonas Salk didn't patent the polio virus. That's the way they did things back then. Guthrie and his hospital were naive about business, and they trusted Ames to do the right thing.
The NEJM article says that Guthrie produced 500 tests, at a cost of $6 each. That means the $6 covered the costs, including the house and everything else. He presumably hired workers to assemble the kits. It's hard to imagine a principal investigator assembling 500 test kits himself. When the U.S. Children's Bureau found out, they decided that the $262 was too high, and they revoked the deal.
There were congressional hearings, so if you want the details, you can look up the hearings, which might be online.
As Elisabeth Rosenthal said in her New York Times stories about the health industry, drug companies charge the highest prices the market will bear, not because they need the money for R&D or manufacturing costgs, but because they can. And that's what they say in their SEC filings and reports to their investors. You can buy asthma inhalers in the U.S. for $160 and the same inhalers in Europe for $5. This happens all the time. The FDA gave the rights to colchicine, a drug that has been used since the pyramids, to a private company, and they raised the price from 5 cents a pill to a dollar. You could still get it in Canada for 5 cents.
There are very competent people working in government labs, and if they want to, they can manufacture anything. Look at the Manhattan Project and the Apollo space program. The Centers for Disease Control provides testing services that aren't available commercially for rare infections.
Here's the story. It's free text online. tldr: The government paid for the research and development, took all the risks, an academic researcher did all the work, a private company came along, took advantage of a naive scientist, and sold the test back to the taxpayers for 50 times what it actually cost.
(The New York Times just had a series on health care by Elisabeth Rosenthal which gave a dozen examples like this. Asthma inhalers cost about 20 to 50 times as much in the US as they do anywhere else. There are people who go to Europe once a year to buy a year's supply of drugs.)
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
Perspective
History of Medicine
Patenting the PKU Test — Federally Funded Research and Intellectual Property
Diane B. Paul, Ph.D., and Rachel A. Ankeny, Ph.D.
N Engl J Med 2013; 369:792-794
August 29, 2013
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1306755
In 1961, the U.S. Children's Bureau (USCB) embarked on a field trial of the test, requiring rapid production of kits to screen more than 400,000 babies. Guthrie, who had a cognitively impaired son and a niece with PKU, was involved in a parents' group, the National Association for Retarded Children (NARC). In consultation with the NARC, he decided that commercial production of test kits would be most efficient.
Guthrie favored the Ames Company, a division of Indiana-based Miles Laboratories, which marketed the earlier PKU tests. Although Guthrie assumed that the government would enter a contract with Ames, the company said it would manufacture the kits only if a patent were issued. In 1962, Guthrie filed a patent application in his own name and signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Miles, under which he would receive no royalties but 5% of net proceeds would be divided among the NARC Research Fund, the Association for Aid of Crippled Children, and the University of Buffalo Foundation (affiliated with the Buffalo Children's Hospital, Guthrie's employer). There was no pricing provision, an omission that Guthrie later deeply regretted.2
Miles, however, couldn't quickly produce test kits in the required quantity. So with financial support from the USCB, Guthrie rented a house in which to produce and assemble kits containing the materials necessary to perform and interpret 500 tests, at a cost of about $6 each. But when Guthrie visited the Ames Company in June 1963, he discovered that it planned to charge $262 for what were essentially the same kits. He was appalled, and when appeals to the company proved futile, he alerted USCB officials. They recommended that Miles not be granted exclusive commercial rights, in light of the large public expenditure on the test, the potential effect on states that planned to manufacture their own materials, and the steep price Miles planned to charge. Although the test had been developed with support from various organizations, the majority of the funds had come from the Public Health Service (PHS), which provided $251,700, and the USCB, which contributed $492,000 plus $250,000 through the states, chiefly for the trial. Given this federal funding, the surgeon general of the PHS determined that the invention belonged to the United States and abrogated the exclusive licensing agreement.
Right now, at this time, people and small business (and thus the economy) are losing a lot of money because unions are closing down the docks in major ports. Why? Because they want their uneducated box-pushers who are already earning 147k a year, to make even more. Did you read that? People who did not invest in any degree, dropped out of high school and got a job at the docks earning 147k a year, and are now demanding more. Demanding more by crippling the rest of the economy. Are you kidding me?
Yes, I read it. It's $83,000 a year, not $147,000. Stop bragging about how smart you are if you can't read a simple newspaper story, realize there are two sides to the story, and do some simple arithmetic.
You say it would be fair for them to make $35/h. Well, $35/h x 40h/wk x 50 wk/yr = $70,000/yr, which is pretty close to $83,000. So they merely drove a good bargain. You have a problem with people making good money?
There are reasons why they make so much money that you resent them.
First, they know how to negotiate. That's something you might learn from them.
When they negotiate, they don't want to match the race to the bottom. They know how much their employer is making and they want a piece of the action. They want job security and they want, in effect, something like an ownership interest in the company. That's not so strange. In Germany, unions have a seat on the board of directors of a company.
Second, they made a grand bargain decades ago. There was new technology that would make their job more labor-saving and efficient. Instead of obstructing it, they agreed to be forward-thinking and go along with it. However, if the company got the benefits of improved efficiency, they wanted the benefits of improved efficiency too. That's why they're making $83,000 a year. Here's a profitable business, where the owners are making millions a year. Why should they settle for $70,000 when their boss is rich and could easily pay $83,000 a year?
My landlord was making at least $300,000 a year, probably more. He inherited the building from his father, like most landlords. He worked hard, just like a longshoreman. Do I envy him? No. That's the free market.
If you live in a rental building, do you envy your landlord if he makes $300,000 a year? Do you envy your maintenance man, who fixes your boiler? Do you envy your auto mechanic? This is a rich country. Why do you want to drag everybody down to the bottom?
Well, you don't see it, but there's likely a 15 point IQ difference between the Soviet Jew and the wetback. Guess which one has more ability to do good.
There's also a 15 point IQ difference between a normal human being and a racist. Guess which one you are.
I haven't heard anything so naive since Mitt Romney told kids to borrow $1 million from their parents.
Thank you. I followed the legal route, filling in countless forms (each one with a high filing fee) and waited, and waited.
Stupid me!
I know a lot of immigrants, legal and otherwise.
Most of the "legal" immigrants fall into one of 3 categories: (1) Chinese who got in by lying and saying they were politically persecuted because they opposed the 1-child policy or because they were members of Falun Gong (2) Soviet Jews who got in by lying and saying they suffered anti-Semitism (even though some of them weren't even Jews) (3) Cubans who got in just because.
A lot of crooked immigration lawyers kept copies of standard affidavits for them to sign describing the persecution that never happened but was legally sufficient to get them in. The New York Times has published stories on this, but everybody knows what was going on.
So when I see a Soviet Jewish immigrant who got in because he lied, and a Mexican immigrant who got in because he climbed over a fence, I don't see any reason to favor one over the other.
In America, I meet a lot of people whose parents or grandparents survived in Europe because they climbed over fences and fled through fields running away from people who were trying to kill them. In the 19th century, there were illegal black fugitive slaves who got to a free country by climbing over fences and fleeing through fields.
So yeah, maybe they didn't follow the immigration laws. But I'm still sympathetic. It was people like them that made this country.
Maybe when you learn more American history and politics you'll understand it better.
The working class was making a living wage doing, for the most part, manual unskilled job (pull a lever on a converyor belt or making US flags.
I'd like to know where you got the idea that the working class was doing mostly manual unskilled jobs.
I lived in Brooklyn, where a major industry was manufacturing and repairing electric motors. That all disappeared with cheap (usually lower-quality) Japanese electric motors. We had a big electronics industry in New York. We had a big printing industry, which requires a lot of skilled workers. We had a big garment industry. We had airports with big maintenance shops. Most of the American airlines are now sending their planes out to mechanics in Latin America.
It wasn't because Americans were less efficient, or because foreign workers were willing to do the same job cheaper. German workers kept their industries and kept competitive while they paid their workers the same salaries Americans used to get. It was because the American businesses made a decision that treating their workers well wasn't a factor.
There are a wide range of jobs in an industrial factory, but most of them were skilled and high-paid. We lost them with free trade.
All the benefits of free trade went to the business owners, and none of the benefits went to the workers.
Corporate Greed and Unions are the exact same issue. Both want more than the market can bear, and eventually it all collapses.
Employees can negotiate as individuals with employers. Employees can also join together with other employees and negotiate as a group in a union. In both cases, they're getting what the market can bear, but as a group, they have a better negotiating position. As individuals, they get less.
A free market requires information. Unions are a way for workers to exchange information and get a better market: How much are you making, what's the minimum you'd be willing to take, what do you know about how much the boss earns, how much do you think we can get?
As Adam Smith said, whenever businessmen get together, even for social purposes, the talk turns to pricing. Workers should have a right to do the same.
BTW those same $10,000 IV antibiotics are a lot cheaper in Europe, because the national health systems negotiate with the drug companies.
This is an area where I can sympathize with these companies, we're asking them to fix problems that we largely have brought on to ourselves by popping a pill anytime we get a tickle in the back of our throats thinking we just got Ebola.
Those pills are prescribed by a doctor, and the drug companies were promoting those pills to the doctor, because the more pills they sell the more money they make. Drug company marketing is the problem.
Most people who espouse socialism as the solution to a given humanitarian problem always seem to ignore that socialism tends to grant the most favors to whoever is best connected (read: best friends with) the resident politicians
This is a total fantasy. Paul Krugman said that conservatives read Fredrich Hayek's predictions about what government services would be like, they assume they're true, and they don't look at the actual facts in the real world which contradict Hayek.
The U.K. has a socialist health care system. I'd like you to tell me where anyone got a favor from the socialist U.K. health care system because he was connected with the politicians.
Sweden has a socialist health care system, perhaps the best health care system in the world. I challenge you to show me a Swede who needed health care and didn't get it.
First, the 19th century is the years between 1800 and 1899. In the 19th century, they had no effective medicine. They were still bloodletting. They could amputate limbs, although the patients often died of infection. I think you mean the 20th century, which is the years between 1900 and 1999. We are now in the 21st century.
Second, America never had a cheap, accessible free market capitalist system. I don't know where you get your ideas from. I live here, I work in the health care system, and I know the history and problems with the American health care system.
At the beginning of the 20th century, doctors couldn't do much. If you were shot in the leg, and the leg was infected, they could cut it off, and your chance of survival would go up from zero to maybe 50%. If you had heart disease, they couldn't do much to extend your life. If you had cancer they could give you morphine.
Things were going along like that without much progress until WWII, where the U.S. government (not free market capitalism) systematically studied the problems and came up with innovative new ways of handling surgery. Penicillin (from Alexander Flemming in England, an academic researcher) was a big breakthrough. Adriamycin, the first cancer drug, was discovered on -- guess where -- the Adriatic sea, by Italians.
The U.S. was a center of tremendous innovation after WWII, not because of free market capitalism, but because the U.S. government funded academic researchers, who provided a lot of the basic research that the private drug companies took and made money out of. The area with the most dramatic progress was heart disease, and much of the important research was done by the U.S. government's Veterans Affairs hospitals.
After WWII, there were private doctors, but people who couldn't afford their prices went to government hospitals, which were scattered around the country. What reason would capitalist doctors have to treat people who can't afford to pay a lot of money? By the 1980s, when doctors could finally do something useful, they got very expensive. People who can't afford health care are left to die http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...
Yeah, I was just talking to an Italian girl who broke her wrist in the U.S. An American hospital charged her $1,000 for an x-ray that would have cost $20 in Italy.
She said what the Europeans always say about American medical prices: You have to be kidding.
The New York Times had a series on American health care by Elisabeth Rosenthal. A guy went to France to get a year's supply of asthma inhalers, and the saving paid for the cost of his trip.
It's true about people getting rejected from hospitals because they can't pay. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...
Oddly enough Cuba is actually a player in biotech, and has invented a treatment for malaria amongst other things.
That's right. Cuban researchers went to Sweden for training.
The explanation I heard was that phages were developed at about the same time as antibiotics, and antibiotics were cheaper and simpler.
But some doctors have suggested that phages were a good idea that should be developed today.
Now that there's a lot of new technology for growing biological products, phages may be practical again.
As a point of fact, Cuban scientists have developed a new meningitis vaccine, and a new cancer drug. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Communist China developed artemisinin, a new class of malaria drug.
American capitalism in the 19th century created snake oil drugs that did more harm than good. You may be thinking of the 20th century. After a few disasters, we created the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to regulate the drug companies.
The USSR moved from socialism to capitalism. The results make you wonder whether they would have been better off under socialism. Male life expectancy immediately dropped by 10 years. The USSR was a world-class scientific power, that put the first man in space, discovered new trans-uranium elements, and developed urokinase, the first drug of the class that includes tissue plasminogen activator.
The reason you think capitalism is so great is that you don't have to live here.
We had not-for-profit pharmaceutical firms. The New York City Department of Health developed its own vaccines. Even today, the Centers for Disease Control develops its own drugs for rare diseases.
There was an article in the New England Journal of Medicine about the guy who developed the PKU test for babies. He was working in an academic medical center. They contracted the manufacturing and marketing to a private company, because they were just academics and they didn't know how to sell a product in the real world.
Then the private company had startup problems and couldn't deliver the test kids in time. So the doctor started assembling them in his (FDA-approved) basement. He was charging about $5 a kit.
Then the private company fixed their problems and started manufacturing the kits themselves. They charged about $100 a kit.
Moral: The private market isn't as great as they think they are.
Or as that notorious socialist Adam Smith said, those who benefit most from society should pay a disproportionate share of the costs of running society.
Actually teachers in developing countries don't cost much money. In a country with a median income of $500 a year, you can hire pretty good teachers for $1,000 a year.
I don't know if you could supply a class with laptops for $1,000.
Has this ever worked before? Has anyone ever shown that it's possible for children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic? And have they published their results in peer-reviewed journals?
I thought that most of the research found that computers weren't too useful in teaching basic reading, writing and arithmetic, even when students had assistance.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10...
Inflating the Software Report Card
By TRIP GABRIEL and MATT RICHTEL
October 8, 2011
(United States Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse review of 10 major software products for teaching algebra and elementary and middle school math and reading found that 9 “did not have statistically significant effects on test scores.”)
those signs don't have the force of law in many states in any case, so many people simply ignore them.
I understand the general mindset that leads towards gun control. But given that guns are out there anyway, under the current legal regime, how are "gun free zones" doing anything helpful at all?
Actually, we never answered your (reasonable) question.
If I go into a bar in Texas or Colorado (which I did), I would feel more comfortable knowing that the good law-abiding guys aren't taking their guns inside. I don't even want the good guys to have guns when they get drunk and get into fights.
If I were running the University of Colorado health services department, I would know that a gun owner with a gun is more likely to use it for suicide than for self-defense.
If they want to have a rifle and hunting club, or ROTC, and keep their firearms locked up until they're used under supervision, fine. I've gone hunting myself.
But I know that suicide is a high risk for college students, and the presence of a gun makes a suicide more successful.