More than speculation. You can look it up in the American Journal of Public Health. That's pretty much the conclusion of all the researchers in the field.
In New York City around 1985, half the AIDS cases were gay men, and the other half were IV drug users. The public health people were fighting with the Giuliani administration (mayor) and the Pataki administration (governor).
This was nothing new. It was well-known that many infections were spread by IVDUs re-using needles. Hepatitis C probably caused more deaths than AIDS. And yet these idiots kept making it illegal to possess clean needles. They used to say, "The risk of dirty needles will discourage people from using IV drugs." Yeah, think that one out for a second. That was like, "If people could get safe abortions, it would promote immorality."
Pataki claimed he couldn't support clean needles until his health commissioner, Barbara DeBuono, had reviewed the issue. DeBuono said she hadn't gotten around to reading the literature. DeBono finally lost her job when she got caught shoplifting. http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-10-08/news/pataki-s-sick-department-of-health/
Another reason why donors can't be found is that during the genetic construction of HLA DNA, there is so much diversity that, if a sibling isn't available, your chances of finding a match are remote.
The funny thing is that in order to get into the Statute of Liberty, you have to wait on line for an airport-style search.
I used to work near Battery Park, and I often used to go to the fort, where I'd sit in one of the windows and look at the Statue of Liberty. It was one of my favorite spots in New York City.
Then they installed that security line and spoiled my view.
(I would have told a joke here if I wasn't worried about being misunderstood and arrested by the FBI.)
The lefties thought that if everyone had a college education it would make us all richer.
Don't blame the lefties for that one. I remember reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page during the 1970s, and their solution for all the problems of poverty was that anybody in this country could get a college degree if he worked hard enough, and a college degree was the ticket out of poverty. No need for the federal government to order desegregation, they said. If the negroes want good jobs, all they have to do is go to college. (Like Condi Rice, playing Chopin for success.)
The idea that education solves all problems is a popular one and appealed to liberals and conservatives alike.
To people on the left (not liberals), education was desirable but education alone wouldn't solve the fundamental problem of an unequal, unjust society.
Once again good intentions prove no substitute for understanding what the heck is going on.
When I was a schoolboy we were taught to take pride in the fact that we were and always had been a melting pot. Somehow we've run off the rails since then.
"America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming... Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians - into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American."
If you read the play, you'll see that he was talking about what became a popular idea of assimilation, while preserving some of the native culture. Don't worry, we're not going to take your Christmas trees away.
Emma Lazarus wrote her poem in a climate of socialism. She was a supporter of the immigrant poor. The Latin Times is correct to identify Zuckerberg's ad as a shameless distortion and exploitation of Lazarus' poem. He's using her name to bring about exactly the opposite of what she fought for. She wanted to bring the poor and desperate to America as a place of refuge. Zuckerberg wants desirable skilled labor because they'll work cheaper for him and he can make money out of them. But what do you expect from a billionaire?
"The New Colossus"
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
The system of prepaid cards with fees is not the perfect solution for poor workers. But it is better than the old system of paying them with checks.
The old system before that was paying in cash. In New York State, they also had an option where the employer could pay in cash, and the employee could go to a nearby bank (usually in the same building) and cash his check there, without a fee.
I don't see anything wrong with paying employees by prepaid cards, if they can cash the cards with no effort in a form they prefer. But according to the NYT article, that's not the way they do it.
You are correct about the minimum balance requirements for checking accounts in banks. You are also correct about the check cashing services.
Another example of parents who studied their own child's genetic disease was Leslie and Scott Gordon, whose son Sam had Hutchinson–Gilford progeria. They were both physicians. They organized a major research project, found the gene and the mechanism, and identified some plausible therapeutics, including a clinical trial of the farnesyltransferase inhibitor lonafarnib. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progeriahttp://www.progeriaresearch.org/
Needless to say, it was a dramatic story that got a lot of news coverage that you can find on Google.
The Hollywood movie would end with a cure, but unfortunately that didn't happen. These are the kind of scientific breakthroughs that would make a scientist's career, but even after this combination of talent, funding, hard work and luck, the only clinical accomplishment they have now is a drug with a small, statistically significant improvement. OTOH there are a few diseases that were inevitably fatal 20 years ago, that now have a long-term treatment that amounts to a cure. I hope it works out for them.
According to Science: "Gordon's foundation set up a cell and tissue bank, launched a clinical and research database, and gave out seed grants for research. The foundation successfully lobbied for the disease to be included in the Children's Health Act of 2000, getting the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to come up with a plan for progeria research. A 2001 workshop led to the creation of a genetics consortium, whose members went on to discover the gene responsible for the disease."
Since 4 years of school are expensive enough here, I think we'll stick with that.
The other alternative is to teach engineers how to learn new things after graduation as they come up.
We're supposed to be doing anyway. That's one of the benefits of liberal arts and humanities courses.
I wouldn't want engineers to graduate without taking at least one good art course. Ever hear of the Bauhaus? One of the best engineering books I ever read was Mechanization Takes Command, by Siegfried Gideon -- an art historian.
I'm talking about American schools. One of the most significant differences is that we don't have a national curriculum. Every state can create its own curriculum, and individual school systems have a lot of freedom within that curriculum. Texas can try to eliminate evolution from the curriculum. We will never "fix" the high schools by convincing them all to follow a common curriculum, including humanities. It would be as difficult as getting everyone in the UK to speak with the same accent.
At one time we were close to a universal college curriculum, when a lot of colleges leaned heavily on the great books of the Western world, or the Western canon, or whatever you want to call it. Even the universities with good engineering schools required all their students to take a freshman humanities course. If it comes at the expense of a course on tensor analysis, so be it. There are certain fundamentals that everyone, including engineers, should have, and many American freshmen don't have it. If you don't know how to frame a logical debate, persuade people, and write a well-organized scientific paper, you're not going to be a very effective engineer.
I'm telling you what I was taught in my humanities class. I was there. We were talking about what you can do in the humanities today.
I was answering the parent's claim,
In science, 1 person can disagree with 1,000,000 people and be right. And be proven right. And have his name go down there after as the guy that was right when everyone else told him he was wrong.
Can you do that in the humanities? Nope. Being right or wrong is mostly a popularity contest. Its politics.
Perhaps if you took a Freshman English class you'd learn how to read and understand the text of a paragraph.
Nobody taught me that the majority of the population should listen to the advice of the "intellectuals." I didn't write anything like that. They taught me that people should listen to all sides and decide for themselves. And they also taught me that people in a minority view are often right. That's what the Apology of Socrates was about. Go read it.
I realize there are good humanities classes and bad humanities classes, like everything else in the world, but you don't have any idea of what humanities is all about.
In my freshman humanities class, the first thing they gave us to read was the Apology of Socrates. Out of respect for the short attention span of people today, I'll refer you to the Wikipedia article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apology_Of_Socrates
Bottom line: Socrates disagreed with most of the other citizens of Athens. He was right. They were wrong.
Where your analysis falls down is most easily seen in the world of drug development. Unless a company can make a profit sufficient at least to cover its research costs many simply refuse to do the research at all. Its not petulant behavior of picking up their marbles and going home, its a simple fact of "They can't afford it".
Unless or until you transfer ALL research into the hands of tax payer funded entities (universities) there appears no other common mechanism to induce people to pay for billions in research with no sure way to pay for it in the end.
The best argument against that is that some of the most important drugs weren't patented.
Alexander Flemming didn't patent penicillin. He generously shared it during the war with the Americans, who took process patents on their contributions so they could charge the original inventors royalties.
Milstein and Kohler invented monoclonal antibodies. Can't get much more innovative and significant than that. They didn't bother to patent them either. In the spirit of scientific collaboration, they generously shared their work with Hilary Koprowski, who -- fool me twice -- took out his own patent. http://www.whatisbiotechnology.org/exhibitions/milstein/patents Those Americans!
Most of the original, creative drug research in the US is done first in academic laboratories, funded by the National Institutes of Health. Thanks to the Bayh–Dole Act, these patents are now owned by the inventor, who usually sells his rights to a private company.
One contribution of the private pharmaceutical companies, scaling up a drug from the research bench to pilot plant and industrial production, is not trivial, and it's often creative, but it's mostly textbook chemical engineering that the Indian pharmaceutical companies have proven themselves to be capable of doing. The New York City health department developed its own vaccines.
Another contribution of the private pharmaceutical companies is the job of bringing drugs through phase I, II and III clinical trials, which establishes their dose, efficacy and safety. However, there are several government agencies, notably the Veterans Affairs agency, which has run some of the best-designed and most important clinical trials of all. In the UK, the government medical research agencies also ran important trials.
The pharmaceutical companies, and particularly their lobby PhRMA, claim that it costs $300 million to bring a drug to market. This is not based on actual company data, since the drug companies never gave researchers access to their internal data, but on inferences by clever economists. If you trace that number to its source, it turns out to be what is known in the industry as a scientific wild-ass guess. Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, has written several articles and books, which you can find with a Google search, arguing for much lower figures.
I've been to medical conferences. Yes, if you're going to spend $10 million on a product launch party at ASCO, and if you're going to invite doctors to football games and marketing dinners at the Waldorf Astoria, and if you're going to pay your high-prescribing "thought leaders" millions in consulting fees, and run multi-million dollar direct-to-consumer TV and print campaigns to "ask your doctor" about prescription drugs, those marketing costs can add up. But outside the US they don't have marketing costs like that.
The private pharmaceutical companies do turn out some important drugs, and I don't want to kill a goose that lays even an occasional, high-priced golden egg. I don't think it would be a good idea to nationalize Merck and send its executives to the rice paddies for re-education. (It might be a good idea for URL Pharma.) But if these companies keep selling their new drugs, based on university research, for $20,000 or $100,000 a year, and it starts bankrupting individuals a
After Gorbachev took office, somebody here started translating the entire day's Pravda into English, and I was able to read it. What I saw looked pretty good. They did feature stories that looked like the New York Times written by Dostoyevsky. It certainly compared well to the Wall Street Journal editorial page. They had a job to do, which was to figure out how to reform the Soviet Union, and they did a pretty good job. Unfortunately external forces intervened.
I know people who were born in the Soviet Union, and I know people who worked as newspaper correspondents in the Soviet Union, so I am well aware that they were under censorship and couldn't say certain things. I realize that the U.S. press is freer in many ways that the press in most other parts of the world.
In the Soviet Union, you were not allowed to criticize socialism. In the U.S., you were allowed to criticize socialism. Well, yeah. That's not freedom.The press in the U.S. would be a lot freer if they were able to criticize capitalism. If you were to study the history of the press in the U.S. over the last century, you'd see that a lot of Americans went to jail for publishing articles that were critical of capitalism. Look up the Supreme Court case of Dennis v. United States. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_v._United_States In the Soviet Union you go to jail for criticizing the Soviet Union. In the U.S. you go to jail for criticizing the U.S. That's freedom?
Look at the coverage of health care in the runup to Obama's health care reform. Try to find an article about single payer health care in the New York Times. There wasn't one. That was corporate censorship on behalf of powerful interest groups. Maybe the freedom of the press here looks pretty good to you. It doesn't look that good to me.
Interestingly, when American establishment journalists criticized the Soviet press, they used to seize on the very problems that we had in our own press and argued that in the Soviet Union, those problems were worse. In America journalists get fired for criticizing the government? Well, in the Soviet Union journalists go to jail for criticizing the government. So they're worse.
We've had this discussion here of the U.S. vs. the Soviet Union all during the cold war. I think most Americans were better off in the U.S. But if you just look at the Jim Crow laws, black Americans were under so much repression here that many of them would have been better off in the Soviet Union.
Now this terrorism business has become an excuse for taking away freedoms that had been settled issues, like the Fourth Amendment right to be free of government spying, which is what Snowden is all about. It used to be that the government couldn't read my mail without a court order. Now they can read my email whenever they want. They can track my cell phone. What was it again that was so bad about East Germany?
I'm an American. I'm not an uncritical booster of my political system. It's not like being a football fan. We have lots of problems here, we don't seem to be solving them, and if we don't solve them, we won't be the economic leader of the world for many more years. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/19/decline-fall-american-society-unravelled Working class people can't even afford to get a college education any more, which is not a complaint I ever heard by people from the Soviet Union.
I knew people who went down to participate in the Civil Rights movement in the South during the 1960s. Many of them also participated in the movement against the war in Vietnam. I went on a couple of demonstrations with them myself.
I never heard of an official rule book on civil disobedience. They did what they thought was effective. For Ghandi and MLK, doing things publicly and getting arrested worked. In other situations they didn't.
A lot of people didn't think it would do any good to refuse to be drafted, and go to jail for 10 years. I don't either. They went to Canada instead.
Daniel Ellsburg did a lot to end the Vietnam war. He did it secretly and didn't want to get arrested. If he were being prosecuted under today's rules, he might have gone to jail for 10 or 20 years. What's the point of that? Richard Nixon didn't go to jail.
Jail is something the government does to make you less effective. I'd rather be effective. There were a few moments in history when you could get valuable publicity for your cause by going to jail. Today isn't one of those moments.
If you want to engage in civil disobedience, reveal your lawbreaking and go to jail, be my guest. Other people want to fight injustice and stay out of jail. That's their decision.
For example up until about 1968 black people were still being killed for trying to vote in the South, and they're still not doing that well. If you were black, you'd be a lot better off in the Communist bloc in the 1970s.
Really, a black person would show up to vote in 1968 and federal secret police would shove them in the back of a van and take them to a secret prison, or to an execution site where they would put a bullet in the back of their head without a trial?
Slashdot Mirror
Cash?
More than speculation. You can look it up in the American Journal of Public Health. That's pretty much the conclusion of all the researchers in the field.
In New York City around 1985, half the AIDS cases were gay men, and the other half were IV drug users. The public health people were fighting with the Giuliani administration (mayor) and the Pataki administration (governor).
This was nothing new. It was well-known that many infections were spread by IVDUs re-using needles. Hepatitis C probably caused more deaths than AIDS. And yet these idiots kept making it illegal to possess clean needles. They used to say, "The risk of dirty needles will discourage people from using IV drugs." Yeah, think that one out for a second. That was like, "If people could get safe abortions, it would promote immorality."
Pataki claimed he couldn't support clean needles until his health commissioner, Barbara DeBuono, had reviewed the issue. DeBuono said she hadn't gotten around to reading the literature. DeBono finally lost her job when she got caught shoplifting. http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-10-08/news/pataki-s-sick-department-of-health/
Another reason why donors can't be found is that during the genetic construction of HLA DNA, there is so much diversity that, if a sibling isn't available, your chances of finding a match are remote.
You need to learn more history.
Look up J. Edgar Hoover.
Look up the Anarchist Exclusion Act.
Look up the Alien and Sedition Act.
The funny thing is that in order to get into the Statute of Liberty, you have to wait on line for an airport-style search.
I used to work near Battery Park, and I often used to go to the fort, where I'd sit in one of the windows and look at the Statue of Liberty. It was one of my favorite spots in New York City.
Then they installed that security line and spoiled my view.
(I would have told a joke here if I wasn't worried about being misunderstood and arrested by the FBI.)
All it would take is another activist generation.
Could you wake them up?
That makes as much sense as pledging allegiance to a flag.
The lefties thought that if everyone had a college education it would make us all richer.
Don't blame the lefties for that one. I remember reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page during the 1970s, and their solution for all the problems of poverty was that anybody in this country could get a college degree if he worked hard enough, and a college degree was the ticket out of poverty. No need for the federal government to order desegregation, they said. If the negroes want good jobs, all they have to do is go to college. (Like Condi Rice, playing Chopin for success.)
The idea that education solves all problems is a popular one and appealed to liberals and conservatives alike.
To people on the left (not liberals), education was desirable but education alone wouldn't solve the fundamental problem of an unequal, unjust society.
Once again good intentions prove no substitute for understanding what the heck is going on.
You're right about that one.
When I was a schoolboy we were taught to take pride in the fact that we were and always had been a melting pot. Somehow we've run off the rails since then.
The idea of a melting pot was first popularized in the play, The Melting Pot (1908) by Israel Zangwill.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Melting_Pot_(play) The famous line is:
"America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming... Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians - into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American."
If you read the play, you'll see that he was talking about what became a popular idea of assimilation, while preserving some of the native culture. Don't worry, we're not going to take your Christmas trees away.
Emma Lazarus wrote her poem in a climate of socialism. She was a supporter of the immigrant poor.
The Latin Times is correct to identify Zuckerberg's ad as a shameless distortion and exploitation of Lazarus' poem. He's using her name to bring about exactly the opposite of what she fought for. She wanted to bring the poor and desperate to America as a place of refuge. Zuckerberg wants desirable skilled labor because they'll work cheaper for him and he can make money out of them. But what do you expect from a billionaire?
"The New Colossus"
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Emma Lazarus, 1883
The system of prepaid cards with fees is not the perfect solution for poor workers. But it is better than the old system of paying them with checks.
The old system before that was paying in cash. In New York State, they also had an option where the employer could pay in cash, and the employee could go to a nearby bank (usually in the same building) and cash his check there, without a fee.
I don't see anything wrong with paying employees by prepaid cards, if they can cash the cards with no effort in a form they prefer. But according to the NYT article, that's not the way they do it.
You are correct about the minimum balance requirements for checking accounts in banks. You are also correct about the check cashing services.
Yes, just look at how well things are working in --
That's funny. I can't think of a single country in the world that is run according to libertarian principles.
"Democrat Party" is generally accepted to be derogatory, by the people who use it and the Democrats themselves. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/08/07/060807ta_talk_hertzberg I remember that Joe McCarthy used it.
The original article said "nearly a decade."
This is journalism. You want fact-checking. That's a different department.*
_____
*And they all got laid off.
Another example of parents who studied their own child's genetic disease was Leslie and Scott Gordon, whose son Sam had Hutchinson–Gilford progeria. They were both physicians. They organized a major research project, found the gene and the mechanism, and identified some plausible therapeutics, including a clinical trial of the farnesyltransferase inhibitor lonafarnib. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progeria http://www.progeriaresearch.org/
Needless to say, it was a dramatic story that got a lot of news coverage that you can find on Google.
The Hollywood movie would end with a cure, but unfortunately that didn't happen. These are the kind of scientific breakthroughs that would make a scientist's career, but even after this combination of talent, funding, hard work and luck, the only clinical accomplishment they have now is a drug with a small, statistically significant improvement. OTOH there are a few diseases that were inevitably fatal 20 years ago, that now have a long-term treatment that amounts to a cure. I hope it works out for them.
According to Science: "Gordon's foundation set up a cell and tissue bank, launched a clinical and research database, and gave out seed grants for research. The foundation successfully lobbied for the disease to be included in the Children's Health Act of 2000, getting the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to come up with a plan for progeria research. A 2001 workshop led to the creation of a genetics consortium, whose members went on to discover the gene responsible for the disease."
Since 4 years of school are expensive enough here, I think we'll stick with that.
The other alternative is to teach engineers how to learn new things after graduation as they come up.
We're supposed to be doing anyway. That's one of the benefits of liberal arts and humanities courses.
I wouldn't want engineers to graduate without taking at least one good art course. Ever hear of the Bauhaus? One of the best engineering books I ever read was Mechanization Takes Command, by Siegfried Gideon -- an art historian.
I'm talking about American schools. One of the most significant differences is that we don't have a national curriculum. Every state can create its own curriculum, and individual school systems have a lot of freedom within that curriculum. Texas can try to eliminate evolution from the curriculum. We will never "fix" the high schools by convincing them all to follow a common curriculum, including humanities. It would be as difficult as getting everyone in the UK to speak with the same accent.
At one time we were close to a universal college curriculum, when a lot of colleges leaned heavily on the great books of the Western world, or the Western canon, or whatever you want to call it. Even the universities with good engineering schools required all their students to take a freshman humanities course. If it comes at the expense of a course on tensor analysis, so be it. There are certain fundamentals that everyone, including engineers, should have, and many American freshmen don't have it. If you don't know how to frame a logical debate, persuade people, and write a well-organized scientific paper, you're not going to be a very effective engineer.
I'm telling you what I was taught in my humanities class. I was there. We were talking about what you can do in the humanities today.
I was answering the parent's claim,
In science, 1 person can disagree with 1,000,000 people and be right. And be proven right. And have his name go down there after as the guy that was right when everyone else told him he was wrong.
Can you do that in the humanities? Nope. Being right or wrong is mostly a popularity contest. Its politics.
Obviously, he knows nothing about humanities.
Perhaps if you took a Freshman English class you'd learn how to read and understand the text of a paragraph.
Nobody taught me that the majority of the population should listen to the advice of the "intellectuals." I didn't write anything like that. They taught me that people should listen to all sides and decide for themselves. And they also taught me that people in a minority view are often right. That's what the Apology of Socrates was about. Go read it.
Did you ever take a humanities class?
I realize there are good humanities classes and bad humanities classes, like everything else in the world, but you don't have any idea of what humanities is all about.
In my freshman humanities class, the first thing they gave us to read was the Apology of Socrates. Out of respect for the short attention span of people today, I'll refer you to the Wikipedia article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apology_Of_Socrates
Bottom line: Socrates disagreed with most of the other citizens of Athens. He was right. They were wrong.
I've found that professional societies are very useful for making contacts, bypassing HR.
I went to my local Linux UG a few times and they were always trading jobs.
The professional society depends on your skill set. You go there and start talking tech.
One of the broadest organizations would be IEEE. What's another one?
I don't know. Maybe other people have different experiences.
Have other people used professional societies to network and get jobs?
Where your analysis falls down is most easily seen in the world of drug development. Unless a company can make a profit sufficient at least to cover its research costs many simply refuse to do the research at all. Its not petulant behavior of picking up their marbles and going home, its a simple fact of "They can't afford it".
Unless or until you transfer ALL research into the hands of tax payer funded entities (universities) there appears no other common mechanism to induce people to pay for billions in research with no sure way to pay for it in the end.
The best argument against that is that some of the most important drugs weren't patented.
Alexander Flemming didn't patent penicillin. He generously shared it during the war with the Americans, who took process patents on their contributions so they could charge the original inventors royalties.
Milstein and Kohler invented monoclonal antibodies. Can't get much more innovative and significant than that. They didn't bother to patent them either. In the spirit of scientific collaboration, they generously shared their work with Hilary Koprowski, who -- fool me twice -- took out his own patent. http://www.whatisbiotechnology.org/exhibitions/milstein/patents Those Americans!
Most of the original, creative drug research in the US is done first in academic laboratories, funded by the National Institutes of Health. Thanks to the Bayh–Dole Act, these patents are now owned by the inventor, who usually sells his rights to a private company.
One contribution of the private pharmaceutical companies, scaling up a drug from the research bench to pilot plant and industrial production, is not trivial, and it's often creative, but it's mostly textbook chemical engineering that the Indian pharmaceutical companies have proven themselves to be capable of doing. The New York City health department developed its own vaccines.
Another contribution of the private pharmaceutical companies is the job of bringing drugs through phase I, II and III clinical trials, which establishes their dose, efficacy and safety. However, there are several government agencies, notably the Veterans Affairs agency, which has run some of the best-designed and most important clinical trials of all. In the UK, the government medical research agencies also ran important trials.
The pharmaceutical companies, and particularly their lobby PhRMA, claim that it costs $300 million to bring a drug to market. This is not based on actual company data, since the drug companies never gave researchers access to their internal data, but on inferences by clever economists. If you trace that number to its source, it turns out to be what is known in the industry as a scientific wild-ass guess. Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, has written several articles and books, which you can find with a Google search, arguing for much lower figures.
I've been to medical conferences. Yes, if you're going to spend $10 million on a product launch party at ASCO, and if you're going to invite doctors to football games and marketing dinners at the Waldorf Astoria, and if you're going to pay your high-prescribing "thought leaders" millions in consulting fees, and run multi-million dollar direct-to-consumer TV and print campaigns to "ask your doctor" about prescription drugs, those marketing costs can add up. But outside the US they don't have marketing costs like that.
The private pharmaceutical companies do turn out some important drugs, and I don't want to kill a goose that lays even an occasional, high-priced golden egg. I don't think it would be a good idea to nationalize Merck and send its executives to the rice paddies for re-education. (It might be a good idea for URL Pharma.) But if these companies keep selling their new drugs, based on university research, for $20,000 or $100,000 a year, and it starts bankrupting individuals a
After Gorbachev took office, somebody here started translating the entire day's Pravda into English, and I was able to read it. What I saw looked pretty good. They did feature stories that looked like the New York Times written by Dostoyevsky. It certainly compared well to the Wall Street Journal editorial page. They had a job to do, which was to figure out how to reform the Soviet Union, and they did a pretty good job. Unfortunately external forces intervened.
I know people who were born in the Soviet Union, and I know people who worked as newspaper correspondents in the Soviet Union, so I am well aware that they were under censorship and couldn't say certain things. I realize that the U.S. press is freer in many ways that the press in most other parts of the world.
In the Soviet Union, you were not allowed to criticize socialism. In the U.S., you were allowed to criticize socialism. Well, yeah. That's not freedom.The press in the U.S. would be a lot freer if they were able to criticize capitalism. If you were to study the history of the press in the U.S. over the last century, you'd see that a lot of Americans went to jail for publishing articles that were critical of capitalism. Look up the Supreme Court case of Dennis v. United States. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_v._United_States In the Soviet Union you go to jail for criticizing the Soviet Union. In the U.S. you go to jail for criticizing the U.S. That's freedom?
Look at the coverage of health care in the runup to Obama's health care reform. Try to find an article about single payer health care in the New York Times. There wasn't one. That was corporate censorship on behalf of powerful interest groups. Maybe the freedom of the press here looks pretty good to you. It doesn't look that good to me.
Interestingly, when American establishment journalists criticized the Soviet press, they used to seize on the very problems that we had in our own press and argued that in the Soviet Union, those problems were worse. In America journalists get fired for criticizing the government? Well, in the Soviet Union journalists go to jail for criticizing the government. So they're worse.
We've had this discussion here of the U.S. vs. the Soviet Union all during the cold war. I think most Americans were better off in the U.S. But if you just look at the Jim Crow laws, black Americans were under so much repression here that many of them would have been better off in the Soviet Union.
Now this terrorism business has become an excuse for taking away freedoms that had been settled issues, like the Fourth Amendment right to be free of government spying, which is what Snowden is all about. It used to be that the government couldn't read my mail without a court order. Now they can read my email whenever they want. They can track my cell phone. What was it again that was so bad about East Germany?
I'm an American. I'm not an uncritical booster of my political system. It's not like being a football fan. We have lots of problems here, we don't seem to be solving them, and if we don't solve them, we won't be the economic leader of the world for many more years.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/19/decline-fall-american-society-unravelled
Working class people can't even afford to get a college education any more, which is not a complaint I ever heard by people from the Soviet Union.
I knew people who went down to participate in the Civil Rights movement in the South during the 1960s. Many of them also participated in the movement against the war in Vietnam. I went on a couple of demonstrations with them myself.
I never heard of an official rule book on civil disobedience. They did what they thought was effective. For Ghandi and MLK, doing things publicly and getting arrested worked. In other situations they didn't.
A lot of people didn't think it would do any good to refuse to be drafted, and go to jail for 10 years. I don't either. They went to Canada instead.
Daniel Ellsburg did a lot to end the Vietnam war. He did it secretly and didn't want to get arrested. If he were being prosecuted under today's rules, he might have gone to jail for 10 or 20 years. What's the point of that? Richard Nixon didn't go to jail.
Jail is something the government does to make you less effective. I'd rather be effective. There were a few moments in history when you could get valuable publicity for your cause by going to jail. Today isn't one of those moments.
If you want to engage in civil disobedience, reveal your lawbreaking and go to jail, be my guest. Other people want to fight injustice and stay out of jail. That's their decision.
For example up until about 1968 black people were still being killed for trying to vote in the South, and they're still not doing that well. If you were black, you'd be a lot better off in the Communist bloc in the 1970s.
Really, a black person would show up to vote in 1968 and federal secret police would shove them in the back of a van and take them to a secret prison, or to an execution site where they would put a bullet in the back of their head without a trial?
Yes, that happened quite a bit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_civil_rights_workers'_murders
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton
How do you get 300 million people in the US aren't free?
Aside from the 30 million black people, that's 270 million people who are free. Who else do you subtract?