They don't do patents? Look up the number of Chinese patents sometime, you'll be surprised. China is discovering the value of IPR now quite rationally -- as its own companies start generating useful, monetizable IPR.
Price differentiation occurs in everything -- cars, cosmetics, DVDs, software. Did you know Revlon knockoff cosmetics are 10-15x cheaper in India/China than in the US? Why don't you start a little import business and sell those in the US or Europe? Oh wait, you'd have the legal system come down on you like a ton of bricks.
The only reason Brazil is getting away with this is because it's the government doing it. Which basically makes it state-sponsored IP-scoffing. The only silver lining in all of this is that poor Brazilian patients will benefit-- but in doing so, the government has dealt a blow to Brazil's future because R&D-intensive industries will think long and hard about investing there. I don't think anyone can object to the idea of helping poor Brazilians, the point is that the countermeasures used (like the RIAA's "we'll sue you all" countermeasures) are not useful.
An example of a country doing it right is India, ironically -- they've routinely copied drug formulas before, but they've also worked with drug companies to modernize its IP law, esp with respect to medicines. This is helping India now because its homegrown drug companies are now able to create new formulations and cheaper drug making processes -- thus contributing to a nascent pharmaceutical industry in India. That's how you do it, not by the brute force approach the.br government seems to like.*
*Is this "we'll take it from you" approach something that a lot of quasi-socialist/authoritarian countries go through? Russia, Venezuela, India (grabbed all of IBM's assets in the 70s and told them to f-ck off). We all know how well that turned out.
> Most free market economist are against patents as they are detrimental to a free market
Bullshit. Most *real* economists know that patents are a temporary (20 year) grant of monopoly to encourage production (and in return divulge details about one's invention). Methinks these 'economists' you quote are paid hacks are Brazil's state universities.
I'm not sure if you understand the concept of "market." In this case the market, being the Brazilian government since they are the only organization wealthy enough to purchase the drug and are actually interested, determined the price. The price they determined was the exact cost of production.
After that definition of 'market', I'm sure any school would grant you a degree of BS in Economics in a heartbeat.
Patents get extended by corrupt politicans? Since when? (Hint: you're thinking about copyright)
Don't let your hatred of the RIAA/MPAA (and, I might add, silly software patents) blind you to the good patents actually do.
> Indeed. If you had read the article, you would know that they have, and failed.
I did read the article, and remain unconvinced that the Brazilians actually wanted to make a deal, especially given that they got the knockoff drugs for 20c less. This is a bit like negotiating over Windows pricing with Microsoft saying that one can get a pirated CD for $2.
Sorry for the double reply, but since I didn't say this in my other reply to you --
It's great you're interested in this, and might I suggest working with some folk in the Southwest (say New Mexico?) and doing a "pilot" there. Maybe some university would be interested?
And obviously all the tinpot dictators that run the charming little countries there are going to fall in line with this plan because--? they're in awe of your brain?
The point is (again) that knowledge (although crucial) itself counts for very little. The societies and systems they are embedded in counts for a lot. If it weren't so, China would be the world's top technological superpower now (having avoided the dark ages). Hell, the Greeks would still be top dog in Europe.
The only reason why living in the West we think knowledge is super-important is because our societies have organized themselves into very efficient competitive systems where the only missing ingredient is the knowledge of how to do something. Find it (a cool game, a new drug) and a whole host of people and governments will help you spread that knowledge and get rich. However, it doesn't work that way everywhere.
Another example: I don't know if you've read Allen Steele's _Coyote_ (great book, btw). There, a bunch of ragtag scientists and intellectuals steal a repressive government's only starship and take it to a habitable planet far, far away. How useful is all of Earth knowledge to them? Hint: a few generations later, they're still clad in handmade cloth and skins (think old West) because they haven't been able to make synthetic yarn yet. Knowledge does not equal capability.
Looking at it from Brazil's POV, 45c from India vs 65c from a reluctant Merck -- I can see why they thought 65c was a good deal. Although as I mentioned in another post, it seems it was more of a "fulfil our demands or we do bad things to you" than a negotiation. And yes, this will hurt Brazil especially as it tries to develop its own drug-making expertise (which the article suggested).
If there are lessons here, I guess it is that the 3rd world is f*cked as the developed world can pay beacoup $$$ for health care and drugs. In the long run, this will result in a gradual siphoning off of the best talent even as 3rd world countries want to spend less on things that cost millions (if not billions) to produce.
> Brazil wanted to pay what Merck charges Thailand, or $0.65 per pill. > They TRIED to negotiate, and Merck put up a wall.
Doesn't seem much like a negotiation to me. Seems more like a "we're the boss in Brazil, and since you don't want to meet our demands, we'll detonate the nuke^W^W^W take your patent away."
Of course, the Brazilian government is within its rights to do this especially as the article notes, they want to make drugs on their own someday. Ironically, the Indians, who they're importing from right now, are busily *increasing* IP protection for drugs even as Indian drug companies invest more and more in R&D and want legal protections in place to protect those investments. In short, all the Robin Hood-style IP-scoffing* sounds good only until you try your hand at profiting from them.
*I should note that this is quite different from scoffing the RIAA and the MPAA, partly because drug companies do not sic lawyers on patients who consume knockoff drugs.
> As we all know, NO ONE does anything unless they are paid to do it. (with links to Linux, Apache and Debian)
Comparing knockoffs of 1970s AT&T/Berkeley technology to bleeding edge pharamcological research. Yeah right. So where the Free Drug Foundation? Where's the A-Patchy AIDS Cocktail? For that matter, why can't open source come up with something like the Sun Streaming Server?
Believe it or not, open source does not apply well across all domains.
Yes, because lord knows a bunch of politicians are best folk to decide how much 'profit' a company needs, as opposed to the market (which can be cruel but a whole lot less corruptible than your average socialist wannabe).
The Brazilian government could have done this in good faith and entered into negotiations to drive down the prize. Many drug companies already sell cheap "only for Africa" drugs and expect to never turn a profit on it, it's unlikely that they'd have refused Brazil. Instead the Brazilian government chose the politically expedient route of revoking their patent.
Knowledge in and of itself is capable of jack shit. The Greeks knew about water-driven mills. The Incas knew about the wheel. Neither was able to use that knowledge to get rid of slaves or human labor. That was something the supposedly ignorant farmers in the middle ages (around 8th-12th century in Europe) did.
So no, knowledge alone did not create the wonder drugs of today. A highly sophisticated system -- capable of spending a metric assload of money on the best researchers and on drug trials and the legal liabilities -- did.
And if you really believe that knowledge alone can work miracles, you ought to take a copy of the Library of Congress and head over to Sub-Saharan Africa. After all, you've got all the knowledge in the world, you should be able to solve any problem they face and make it a paradise, right?
> As they say: necessity is the mother of innovation.
Actually, it's "necessity is the mother of *invention*" and any serious student of innovation knows that phrase is very misleading and very often not the case. If you want to learn more, Joel Mokyr's The Lever of Riches has many examples (and is a good read anyway).
> a wasteful, sluggish, barely responsive, bureaucratic healthcare system is better than no healthcare system at all
You've been repeating that for much of that thread:-) but that's a fallacy. A wasteful, sluggish bureaucracy can perpetuate itself. No healthcare at all creates the opportunity (if only because the absence shocks you) to create something better -- in the case of the US it'd probably be tort reform to start with.
The same goes for bad governments vs anarchies, btw. As long as the entire world doesn't dip down into anarchy, a localized anarchy will be resolved fairly quickly. Bad governments, though, can perpetuate themselves almost indefinitely (e.g., Burma, Zimbabwe,...).
> but they would essentially mean that the US is doomed.
It's not just the US. I've spoken to a number of senior doctors ("consultants", they're called) and health service administrators in the UK and they don't see their NHS lasting for more than a generation. And the UK's a much smaller (but more densely populated) country.
That said, it doesn't matter if the NHS or the US health service is 'doomed' in its current form. Precisely because of rising health care costs, a LOT of private money is being invested into R&D into autodiagnosis systems right now. And also fundamental biological research (don't forget we actually _understand_ a small fraction of all diseases... we're only a little better than witch doctors in this regard). There is immense scope for reducing cost in healthcare, only when it happens the current model of healthcare will look positively antiquated.
Come on now, you're ruining a perfectly good America-bashing with facts.:-)
> On the drug issue alone, your national health care plan won't pay for the most advanced drugs, isn't that cold and inhumane?
It isn't, because European leaders do this amazing parlor trick where they tell their voters, look, you've got great healthcare, especially compared to those simplisme Yanks. Half of them don't even realize how backward their medical system is, except when the odd tabloid picks up on a story about some child being treated in America after their national health system told the parents that "it was incurable".
That said, the US *legal* system urgently requires fixing with regard to medicine. Suing someone's ass off might be a grand American tradition, but the costs involved are wrecking our healthcare system.
Your points are quite valid but there's something else at work here. Countries like Sweden and Switzerland, with good public health systems, are much smaller than the US and (more importantly) much more economically and socially homogenous.
Countries like the US, with a lot more variance in incomes, a much larger population (good medical care does't scale well), unique health problems (the obesity mess, a large population of uninsured illegal aliens) have a harder time providing decent health care. Even a country like Canada (population less than California) has health care horror stories that'll make you flinch.
Again, I'm not saying you're wrong or that the US shouldn't aim for Swiss levels of excellence, but I wonder how well a small homogenous country's experience will scale up to the US.
Ah genius. People are selfish, so let's create this huge bureaucratic apparatus that wastes scandalous amounts of money in the name of 'public funding' (and often this money does not even reach the people who most needs it: see also, aid to Africa). In many, many cases, governments do not solve problems, governments ARE the problem.
Because obviously, enforced high levels of taxation is the best way. There could not be any other way to help poor people, such as extending microcredit, focusing on schooling, running soup kitchens, etc.
Sheesh. You don't even see that all you are creating is an underclass for whom handouts have become a habit they can't kick.
What's being white got to do with it? If you see my comment history, you'll see I'm not. Oh, it's more of the "colored people can't possibly want to stand on their feet, they obviously need handouts" sort of thinking, is it?
Dude, code that compiles and runs for two processor architectures is called "lowest common denominator" (unless you use #ifdefs, in which case it's clearly not the _same_ code), assuming even one of the processor architectures have _any_ unique features at all. We aren't yet at the point where processors are homogenous commodities differentiated only by price.
You are about as kneejerk as the man you are trying to hector, and you don't even realize it.
> (and millions of right-wing conservatives) are afraid of what the future may bring
Yeah, because "millions of right-wing conservatives" don't play games. Because gamers are one vast hivemind and march in lockstep to the promised socialist future. What crap -- in a story about gaming! As if Democrats are immune from the knee-jerk "bash gamers" disease.
And oh --
> Who knows what changes the liberalization of the West may bring?
It happened 500 years ago, it's called the Renaissance. And it's produced some mighty good things, but it's also produced pussies who piss their pants in the name of political correctness. And that's just sad.
> Don't believe me? When was the last major UK shooting in which more than 10 people were killed? When?
The gun ban in the UK has definitely made it harder for nutcases to get access to guns. That's stopped mass slaughter, but armed assault is rising. Criminals know how to get guns and profit using them. And just because these individual assaults are less newsworthy (and mass murders get 72-point headlines) doesn't make them any less of a problem. Frankly I'd take the risk of the occasional nutjob with a gun than cowering in fear _every day_ in some of Birmingham's rougher neighborhoods.
> Ban guns, this will never happen again.
Yeah right. Guns have disappeared from the UK because of the gun prohibitions. Not. Instead, the state is resorting to ever more draconian legislation (given your big brother sig, I'm sure you know about that) to make sure guns keep out -- good luck with that, given the open access East Europeans have into your country.
Finally, I'll point out that comparing the densely populated UK with the US (parts of which are very far away from any kind of police presence) is ridiculous. For that matter, I'm quite sure British countryside-dwellers will be happy to tell you what they think of the gun ban when they live miles away from any police help.
You write about earthquakes. I wrote that our ability to cause global-scale disasters is over-estimated. Where is the discrepancy here? Or are you suggesting that human activity is causing earthquakes? Granted I know little geology but that sounds odd to me.
Further, you need to get a broader perspective on what global-scale disasters are. Even the Asian tsunami, which literally altered the map in parts of the Indian ocean and surrounding islands, had zero effect less than 2 miles from India's Southern beaches (where I was at the time, sleeping off an all-night party on the 25th).
This bald assertion is made without providing any foundation or subsequent argument. It is also a serious misrepresentation of the work of environmental science and catastrophic modeling.
The assertion was bald because a proper argument of it would occupy a good part of a scholarly paper. However there are two points I would want to make: one, their prior record. Previous models of world resource shortages have proven to be wrong (Ehrlich et al), previous models of world temperature changes have been wrong (Sagan and global cooling before him). Two, our lack of understanding of chained feedback effects in climatology -- for example, we're only now realizing that cloud formation could have a bigger role in global warming (or the lack of it) than previously thought. And that cosmic rays affect cloud formation. And so on.
We now have come to the point where present-day environmentalists have learnt to call the "loss of Atlantic (or wherever) cod" a "global catastrophe". I'm sorry but it isn't. I weep for the cod, but "global catastrophe" it ain't. Even the purely hypothetical loss of all the edible fish in the sea isn't (it would change human diets a lot, though).
When I say global catastrophe I mean _global_, as in, the ring of fire around the Pacific deciding to burst forth in all its glory. Or an asteroid strike -- something capable of affecting more than half the global *human* population.
We know that our very existence is seriously changing the world around us; if we are going to manage that change with informed public policies, then we need to have the catastrophic modeling done and we need to hear a lot of talk about those models and their implications.
There are lots of good techniques to do "catastrophic modeling", or worst-case scenarios. The problem is assigning a probability to them and further, getting a sense of the return on investment. Especially when the threat is spread over an unknown period of time. It is a hard problem, and if you've got any good ideas, I'm sure a lot of economists and public policy specialists will want to talk to you!
Pretending that the changes that have happened in the last hundred years are simply linear extensions of the changes of the last ten thousand years is an absurd fallacy.
I don't think any serious person's actually saying that. If you see my original post, my whole point is that climate change is DIS-continuous. And yet, most models linearly project the last 30-50 years and come up with doomsday scenarios! (Think I'm kidding? The British government's widely publicized Stern report did this, by including Katrina -- a statistical fluke -- in its projections. If Katrina was not included, its results changed dramatically.)
Btw, the wikipedia article references a BBC radio programme, you might want to listen to it -- it's quite a good look into the Stern Report's modelling: download link (mp3). (Note: Gigasize'll make you go through a CAPTCHA to get the file.)
Slashdot Mirror
They don't do patents? Look up the number of Chinese patents sometime, you'll be surprised. China is discovering the value of IPR now quite rationally -- as its own companies start generating useful, monetizable IPR.
Price differentiation occurs in everything -- cars, cosmetics, DVDs, software. Did you know Revlon knockoff cosmetics are 10-15x cheaper in India/China than in the US? Why don't you start a little import business and sell those in the US or Europe? Oh wait, you'd have the legal system come down on you like a ton of bricks.
.br government seems to like.*
The only reason Brazil is getting away with this is because it's the government doing it. Which basically makes it state-sponsored IP-scoffing. The only silver lining in all of this is that poor Brazilian patients will benefit-- but in doing so, the government has dealt a blow to Brazil's future because R&D-intensive industries will think long and hard about investing there. I don't think anyone can object to the idea of helping poor Brazilians, the point is that the countermeasures used (like the RIAA's "we'll sue you all" countermeasures) are not useful.
An example of a country doing it right is India, ironically -- they've routinely copied drug formulas before, but they've also worked with drug companies to modernize its IP law, esp with respect to medicines. This is helping India now because its homegrown drug companies are now able to create new formulations and cheaper drug making processes -- thus contributing to a nascent pharmaceutical industry in India. That's how you do it, not by the brute force approach the
*Is this "we'll take it from you" approach something that a lot of quasi-socialist/authoritarian countries go through? Russia, Venezuela, India (grabbed all of IBM's assets in the 70s and told them to f-ck off). We all know how well that turned out.
> Most free market economist are against patents as they are detrimental to a free market
Bullshit. Most *real* economists know that patents are a temporary (20 year) grant of monopoly to encourage production (and in return divulge details about one's invention). Methinks these 'economists' you quote are paid hacks are Brazil's state universities.
I'm not sure if you understand the concept of "market." In this case the market, being the Brazilian government since they are the only organization wealthy enough to purchase the drug and are actually interested, determined the price. The price they determined was the exact cost of production.
After that definition of 'market', I'm sure any school would grant you a degree of BS in Economics in a heartbeat.
Patents get extended by corrupt politicans? Since when? (Hint: you're thinking about copyright)
Don't let your hatred of the RIAA/MPAA (and, I might add, silly software patents) blind you to the good patents actually do.
> Indeed. If you had read the article, you would know that they have, and failed.
I did read the article, and remain unconvinced that the Brazilians actually wanted to make a deal, especially given that they got the knockoff drugs for 20c less. This is a bit like negotiating over Windows pricing with Microsoft saying that one can get a pirated CD for $2.
Sorry for the double reply, but since I didn't say this in my other reply to you --
It's great you're interested in this, and might I suggest working with some folk in the Southwest (say New Mexico?) and doing a "pilot" there. Maybe some university would be interested?
And obviously all the tinpot dictators that run the charming little countries there are going to fall in line with this plan because--? they're in awe of your brain?
The point is (again) that knowledge (although crucial) itself counts for very little. The societies and systems they are embedded in counts for a lot. If it weren't so, China would be the world's top technological superpower now (having avoided the dark ages). Hell, the Greeks would still be top dog in Europe.
The only reason why living in the West we think knowledge is super-important is because our societies have organized themselves into very efficient competitive systems where the only missing ingredient is the knowledge of how to do something. Find it (a cool game, a new drug) and a whole host of people and governments will help you spread that knowledge and get rich. However, it doesn't work that way everywhere.
Another example: I don't know if you've read Allen Steele's _Coyote_ (great book, btw). There, a bunch of ragtag scientists and intellectuals steal a repressive government's only starship and take it to a habitable planet far, far away. How useful is all of Earth knowledge to them? Hint: a few generations later, they're still clad in handmade cloth and skins (think old West) because they haven't been able to make synthetic yarn yet. Knowledge does not equal capability.
Looking at it from Brazil's POV, 45c from India vs 65c from a reluctant Merck -- I can see why they thought 65c was a good deal. Although as I mentioned in another post, it seems it was more of a "fulfil our demands or we do bad things to you" than a negotiation. And yes, this will hurt Brazil especially as it tries to develop its own drug-making expertise (which the article suggested).
If there are lessons here, I guess it is that the 3rd world is f*cked as the developed world can pay beacoup $$$ for health care and drugs. In the long run, this will result in a gradual siphoning off of the best talent even as 3rd world countries want to spend less on things that cost millions (if not billions) to produce.
> Brazil wanted to pay what Merck charges Thailand, or $0.65 per pill.
> They TRIED to negotiate, and Merck put up a wall.
Doesn't seem much like a negotiation to me. Seems more like a "we're the boss in Brazil, and since you don't want to meet our demands, we'll detonate the nuke^W^W^W take your patent away."
Of course, the Brazilian government is within its rights to do this especially as the article notes, they want to make drugs on their own someday. Ironically, the Indians, who they're importing from right now, are busily *increasing* IP protection for drugs even as Indian drug companies invest more and more in R&D and want legal protections in place to protect those investments. In short, all the Robin Hood-style IP-scoffing* sounds good only until you try your hand at profiting from them.
*I should note that this is quite different from scoffing the RIAA and the MPAA, partly because drug companies do not sic lawyers on patients who consume knockoff drugs.
> As we all know, NO ONE does anything unless they are paid to do it. (with links to Linux, Apache and Debian)
Comparing knockoffs of 1970s AT&T/Berkeley technology to bleeding edge pharamcological research. Yeah right. So where the Free Drug Foundation? Where's the A-Patchy AIDS Cocktail? For that matter, why can't open source come up with something like the Sun Streaming Server?
Believe it or not, open source does not apply well across all domains.
Yes, because lord knows a bunch of politicians are best folk to decide how much 'profit' a company needs, as opposed to the market (which can be cruel but a whole lot less corruptible than your average socialist wannabe).
The Brazilian government could have done this in good faith and entered into negotiations to drive down the prize. Many drug companies already sell cheap "only for Africa" drugs and expect to never turn a profit on it, it's unlikely that they'd have refused Brazil. Instead the Brazilian government chose the politically expedient route of revoking their patent.
Knowledge in and of itself is capable of jack shit. The Greeks knew about water-driven mills. The Incas knew about the wheel. Neither was able to use that knowledge to get rid of slaves or human labor. That was something the supposedly ignorant farmers in the middle ages (around 8th-12th century in Europe) did.
So no, knowledge alone did not create the wonder drugs of today. A highly sophisticated system -- capable of spending a metric assload of money on the best researchers and on drug trials and the legal liabilities -- did.
And if you really believe that knowledge alone can work miracles, you ought to take a copy of the Library of Congress and head over to Sub-Saharan Africa. After all, you've got all the knowledge in the world, you should be able to solve any problem they face and make it a paradise, right?
> As they say: necessity is the mother of innovation.
Actually, it's "necessity is the mother of *invention*" and any serious student of innovation knows that phrase is very misleading and very often not the case. If you want to learn more, Joel Mokyr's The Lever of Riches has many examples (and is a good read anyway).
> a wasteful, sluggish, barely responsive, bureaucratic healthcare system is better than no healthcare system at all
:-) but that's a fallacy. A wasteful, sluggish bureaucracy can perpetuate itself. No healthcare at all creates the opportunity (if only because the absence shocks you) to create something better -- in the case of the US it'd probably be tort reform to start with.
...).
You've been repeating that for much of that thread
The same goes for bad governments vs anarchies, btw. As long as the entire world doesn't dip down into anarchy, a localized anarchy will be resolved fairly quickly. Bad governments, though, can perpetuate themselves almost indefinitely (e.g., Burma, Zimbabwe,
> but they would essentially mean that the US is doomed.
... we're only a little better than witch doctors in this regard). There is immense scope for reducing cost in healthcare, only when it happens the current model of healthcare will look positively antiquated.
It's not just the US. I've spoken to a number of senior doctors ("consultants", they're called) and health service administrators in the UK and they don't see their NHS lasting for more than a generation. And the UK's a much smaller (but more densely populated) country.
That said, it doesn't matter if the NHS or the US health service is 'doomed' in its current form. Precisely because of rising health care costs, a LOT of private money is being invested into R&D into autodiagnosis systems right now. And also fundamental biological research (don't forget we actually _understand_ a small fraction of all diseases
Come on now, you're ruining a perfectly good America-bashing with facts. :-)
> On the drug issue alone, your national health care plan won't pay for the most advanced drugs, isn't that cold and inhumane?
It isn't, because European leaders do this amazing parlor trick where they tell their voters, look, you've got great healthcare, especially compared to those simplisme Yanks. Half of them don't even realize how backward their medical system is, except when the odd tabloid picks up on a story about some child being treated in America after their national health system told the parents that "it was incurable".
That said, the US *legal* system urgently requires fixing with regard to medicine. Suing someone's ass off might be a grand American tradition, but the costs involved are wrecking our healthcare system.
Your points are quite valid but there's something else at work here. Countries like Sweden and Switzerland, with good public health systems, are much smaller than the US and (more importantly) much more economically and socially homogenous.
Countries like the US, with a lot more variance in incomes, a much larger population (good medical care does't scale well), unique health problems (the obesity mess, a large population of uninsured illegal aliens) have a harder time providing decent health care. Even a country like Canada (population less than California) has health care horror stories that'll make you flinch.
Again, I'm not saying you're wrong or that the US shouldn't aim for Swiss levels of excellence, but I wonder how well a small homogenous country's experience will scale up to the US.
Ah genius. People are selfish, so let's create this huge bureaucratic apparatus that wastes scandalous amounts of money in the name of 'public funding' (and often this money does not even reach the people who most needs it: see also, aid to Africa). In many, many cases, governments do not solve problems, governments ARE the problem.
Because obviously, enforced high levels of taxation is the best way. There could not be any other way to help poor people, such as extending microcredit, focusing on schooling, running soup kitchens, etc.
Sheesh. You don't even see that all you are creating is an underclass for whom handouts have become a habit they can't kick.
What's being white got to do with it? If you see my comment history, you'll see I'm not. Oh, it's more of the "colored people can't possibly want to stand on their feet, they obviously need handouts" sort of thinking, is it?
> Libertarians make me sad.
As a libertarian, I must say that as long as your hand is out of my pocket, I don't give a flying frak about how happy or sad you are.
Dude, code that compiles and runs for two processor architectures is called "lowest common denominator" (unless you use #ifdefs, in which case it's clearly not the _same_ code), assuming even one of the processor architectures have _any_ unique features at all. We aren't yet at the point where processors are homogenous commodities differentiated only by price.
>I'm continually disappointed that we've never sent a manned mission to the Sun.
Don't worry, Hollywood is on the case! Linky
You are about as kneejerk as the man you are trying to hector, and you don't even realize it.
> (and millions of right-wing conservatives) are afraid of what the future may bring
Yeah, because "millions of right-wing conservatives" don't play games. Because gamers are one vast hivemind and march in lockstep to the promised socialist future. What crap -- in a story about gaming! As if Democrats are immune from the knee-jerk "bash gamers" disease.
And oh --
> Who knows what changes the liberalization of the West may bring?
It happened 500 years ago, it's called the Renaissance. And it's produced some mighty good things, but it's also produced pussies who piss their pants in the name of political correctness. And that's just sad.
"... only wimps use backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it."
I think it'd work well for the MPAA.
> Don't believe me? When was the last major UK shooting in which more than 10 people were killed? When?
The gun ban in the UK has definitely made it harder for nutcases to get access to guns. That's stopped mass slaughter, but armed assault is rising. Criminals know how to get guns and profit using them. And just because these individual assaults are less newsworthy (and mass murders get 72-point headlines) doesn't make them any less of a problem. Frankly I'd take the risk of the occasional nutjob with a gun than cowering in fear _every day_ in some of Birmingham's rougher neighborhoods.
> Ban guns, this will never happen again.
Yeah right. Guns have disappeared from the UK because of the gun prohibitions. Not. Instead, the state is resorting to ever more draconian legislation (given your big brother sig, I'm sure you know about that) to make sure guns keep out -- good luck with that, given the open access East Europeans have into your country.
Finally, I'll point out that comparing the densely populated UK with the US (parts of which are very far away from any kind of police presence) is ridiculous. For that matter, I'm quite sure British countryside-dwellers will be happy to tell you what they think of the gun ban when they live miles away from any police help.
Further, you need to get a broader perspective on what global-scale disasters are. Even the Asian tsunami, which literally altered the map in parts of the Indian ocean and surrounding islands, had zero effect less than 2 miles from India's Southern beaches (where I was at the time, sleeping off an all-night party on the 25th).The assertion was bald because a proper argument of it would occupy a good part of a scholarly paper. However there are two points I would want to make: one, their prior record. Previous models of world resource shortages have proven to be wrong (Ehrlich et al), previous models of world temperature changes have been wrong (Sagan and global cooling before him). Two, our lack of understanding of chained feedback effects in climatology -- for example, we're only now realizing that cloud formation could have a bigger role in global warming (or the lack of it) than previously thought. And that cosmic rays affect cloud formation. And so on.
We now have come to the point where present-day environmentalists have learnt to call the "loss of Atlantic (or wherever) cod" a "global catastrophe". I'm sorry but it isn't. I weep for the cod, but "global catastrophe" it ain't. Even the purely hypothetical loss of all the edible fish in the sea isn't (it would change human diets a lot, though).
When I say global catastrophe I mean _global_, as in, the ring of fire around the Pacific deciding to burst forth in all its glory. Or an asteroid strike -- something capable of affecting more than half the global *human* population.
We know that our very existence is seriously changing the world around us; if we are going to manage that change with informed public policies, then we need to have the catastrophic modeling done and we need to hear a lot of talk about those models and their implications.
There are lots of good techniques to do "catastrophic modeling", or worst-case scenarios. The problem is assigning a probability to them and further, getting a sense of the return on investment. Especially when the threat is spread over an unknown period of time. It is a hard problem, and if you've got any good ideas, I'm sure a lot of economists and public policy specialists will want to talk to you!
Pretending that the changes that have happened in the last hundred years are simply linear extensions of the changes of the last ten thousand years is an absurd fallacy.
I don't think any serious person's actually saying that. If you see my original post, my whole point is that climate change is DIS-continuous. And yet, most models linearly project the last 30-50 years and come up with doomsday scenarios! (Think I'm kidding? The British government's widely publicized Stern report did this, by including Katrina -- a statistical fluke -- in its projections. If Katrina was not included, its results changed dramatically.)
Btw, the wikipedia article references a BBC radio programme, you might want to listen to it -- it's quite a good look into the Stern Report's modelling: download link (mp3). (Note: Gigasize'll make you go through a CAPTCHA to get the file.)