Foreign policy discusses Syria from a Startrek perspective, now military "learning lessons" from a dumb TV show. WTF? How about a reality check -- what could you have "learned" from a Hollywood disaster movie that would have helped you survive the Japan 2011 tsunami?
Go ahead, slashdotters, make an experiment. Rent a movie or two and then watch the real thing on the youtubes and tell me honestly what the fuck could you have learned from the movies to help you escape the disaster? Well, that one's easy -- absolutely nothing. Because what Hollywood imagined isn't anything like the real thing.
Sci-fi shows are entertainment, and they don't teach "lessons", just help you kill time.
In many parts of the world "clean energy" is indeed a scam to siphon off government subsidies to selected enterprises. I look at my energy bills in several jurisdictions and I see a huge add-on for "green energy".
One of the said jurisdictions is an Asian country, which, despite the massive "green bill", has been burning gas for the past two years exclusively as a tribute to the fuck-ups of its nuclear power sector.
Another is a small country in Europe, where European and state subsidies and tax transfers have created a huge mess of the energy sector and a situation in which the overinvestment in "green" energy has left the base load generation capacity unable to maintain itself, boding serious trouble in the coming decade.
In the third, also in Europe, local thermal power plant has mostly cut the trees from the adjacent forests and chopped it into pellets, for wood fuel. Again, this has been done with a huge, 300+ million euros grant from the EU for energy from "renewable" sources. Except they cut oak and beech trees that are 100 years old, and in their place only grass and bushes grow.
So, yeah, green energy is a scam in many places, and an ecologically dangerous scam too.
This is in the other XDA thread, the one about OpenPDroid (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2098156). You may also look into the autopatcher (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1719408) for an easier install.
Yes, it funds you, but "funding" and "you" have a very narrow and specific meaning.
"You" are someone who is so close to the regime that "you" can pocket the increase without risk of scrutiny, while your satellites proceed to explore the depths of the ocean one after the other.
"Funding" is known as "otkat" (recoil) in Russian -- because a part of it has to be handed back to the person who approved the appropriation that's funding "you".
The logical and natural solution to this would be to make a publicly funded system as transparent and democratic as possible.
The issue is how. Building such a system is probably a worthy goal, but wishing for one is a lot easier than achieving it. The current system, however imperfect, has two enormously useful principles at its foundation. First, it aligns the interests of all players -- the investors, the pharmaceutical companies, the researchers and the patients -- via a mechanism that is at least partially exposed to market pressure. Second, the role of the government is one of a rule maker and arbiter, which makes it a suitable controller of the quality of the developed treatments.
Reforming the current system in a manner that will make it less prone to fall victim to rent-seeking, and finding good solutions to the market failures that appear to exist (e.g. treatments for rare diseases, etc.) is a much more rational choice than trying to replace it with something that has already been tried and shown not to work well at all.
A company will have to make the same considerations before developing its product. Why should a public system not be able to poll the preferences of those who seek treatment?
Because the way interests combine to produce outcome is different.
In the case of a public body, financing is seen as unlimited, the controls are usually weaker and the responsibility of the decision-makers is watered down. Also, it is rare to see a lot of competition, usually there is one body that deals with one area of government spending. Finally, the government assumes not only the role of rule-maker and arbiter, but also a side as an investor and manager of the system. The interests of the players align in a weird way, which creates incentives that are not exactly aligned with the best interests of the patients and the taxpayers.
None of these are inherent in the patent model. It shortcomings are mostly the monopolistic rents and the rent-seeking behavior they induce, and this is the problem that should be solved.
What treatments are most needed can easily be seen from statistics, you don't need patents for that.
Given these research priorities and the total available funding you can get perfectly efficient allocation of resources.
You could, assuming a) you have very reliable system for collecting statistics, b) a very reliable and efficient mechanism to transform these statistics into funding decisions and c) you don't really care about the preferences of those who seek treatment, because decision-making that is relying on statistics will be very different from one that takes the preferences and the interests of the patients as its most important input. Overall, I predict that you'll end up with policies that over-invest in stuff that the public body in charge of financing decisions think are important, severe shortages in all other areas and a progressively worsening decision-making mechanism.
Could you be a little more specific on what to look for?
If we stay on the topic of medical innovation, you should look at the quality and availability of advanced treatments, especially treatments that were developed there. You'll see that most of the public health effort went into visible infrastructure, hospitals and production facilities, some -- into education with visible results -- e.g. of doctors and nurses, but very little -- in development of new treatments that required investment into areas of low "visibility" that are poorly understood by the managers of the Socialist state.
You'll also see that virtually all advanced treatments during the lifetime of the system were "imported" from the West, because of lack of domestic development. Even worse, the results in preventive care (which is an area where a purely government-managed system should shine far above one driven by profits) were awful. In short, the system was a poorly organized mess that failed in its every aspect -- mostly because decisions were not coupled to the interests of the patients.
As for Cuba, please.
First, again, you shift from treatment development to healthcare provision. These aren't the same. If you consider what treatments have been developed in Cuba, I doubt you'll find a lot of achievement.
Second, even concerning the whole health-care sector, Cuba isn't the clear-cut case you're looking for. Its system was built on the already good healthcare they had before the revolution. Cuba has, throughout its Socialist period and onwards, been a huge recipient of foreign aid -- the Comecon poured the equivalent nearly 70 billion dollars into the Cuban healthcare system between 1960 and 1990, and when the Soviet system collapsed, the Cuban healthcare indicators deteriorated sharply. The complete collapse was avoided because a host of UN programs kept funding it, which allowed modern medicine from abroad. Without these injections and the piggybacking on modern research in the West, Cuba would have been much, much worse.
Finally, I am skeptical about the quality of statistics that is available on Cuba, and twice more on the aggregates in the Wikipedia. I was there once briefly more than 25 years ago, but I remember shabby polyclinics where only very basic treatment was available. Anything else you had to pay for under the table (which was the same situation you'd have found all over the Eastern bloc at the time). It is quite hard to believe the magically high numbers they keep displaying. Maybe they are true, but if the Cuban statistical offiice is anything like the institute for statistics in the country where I was born, I'd take them with a grain of salt the size of Chavez' tumor.
The issue at hand is "Finding the most cost-efficient way to fund research/development/testing of drugs"
I don't see how patents are helping there when you (the public who has to pay for all of this one way or another) could do the funding directly?
The patents provide a mechanism that helps to efficiently allocate resources for research in response to the need for a treatment. On one hand, the economic rents from the patent monopoly give incentives to invest in research. On the other, the terms cap the revenues, creating incentive for efficient use of resources. The system has problems that need to be solved, e.g. no interest in small-market expensive treatments, using the excess profits for lobbying and other rent-seeking activities and so on, but is the alternative you suggest any better? It is hard to tell.
When the public funds all research, you have all the problems of the patent system plus the fundamental issues of priority and resource allocation. You can look at the pharmaceutical industry in the Soviet bloc for a comprehensive example of the range of problems that exclusive public funding for research can create.
Well, with so little detail your opinion is hand-waving, and not a solution. The issue at hand isn't the "incentive to develop cheap drugs", but the incentive to develop effective drugs that are cheap.
It is a marketing issue. Where I live, generic medicine has been available for several years now and is of high quality, comparable to the branded one. However, the rules are that the pharmacy will not sell you a generic item unless the doctor indicates that a substitution is acceptable on the prescription. This is, of course all fine and cool until you consider how doctors learn about new drugs and treatments.
A lot of the doctors I've talked to seem to learn about those mostly from seminars run by the drug companies themselves. There, the newest drug will invariably be touted as much better than the old one. Of course, the training has value for the patient when it helps the doctors to better understand the implications of using the various options and provide a better (both more effective, and more cost-effective) treatment because of it. The problem is that some of these seminars are more of a marketing campaign than rigorous training, and the end result is they promote the more expensive treatment, not the most effective one.
As a result of this training system, the likelihood increases that your doctor will prescribe you a branded item, often without the option to substitute for a generic item, even if one may be available and just as effective. While there are no absolutes in this matter and, in the end, it all depends on the particular doctor, there are many who go the easy way and just give you the option they've learned from the maker's marketing literature.
I've had experiences all over the range, from doctors who prescribe the branded item because "this is the drug that is used most often", "this is the best" or "the price difference is not all that large" (in my case, the government insurance covers a large percent of the cost, so, indeed, the cost I pay directly is low, but, of course, the taxes are high and getting higher), to doctors who give a long lecture about the reasons to pick a specific drug and relate those to details of the diagnosis. On the positive side, I've seen the least amount of unnecessary expensive treatments when dealing with complex problems that required a high level of qualification from the doctor.
The real question is can you run the whole system well enough with government money. While it is true that a lot of the basic research is done with government money, it seems that most of the work that turns the scientific discovery into a working medicine is done by the pharmaceutical industry, and a lot of the costs on the way are there because of the complex regulatory framework -- necessary because of the need for safe medication. It is unclear if enough effort will go into pharmaceuticals unless there is the carrot of the huge profits that is dangling somewhere at the end of this complex process.
It is tempting to say that patents are always bad for the economy and that the pharmaceutical ones are also immoral, but I recall a study on the subject of patent effects that found that pharmaceutical patents were about the only kind that is economically justified.
It isn't all black and white, unfortunately, nor easy to fix.
Yeah, which usually makes the point the presenter wants to make. Allow me to refer you to the many charts released recently that allow humans to easily discern there has been no global warming in the past decade.
No, you cannot get the same information, you cannot even get close. You may have mod points today, but you don't know jack shit about data and charts. If you have data, you can make your own inferences and charts, as you please. If you have someone's charts, you don't know anything at all beyond they mean to tell you. You have to assume that a) the data was not tampered, b) the charts are drawn correctly, c) they are relevant and meaningful, d) scale is chosen well, e)... You get the idea.
But to the average person charts look like serious business.
Okay, I am not familiar with the name, so I'll take your word for it and hope she does a good job uncovering the real story. Which, IMHO will be that of several misunderstandings between the reporter and Tesla staff, which lead to less than pleasurable experience for the reporter and to unjustified over-reaction by Musk.
But there is no real information in this entry. The rebuttal and the rebuttal thereof are more interesting. Reader comments I've seen are very much biased in favor of Mr. Musk, but most of them are based on the logic "he released data, therefore he is right" rather than a look at what actually was released and what it means.
Overall, this is a skirmish about nothing, except that it is very interesting to observe how the public reacts.
You can bet what you want, but I read the original article, the rebuttal and the rebuttal of the rebuttal and I see no basis for Musk's accusations, the charts support the reporter's story better than Musk's. There is no indication of lying, of large detours, of the reporter trying to "run down" the battery, etc. For all intensive purposes the conclusions of the original report -- that the car performs poorly in cold weather, that it takes longer to fill up and that much more careful planning is needed driving it -- stand.
And the car salesman doesn't like his half-baked vehicle to be reviewed negatively. So? Anyone who's looking will see three things: Musk has not published data, but charts and accusations, the released charts largely corroborate the original report and definitely do not paint the grave picture the car salesman is pitching; and the advice the reporter got from Tesla staff was ridiculous and contributed more to the problems than his driving style or heater usage.
Both the original report and the rebuttal were biased, but Musk's accusations are unjustified and his ramblings are not very convincing.
I'll wait for the data before I make up my mind though, although I doubt they will be released.
There is no "lying" in the review, just as there is no "evidence" on Musk's blog. "Evidence" would be raw logs. Instead, you have imprecise charts and allegations of misconduct that the charts don't corroborate. If anything, the charts corroborate to my impression of an account that is quite close to what actually happened if a little biased.
In particular, the allegations of Musk that there was a "significant detour", that the NYT reporter drove around to drain the battery and that he drove too fast and with the A/C on high at all times don't really bear out at all.
Of the two biased comments, the one from Musk is much closer to a truth-bending shill.
Slashdot Mirror
Foreign policy discusses Syria from a Startrek perspective, now military "learning lessons" from a dumb TV show. WTF? How about a reality check -- what could you have "learned" from a Hollywood disaster movie that would have helped you survive the Japan 2011 tsunami?
Go ahead, slashdotters, make an experiment. Rent a movie or two and then watch the real thing on the youtubes and tell me honestly what the fuck could you have learned from the movies to help you escape the disaster? Well, that one's easy -- absolutely nothing. Because what Hollywood imagined isn't anything like the real thing.
Sci-fi shows are entertainment, and they don't teach "lessons", just help you kill time.
It is even easier today with DRM -- I can just get it off the torrent straight onto my tablet.
In many parts of the world "clean energy" is indeed a scam to siphon off government subsidies to selected enterprises. I look at my energy bills in several jurisdictions and I see a huge add-on for "green energy".
One of the said jurisdictions is an Asian country, which, despite the massive "green bill", has been burning gas for the past two years exclusively as a tribute to the fuck-ups of its nuclear power sector.
Another is a small country in Europe, where European and state subsidies and tax transfers have created a huge mess of the energy sector and a situation in which the overinvestment in "green" energy has left the base load generation capacity unable to maintain itself, boding serious trouble in the coming decade.
In the third, also in Europe, local thermal power plant has mostly cut the trees from the adjacent forests and chopped it into pellets, for wood fuel. Again, this has been done with a huge, 300+ million euros grant from the EU for energy from "renewable" sources. Except they cut oak and beech trees that are 100 years old, and in their place only grass and bushes grow.
So, yeah, green energy is a scam in many places, and an ecologically dangerous scam too.
Amateurs built the Kon-Tiki. That better?
Maybe AC's referring to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Flawed_mirror
This is in the other XDA thread, the one about OpenPDroid (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2098156). You may also look into the autopatcher (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1719408) for an easier install.
Yes, it funds you, but "funding" and "you" have a very narrow and specific meaning.
"You" are someone who is so close to the regime that "you" can pocket the increase without risk of scrutiny, while your satellites proceed to explore the depths of the ocean one after the other.
"Funding" is known as "otkat" (recoil) in Russian -- because a part of it has to be handed back to the person who approved the appropriation that's funding "you".
You think defense doesn't get outsourced? Apparently the MIC doesn't think like you do. According to almost everyone in the industry, outsourcing in defense is common, increasing and the scope is widening over the whole range -- from design to manufacturing. http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2011/January/Pages/OutsourcingUSDefenseNationalSecurityImplications.aspx http://www.defencetalk.com/outsourcing-services-helps-defense-aerospace-reduce-costs-27510/
The logical and natural solution to this would be to make a publicly funded system as transparent and democratic as possible.
The issue is how. Building such a system is probably a worthy goal, but wishing for one is a lot easier than achieving it. The current system, however imperfect, has two enormously useful principles at its foundation. First, it aligns the interests of all players -- the investors, the pharmaceutical companies, the researchers and the patients -- via a mechanism that is at least partially exposed to market pressure. Second, the role of the government is one of a rule maker and arbiter, which makes it a suitable controller of the quality of the developed treatments.
Reforming the current system in a manner that will make it less prone to fall victim to rent-seeking, and finding good solutions to the market failures that appear to exist (e.g. treatments for rare diseases, etc.) is a much more rational choice than trying to replace it with something that has already been tried and shown not to work well at all.
A company will have to make the same considerations before developing its product. Why should a public system not be able to poll the preferences of those who seek treatment?
Because the way interests combine to produce outcome is different.
In the case of a public body, financing is seen as unlimited, the controls are usually weaker and the responsibility of the decision-makers is watered down. Also, it is rare to see a lot of competition, usually there is one body that deals with one area of government spending. Finally, the government assumes not only the role of rule-maker and arbiter, but also a side as an investor and manager of the system. The interests of the players align in a weird way, which creates incentives that are not exactly aligned with the best interests of the patients and the taxpayers.
None of these are inherent in the patent model. It shortcomings are mostly the monopolistic rents and the rent-seeking behavior they induce, and this is the problem that should be solved.
What treatments are most needed can easily be seen from statistics, you don't need patents for that. Given these research priorities and the total available funding you can get perfectly efficient allocation of resources.
You could, assuming a) you have very reliable system for collecting statistics, b) a very reliable and efficient mechanism to transform these statistics into funding decisions and c) you don't really care about the preferences of those who seek treatment, because decision-making that is relying on statistics will be very different from one that takes the preferences and the interests of the patients as its most important input. Overall, I predict that you'll end up with policies that over-invest in stuff that the public body in charge of financing decisions think are important, severe shortages in all other areas and a progressively worsening decision-making mechanism.
Could you be a little more specific on what to look for?
If we stay on the topic of medical innovation, you should look at the quality and availability of advanced treatments, especially treatments that were developed there. You'll see that most of the public health effort went into visible infrastructure, hospitals and production facilities, some -- into education with visible results -- e.g. of doctors and nurses, but very little -- in development of new treatments that required investment into areas of low "visibility" that are poorly understood by the managers of the Socialist state.
You'll also see that virtually all advanced treatments during the lifetime of the system were "imported" from the West, because of lack of domestic development. Even worse, the results in preventive care (which is an area where a purely government-managed system should shine far above one driven by profits) were awful. In short, the system was a poorly organized mess that failed in its every aspect -- mostly because decisions were not coupled to the interests of the patients.
As for Cuba, please.
First, again, you shift from treatment development to healthcare provision. These aren't the same. If you consider what treatments have been developed in Cuba, I doubt you'll find a lot of achievement.
Second, even concerning the whole health-care sector, Cuba isn't the clear-cut case you're looking for. Its system was built on the already good healthcare they had before the revolution. Cuba has, throughout its Socialist period and onwards, been a huge recipient of foreign aid -- the Comecon poured the equivalent nearly 70 billion dollars into the Cuban healthcare system between 1960 and 1990, and when the Soviet system collapsed, the Cuban healthcare indicators deteriorated sharply. The complete collapse was avoided because a host of UN programs kept funding it, which allowed modern medicine from abroad. Without these injections and the piggybacking on modern research in the West, Cuba would have been much, much worse.
Finally, I am skeptical about the quality of statistics that is available on Cuba, and twice more on the aggregates in the Wikipedia. I was there once briefly more than 25 years ago, but I remember shabby polyclinics where only very basic treatment was available. Anything else you had to pay for under the table (which was the same situation you'd have found all over the Eastern bloc at the time). It is quite hard to believe the magically high numbers they keep displaying. Maybe they are true, but if the Cuban statistical offiice is anything like the institute for statistics in the country where I was born, I'd take them with a grain of salt the size of Chavez' tumor.
The patents provide a mechanism that helps to efficiently allocate resources for research in response to the need for a treatment. On one hand, the economic rents from the patent monopoly give incentives to invest in research. On the other, the terms cap the revenues, creating incentive for efficient use of resources. The system has problems that need to be solved, e.g. no interest in small-market expensive treatments, using the excess profits for lobbying and other rent-seeking activities and so on, but is the alternative you suggest any better? It is hard to tell.
When the public funds all research, you have all the problems of the patent system plus the fundamental issues of priority and resource allocation. You can look at the pharmaceutical industry in the Soviet bloc for a comprehensive example of the range of problems that exclusive public funding for research can create.
Well, with so little detail your opinion is hand-waving, and not a solution. The issue at hand isn't the "incentive to develop cheap drugs", but the incentive to develop effective drugs that are cheap.
It is a marketing issue. Where I live, generic medicine has been available for several years now and is of high quality, comparable to the branded one. However, the rules are that the pharmacy will not sell you a generic item unless the doctor indicates that a substitution is acceptable on the prescription. This is, of course all fine and cool until you consider how doctors learn about new drugs and treatments.
A lot of the doctors I've talked to seem to learn about those mostly from seminars run by the drug companies themselves. There, the newest drug will invariably be touted as much better than the old one. Of course, the training has value for the patient when it helps the doctors to better understand the implications of using the various options and provide a better (both more effective, and more cost-effective) treatment because of it. The problem is that some of these seminars are more of a marketing campaign than rigorous training, and the end result is they promote the more expensive treatment, not the most effective one.
As a result of this training system, the likelihood increases that your doctor will prescribe you a branded item, often without the option to substitute for a generic item, even if one may be available and just as effective. While there are no absolutes in this matter and, in the end, it all depends on the particular doctor, there are many who go the easy way and just give you the option they've learned from the maker's marketing literature.
I've had experiences all over the range, from doctors who prescribe the branded item because "this is the drug that is used most often", "this is the best" or "the price difference is not all that large" (in my case, the government insurance covers a large percent of the cost, so, indeed, the cost I pay directly is low, but, of course, the taxes are high and getting higher), to doctors who give a long lecture about the reasons to pick a specific drug and relate those to details of the diagnosis. On the positive side, I've seen the least amount of unnecessary expensive treatments when dealing with complex problems that required a high level of qualification from the doctor.
The real question is can you run the whole system well enough with government money. While it is true that a lot of the basic research is done with government money, it seems that most of the work that turns the scientific discovery into a working medicine is done by the pharmaceutical industry, and a lot of the costs on the way are there because of the complex regulatory framework -- necessary because of the need for safe medication. It is unclear if enough effort will go into pharmaceuticals unless there is the carrot of the huge profits that is dangling somewhere at the end of this complex process.
It is tempting to say that patents are always bad for the economy and that the pharmaceutical ones are also immoral, but I recall a study on the subject of patent effects that found that pharmaceutical patents were about the only kind that is economically justified.
It isn't all black and white, unfortunately, nor easy to fix.
As you know, they can track you even when the device is off, unless you've taken the battery out.
A chart is just a presentation of data.
Yeah, which usually makes the point the presenter wants to make. Allow me to refer you to the many charts released recently that allow humans to easily discern there has been no global warming in the past decade.
No, you cannot get the same information, you cannot even get close. You may have mod points today, but you don't know jack shit about data and charts. If you have data, you can make your own inferences and charts, as you please. If you have someone's charts, you don't know anything at all beyond they mean to tell you. You have to assume that a) the data was not tampered, b) the charts are drawn correctly, c) they are relevant and meaningful, d) scale is chosen well, e) ... You get the idea.
But to the average person charts look like serious business.
Okay, I am not familiar with the name, so I'll take your word for it and hope she does a good job uncovering the real story. Which, IMHO will be that of several misunderstandings between the reporter and Tesla staff, which lead to less than pleasurable experience for the reporter and to unjustified over-reaction by Musk.
No, stupid, charts are not data. I can make my own charts with data. I can't, however, deduce as much about the data from the charts.
But there is no real information in this entry. The rebuttal and the rebuttal thereof are more interesting. Reader comments I've seen are very much biased in favor of Mr. Musk, but most of them are based on the logic "he released data, therefore he is right" rather than a look at what actually was released and what it means.
Overall, this is a skirmish about nothing, except that it is very interesting to observe how the public reacts.
Yeah. Can you guess why?
You can bet what you want, but I read the original article, the rebuttal and the rebuttal of the rebuttal and I see no basis for Musk's accusations, the charts support the reporter's story better than Musk's. There is no indication of lying, of large detours, of the reporter trying to "run down" the battery, etc. For all intensive purposes the conclusions of the original report -- that the car performs poorly in cold weather, that it takes longer to fill up and that much more careful planning is needed driving it -- stand.
And the car salesman doesn't like his half-baked vehicle to be reviewed negatively. So? Anyone who's looking will see three things: Musk has not published data, but charts and accusations, the released charts largely corroborate the original report and definitely do not paint the grave picture the car salesman is pitching; and the advice the reporter got from Tesla staff was ridiculous and contributed more to the problems than his driving style or heater usage.
Both the original report and the rebuttal were biased, but Musk's accusations are unjustified and his ramblings are not very convincing.
I'll wait for the data before I make up my mind though, although I doubt they will be released.
There is no "lying" in the review, just as there is no "evidence" on Musk's blog. "Evidence" would be raw logs. Instead, you have imprecise charts and allegations of misconduct that the charts don't corroborate. If anything, the charts corroborate to my impression of an account that is quite close to what actually happened if a little biased.
In particular, the allegations of Musk that there was a "significant detour", that the NYT reporter drove around to drain the battery and that he drove too fast and with the A/C on high at all times don't really bear out at all.
Of the two biased comments, the one from Musk is much closer to a truth-bending shill.
Don't worry, they'll have the logs to prove it was your fault.