Re:Bioweapons will be used in WWIII (2006-)
on
Smallpox From The Past
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· Score: 4, Funny
It's a widely believed fact that bioweapons and extensive use of tactical nuclear weapons will be used in WWIII that is due to begin in 2006-2007. Russia, China and the Arabs will unite. New York will be devastated by two small nuclear devices and while USA isolates itself to deal with the trauma, China invades Asia and Russia pushes into Western Europe.
Could you pin down the dates a little more, old chap? I need to get my planning in order and know when to go hide.
probably the most important news is that China will disallow standard 802.11 WEP security and mandate its own standard - WAPI for all Wi-Fi in the country. This could have wide ranging implications, from splitting the market to leading to a possibly improved system (on first glance, WAPI beats WEP hands down, except for privacy implications - big surprise) for the world.
There's also a slim chance, researchers say, that the scabs could yield live smallpox virus -- believed to reside in only two laboratories in the world
Only the naive believe that live smallpox exists in only two labs in the world. A more accurate statement in the article would have been "only legally allowed in two labs in the world."
There is strong reason to believe that North Korea has the virus. France is also believed to have it. Iraq may have had it up until recently, as it was endemic in the region in the late sixties, and just a few scabs in a refrigerator would have been enough. It used to be common practice for scientists and doctors to keep a bit of smallpox in the fridge when they gathered it from patients. Hence there could be samples, possibly not even labelled or known to the owners, in a number of places in the world.
One reason that the plan to destroy all stocks at the CDC and the official Russian lab was the realization that rogue countries probably had the virus, and hence destroying it would damage future defense attempts.
Furthermore, the USSR and later Russia maintained stockpiles of 20 tons of weaponized smallpox in the eighties (authorized by Gorbachev) and probably to the present, and loaded it into missile warheads. Furthermore, a number of their scientists have since emigrated to other countries. In 1994 a number visited North Korea for unknown reasons. One former Soviet BW officieal entered into a deal with Iraq to sell 5000 liter fermenters.
And then we have accidental discoveries like these scabs. Smallpox can survive in scabs for a long time, although >100 years is stretching it.
None of your response deals with the real issues. Furthermore, it fails to address why Scientific American would take the unprecedented step of attacking him with 14 pages of its magazine while only allowing him one page to reply, and forcing him to take down his web reply.
There have been many cases of bad science in history. Polywater and Cold Fusion being the most recent. The scientific process is not perfect - it is loaded with politics and factions in practice, as anyone familiar with science is aware. In the long run, on those subjects where its process can be applied, it provides the best truths we can have. But along the way, it can be far off. Furthermore, it does not approach the truth asymptotically, but sometimes with sudden paradigm shifts.
And quite contrary to your beliefs, many leaders of environmentalist organizations indeed act just like other special interest groups, putting out intentionally deceitful propaganda in order to increase their income. Notice I said "leaders." I am not imputing the motives of environmentalists in general.
However, since you bring the subject up, environmentalists can broadly be divided into two types. One type wants to preserve the environment for our use and the future use of humanity. This is simply conservationism by another name.
Another type, which is distressingly common, uses environmentalism as a substitute for religion. Where else can one derive the basis that we should preserve the earth for its own sake, or that we don't have the "right" to change it? Anyone making that argument is putting "the earth" above mankind. Only a religion gives a basis for such a set of ethics.
As it happens, although I am not in the field, I am well acquainted with some people in the global warming field. I also have enough scientific background to not be a typical ideologically driven opponent to the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. And I know the level of politics in global warming "science" and the poor quality of much of the work.
The issue with BL is how such a huge portion of the scientific community (most of whom are NOT earth scientists) have joined to attack him. He did NOT publish a flawed scientific work. He published a compendium of references and his interpretations. Furthermore, as a PhD statistician, he does indeed have a background to judge many of the environmental studies as far as their methodology is concerned - better qualified than many of the researchers.
But as far as I can tell, the theory of anthropogenic global warming has reached the point of being doctrine among many who have not studied it, because it fits THEIR political or ideological agenda. Hence the reaction to someone like BL is hysterical and overblown.
If his appointment was political, then so was the attack on him by the commission. In that sense, he is a pawn between powerful forces.
Finally, I have yet to meet an environmentalist who can justify Kyoto even using the global warming projections that it is based on, projections which are not the result of solid science, but rather highly speculative science.
Consider other areas of science where the strong consensus model was wrong:
Causes of peptic ulcers.. stress, eating wrong foods, etc. Then one day a doctor discovers that treating ulcers with antibiotics is very effective, leading to the discovery that Helicobacter Pylori is the cause of most ulcers. Oops!
Plate tectonics. Because the theory of continental drift was first proposed by an astrophysicist, and because it was at strong variance with prevailing theories, it took many years before geologists were willing to accept the already very strong evidence.
These are just recent reversals. The scientific method works, but you have to give it enough time. If you watch the flip/flops of major pieces of the CO2 debate, you realize that the science in that area is far from mature. If you understand the mechanisms of the models, and realize how parameterization works, then you know that the models are not strong science, but rather just a best guess.
Evolution is one of the best tested theories in science. It's predictive power is used every day by research scientist in a number of disciplines, including medicine.
In other words, one can use the theory of evolution to make predictions (for example, in microbiology or epidemiology) and then one can test those predictions, which is science at its best.
For example, when a new disease pops up, evolutionary reasoning (host-parasite coevolution, for example) gives researchers direction in where to look for the host of the disease (if there is one, which there usually is).
Simple examples in that area: diseases which kill the host too quickly normally will not survive, unless they have a novel means of spread. Thus Anthrax, which kills very rapidly, needs to form spores so that it will survive until another animal ingests it. Furthermore, it is a disease of ruminants, because they go around eating from the ground, where the spores reside.
Malaria, on the other hand, causes extended periods of sickness during which the victim is stationary (laying down sick) and thus an optimal target for the mosquitos which spread that diseas.
But anti-evolutionists are normally not driven by science, but rather faith, so no amount of argumentation (as shown by the ancient Usenet group talk.origins, in which the same arguments have been rehashed for decades) will persuade them.
A climatologist researcher friend of mine was going along with the global warming consensus while he was running Global Circulation Models. Then he got deep into paleoclimatology and changed his position, because he saw first hand how terribly bad the historical climate record was, and what large, important conclusions were drawn from inadequate data coupled to very suspect indirect causation chains.
Other acuaintances of mine in the field, at least during the Clinton administration, would not publish their skepticisms and didn't want to be quoted by name because being a GW skeptic meant not getting research grants!
Another acquaintance doing research on increased CO2 on plant growth had trouble getting grants once he started showing very positive results.
Global Warming "science" is already highly politicized. And I put "science" in quotes because forecasting something 100 years in advance is not particularly scientific, given the lack of testability in reasonable time frames. Furthermore, there is a sampling bias in the models... huge amounts of assumptions go into models, many in what is called "paramterization" - which means literally sticking in fudge factors to account for many phenomenon either too fine grained, too poorly understood or just too hard to model to put into the program. Naturally, those models which can "forecast" the historical record tend to be considered the best ones. However, given the level of tweaking the models require, this is more likely to be a matter of chance than to indicate that the model is really correct.
Finally, what BL says about the Kyoto accords is true. Put in different terms, the change in temperature as a result of Kyoto would not be measurable (separable from noise) in 100 years. In other words, Kyoto does nothing to help the environment (the other formulation is to say it delays warming 6 years out of 100). If one pins down a knowledgable Kyoto proponent, they will admit that Kyoto doesn't achieve anything of significance with regard to the climate, but rather gives a start to what is really required, which (if you believe the IPCC models) is a reduction in CO2 emissions so great that with current technology it would destroy the economies of the world and result in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in the 3rd and 4th world.
In other words, Kyoto was meant as a trojan horse (with goodies in there to make the US economy less competitive with Europe, and a complete lack of regulation of the largest and fastest growing countries). Its purpose was to get people used to suffering to reduce CO2, and to get agreements in place that could be used to tighten the CO2 rules over time.
Finally, many environmentalists believe in the "precautionary principle" which in effect says that if we suspect something might be harmful, but can't prove it, we should stop it anyway.
This sounds reasonable on the surface, until one realizes that it is applied to restrict CO2 emitting activity, but is not applied to the potential social impacts of those restrictions. In other words, precautionaryism (to coin a term) is okay for the environment, but potential harm to man does not receive the same level of caution. Furthermore, it is easy to extend the precautionary principle to end all progress. For example, the precautionary principle, applied to genetic engineering, would cause us to shut down all efforts in the area, because it is likely (yes, likely) that the technology will be used by terrorists to create dangerous pathogens.
On another topic, I read the Scientific American criticism of The Skeptical Environmentalist. It almost caused me to cancel my subscription after forty years. It was an poor excuse for a rebuttal - it was an attack on the person, BL, more than on what he had to say. It ignored most of his main points and where it found specific fault (and there was almost none pointed out), it was on trivial details. And yet, they only gave him one page to respond. Furthermore, the threatened him with copyr
The book does not purport to be science, but rather to be a review of the science, the players in the environmental conflict and the claims that are made.
The book was a result of Lomborg attempting to REFUTE a series of claims counter to normal environmental doctrine. He was unable to do so, and in the process concluded, and documented, that a lot of the public statements are misleading. In doing so, he is talking to the public, not publishing in a peer reviewed journal, and he is taking on others who do the same thing.
His level of honesty is far ahead of that of his opponents. That there may be weaknesses in the book is hardly surprising, given the vast area it covers.
I do know that in the area of climatology, his conclusion are more consistent with what my climatologist researcher friends conclude than with what the environmental organizations are saying.
There is no doubt but what he is being attacked for going against the orthodoxy. Many others publish far less carefully researched books that support the orthodoxy, and they are not investigated by committees. Nor does Scientific American devote 14 pages of criticism to those books - 14 pages which attacked BL but were almost entirely full of ad hominem attacks and nit picking of trivial points, but had little to say about the important conclusions.
He is also probably being attacked for showing how the dynamics of the environmental movement work, how they lead to a crisis atmosphere, and how environmental organizations profit from made up or exaggerated crisis.
Environmentalism has become a religion to many. It is no wonder that they want to burn him at the stake.
I have an older Dish Network DVR Receiver (model unknown, it doesn't say on the front and I'm, not going to disrupt my video distribution system to find out) that has the worst firmware I have ever encountered in a consumer device. After replacing it three times, I concluded that it was firmware rather than hardware.
I can crash it, requiring a power up, just by hitting things too fast on the remote control. Whenever it decides to reload the program guide, it loses the ability to schedule a recording by hitting the "record" button! It has various other malfunctions where unrelated functions break other ones.
As one who does embedded software, I am ashamed for the profession about this lousy software.
Actually, the Soviets came up with their own H-bomb design. It was done by Sakharov independent of US H-bomb efforts. Espionage helped them greatly with the fission bomb.
Britain and the US collaborated from the start.
China is believed to have stolen US designs, although they may have come up their first themselves (I have no info on this).
I don't know where the French got theirs.
There is supposition that the Israeli's also came up with a design themselves, but since they don't even admit having them, who knows.
Frankly, your assertion is very unlikely. Sure, basic physics teaches how to build a fission bomb (although getting the material is really tough unless you have a reactor).
The invention of the hydrogen bomb was done independently at least twice, both by extremely smart specialists, not your BS physics grad.
However, the basic design of the Teller-Ulam fusion bomb is now readily available, including many of the relevant equations. A less detailed source is here.
Because the article is slashdotted, I can't judge what it gives away, but probably not as much as is now readily available (which may be very different from what was available in 1979).
Iran's #2 mullah, Rafsanjani, has indeed said he is willing to sacrifice millions in order to destroy Israel. Pakistan is a different situation. The biggest danger to the US with Pakistan is that an Islamist takeover would result in nukes which could be given to terrorists, and which might be detonated anonymously in the US, with the source unknown (was it Pakistan? Iran? North Korea? stolen Russian Nuke?).
Perhaps indeed India would not perceive the threat to itself as high enough to instantly attack, in which case my ranking is wrong. However, in an unstable situation where terrorists might acquire the nukes, India would certainly face the same risk as the US: terrorist use of Pakistani nukes, which is a pretty terrible threat.
My guess: if India could achieve a successful first strike (i.e. a destruction of Pakistani nukes with extremely low risk of nuclear retaliation against population centers), they would probably do so - especially if doing so did not require hitting population centers. If they could not, then it is hard to say what would happen. Perhaps the United States would feel compelled to do so, perhaps using precision non-nuclear weapons.
How do you explain the fact that Huntsville, Alabama (home of the rocketry program) has German Hill [so named for the German rocket scientists who lived there]? A number of German scientists were very influential in the early rocketry program through Apollo at least.
India would first-strike Pakistan if they calculated (either correctly or not) that an Al Qaeda/Taliban style regime would represent too much of a threat, and that the first strike would be effective.
In the case of WW-II, it may be that the only reason that Germany did not use toxic weapons was that Hitler had personally been gassed in WW-I and thus chose not to use them.
Furthermore, WW-I had shown that gas weapons were not that effective if both sides used them. Saddam used them more effectively against Iran but that was because Iran was using poorly equipped suicide mass charges, against which gas is more effective.
Another important aspect of the Cuban missile crisis is that when it came to a showdown, Fidel Castro demanded that the Russians launch the missiles against the US, which the Russians wisely refused to do.
This is the same Fidel Castro that peaceniks the world over fawn over.
Kennedy lost a lot in the missile crisis. In order to resolve the crisis, the US had to agree not to ever attack Cuba, and had to remove the missiles from Turkey. Russia lost only a quick attempt to emplace missiles near the US.
India is at the top of the list because of the instability of Pakistan. It does not mean that India is especially aggressive or desires to make such an attack.
However, given the instability of Pakistan, it is possible that India will find it necessary to enact a counter-force strike against Pakistan for its own survival, in conditions where Pakistan is taken over by Isamic fundamentalists of a certain stripe. I do not know if such a strike is practical, however, in which case India would instead be forced to rely on nuclear deterrent by threatening (as opposed to attacking) Pakistani population centers.
Thus India might have to strike first because it has no choice. It is not at the top of the list because it is viewed as the most aggressive, which it certainly is not. It is at the top of the list because it is in the most danger.
Rolling over Pakistan in a conventional war would not be sufficient to remove the Pakistani nuclear capability, and in fact would almost certainly trigger a Pakistani nuclear strike, especially under the circumstances posited.
India also needs to maintain a deterrent against China, and Pakistan acts as a Chinese proxy to some extent, having apparently received considerable nuclear aid from China. However, the likelihood of a nuclear war with China is far lower, IMHO because China is far more careful and is hence adequately deterred at this time.
Certainly in terms of the big picture, the large power rivalry is between India and China, not India and Pakistan. But the nuclear arming of Pakistan changes the equation radically, allowing it to greatly threaten India's population centers. Combining that with the political volatility thus makes Pakistan more immediately dangerous to India than China.
Thus, if a high probability even is the takeover of Pakistan by Islamic fundamentalists, and there are not adequate safeguards to prevent them from launching a first strike, India would be almost compelled to launch a counter-force strike - not out of aggressive intend but out of self defense. Hence its ranking on the list.
As far as "no first use" doctrines, those go out the middle the first nanosecond after a huge threat arises which can only be neutralized with first use!
I would not be surprised to find India working hard on fourth generation nuclear weapons for use against Pakistani nuclear facilities and also for use in theater ABM systems. If they can get them working, it allows the reduction of the Pakistani threat without crossing the true nuclear threshold (which is the use of large yield weapons which create radioactive fallout).
One more potential use has come to my attention since I wrote the article above.
From here we see a threatened (12/5/2002) Russian use (apparently of nuclear weapons) to destroy the population of Chechnya:
Question: Shamil Basayev is threatening Russia with nuclear terrorism. Should we be frightened?
Answer: If Chechen terrorists attempt to seize a nuclear power station or spread radioactive materials to pollute the air and land, it will amount to proclaiming a nuclear war on Russia. The reply will be ruthless for Chechens....
If Chechens resort to nuclear blackmail, there will be no Chechnya to fight for.
You seem to have left out Russia, which has still has lots of deployed ICBMs (about as many as the US). Russia is more unstable than the US by orders of magnitude, and remains quite paranoid.
Also, the issue of first strike means different things in different conditions. A fourth generation nuke (i.e. low yield, very little fallout) used as a bunker buster is a relatively insignificant event compared to a cold-war style counter-force first strike or a retaliatory anti-population strike.
Furthermore, the political acceptability of anything other than a highly limited, low collateral damage (fourth generation) pre-emptive attack is extremely low in the US, UK and Israel. Even such a limitted attack would have enormous political repercussions in those three countries. The idea that the US is at the top of the list of those politically likely to launch an attack is absolutely insane.
I'd give a quite different order of probabilitites:
India - miscalculation or response to radical Islamic takeover of Pakistan.
Pakistan - result of miscalculation or radical Islamic takeover.
Al Qaeda - using purchased/furnished NK or Iranian (or even Russian) weapon smuggled to civilian target.
Israel - fourth generation pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear capabilities.
Iran - (against Israeli population centers - see this and this.) Iran and North Korea have been closely cooperating, trading Iranian money for North Korean capabilities, including long range missiles and probably nuclear weapons. Iran has its own Uranium enrichment facilities sufficient to produce weapons grade Uranium, and North Korea has a supply of Plutonium, and a Uranium enrichment program at an unknown stage of progress. Both nations have local Uranium mines. A large contingent of North Korean scientists are living in Iran, indicating that the nuclear programs may be as deeply coupled as the historic ties between the US and UK in that field.
US, UK - fourth generation strike against deep underground targets in Iran or North Korea), or strategic retaliation against terrorist supporting regimes after an Al Qaeda nuclear attack in the US.
NK - as part of an attempted conquest of the south, as a dying spasm of the regime, or less likely, as a response to a US pre-emptive strike against nuclear facilities and stockpiiles.
China - either as an extension of an Indo-Pakistani conflict, or a Taiwan crisis.
USSR (major counter-force strike against US as a result of a mistake or rogue elements in the SRF)
France - no plausible scenario until about 2050, which it becomes Dar-al-France (Islamic dominated France).
Note that only a few of these scenarios result in major nuclear war, and some (the fourth generation attacks) are only nominally nuclear, in that they are low yield with essentially no residual radiation.
Also note that all of the nuclear powers probably have the capability of using Fusion boosting to create high yield weapons, and many are probably capable of fielding true two-stage thermonuclear weapons.
Fourth generation weapons are speculative. The physics are discussed in one unclassified reference, and the recent defense spending authorization most likely funds some fourth generation research and testing. Such weapons are especially useful for bunker busters (funded) and anti-ballistic missile systems (I hope that the US ABM system is secretly using them).
By far the most deadly threat is STILL Russia. Note that this >a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/missileers/fals ealarms.html">came close as recently as 1995 when a scientific sounding rocket, launched in the arctic, was misinterpreted by the aging Russian radar system as a sub-launched EMP first-phase attack. Yeltsin activated his football and had an estimat
Re:Credit Card Late Charges = PROFIT
on
Stealth Inflation
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· Score: 1
The more that people use debit cards, the higher the prices have to be for everyone to overcome the higher merchant fees.
Re:Credit Card Late Charges = PROFIT
on
Stealth Inflation
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· Score: 1
Reason one: Airline Mileage Reason two: Limited fraud liability ($50) by law. Not true last I checked on debit cards. Reason three: float - the bank account is earning a little interest.
And yeah, I know about debit cards. I was working for VISA when we implemented the first big debit card systems, and our spinoff business plan was built around debit cards (this was almost 20 years ago).
Banks love debit cards. No float. Higher merchant fees.
I don't love debit cards.
Credit Card Late Charges = PROFIT
on
Stealth Inflation
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· Score: 3, Interesting
For some time, credit card issuers have made almost all of their profit on late charges. The interest primarily pays off fraud losses.
I know of one large issuer which has processing centers in many states. It intentionally mails its bills from the one with the longest average snail-mail delivery to your address (a friend of mine was in the meeting where this strategy was hatched at that company). Credit card companies have also greatly increased their late fees (they used to be trivial) and a late payment will usually cause any interest rate deal that you had to disappear, with your rate going very high.
In the good old days, paying your credit card bills on time was the best way to have good credit. Today, credit card companies prefer people who pay late, but always pay, and also those who keep big balances on the cards. Pay your card late and watch the increase in credit card solicitations in your mailbox!
I have a couple of cards that account for almost all my credit card usage. I use automatic electronic payments monthly out to eternity to those cards... payments exceeding the minimum payment expected. This avoids any late payment charges (and the loss of my mileage points) should I not get around to processing the bill and sending in the full payment in time.
After I switched my long distance away from MCI, they continued to bill me a few bucks a month for some sort of access fee - but they weren't providing any service.
A phone call resolved the problem but I didn't get back all the money.
This is slightly off topic, but I noticed a number of people complaining about the same experience I had... looking for information about a medication and finding pages of online pharmacies rated higher.
However, I also run a blog (Useful Fools http://www.tinyvital.com/blog) and thus can tell you where those high page ranks come from: link spamming.
I started getting comments in my blog that were a bit odd (some ancient article would get a comment like "nice article" and nothing else). I would check and the associated URL was an online pharmacy. Also, I would get comments that were nothing more than a list of online-pharmacy links.
I delete all of these. I have modified my blog code to make the automated Movable Type automated spamming more difficult, just to find that the spammers using automated means come back to the site where it fails and manually enter the spam. I also modified my blog so the email notification of a comment to me also includes a hotlink to delete the comment. I am considering sequestering hotlinks until I manually approve them, but that's a bunch more Perl hacking and I hate Perl and don't have time:-)
This approach causes the google page rank to be artificially inflated. By spreading the spam across a lot of blogs (and I assume BBS's and usenet), the links do not appear to Google's algorithms to be link farms (i.e. they create a widely distributed link farm that is hard to detect). I wouldn't be surprised if there are comments buried away in Slashdot that also contain these links.
One of my favorite blogs, Samizdata, uses a simple Turing test (an image with a random code in it that you have to enter) to deter automated spam. But this won't stop it all.
I fear that google will end up derating blog links as a result, which would be a big shame (I *like* the high page rank on my blog, and get lots of interesting comments and email as a result).
The reason is that the total cost of the system it what counts. The incremental cost of producing a number of these drugs is small (which is one reason that they are provided to third world countries at greatly reduced cost).
Your argument can be extended too all of medicine, food production, and damn near anything else. It is a fundamental view that companies should be run as charities.
You may not realize this, but there are many diseases killing vast numbers of people in the third world - not just AIDS. Should we force the drug companies to give away their treatments for all of these? Should we force them to send people to those countries to force the populace to use the drugs properly (because in many of the poor countries, people use drugs improperly, increasing the speed of the development of drug resistance)? Where do we stop? Do you want poor people in America to subsidize the poor people in Africa?
"Holding out on third world countries" - holding out what? AIDS drugs that they spent billions of dollars developing? Food (a lot of people starve, too, you know)?
Somehow the idea that companies are morally related to the Nazi medical researchers because they don't give away all of their products to those who cannot afford them is just silly.
I wouldn't say you hit a nerve. I'd say you revealed assumptions that you were incorrectly making! There was no nerve there to hit.
I didn't say that dtca is about benefits to patients. I do, however, believe that some advertising in beneficial to patients, and the reason is because of the too-slow uptake of information by many doctors. Furthermore, preventing the advertising had long been an unreasonable prevention of commercial speech. After all, the people selling snake oil in the herbal "medicine" area didn't face those restrictions. So letting people know that there might be a medical alternative to whatever quack potion they are taking is indeed a service.
For example, persistent heartburn significantly increases the risk of esophageal cancer. The ads for Nexium informs people that persistent heartburn is dangerous, something few actually know. Nexium is basically a patented replacement for Prilosec (which is no longer patented) and itself seems to offer, at a significant cost, only some benefit over Prilosec.
Please don't confuse motives (pharmacos want to make more money) with results.
Obviously the pharmas lobbied for the ability to advertise. And obviously they use it for reasons that are not helpful in some cases, such as promoting still patented drugs that are functionally equivalent to ones that have expired patents. But the fact that they spend the money doing this is in itself evidence that they protection of investments through patents is important.
Now, as far as R&D costs... it is not specious to argue that protecting the products of R&D's, whether they are 15% or 30% of the pharmacos total expenses is critically important to the continuation of those efforts. Pharmacos do indeed go through massive costs to meed often overly burdensome regulatory requirements in order to sell their inventions. To strip them of protection of the invention is to end the invention process by them. That should be obvious to anyone familiar with how businesses operate. To say they are not overburdened just because they also spend a lot of money in areas outside of R&D is overly simplistic.
Now, those who are statist enough to believe government can always do things better won't care about this. After all, let the pharmacos go under. So what? Then we won't have advertising costs and executive overcompensation (which is being fixed anyway, as stockholders are starting to hold their fiduciaries to much higher standards after the scandals of the '90s). We wont have, gasp, that evil thing: profits!
And that is why I proposed that perhaps we force have some experimentation. There are countries whose health payments systems are free-riding on the R&D expenses of pharmacos and, by passthrough, on the prices Americans pay for those drugs. Lets try out other approaches in those countries and see what happens. Its a big world, we don't all have to do it the same way.
To simply end patent protection of pharmaceuticals is to discriminate against one particular industry, one that is very important or critical to the health of many people. In my opinion, it would be idiotic to do so, regardless of what sort of snakes are involved in running pharmaceutical companies.
With the current dramatic progress being made in genomics, proteonomics, and genetic engineering (my daughter is using a powerful technique just discovered 1.5 years ago0), a progress rate far exceeding Moore's law according to Science Magazine, forcing innovators to rely on secrecy (hence damaging the exchange of scientific information) instead of patent protection, or just depriving innovators of capital (because why invest in a losing business proposition - one which free-riders can and absolutely will destroy) just doesn't make sense.
Much innovation is being done by government. But much is being done by private companies. Craig Ventner really ticked off a lot of government folks because he, for profit, sequenced the human genome far faster than the government forecast, and did i
I think the problem with putting all drug development in the hands of the government is simple: the government is not likely to be very good at it (for example, the FDA is horribly inefficient, puts huge burdens on drug development, and actively prevents people from getting drugs that are needed, and is politicized); the process will be highly politicized, with the funds often allocated to the victim group that screams the loudest.
Here is what I suggest: prohibit the selling of any drugs developed after a certain date to countries which have drug price controls or a single buyer for all drugs. Then those companies will be forced to do their own drug development. Then we can see which model works the best, because we will have both. This would also end the free-riding that those companies currently get.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a widely believed fact that bioweapons and extensive use of tactical nuclear weapons will be used in WWIII that is due to begin in 2006-2007.
Russia, China and the Arabs will unite. New York will be devastated by two small nuclear devices and while USA isolates itself to deal with the trauma, China invades Asia and Russia pushes into Western Europe.
Could you pin down the dates a little more, old chap? I need to get my planning in order and know when to go hide.
Thanks!
probably the most important news is that China will disallow standard 802.11 WEP security and mandate its own standard - WAPI for all Wi-Fi in the country. This could have wide ranging implications, from splitting the market to leading to a possibly improved system (on first glance, WAPI beats WEP hands down, except for privacy implications - big surprise) for the world.
In any case, it is a dramatic development.
There's also a slim chance, researchers say, that the scabs could yield live smallpox virus -- believed to reside in only two laboratories in the world
Only the naive believe that live smallpox exists in only two labs in the world. A more accurate statement in the article would have been "only legally allowed in two labs in the world."
There is strong reason to believe that North Korea has the virus. France is also believed to have it. Iraq may have had it up until recently, as it was endemic in the region in the late sixties, and just a few scabs in a refrigerator would have been enough. It used to be common practice for scientists and doctors to keep a bit of smallpox in the fridge when they gathered it from patients. Hence there could be samples, possibly not even labelled or known to the owners, in a number of places in the world.
One reason that the plan to destroy all stocks at the CDC and the official Russian lab was the realization that rogue countries probably had the virus, and hence destroying it would damage future defense attempts.
Furthermore, the USSR and later Russia maintained stockpiles of 20 tons of weaponized smallpox in the eighties (authorized by Gorbachev) and probably to the present, and loaded it into missile warheads. Furthermore, a number of their scientists have since emigrated to other countries. In 1994 a number visited North Korea for unknown reasons. One former Soviet BW officieal entered into a deal with Iraq to sell 5000 liter fermenters.
And then we have accidental discoveries like these scabs. Smallpox can survive in scabs for a long time, although >100 years is stretching it.
None of your response deals with the real issues. Furthermore, it fails to address why Scientific American would take the unprecedented step of attacking him with 14 pages of its magazine while only allowing him one page to reply, and forcing him to take down his web reply.
There have been many cases of bad science in history. Polywater and Cold Fusion being the most recent. The scientific process is not perfect - it is loaded with politics and factions in practice, as anyone familiar with science is aware. In the long run, on those subjects where its process can be applied, it provides the best truths we can have. But along the way, it can be far off. Furthermore, it does not approach the truth asymptotically, but sometimes with sudden paradigm shifts.
And quite contrary to your beliefs, many leaders of environmentalist organizations indeed act just like other special interest groups, putting out intentionally deceitful propaganda in order to increase their income. Notice I said "leaders." I am not imputing the motives of environmentalists in general.
However, since you bring the subject up, environmentalists can broadly be divided into two types. One type wants to preserve the environment for our use and the future use of humanity. This is simply conservationism by another name.
Another type, which is distressingly common, uses environmentalism as a substitute for religion. Where else can one derive the basis that we should preserve the earth for its own sake, or that we don't have the "right" to change it? Anyone making that argument is putting "the earth" above mankind. Only a religion gives a basis for such a set of ethics.
As it happens, although I am not in the field, I am well acquainted with some people in the global warming field. I also have enough scientific background to not be a typical ideologically driven opponent to the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. And I know the level of politics in global warming "science" and the poor quality of much of the work.
The issue with BL is how such a huge portion of the scientific community (most of whom are NOT earth scientists) have joined to attack him. He did NOT publish a flawed scientific work. He published a compendium of references and his interpretations. Furthermore, as a PhD statistician, he does indeed have a background to judge many of the environmental studies as far as their methodology is concerned - better qualified than many of the researchers.
But as far as I can tell, the theory of anthropogenic global warming has reached the point of being doctrine among many who have not studied it, because it fits THEIR political or ideological agenda. Hence the reaction to someone like BL is hysterical and overblown.
If his appointment was political, then so was the attack on him by the commission. In that sense, he is a pawn between powerful forces.
Finally, I have yet to meet an environmentalist who can justify Kyoto even using the global warming projections that it is based on, projections which are not the result of solid science, but rather highly speculative science.
Consider other areas of science where the strong consensus model was wrong:
Causes of peptic ulcers.. stress, eating wrong foods, etc. Then one day a doctor discovers that treating ulcers with antibiotics is very effective, leading to the discovery that Helicobacter Pylori is the cause of most ulcers. Oops!
Plate tectonics. Because the theory of continental drift was first proposed by an astrophysicist, and because it was at strong variance with prevailing theories, it took many years before geologists were willing to accept the already very strong evidence.
These are just recent reversals. The scientific method works, but you have to give it enough time. If you watch the flip/flops of major pieces of the CO2 debate, you realize that the science in that area is far from mature. If you understand the mechanisms of the models, and realize how parameterization works, then you know that the models are not strong science, but rather just a best guess.
Evolution is one of the best tested theories in science. It's predictive power is used every day by research scientist in a number of disciplines, including medicine.
In other words, one can use the theory of evolution to make predictions (for example, in microbiology or epidemiology) and then one can test those predictions, which is science at its best.
For example, when a new disease pops up, evolutionary reasoning (host-parasite coevolution, for example) gives researchers direction in where to look for the host of the disease (if there is one, which there usually is).
Simple examples in that area: diseases which kill the host too quickly normally will not survive, unless they have a novel means of spread. Thus Anthrax, which kills very rapidly, needs to form spores so that it will survive until another animal ingests it. Furthermore, it is a disease of ruminants, because they go around eating from the ground, where the spores reside.
Malaria, on the other hand, causes extended periods of sickness during which the victim is stationary (laying down sick) and thus an optimal target for the mosquitos which spread that diseas.
But anti-evolutionists are normally not driven by science, but rather faith, so no amount of argumentation (as shown by the ancient Usenet group talk.origins, in which the same arguments have been rehashed for decades) will persuade them.
Yep.
A climatologist researcher friend of mine was going along with the global warming consensus while he was running Global Circulation Models. Then he got deep into paleoclimatology and changed his position, because he saw first hand how terribly bad the historical climate record was, and what large, important conclusions were drawn from inadequate data coupled to very suspect indirect causation chains.
Other acuaintances of mine in the field, at least during the Clinton administration, would not publish their skepticisms and didn't want to be quoted by name because being a GW skeptic meant not getting research grants!
Another acquaintance doing research on increased CO2 on plant growth had trouble getting grants once he started showing very positive results.
Global Warming "science" is already highly politicized. And I put "science" in quotes because forecasting something 100 years in advance is not particularly scientific, given the lack of testability in reasonable time frames. Furthermore, there is a sampling bias in the models... huge amounts of assumptions go into models, many in what is called "paramterization" - which means literally sticking in fudge factors to account for many phenomenon either too fine grained, too poorly understood or just too hard to model to put into the program. Naturally, those models which can "forecast" the historical record tend to be considered the best ones. However, given the level of tweaking the models require, this is more likely to be a matter of chance than to indicate that the model is really correct.
Finally, what BL says about the Kyoto accords is true. Put in different terms, the change in temperature as a result of Kyoto would not be measurable (separable from noise) in 100 years. In other words, Kyoto does nothing to help the environment (the other formulation is to say it delays warming 6 years out of 100). If one pins down a knowledgable Kyoto proponent, they will admit that Kyoto doesn't achieve anything of significance with regard to the climate, but rather gives a start to what is really required, which (if you believe the IPCC models) is a reduction in CO2 emissions so great that with current technology it would destroy the economies of the world and result in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in the 3rd and 4th world.
In other words, Kyoto was meant as a trojan horse (with goodies in there to make the US economy less competitive with Europe, and a complete lack of regulation of the largest and fastest growing countries). Its purpose was to get people used to suffering to reduce CO2, and to get agreements in place that could be used to tighten the CO2 rules over time.
Finally, many environmentalists believe in the "precautionary principle" which in effect says that if we suspect something might be harmful, but can't prove it, we should stop it anyway.
This sounds reasonable on the surface, until one realizes that it is applied to restrict CO2 emitting activity, but is not applied to the potential social impacts of those restrictions. In other words, precautionaryism (to coin a term) is okay for the environment, but potential harm to man does not receive the same level of caution. Furthermore, it is easy to extend the precautionary principle to end all progress. For example, the precautionary principle, applied to genetic engineering, would cause us to shut down all efforts in the area, because it is likely (yes, likely) that the technology will be used by terrorists to create dangerous pathogens.
On another topic, I read the Scientific American criticism of The Skeptical Environmentalist. It almost caused me to cancel my subscription after forty years. It was an poor excuse for a rebuttal - it was an attack on the person, BL, more than on what he had to say. It ignored most of his main points and where it found specific fault (and there was almost none pointed out), it was on trivial details. And yet, they only gave him one page to respond. Furthermore, the threatened him with copyr
The book does not purport to be science, but rather to be a review of the science, the players in the environmental conflict and the claims that are made.
The book was a result of Lomborg attempting to REFUTE a series of claims counter to normal environmental doctrine. He was unable to do so, and in the process concluded, and documented, that a lot of the public statements are misleading. In doing so, he is talking to the public, not publishing in a peer reviewed journal, and he is taking on others who do the same thing.
His level of honesty is far ahead of that of his opponents. That there may be weaknesses in the book is hardly surprising, given the vast area it covers.
I do know that in the area of climatology, his conclusion are more consistent with what my climatologist researcher friends conclude than with what the environmental organizations are saying.
There is no doubt but what he is being attacked for going against the orthodoxy. Many others publish far less carefully researched books that support the orthodoxy, and they are not investigated by committees. Nor does Scientific American devote 14 pages of criticism to those books - 14 pages which attacked BL but were almost entirely full of ad hominem attacks and nit picking of trivial points, but had little to say about the important conclusions.
He is also probably being attacked for showing how the dynamics of the environmental movement work, how they lead to a crisis atmosphere, and how environmental organizations profit from made up or exaggerated crisis.
Environmentalism has become a religion to many. It is no wonder that they want to burn him at the stake.
I have an older Dish Network DVR Receiver (model unknown, it doesn't say on the front and I'm, not going to disrupt my video distribution system to find out) that has the worst firmware I have ever encountered in a consumer device. After replacing it three times, I concluded that it was firmware rather than hardware.
I can crash it, requiring a power up, just by hitting things too fast on the remote control. Whenever it decides to reload the program guide, it loses the ability to schedule a recording by hitting the "record" button! It has various other malfunctions where unrelated functions break other ones.
As one who does embedded software, I am ashamed for the profession about this lousy software.
Actually, the Soviets came up with their own H-bomb design. It was done by Sakharov independent of US H-bomb efforts. Espionage helped them greatly with the fission bomb.
Britain and the US collaborated from the start.
China is believed to have stolen US designs, although they may have come up their first themselves (I have no info on this).
I don't know where the French got theirs.
There is supposition that the Israeli's also came up with a design themselves, but since they don't even admit having them, who knows.
Frankly, your assertion is very unlikely. Sure, basic physics teaches how to build a fission bomb (although getting the material is really tough unless you have a reactor).
The invention of the hydrogen bomb was done independently at least twice, both by extremely smart specialists, not your BS physics grad.
However, the basic design of the Teller-Ulam fusion bomb is now readily available, including many of the relevant equations. A less detailed source is here.
Because the article is slashdotted, I can't judge what it gives away, but probably not as much as is now readily available (which may be very different from what was available in 1979).
Iran's #2 mullah, Rafsanjani, has indeed said he is willing to sacrifice millions in order to destroy Israel. Pakistan is a different situation. The biggest danger to the US with Pakistan is that an Islamist takeover would result in nukes which could be given to terrorists, and which might be detonated anonymously in the US, with the source unknown (was it Pakistan? Iran? North Korea? stolen Russian Nuke?).
Perhaps indeed India would not perceive the threat to itself as high enough to instantly attack, in which case my ranking is wrong. However, in an unstable situation where terrorists might acquire the nukes, India would certainly face the same risk as the US: terrorist use of Pakistani nukes, which is a pretty terrible threat.
My guess: if India could achieve a successful first strike (i.e. a destruction of Pakistani nukes with extremely low risk of nuclear retaliation against population centers), they would probably do so - especially if doing so did not require hitting population centers. If they could not, then it is hard to say what would happen. Perhaps the United States would feel compelled to do so, perhaps using precision non-nuclear weapons.
How do you explain the fact that Huntsville, Alabama (home of the rocketry program) has German Hill [so named for the German rocket scientists who lived there]? A number of German scientists were very influential in the early rocketry program through Apollo at least.
India would first-strike Pakistan if they calculated (either correctly or not) that an Al Qaeda/Taliban style regime would represent too much of a threat, and that the first strike would be effective.
In the case of WW-II, it may be that the only reason that Germany did not use toxic weapons was that Hitler had personally been gassed in WW-I and thus chose not to use them.
Furthermore, WW-I had shown that gas weapons were not that effective if both sides used them. Saddam used them more effectively against Iran but that was because Iran was using poorly equipped suicide mass charges, against which gas is more effective.
Another important aspect of the Cuban missile crisis is that when it came to a showdown, Fidel Castro demanded that the Russians launch the missiles against the US, which the Russians wisely refused to do.
This is the same Fidel Castro that peaceniks the world over fawn over.
Kennedy lost a lot in the missile crisis. In order to resolve the crisis, the US had to agree not to ever attack Cuba, and had to remove the missiles from Turkey. Russia lost only a quick attempt to emplace missiles near the US.
India is at the top of the list because of the instability of Pakistan. It does not mean that India is especially aggressive or desires to make such an attack.
However, given the instability of Pakistan, it is possible that India will find it necessary to enact a counter-force strike against Pakistan for its own survival, in conditions where Pakistan is taken over by Isamic fundamentalists of a certain stripe. I do not know if such a strike is practical, however, in which case India would instead be forced to rely on nuclear deterrent by threatening (as opposed to attacking) Pakistani population centers.
Thus India might have to strike first because it has no choice. It is not at the top of the list because it is viewed as the most aggressive, which it certainly is not. It is at the top of the list because it is in the most danger.
Rolling over Pakistan in a conventional war would not be sufficient to remove the Pakistani nuclear capability, and in fact would almost certainly trigger a Pakistani nuclear strike, especially under the circumstances posited.
India also needs to maintain a deterrent against China, and Pakistan acts as a Chinese proxy to some extent, having apparently received considerable nuclear aid from China. However, the likelihood of a nuclear war with China is far lower, IMHO because China is far more careful and is hence adequately deterred at this time.
Certainly in terms of the big picture, the large power rivalry is between India and China, not India and Pakistan. But the nuclear arming of Pakistan changes the equation radically, allowing it to greatly threaten India's population centers. Combining that with the political volatility thus makes Pakistan more immediately dangerous to India than China.
Thus, if a high probability even is the takeover of Pakistan by Islamic fundamentalists, and there are not adequate safeguards to prevent them from launching a first strike, India would be almost compelled to launch a counter-force strike - not out of aggressive intend but out of self defense. Hence its ranking on the list.
As far as "no first use" doctrines, those go out the middle the first nanosecond after a huge threat arises which can only be neutralized with first use!
I would not be surprised to find India working hard on fourth generation nuclear weapons for use against Pakistani nuclear facilities and also for use in theater ABM systems. If they can get them working, it allows the reduction of the Pakistani threat without crossing the true nuclear threshold (which is the use of large yield weapons which create radioactive fallout).
One more potential use has come to my attention since I wrote the article above.
...
From here we see a threatened (12/5/2002) Russian use (apparently of nuclear weapons) to destroy the population of Chechnya:
Question: Shamil Basayev is threatening Russia with nuclear terrorism. Should we be frightened?
Answer: If Chechen terrorists attempt to seize a nuclear power station or spread radioactive materials to pollute the air and land, it will amount to proclaiming a nuclear war on Russia. The reply will be ruthless for Chechens.
If Chechens resort to nuclear blackmail, there will be no Chechnya to fight for.
You seem to have left out Russia, which has still has lots of deployed ICBMs (about as many as the US). Russia is more unstable than the US by orders of magnitude, and remains quite paranoid.
Also, the issue of first strike means different things in different conditions. A fourth generation nuke (i.e. low yield, very little fallout) used as a bunker buster is a relatively insignificant event compared to a cold-war style counter-force first strike or a retaliatory anti-population strike.
Furthermore, the political acceptability of anything other than a highly limited, low collateral damage (fourth generation) pre-emptive attack is extremely low in the US, UK and Israel. Even such a limitted attack would have enormous political repercussions in those three countries. The idea that the US is at the top of the list of those politically likely to launch an attack is absolutely insane.
I'd give a quite different order of probabilitites:
India - miscalculation or response to radical Islamic takeover of Pakistan.
Pakistan - result of miscalculation or radical Islamic takeover.
Al Qaeda - using purchased/furnished NK or Iranian (or even Russian) weapon smuggled to civilian target.
Israel - fourth generation pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear capabilities.
Iran - (against Israeli population centers - see this and this.) Iran and North Korea have been closely cooperating, trading Iranian money for North Korean capabilities, including long range missiles and probably nuclear weapons. Iran has its own Uranium enrichment facilities sufficient to produce weapons grade Uranium, and North Korea has a supply of Plutonium, and a Uranium enrichment program at an unknown stage of progress. Both nations have local Uranium mines. A large contingent of North Korean scientists are living in Iran, indicating that the nuclear programs may be as deeply coupled as the historic ties between the US and UK in that field.
US, UK - fourth generation strike against deep underground targets in Iran or North Korea), or strategic retaliation against terrorist supporting regimes after an Al Qaeda nuclear attack in the US.
NK - as part of an attempted conquest of the south, as a dying spasm of the regime, or less likely, as a response to a US pre-emptive strike against nuclear facilities and stockpiiles.
China - either as an extension of an Indo-Pakistani conflict, or a Taiwan crisis.
USSR (major counter-force strike against US as a result of a mistake or rogue elements in the SRF)
France - no plausible scenario until about 2050, which it becomes Dar-al-France (Islamic dominated France).
Note that only a few of these scenarios result in major nuclear war, and some (the fourth generation attacks) are only nominally nuclear, in that they are low yield with essentially no residual radiation.
Also note that all of the nuclear powers probably have the capability of using Fusion boosting to create high yield weapons, and many are probably capable of fielding true two-stage thermonuclear weapons.
Fourth generation weapons are speculative. The physics are discussed in one unclassified reference, and the recent defense spending authorization most likely funds some fourth generation research and testing. Such weapons are especially useful for bunker busters (funded) and anti-ballistic missile systems (I hope that the US ABM system is secretly using them).
By far the most deadly threat is STILL Russia. Note that this >a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/missileers/fals ealarms.html">came close as recently as 1995 when a scientific sounding rocket, launched in the arctic, was misinterpreted by the aging Russian radar system as a sub-launched EMP first-phase attack. Yeltsin activated his football and had an estimat
The more that people use debit cards, the higher the prices have to be for everyone to overcome the higher merchant fees.
Reason one: Airline Mileage
Reason two: Limited fraud liability ($50) by law. Not true last I checked on debit cards.
Reason three: float - the bank account is earning a little interest.
And yeah, I know about debit cards. I was working for VISA when we implemented the first big debit card systems, and our spinoff business plan was built around debit cards (this was almost 20 years ago).
Banks love debit cards. No float. Higher merchant fees.
I don't love debit cards.
For some time, credit card issuers have made almost all of their profit on late charges. The interest primarily pays off fraud losses.
I know of one large issuer which has processing centers in many states. It intentionally mails its bills from the one with the longest average snail-mail delivery to your address (a friend of mine was in the meeting where this strategy was hatched at that company). Credit card companies have also greatly increased their late fees (they used to be trivial) and a late payment will usually cause any interest rate deal that you had to disappear, with your rate going very high.
In the good old days, paying your credit card bills on time was the best way to have good credit. Today, credit card companies prefer people who pay late, but always pay, and also those who keep big balances on the cards. Pay your card late and watch the increase in credit card solicitations in your mailbox!
I have a couple of cards that account for almost all my credit card usage. I use automatic electronic payments monthly out to eternity to those cards... payments exceeding the minimum payment expected. This avoids any late payment charges (and the loss of my mileage points) should I not get around to processing the bill and sending in the full payment in time.
After I switched my long distance away from MCI, they continued to bill me a few bucks a month for some sort of access fee - but they weren't providing any service.
A phone call resolved the problem but I didn't get back all the money.
Skunks!
This is slightly off topic, but I noticed a number of people complaining about the same experience I had... looking for information about a medication and finding pages of online pharmacies rated higher.
:-)
However, I also run a blog (Useful Fools http://www.tinyvital.com/blog) and thus can tell you where those high page ranks come from: link spamming.
I started getting comments in my blog that were a bit odd (some ancient article would get a comment like "nice article" and nothing else). I would check and the associated URL was an online pharmacy. Also, I would get comments that were nothing more than a list of online-pharmacy links.
I delete all of these. I have modified my blog code to make the automated Movable Type automated spamming more difficult, just to find that the spammers using automated means come back to the site where it fails and manually enter the spam. I also modified my blog so the email notification of a comment to me also includes a hotlink to delete the comment. I am considering sequestering hotlinks until I manually approve them, but that's a bunch more Perl hacking and I hate Perl and don't have time
This approach causes the google page rank to be artificially inflated. By spreading the spam across a lot of blogs (and I assume BBS's and usenet), the links do not appear to Google's algorithms to be link farms (i.e. they create a widely distributed link farm that is hard to detect). I wouldn't be surprised if there are comments buried away in Slashdot that also contain these links.
One of my favorite blogs, Samizdata, uses a simple Turing test (an image with a random code in it that you have to enter) to deter automated spam. But this won't stop it all.
I fear that google will end up derating blog links as a result, which would be a big shame (I *like* the high page rank on my blog, and get lots of interesting comments and email as a result).
The reason is that the total cost of the system it what counts. The incremental cost of producing a number of these drugs is small (which is one reason that they are provided to third world countries at greatly reduced cost).
Your argument can be extended too all of medicine, food production, and damn near anything else. It is a fundamental view that companies should be run as charities.
You may not realize this, but there are many diseases killing vast numbers of people in the third world - not just AIDS. Should we force the drug companies to give away their treatments for all of these? Should we force them to send people to those countries to force the populace to use the drugs properly (because in many of the poor countries, people use drugs improperly, increasing the speed of the development of drug resistance)? Where do we stop? Do you want poor people in America to subsidize the poor people in Africa?
"Holding out on third world countries" - holding out what? AIDS drugs that they spent billions of dollars developing? Food (a lot of people starve, too, you know)?
Somehow the idea that companies are morally related to the Nazi medical researchers because they don't give away all of their products to those who cannot afford them is just silly.
I wouldn't say you hit a nerve. I'd say you revealed assumptions that you were incorrectly making! There was no nerve there to hit.
I didn't say that dtca is about benefits to patients. I do, however, believe that some advertising in beneficial to patients, and the reason is because of the too-slow uptake of information by many doctors. Furthermore, preventing the advertising had long been an unreasonable prevention of commercial speech. After all, the people selling snake oil in the herbal "medicine" area didn't face those restrictions. So letting people know that there might be a medical alternative to whatever quack potion they are taking is indeed a service.
For example, persistent heartburn significantly increases the risk of esophageal cancer. The ads for Nexium informs people that persistent heartburn is dangerous, something few actually know. Nexium is basically a patented replacement for Prilosec (which is no longer patented) and itself seems to offer, at a significant cost, only some benefit over Prilosec.
Please don't confuse motives (pharmacos want to make more money) with results.
Obviously the pharmas lobbied for the ability to advertise. And obviously they use it for reasons that are not helpful in some cases, such as promoting still patented drugs that are functionally equivalent to ones that have expired patents. But the fact that they spend the money doing this is in itself evidence that they protection of investments through patents is important.
Now, as far as R&D costs... it is not specious to argue that protecting the products of R&D's, whether they are 15% or 30% of the pharmacos total expenses is critically important to the continuation of those efforts. Pharmacos do indeed go through massive costs to meed often overly burdensome regulatory requirements in order to sell their inventions. To strip them of protection of the invention is to end the invention process by them. That should be obvious to anyone familiar with how businesses operate. To say they are not overburdened just because they also spend a lot of money in areas outside of R&D is overly simplistic.
Now, those who are statist enough to believe government can always do things better won't care about this. After all, let the pharmacos go under. So what? Then we won't have advertising costs and executive overcompensation (which is being fixed anyway, as stockholders are starting to hold their fiduciaries to much higher standards after the scandals of the '90s). We wont have, gasp, that evil thing: profits!
And that is why I proposed that perhaps we force have some experimentation. There are countries whose health payments systems are free-riding on the R&D expenses of pharmacos and, by passthrough, on the prices Americans pay for those drugs. Lets try out other approaches in those countries and see what happens. Its a big world, we don't all have to do it the same way.
To simply end patent protection of pharmaceuticals is to discriminate against one particular industry, one that is very important or critical to the health of many people. In my opinion, it would be idiotic to do so, regardless of what sort of snakes are involved in running pharmaceutical companies.
With the current dramatic progress being made in genomics, proteonomics, and genetic engineering (my daughter is using a powerful technique just discovered 1.5 years ago0), a progress rate far exceeding Moore's law according to Science Magazine, forcing innovators to rely on secrecy (hence damaging the exchange of scientific information) instead of patent protection, or just depriving innovators of capital (because why invest in a losing business proposition - one which free-riders can and absolutely will destroy) just doesn't make sense.
Much innovation is being done by government. But much is being done by private companies. Craig Ventner really ticked off a lot of government folks because he, for profit, sequenced the human genome far faster than the government forecast, and did i
I think the problem with putting all drug development in the hands of the government is simple: the government is not likely to be very good at it (for example, the FDA is horribly inefficient, puts huge burdens on drug development, and actively prevents people from getting drugs that are needed, and is politicized); the process will be highly politicized, with the funds often allocated to the victim group that screams the loudest.
Here is what I suggest: prohibit the selling of any drugs developed after a certain date to countries which have drug price controls or a single buyer for all drugs. Then those companies will be forced to do their own drug development. Then we can see which model works the best, because we will have both. This would also end the free-riding that those companies currently get.