My opinion has nothing to do with guilt or innocence. The indisputable facts--which Zimmerman himself (or at least his lawyer/spokesperson) admits--are that Martin was unarmed, that Martin was returning home, that Zimmerman was armed, and that Zimmerman (at least initially) followed Martin. That's really all I need to know to conclude that the end result--Martin ending up dead--was not inevitable. And that conclusion has nothing to do with guilt or innocence or legal justification, which was my point.
To put it another way: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
I've tried to stick to the indisputable facts in forming my opinion on this case (of which there are few), but regardless of the legal outcome, it seems clear to me that Trayvon Martin did not need to die that night, and that his death was the result of George Zimmerman patrolling the neighborhood with a firearm and choosing to follow Martin.
Had Zimmerman not been patrolling, or had he been patrolling without a firearm, or had he been patrolling with a firearm but taken the 911 operator's suggestion and not followed Martin, Martin would not be dead.
Even if Zimmerman's actions were legally justified, it doesn't mean they were right or intelligent. I was assaulted in downtown Washington, DC in the middle of the day. I could have escalated the situation and probably have been legally justified in doing so, but for all I know I might have gotten myself stabbed or run down by the car the asshole was driving. And for what? And here, Martin is dead--for what?
While that's technically true, my understanding is that it's only ever happened one time (Canada and an African country I don't remember off the top of my head), and that the drug manufacturer had such a bad experience with the process that they vowed to never do it again.
Sorry, but no. You broadened this topic to 'arbitrage in legal pharmaceuticals,' as opposed to smuggling illegal contraband. You don't get to reel the scope back in just because your ignorance showed.
First off, why are you posting anonymously? Second, my original post was specifically responding to a comment about the potential for generic versions of these drugs leaking out of India and making their way into other markets.
Third, by "arbitrage in legal pharmaceuticals", I meant something different than what you assumed. I'm referring to taking advantage of price differentials between countries when dealing with non-counterfeit prescription drugs (which is a relevant topic in this discussion). For some reason, you read that as having to do with drug shortages in the U.S., which is not relevant to this discussion.
Watch/read the testimony I linked. Punch "gray market drugs" into Google. First try got me here [premierinc.com]. This isn't the mysterious phenomenon you appear to believe it is and you can easily find your own answers just as soon as stop insisting they don't exist.
Well, I don't really have time to watch 2.5 hours of CSPAN right now, but I'll take your word for it. However, it's still not relevant to this discussion. Nothing in the linked document you noted even hints that gray market drugs are coming from other countries (rather, it points to domestic US theft). Even if they were, I suspect the number one candidate would be Canada, not India.
I'm sorry you completely misunderstood my comments and instead resorted to personal insults.
The gray market for drugs in the US is alive and well and entirely understood. The operate quietly by fax and email, reselling drugs to doctors and hospitals. They anticipate shortages, buy stocks of drugs and sell high when normal channels run dry.
But "gray market" can refer to any number of strategies. The specific worry in this case is that generic versions of a drug are going to make their way out of India and into the U.S. and European markets. This isn't about trips to Canada, or buying low and holding to sell high during a shortage...
If you have peer-reviewed studies or any other kind of study with hard, empirical evidence (numbers) about this, I would greatly appreciate the citations. I'm interested in the prevalence of it, and specific instances that someone can point to where generic versions have been diverted from low-income countries and resold in siginificant quantities in high-income countries..
Trade secrecy probably wouldn't matter, as the composition of the drug could be legally reverse engineered without too much trouble (this is probably what Cipla did). The Indian company is prohibited from selling their version outside of India. What will Bayer do? They will complain to the U.S. Trade Representative about India's actions, and the US Trade Representative will write a nasty entry about India in their annual report citing this episode.
There are already many, many opportunities for arbitrage in legal pharmaceuticals, but I don't think anyone has hard evidence about how much of a problem in the North American and EU markets this really is. Typically seniors on Medicaid don't buy their drugs out of the back of El Camino that has a bunch of Folexes and Foakleys in it...
Yes, it's for domestic use only. It also has to manufactured domestically, which is why this type of agreement doesn't work in smaller countries without adequate manufacturing capacity for pharmaceutical products (e.g., most of Africa).
That argument does not work in this situation. Bayer had priced the drug so high in India that it was clear they had no interest in serving the Indian market. I'm on a listserv for this type of information, and someone close to the issue noted that "Last year Bayer sold 493 boxes of 120 tabs of Sorafenib in India. That was enough for about 49 people, in a country with a population of 1,210,193,422."
Any money Bayer was making in India off this drug was a rounding error compared to the lucrative North American and European markets. Furthermore, Bayer argued to the Indian court that the Indian population did have access to the drug through an infringing version produced by Cipla, while at the same time Bayer was suing Cipla for patent infringement, trying to get their product off the market.
Given the 6% royalty rate that NATCO has to pay to Bayer, I wouldn't be suprised if Bayer ends up making more money with the compulsory license than before.
I find it funny when people quote Einstein as if those statements indicated he believed in the quoter's God. Neither of those statements really have anything to do with intelligent design. Einstein also said this:
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.
If the songs were created anytime in the past few decades, copyright applies automatically upon fixation of the work in a tangible medium of expression. Publication is not necessary. The rules for older works get much more complicated, but unlikely to apply here.
Cary Sherman did have at least one good point. On the RIAA's Music Notes blog, he discussed how he went through and read every one of the 280 some comments on his very poorly received New York Times op-ed.
I was one of the ones who posted a substantive, up-voted comment on his op-ed, and his blog post addressed something I (and several other commenters) pointed out. Just Googling for the text of the bill leaves one with a misleading impression, because important amendments were not included in that text. I took Sherman to task for what I viewed as purposefully misleading people in his op-ed, doing exactly what he was complaining Wikipedia and Google were doing.
On that particular detail, I was wrong, and Sherman was right. So the point is taken that there is a lot of misunderstanding about what precisely this bill will do and not do. That said, what I think he continually fails to understand is that his association (and really, the entire industry) has virtually no credibility in the minds of the tech-savvy, Internet-using public. We know the record companies rip off actual artists with raw contracts. We know the RIAA supported the ridiculous tactic of suing individual file-sharers for astronomical damages in order to bully them into settlement. We know they inflate their losses, that they massage data, and that they lobby hard for what they want. In fact, that last part is to be expected by any industry trade group.
We're Americans. We know that practically everyone in politics is lying to us whenever they open their mouth. That's not news. I'm not sure why Cary Sherman expects a free pass on this issue... you've got the lobbying money, get in there and play hardball like everyone else.
Full disclosure - I submitted this story, and my SO works in Washington DC's office for teacher evaluation.
In this case, NYC is using a value-added model (performance measured by student improvement while in that teacher's classroom). But the critic of this system, as far as I can tell, is the union. I think the union's ad (second link in the submission) has some valid points about problems in the data, however, by foregrounding a multiple regression equation and saying "this is no way to rate a teacher", to me it sounds like they will essentially oppose all efforts to quantify teacher performance based on statistics and test scores.
To me, that's not a tenable or legitimate position. There are problems in every data set - identify them, understand them, try to correct them next time around. But the approach here is basically to try and discredit math. I imagine the union would prefer to keep an observation-only evaluation process, but that's what we've had around the country for years, and it consistently results in about 99% of teachers being rated satisfactory when that is clearly not the case.
So, how exactly will firing professors for not publishing "enough" encourage professors to care more about students and teaching, and less about publishing?
With all of these politicians, I'm never sure if they actually are so ignorant to reject science out of hand, or if they are so self-serving that they simply lie about what they actually believe in order to win votes from people who really are ignorant. I tend to think it's the latter, and that that is more despicable.
Santorum's claim to have come "from the coal fields" is a stretch - by two generations. He has never worked in a coal mine. His parents' professions were psychologist and nurse, and Santorum is a lawyer who has spent all of his adult life in politics.
By that measure, I come "from the shipyards of Baltimore." I'll have to remember that if I ever go into politics.
I find this new definition of political science funny. Politicized science is what he meant, I guess. All these fools should just admit that they like science and regulation when it supports their preconceived notions about how the world should work, and when science and regulation contradict those notions, science and regulation are evil.
"With Tax Day coming on Thursday, 47 percent has become shorthand for the notion that the wealthy face a much higher tax burden than they once did while growing numbers of Americans are effectively on the dole. Neither one of those ideas is true. They rely on a cleverly selective reading of the facts. So does the 47 percent number."
My SO works in the DC office responsible for training the evaluators who assess teachers in the classroom. I don't know exactly how it worked under Rhee, but I do know the way it works now... about half of teacher evaluations are based on standardized test scores, and the other half is based on in-class observation by professional evaluators.
No one is going to argue that teachers can overcome the strong influences of parental involvement and other exogenous factors. However, of the things that can be dealt with in the school, teacher quality is likely the most important. If year after year you have a teacher whose students show no improvement at all and there are other teachers in the same school (and even same subject) who students do show improvement, what do you do?
There are in fact efforts to identify high quality teachers and disseminate their practices to the rest of the teaching population (this was my SO's last work project), so it's not as if there are no resources going into actually improving the quality of teachers in the classroom. However, the fact remains that in many cases you have teachers who may very well be veterans of the classroom but who frankly aren't all that good at their job. Tenure for primary and secondary teachers in this day and age doesn't make sense - you need to be able to fire poor performers.
In my mind, a person posting as AC is not interested in having a discussion, for at least two reasons. First, there is no way to keep track of what is actually their contribution, versus the contribution of some other AC. Second, a person who is registered has a simple method to check for responses to their comments (e.g., I get e-mails alerting me to replies to my comments), so I feel they are more likely to see my response and respond in turn. An AC has to manually check a thread for responses.
You're absolutely correct on a legal level, no one can argue with that.
However, I think a lot of us pose the question the opposite way: what makes you think government-backed enforcement of monopoly is a right? The only reason it's a legal right is because of accidents of history and law... Unless you're taking a Rick Santorum-style approach where you generally think that US law was handed down by God almighty.
When you look beyond mere existing law and ask about fundamental human rights, there is a pretty hard-to-navigate conflict between the feeling that someone should be rewarded for their valuable effort, and the feeling that knowledge should flow as freely as possible.
It's not for sitting on your rear end and downloading some movie without paying for it. Calling downloading a "human right" is an insult to Martin Luther King, Peter Zenger, and everyone else who fought for our right to express ourselves.
Considering that library.nu was a site for book piracy, I think your comment is a bit misguided. Frankly, I suspect Martin Luther King would probably have been okay with someone downloading "Why We Can't Wait" from library.nu.
Slashdot Mirror
My opinion has nothing to do with guilt or innocence. The indisputable facts--which Zimmerman himself (or at least his lawyer/spokesperson) admits--are that Martin was unarmed, that Martin was returning home, that Zimmerman was armed, and that Zimmerman (at least initially) followed Martin. That's really all I need to know to conclude that the end result--Martin ending up dead--was not inevitable. And that conclusion has nothing to do with guilt or innocence or legal justification, which was my point.
To put it another way: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
I've tried to stick to the indisputable facts in forming my opinion on this case (of which there are few), but regardless of the legal outcome, it seems clear to me that Trayvon Martin did not need to die that night, and that his death was the result of George Zimmerman patrolling the neighborhood with a firearm and choosing to follow Martin.
Had Zimmerman not been patrolling, or had he been patrolling without a firearm, or had he been patrolling with a firearm but taken the 911 operator's suggestion and not followed Martin, Martin would not be dead.
Even if Zimmerman's actions were legally justified, it doesn't mean they were right or intelligent. I was assaulted in downtown Washington, DC in the middle of the day. I could have escalated the situation and probably have been legally justified in doing so, but for all I know I might have gotten myself stabbed or run down by the car the asshole was driving. And for what? And here, Martin is dead--for what?
While that's technically true, my understanding is that it's only ever happened one time (Canada and an African country I don't remember off the top of my head), and that the drug manufacturer had such a bad experience with the process that they vowed to never do it again.
Sorry, but no. You broadened this topic to 'arbitrage in legal pharmaceuticals,' as opposed to smuggling illegal contraband. You don't get to reel the scope back in just because your ignorance showed.
First off, why are you posting anonymously? Second, my original post was specifically responding to a comment about the potential for generic versions of these drugs leaking out of India and making their way into other markets.
Third, by "arbitrage in legal pharmaceuticals", I meant something different than what you assumed. I'm referring to taking advantage of price differentials between countries when dealing with non-counterfeit prescription drugs (which is a relevant topic in this discussion). For some reason, you read that as having to do with drug shortages in the U.S., which is not relevant to this discussion.
Watch/read the testimony I linked. Punch "gray market drugs" into Google. First try got me here [premierinc.com]. This isn't the mysterious phenomenon you appear to believe it is and you can easily find your own answers just as soon as stop insisting they don't exist.
Well, I don't really have time to watch 2.5 hours of CSPAN right now, but I'll take your word for it. However, it's still not relevant to this discussion. Nothing in the linked document you noted even hints that gray market drugs are coming from other countries (rather, it points to domestic US theft). Even if they were, I suspect the number one candidate would be Canada, not India.
I'm sorry you completely misunderstood my comments and instead resorted to personal insults.
The gray market for drugs in the US is alive and well and entirely understood. The operate quietly by fax and email, reselling drugs to doctors and hospitals. They anticipate shortages, buy stocks of drugs and sell high when normal channels run dry.
But "gray market" can refer to any number of strategies. The specific worry in this case is that generic versions of a drug are going to make their way out of India and into the U.S. and European markets. This isn't about trips to Canada, or buying low and holding to sell high during a shortage...
If you have peer-reviewed studies or any other kind of study with hard, empirical evidence (numbers) about this, I would greatly appreciate the citations. I'm interested in the prevalence of it, and specific instances that someone can point to where generic versions have been diverted from low-income countries and resold in siginificant quantities in high-income countries..
Trade secrecy probably wouldn't matter, as the composition of the drug could be legally reverse engineered without too much trouble (this is probably what Cipla did). The Indian company is prohibited from selling their version outside of India. What will Bayer do? They will complain to the U.S. Trade Representative about India's actions, and the US Trade Representative will write a nasty entry about India in their annual report citing this episode.
Sorry, that should be Medicare...
There are already many, many opportunities for arbitrage in legal pharmaceuticals, but I don't think anyone has hard evidence about how much of a problem in the North American and EU markets this really is. Typically seniors on Medicaid don't buy their drugs out of the back of El Camino that has a bunch of Folexes and Foakleys in it...
Yes, it's for domestic use only. It also has to manufactured domestically, which is why this type of agreement doesn't work in smaller countries without adequate manufacturing capacity for pharmaceutical products (e.g., most of Africa).
That argument does not work in this situation. Bayer had priced the drug so high in India that it was clear they had no interest in serving the Indian market. I'm on a listserv for this type of information, and someone close to the issue noted that "Last year Bayer sold 493 boxes of 120 tabs of Sorafenib in India. That was enough for about 49 people, in a country with a population of 1,210,193,422."
Any money Bayer was making in India off this drug was a rounding error compared to the lucrative North American and European markets. Furthermore, Bayer argued to the Indian court that the Indian population did have access to the drug through an infringing version produced by Cipla, while at the same time Bayer was suing Cipla for patent infringement, trying to get their product off the market.
Given the 6% royalty rate that NATCO has to pay to Bayer, I wouldn't be suprised if Bayer ends up making more money with the compulsory license than before.
I find it funny when people quote Einstein as if those statements indicated he believed in the quoter's God. Neither of those statements really have anything to do with intelligent design. Einstein also said this:
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.
If the songs were created anytime in the past few decades, copyright applies automatically upon fixation of the work in a tangible medium of expression. Publication is not necessary. The rules for older works get much more complicated, but unlikely to apply here.
Really, really bad.
Cary Sherman did have at least one good point. On the RIAA's Music Notes blog, he discussed how he went through and read every one of the 280 some comments on his very poorly received New York Times op-ed.
I was one of the ones who posted a substantive, up-voted comment on his op-ed, and his blog post addressed something I (and several other commenters) pointed out. Just Googling for the text of the bill leaves one with a misleading impression, because important amendments were not included in that text. I took Sherman to task for what I viewed as purposefully misleading people in his op-ed, doing exactly what he was complaining Wikipedia and Google were doing.
On that particular detail, I was wrong, and Sherman was right. So the point is taken that there is a lot of misunderstanding about what precisely this bill will do and not do. That said, what I think he continually fails to understand is that his association (and really, the entire industry) has virtually no credibility in the minds of the tech-savvy, Internet-using public. We know the record companies rip off actual artists with raw contracts. We know the RIAA supported the ridiculous tactic of suing individual file-sharers for astronomical damages in order to bully them into settlement. We know they inflate their losses, that they massage data, and that they lobby hard for what they want. In fact, that last part is to be expected by any industry trade group.
We're Americans. We know that practically everyone in politics is lying to us whenever they open their mouth. That's not news. I'm not sure why Cary Sherman expects a free pass on this issue... you've got the lobbying money, get in there and play hardball like everyone else.
Full disclosure - I submitted this story, and my SO works in Washington DC's office for teacher evaluation.
In this case, NYC is using a value-added model (performance measured by student improvement while in that teacher's classroom). But the critic of this system, as far as I can tell, is the union. I think the union's ad (second link in the submission) has some valid points about problems in the data, however, by foregrounding a multiple regression equation and saying "this is no way to rate a teacher", to me it sounds like they will essentially oppose all efforts to quantify teacher performance based on statistics and test scores.
To me, that's not a tenable or legitimate position. There are problems in every data set - identify them, understand them, try to correct them next time around. But the approach here is basically to try and discredit math. I imagine the union would prefer to keep an observation-only evaluation process, but that's what we've had around the country for years, and it consistently results in about 99% of teachers being rated satisfactory when that is clearly not the case.
I'd love to hear more from you about all this.
So, how exactly will firing professors for not publishing "enough" encourage professors to care more about students and teaching, and less about publishing?
With all of these politicians, I'm never sure if they actually are so ignorant to reject science out of hand, or if they are so self-serving that they simply lie about what they actually believe in order to win votes from people who really are ignorant. I tend to think it's the latter, and that that is more despicable.
Santorum's claim to have come "from the coal fields" is a stretch - by two generations. He has never worked in a coal mine. His parents' professions were psychologist and nurse, and Santorum is a lawyer who has spent all of his adult life in politics.
By that measure, I come "from the shipyards of Baltimore." I'll have to remember that if I ever go into politics.
I find this new definition of political science funny. Politicized science is what he meant, I guess. All these fools should just admit that they like science and regulation when it supports their preconceived notions about how the world should work, and when science and regulation contradict those notions, science and regulation are evil.
Did you even read the article you linked to?
"With Tax Day coming on Thursday, 47 percent has become shorthand for the notion that the wealthy face a much higher tax burden than they once did while growing numbers of Americans are effectively on the dole. Neither one of those ideas is true. They rely on a cleverly selective reading of the facts. So does the 47 percent number."
My SO works in the DC office responsible for training the evaluators who assess teachers in the classroom. I don't know exactly how it worked under Rhee, but I do know the way it works now... about half of teacher evaluations are based on standardized test scores, and the other half is based on in-class observation by professional evaluators.
No one is going to argue that teachers can overcome the strong influences of parental involvement and other exogenous factors. However, of the things that can be dealt with in the school, teacher quality is likely the most important. If year after year you have a teacher whose students show no improvement at all and there are other teachers in the same school (and even same subject) who students do show improvement, what do you do?
There are in fact efforts to identify high quality teachers and disseminate their practices to the rest of the teaching population (this was my SO's last work project), so it's not as if there are no resources going into actually improving the quality of teachers in the classroom. However, the fact remains that in many cases you have teachers who may very well be veterans of the classroom but who frankly aren't all that good at their job. Tenure for primary and secondary teachers in this day and age doesn't make sense - you need to be able to fire poor performers.
In my mind, a person posting as AC is not interested in having a discussion, for at least two reasons. First, there is no way to keep track of what is actually their contribution, versus the contribution of some other AC. Second, a person who is registered has a simple method to check for responses to their comments (e.g., I get e-mails alerting me to replies to my comments), so I feel they are more likely to see my response and respond in turn. An AC has to manually check a thread for responses.
Next time don't post as AC and I might be willing to have a reasonable discussion with you.
You're absolutely correct on a legal level, no one can argue with that.
However, I think a lot of us pose the question the opposite way: what makes you think government-backed enforcement of monopoly is a right? The only reason it's a legal right is because of accidents of history and law... Unless you're taking a Rick Santorum-style approach where you generally think that US law was handed down by God almighty.
When you look beyond mere existing law and ask about fundamental human rights, there is a pretty hard-to-navigate conflict between the feeling that someone should be rewarded for their valuable effort, and the feeling that knowledge should flow as freely as possible.
It was a post containing text copyrighted by the Church of Scientology, and it happened in 2001.
It's not for sitting on your rear end and downloading some movie without paying for it. Calling downloading a "human right" is an insult to Martin Luther King, Peter Zenger, and everyone else who fought for our right to express ourselves.
Considering that library.nu was a site for book piracy, I think your comment is a bit misguided. Frankly, I suspect Martin Luther King would probably have been okay with someone downloading "Why We Can't Wait" from library.nu.