A me too drug is more like a drug number 124, with some part of the molecule that doesn't interact with the site of interest is modified to give you TECHNICALLY new molecule. Patent is submitted, media machine is spun up, and your NEW purple pill hits the market, with the exact same effectiveness and side effect profile as the last one.
If it were an entirely different compound, it would just be another drug that treats the same problem. It might even do it in a different way.
Unless, as was the case with California recently, you get an IOU instead of a check. Or inflation has kicked in, and your money buys 50% of what it would have a year ago.
Inflation can become a real bitch when you are doubling the monetary base every four months.
That $105 fine is going to seem cheap this time next year if the Fed doesn't neutralize these funds before they get out into the wild, which doesn't seem to be in the cards at this point.
Whoops, "less than" signs seem to cut out text. I thought it was a display problem on my computer. The rest of the comment was commenting on the fact that the way this tax is structured, it pits internet operations against brick and mortar operations. If internet operations bring in a lot more than the value of the brick and mortar operation, then they will definately just close it down, as it is now costing more than it is worth.
It also noted that with the institution of a new tax, they open up the possibility of raising it in the future. Corporations hate risk, especially in this economic climate, and will be tempted to close up shop even if it was still profitable, so they could focus their efforts on core stores. They might also just move to a neighboring state, depending on the costs.
Ok, so impose as much taxes as you want, and depend on the generosity of the services and the customers to keep your governments running. I'm sure that
will work out well.
Moving makes sense when it makes sense. There are a lot of factors in making a decision to close a store or not, especially when you are a large corporation looking to trim the fat. Why hire
a whole new division to deal with collecting and distributing funds from this new tax (which costs $X) when your presence in that state only nets $Y (when Y
Also, there is no need for personal insults. We have a philosophical difference. There is no need to call me stupid of crazy.
If the cost is high enough, yes. If they were on the borderline (what with the recession and all), a tax like this could easily be enough to push them over the edge.
If that's the case, then they are actually encouraging businesses to not come to their state, lest their internet operations be subjected to a costly tax. Large businesses like Apple or Amazon, which do such a large amount of online business, will probably end up stopping all operations in that state.
If you tax something, you get less of it. This is kindergarden economics.
"Everything is worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it."
-Adam Smith, Father of Modern Economics
You confuse the issue with a bunch of figures made completely worthless by a hundred years of inflation and four hundred years of development. You also confuse the meaning of "value".
What the GP is saying is that, due to it's status as a hub for practiaclly all international commerce, it's not a good use of resources to use land in NYC for farming. One acre of office space (approximately one floor of an office building) is worth more than an acre of farmland, because people are willing to pay more for office space than for farmland. To deny that is the ultimate exercise in futility. To try to legislate something into existence based on the denial of that fact leads to economic ruin, which is the REAL cause of this economic situation that we are in.
In our case, people at the semi-governmental agency known as the Federal Reserve took marching orders from congress to get more people into homes, no matter the cost. The method turned out to be subprime and alt-a loans. These types of loans are unsustainable on their own (or even with government support as we are seeing now, and will continue to see in the future), and only come into existence due to government interference. They are doomed to fail, just as your skyscraping farms are sure to fail, because they both ignore the underlaying principles of economics. Unfortunately, the failure of those loans is now being blamed on the free market, when it was actually the fault of the central planners in congress and the Fed that caused the collapse. If your abomination were to be built, and it turned out to be unsustainable, I'm sure you would blame it on the market as well (you'd probably get huge government subsidies at first, until your pull in Congress wore out).
Sadly, what works in the Europe doesn't necessarily work in the US, due to the immense cultural chasm (not to mention our ingrained system of representation--parliamentary systems are much more representative, and don't get the nasty two party bias like we do). In fact, it might not even work in Europe. But then, I don't know much about European industry or history. I know that Socialism failed spectacularly in Russia, at the cost of untold millions of lives and billions or trillions in lost productivity (although it probably wouldn't have been any better under the rule of the Tsars).
In reality, the only way to really raise the standard of living of a people is to increase their production. Keep the brutes out of the system, and allow the funds to arrange themselves to their most efficient configuration. When you produce enough stuff, you can buy things, which raises your standard of living. When the labor pool is limited, then wages rise. When jobs outnumber people, conditions improve. That's the way it happens. If those conditions didn't exist, then it doesn't matter how many regulations you imposed, the populace of your country will still be poor, unless you are lucky enough to have kept a job, in which case you benefit from the system which has redistributed money into your pocket. Even though in that case you benefit, it is net destructive, because the companies are unable to produce as much with less labor.
Actually, the government almost always intervened on behalf of the big businesses (which is just as bad as intervention for the little guy, worse in many cases because they often intervened with the military). The union movement is directly in line with truly free market principles, despite the protests of many so called free-marketers. If union activity goes too far and creates union-only shops, compelling even non-members to pay dues, or participate in violent protest, only then do they become anti competitive, and even then, they only harm the company or industry they are attached to, as we have seen recently with the Big Three.
Those particular unions will destroy the companies that they rely on for their jobs through their exorbitant demands and wages. Things would probably go better if there were multiple unions within each industry/large company, so that they could compete with each other, keeping wage and benefit inflation in step with the growth of the company.
The problem with relying on government to make such interventions is that government is stupid and inefficient. Those dumb brutes should only be used for the purposes they were set for, defending the borders and negotiating treaties. When they start interfering in business, people with pull and access can swing regulations so that they favor this company or that, or shut off markets to new competitors. Again, this happened with the Big Three--why haven't there been any new American car manufacturers starting up in the last 50 years?
The answer is that regulatory hurdles were imposed that no startup could overcome, only those with a lot of money could handle it, so that limited us to the Big Three or foreign companies. Now that the big three are collapsing, all we will have is foreign cars. That is the ultimate consequence of government interference and labor overzealousness.
+1 Insightful. Until people are free to import things like drugs for their own consumption, there is no free market. Instead we have a neo-imperialist state coordinated system resembling mercantilism. It's utterly backwards. Despite the hoopla from the Bush Administration over free trade, the fact is that we have anything but.
I propose we rename GlaxoSmithKline as the East India Drug Trading Company and be done with it. It should be noted that these types of anti-competitive policies led to much of the civil unrest that culminated in the American Revolution.
I'm saying that child labor is better than child prostitution, which is better than children starving to death. It would be nice if we could replace all of that with schooling, but that isn't possible right away.
Governments have to make tough choices when they don't have robust economies. If it is a choice between allowing child labor and having underground child prostitution run wild, I personally would allow child labor. If cracking down on child prostitution caused those prostitutes or their families to starve, then I would probably allow it to go on, while spending my resources attracting foreign investment and getting those kids and their parents into jobs.
Corruption and cronyism. Sound familiar? I wonder how our life expectancy will fare over the next decade. IIRC it started going down in the Bush years.
Ok, so you have found 2 million who were relocated, what about the other 387 million employed in agriculture, forestry, and fishing?
More and more people have been leaving the countryside for jobs in the cities (as has happened in every single nation that has undergone an industrial revolution). It's not a forced migration for the most part. It can't be. It would take an act of God to force that many people from their homes.
What if that is the highest marginal rate that will allow the factory to operate at a profit? You would rather turn the workers out onto the street to starve? You cruel, evil bastard.
Industry does not exist to serve the needs of society. It exists to make money. If you take the money away, it will disappear, and you end up with starvation in the streets and economic ruin. Think about how many children have been forced into prostitution because they couldn't get a job in a sweatshop. Think how many children have starved because they couldn't get work as prostitutes.
You have to think of the consequences of your actions. People work out of their own self interests. You might look out from your ivory tower and say that the people are being exploited, but if you walked a mile in their shoes, and saw the consequences of such regulations, you would see how much damage is caused be misguided worker's rights crusaders. If the workers want better conditions or better pay, let them vote with their feet, and go to where there are better working conditions with better pay. When you think about it, that is what they are doing by leaving the countryside.
The common people lived as slaves well before the industrial revolution. The new jobs gave the people more choices, just as it is doing now in China.
As their industrial output increases, and more and more positions become available to skilled and unskilled laborers, the pay will go up, and the conditions will get better.
Even now, the conditions are far better than the lives they would lead without those jobs, as rural laborers (think cotton slaves from the American south, only without the actual ownership of the people by the masters (so there is no incentive for the masters to look out after their investments). One false move in that field, and your whole family is dead. Things get better as their economy develops, with or without reforms being shoved down the throats of industrialists by big government. In fact, such regulation only slows development. When you are forced to pay more, you have to fire some people (or shut down altogether), costing the workers their jobs. If conditions were so bad, they could have left and went back to their lives in the country. They stay because they are getting paid more.
Also, the yuan is artificially low against the dollar. Once the Chinese let their currency float, that salary will start to look a lot better, especially as we start to lose more and more jobs in THIS country (due in no small part to our onerous regulations that drive companies overseas to places like China).
That's fine, until a political party adopts it as their party line, and they institute regulations that drive industry overseas, creating a huge trade deficit, winding up with the potential collapse of the entire economy.
While they're at it, they pander to fears about nuclear power, forcing us to rely on the same polluting hydrocarbons that are causing the problem they claim to want to save us from.
Perhaps a better metaphor would be to say imagine buying a bus ticket and being charged for admission to a theme park along with the bus fare (and for tickets to the game to keep with the sports theme). You have not car (lol car analogy), and there's only one bus service in your area. You just want to get across town, but they are charging you for a bunch of stuff that you don't necessarily want, and if you did, you would just buy a ticket on your own.
You're missing the point. Imagine if your cable company FORCED you to buy HBO with their service. Now imagine that they forced you to buy Cinemax, Starz, and a bunch of others. Then, imagine that they forced you to buy all the pay-per-view items, whether or not you watch them.
The point is that ISPs are using their monopoly power to force charges down their customer's throats with no recourse, except to severe the now VITAL service, or go to an unacceptably slow alternative (dial up).
This is what happens when people let their governments grant monopolies. The people get screwed.
Some time ago I saw a television program about extreme body modifications, and I saw one guy who had a small round magnet which he put inside of a silicone shell and implanted into one of his fingertips. The magnet would vibrate when in the proximity of an electric field. Basically, he could use it to sense when a circuit was on, and could tell what frequency the power was.
Wouldn't that just cause a plant to make fruit like a tomato that has roots like a potato? Or did it make fruit like a potato, with roots like a tomato?
Personally, I preferred the tomato-tobacco hybrid. It produced enough nicotine to kill a man after half a tombacco sandwich!
Slashdot Mirror
I am interested by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
A me too drug is more like a drug number 124, with some part of the molecule that doesn't interact with the site of interest is modified to give you TECHNICALLY new molecule. Patent is submitted, media machine is spun up, and your NEW purple pill hits the market, with the exact same effectiveness and side effect profile as the last one.
If it were an entirely different compound, it would just be another drug that treats the same problem. It might even do it in a different way.
Because we made Him, obviously.
Unless, as was the case with California recently, you get an IOU instead of a check. Or inflation has kicked in, and your money buys 50% of what it would have a year ago. Inflation can become a real bitch when you are doubling the monetary base every four months.
That $105 fine is going to seem cheap this time next year if the Fed doesn't neutralize these funds before they get out into the wild, which doesn't seem to be in the cards at this point.
Whoops, "less than" signs seem to cut out text. I thought it was a display problem on my computer. The rest of the comment was commenting on the fact that the way this tax is structured, it pits internet operations against brick and mortar operations. If internet operations bring in a lot more than the value of the brick and mortar operation, then they will definately just close it down, as it is now costing more than it is worth.
It also noted that with the institution of a new tax, they open up the possibility of raising it in the future. Corporations hate risk, especially in this economic climate, and will be tempted to close up shop even if it was still profitable, so they could focus their efforts on core stores. They might also just move to a neighboring state, depending on the costs.
Ok, so impose as much taxes as you want, and depend on the generosity of the services and the customers to keep your governments running. I'm sure that will work out well.
Moving makes sense when it makes sense. There are a lot of factors in making a decision to close a store or not, especially when you are a large corporation looking to trim the fat. Why hire a whole new division to deal with collecting and distributing funds from this new tax (which costs $X) when your presence in that state only nets $Y (when Y
Also, there is no need for personal insults. We have a philosophical difference. There is no need to call me stupid of crazy.
If the cost is high enough, yes. If they were on the borderline (what with the recession and all), a tax like this could easily be enough to push them over the edge.
If that's the case, then they are actually encouraging businesses to not come to their state, lest their internet operations be subjected to a costly tax. Large businesses like Apple or Amazon, which do such a large amount of online business, will probably end up stopping all operations in that state.
If you tax something, you get less of it. This is kindergarden economics.
More importantly, did they find any frozen cavemen?
"Everything is worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it."
-Adam Smith, Father of Modern Economics
You confuse the issue with a bunch of figures made completely worthless by a hundred years of inflation and four hundred years of development. You also confuse the meaning of "value".
What the GP is saying is that, due to it's status as a hub for practiaclly all international commerce, it's not a good use of resources to use land in NYC for farming. One acre of office space (approximately one floor of an office building) is worth more than an acre of farmland, because people are willing to pay more for office space than for farmland. To deny that is the ultimate exercise in futility. To try to legislate something into existence based on the denial of that fact leads to economic ruin, which is the REAL cause of this economic situation that we are in.
In our case, people at the semi-governmental agency known as the Federal Reserve took marching orders from congress to get more people into homes, no matter the cost. The method turned out to be subprime and alt-a loans. These types of loans are unsustainable on their own (or even with government support as we are seeing now, and will continue to see in the future), and only come into existence due to government interference. They are doomed to fail, just as your skyscraping farms are sure to fail, because they both ignore the underlaying principles of economics. Unfortunately, the failure of those loans is now being blamed on the free market, when it was actually the fault of the central planners in congress and the Fed that caused the collapse. If your abomination were to be built, and it turned out to be unsustainable, I'm sure you would blame it on the market as well (you'd probably get huge government subsidies at first, until your pull in Congress wore out).
Sadly, what works in the Europe doesn't necessarily work in the US, due to the immense cultural chasm (not to mention our ingrained system of representation--parliamentary systems are much more representative, and don't get the nasty two party bias like we do). In fact, it might not even work in Europe. But then, I don't know much about European industry or history. I know that Socialism failed spectacularly in Russia, at the cost of untold millions of lives and billions or trillions in lost productivity (although it probably wouldn't have been any better under the rule of the Tsars).
In reality, the only way to really raise the standard of living of a people is to increase their production. Keep the brutes out of the system, and allow the funds to arrange themselves to their most efficient configuration. When you produce enough stuff, you can buy things, which raises your standard of living. When the labor pool is limited, then wages rise. When jobs outnumber people, conditions improve. That's the way it happens. If those conditions didn't exist, then it doesn't matter how many regulations you imposed, the populace of your country will still be poor, unless you are lucky enough to have kept a job, in which case you benefit from the system which has redistributed money into your pocket. Even though in that case you benefit, it is net destructive, because the companies are unable to produce as much with less labor.
Actually, the government almost always intervened on behalf of the big businesses (which is just as bad as intervention for the little guy, worse in many cases because they often intervened with the military). The union movement is directly in line with truly free market principles, despite the protests of many so called free-marketers. If union activity goes too far and creates union-only shops, compelling even non-members to pay dues, or participate in violent protest, only then do they become anti competitive, and even then, they only harm the company or industry they are attached to, as we have seen recently with the Big Three.
Those particular unions will destroy the companies that they rely on for their jobs through their exorbitant demands and wages. Things would probably go better if there were multiple unions within each industry/large company, so that they could compete with each other, keeping wage and benefit inflation in step with the growth of the company.
The problem with relying on government to make such interventions is that government is stupid and inefficient. Those dumb brutes should only be used for the purposes they were set for, defending the borders and negotiating treaties. When they start interfering in business, people with pull and access can swing regulations so that they favor this company or that, or shut off markets to new competitors. Again, this happened with the Big Three--why haven't there been any new American car manufacturers starting up in the last 50 years?
The answer is that regulatory hurdles were imposed that no startup could overcome, only those with a lot of money could handle it, so that limited us to the Big Three or foreign companies. Now that the big three are collapsing, all we will have is foreign cars. That is the ultimate consequence of government interference and labor overzealousness.
+1 Insightful. Until people are free to import things like drugs for their own consumption, there is no free market. Instead we have a neo-imperialist state coordinated system resembling mercantilism. It's utterly backwards. Despite the hoopla from the Bush Administration over free trade, the fact is that we have anything but.
I propose we rename GlaxoSmithKline as the East India Drug Trading Company and be done with it. It should be noted that these types of anti-competitive policies led to much of the civil unrest that culminated in the American Revolution.
I'm saying that child labor is better than child prostitution, which is better than children starving to death. It would be nice if we could replace all of that with schooling, but that isn't possible right away.
Governments have to make tough choices when they don't have robust economies. If it is a choice between allowing child labor and having underground child prostitution run wild, I personally would allow child labor. If cracking down on child prostitution caused those prostitutes or their families to starve, then I would probably allow it to go on, while spending my resources attracting foreign investment and getting those kids and their parents into jobs.
Corruption and cronyism. Sound familiar? I wonder how our life expectancy will fare over the next decade. IIRC it started going down in the Bush years.
Ok, so you have found 2 million who were relocated, what about the other 387 million employed in agriculture, forestry, and fishing?
More and more people have been leaving the countryside for jobs in the cities (as has happened in every single nation that has undergone an industrial revolution). It's not a forced migration for the most part. It can't be. It would take an act of God to force that many people from their homes.
What if that is the highest marginal rate that will allow the factory to operate at a profit? You would rather turn the workers out onto the street to starve? You cruel, evil bastard.
Industry does not exist to serve the needs of society. It exists to make money. If you take the money away, it will disappear, and you end up with starvation in the streets and economic ruin. Think about how many children have been forced into prostitution because they couldn't get a job in a sweatshop. Think how many children have starved because they couldn't get work as prostitutes.
You have to think of the consequences of your actions. People work out of their own self interests. You might look out from your ivory tower and say that the people are being exploited, but if you walked a mile in their shoes, and saw the consequences of such regulations, you would see how much damage is caused be misguided worker's rights crusaders. If the workers want better conditions or better pay, let them vote with their feet, and go to where there are better working conditions with better pay. When you think about it, that is what they are doing by leaving the countryside.
The common people lived as slaves well before the industrial revolution. The new jobs gave the people more choices, just as it is doing now in China. As their industrial output increases, and more and more positions become available to skilled and unskilled laborers, the pay will go up, and the conditions will get better. Even now, the conditions are far better than the lives they would lead without those jobs, as rural laborers (think cotton slaves from the American south, only without the actual ownership of the people by the masters (so there is no incentive for the masters to look out after their investments). One false move in that field, and your whole family is dead. Things get better as their economy develops, with or without reforms being shoved down the throats of industrialists by big government. In fact, such regulation only slows development. When you are forced to pay more, you have to fire some people (or shut down altogether), costing the workers their jobs. If conditions were so bad, they could have left and went back to their lives in the country. They stay because they are getting paid more.
Also, the yuan is artificially low against the dollar. Once the Chinese let their currency float, that salary will start to look a lot better, especially as we start to lose more and more jobs in THIS country (due in no small part to our onerous regulations that drive companies overseas to places like China).
Well, that's a Jesus and the egg question if I ever heard one.
That's fine, until a political party adopts it as their party line, and they institute regulations that drive industry overseas, creating a huge trade deficit, winding up with the potential collapse of the entire economy.
While they're at it, they pander to fears about nuclear power, forcing us to rely on the same polluting hydrocarbons that are causing the problem they claim to want to save us from.
Yeah...
Point taken.
Perhaps a better metaphor would be to say imagine buying a bus ticket and being charged for admission to a theme park along with the bus fare (and for tickets to the game to keep with the sports theme). You have not car (lol car analogy), and there's only one bus service in your area. You just want to get across town, but they are charging you for a bunch of stuff that you don't necessarily want, and if you did, you would just buy a ticket on your own.
You're missing the point. Imagine if your cable company FORCED you to buy HBO with their service. Now imagine that they forced you to buy Cinemax, Starz, and a bunch of others. Then, imagine that they forced you to buy all the pay-per-view items, whether or not you watch them.
The point is that ISPs are using their monopoly power to force charges down their customer's throats with no recourse, except to severe the now VITAL service, or go to an unacceptably slow alternative (dial up).
This is what happens when people let their governments grant monopolies. The people get screwed.
Or that we've been told about.
Some time ago I saw a television program about extreme body modifications, and I saw one guy who had a small round magnet which he put inside of a silicone shell and implanted into one of his fingertips. The magnet would vibrate when in the proximity of an electric field. Basically, he could use it to sense when a circuit was on, and could tell what frequency the power was.
Seems much more useful than the drivel in TFA.
Wouldn't that just cause a plant to make fruit like a tomato that has roots like a potato? Or did it make fruit like a potato, with roots like a tomato?
Personally, I preferred the tomato-tobacco hybrid. It produced enough nicotine to kill a man after half a tombacco sandwich!