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Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

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Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#221

Post by notch656a »

denton-scratch wrote: post #220
notch656a wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You mean, when you can opt out, apparently Yes precisely, this to me is the essence of anarchism. To have the free will to opt-out or opt-in to any voluntary exchange without coercion. To keep my factory floor if I like, and if people voluntarily want to buy enough widgets from me that I can build a space ship, that is great for everyone because I've given the world lots of value and they've voluntarily given it bac…

> It's really strange to me that leftist anarchists and capitalist anarchists are such bitter enemies Not enemies; I don't have bitter enemies. I just see opposition to capitalism as a pretty fundamental aspect of anarchism. I'm not gatekeeping "anarchist". I see you as hijacking the term; a capitalist anarchist is not an anarchist, it's a libertarian, or an individualist. I think you know this. I think your persiste…

>So I think I will not respond to this thread again.

Ok, you won't be missed (nor remembered), pathetic leftist gate-keeper of the word anarchism. Hopefully you find a True Scotsman worthy of the title.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#222

Post by kragen »

fabian2k wrote: post #82
kragen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the companies, or at least the industries, that would buy all the machines? Ultimately what everyday people will end up using is whatever is cheap and works well enough. Right now NMR isn't cheap, and neither is FT-IR or XRD, but these things change over time. Benchtop NMR is already good enough for distinguishing between significant classes of contaminants that could be in your purported insulin. I'm typing…

You can't really escape the physics here, you need a very strong and very homogeneous magnetic field for NMR and very sensitive electronics to detect the signal. That's not something we can do for cheap right now. And even beyond that I don't think the area has enough volumen and is competitive enough to produce significantly lower prices. The high-field NMR area is almost a monopoly right now, the benchtops and lowe…

As I asked you above, how sensitive do the electronics need to be? How weak is the signal?

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#223

Post by kragen »

denton-scratch wrote: post #203
kragen wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first I expected the advent of mass vaccination to end the pandemic, because it only had to drop R by a factor of two or so to drop below the critical percolation threshold, so even a vaccine providing 50% sterilizing immunity would be good enough, and the mRNA vaccines turned out to be even more effective than expected. I turned out to be spectacularly wrong about that; as you may or may not be aware, the pandemi…

> after the humans reach herd immunity That doesn't appear to be on the cards; neither vaccines nor actual infection confers immunity, in either case you only get resistance. And if you can't get individual immunity, talk of herd immunity is silly. COVID is going to be endemic. My hope is that omicron confers cross-resistance to other variants. From what I've heard, an omicron infection is nastier than a bad dose of…

Immunity and resistance are the same thing, not two separate things. Total immunity ("sterilizing immunity") is relatively unusual, and doesn't seem to exist for covid, but covid immunity seems to last for at least several months, maybe a year or more, at high enough levels to prevent epidemics ("herd immunity"). Given how fast O spreads, it seems likely that it will burn itself out among the humans in a few months --- but covid will probably always be able to come back from the zoonotic reservoirs.

I hope you're right about the scariness, but I worry about the incidence of "long covid", and in particular the possibility of widespread organ damage from blood clots.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#224

Post by kragen »

denton-scratch wrote: post #197
kragen wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost the entire world economy, by value, consists of more competitive markets than US healthcare. Restaurants, yes, but also the rest of retail, energy, agriculture, transportation, mining, metals, automobiles, clothing, shipbuilding, forestry, fishing, custom manufacturing, industrial food processing, scientific instruments, electronics, electrical equipment, and the financial markets. Some of these sectors don't…

> Some of these sectors don't engage in wage-labor production, or aren't dominated by it, and so aren't capitalist, while others are You seem to be relying on a rather narrow definition of "capitalism".

The bit you quoted is the definition made up by the folks who invented the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Etymology

But the standard definition I'm using has evolved a bit and is somewhat richer. Quoting the Wikipedia definition:

> Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor. In a capitalist market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, ability to maneuver capital or production ability in capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.

I think that is a very good and uncontroversial definition of "capitalism", and that is the one I am using. It sounds like you have some non-mainstream definition in mind?

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#225

Post by kragen »

notch656a wrote: post #221
denton-scratch wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really strange to me that leftist anarchists and capitalist anarchists are such bitter enemies Not enemies; I don't have bitter enemies. I just see opposition to capitalism as a pretty fundamental aspect of anarchism. I'm not gatekeeping "anarchist". I see you as hijacking the term; a capitalist anarchist is not an anarchist, it's a libertarian, or an individualist. I think you know this. I think your persiste…

>So I think I will not respond to this thread again. Ok, you won't be missed (nor remembered), pathetic leftist gate-keeper of the word anarchism. Hopefully you find a True Scotsman worthy of the title.

You are of course free to use words to mean whatever you want, but if you choose to use "anarchism" to mean a non-leftist ideology, you should expect that most people will misunderstand you; in some cases that can slide into deliberate deception, though I don't think that's your intention here. You aren't the first, of course; Rothbard and arguably Spooner understood anarchism in the same way you do, though Spooner belonged to the First International. But when you slide into attacking people as "pathetic" because they use the word in its mainstream sense, you're tempting people to label you as a troll. Please don't do that.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#226

Post by kragen »

kragen wrote: post #58
pessimizer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People mostly aren't dying because they can't afford life-saving medicine. No, people are definitely dying because they can't afford medicine. They're not taking things they need, they're cutting pills in half, they're diluting injections. When they finally die from some acute episode, what got them there is never recorded. The amount of bullshit I have gone through to get albuterol inhalers (which cost $5 in civil…

It's also worth mentioning that albuterol and similar inhalers used to be an exception to the prohibitions on CFCs (these inhalers an't used in large enough volume to do significant ozone damage), but due to lobbying from the companies that made them, they no longer are. Why would a company lobby to outlaw its current product? Well, they had patents on "improved" CFC-free versions, allowing them to exclude new entran…

*aren't used in large enough

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#227

Post by kragen »

cloudfifty wrote: post #162
kragen wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost the entire world economy, by value, consists of more competitive markets than US healthcare. Restaurants, yes, but also the rest of retail, energy, agriculture, transportation, mining, metals, automobiles, clothing, shipbuilding, forestry, fishing, custom manufacturing, industrial food processing, scientific instruments, electronics, electrical equipment, and the financial markets. Some of these sectors don't…

That's like saying that a Leninist system stops being Leninist when its vanguard inevitably becomes corrupted, because its vanilla state is - in theory - democratic. But that's ridiculous, each system should be held accountable for the outcome of its incentive system, not just its vanilla state.

If a Leninist system institutes free-market capitalism, as in China, it stops being Leninist, however dictatorial it may still be. As it happens, in this case the incentives usually run to the preservation of the system rather than its extinguishment.

The two examples are temporal inverses of one another. In the situation of capitalism collapsing into government-granted monopolies, free-market capitalism is the first stage, and state central planning is the second stage. In the situation in China, the first stage was a vanguard-party-led society governed by a dictatorship of the proletariat that carries out state central planning, and the second stage is mostly free-market capitalism.

I don't think that anyone ever tried to use "Leninist system" to mean "a system where the government is not corrupt", but maybe I just haven't read enough of Lenin?

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#228

Post by kragen »

pessimizer wrote: post #217
kragen wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In almost any version of Democracy, an authoritarian politician can choose to run for office on a platform of establishing a dictatorship; in most of them, they can even succeed. That doesn't make the would-be dictator a democrat, and it doesn't make their platform a democratic platform. Similarly, free-market incentives to lobby for government monopolies don't make monopolies capitalistic, because capitalism require…

If the premise is that being elected dictator in a free and fair election is undemocratic, it's an authoritarian premise. It presumes that elections are only democratic to the extent that the results agree with some "democratic values" that are separate from the process of having elections. I agree that the outcomes of democracy can be bad. But I don't believe that bad and undemocratic are synonymous.

I don't think that the election is undemocratic, no. I think that when the new dictator bans all opposition parties, dissolves the parliament, replaces judges with his allies, and starts having the police shut down newspapers and torture dissidents, that's undemocratic, even if the dictator was democratically elected in the first place, and even if what the dictator is doing is not bad.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#229

Post by kragen »

kragen wrote: post #149
erosenbe0 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm, the variance in prices in only very slightly due to quality, like often 5% or 1% or less than 1% of the variance. Please show data accounting for why anti-parasitics that costs 5 cents per dose for a horse or 5 cents per dose in India with 20 high quality generic versions are $50 in the US. Hint. BECAUSE WE DO NOT HAVE A FREE MARKET ON HIGH-QUALITY AND SAFE DRUGS. WE HAVE A PAY TO EXTRACT RENT SYSTEM.

I wish you wouldn't post things like this because, although what you are saying is factually correct, you are saying it in a patronizing and shouting way, which will lead people to associate these insights with acting like an asshole. That makes it harder for them to assimilate them, even when I'm the one explaining them and even if I'm managing not to act like an asshole.

Also, the person you were shouting at and saying "Hint" to probably knows about 100 times more than you do about the economics of drug companies.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#230

Post by cloudfifty »

kragen wrote: post #227
cloudfifty wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying that a Leninist system stops being Leninist when its vanguard inevitably becomes corrupted, because its vanilla state is - in theory - democratic. But that's ridiculous, each system should be held accountable for the outcome of its incentive system, not just its vanilla state.

If a Leninist system institutes free-market capitalism, as in China, it stops being Leninist, however dictatorial it may still be. As it happens, in this case the incentives usually run to the preservation of the system rather than its extinguishment. The two examples are temporal inverses of one another. In the situation of capitalism collapsing into government-granted monopolies, free-market capitalism is the first…

China and free market mumbling to avoid a simple accountability comparison? Come on. Your just flailing about to keep some neat image of Capitalism intact at this point.

The only thing this had to do with is what incentive structure each set up and what the expected outcomes of those are.

Leninism:

Concentrate the power into professional revolutionaries, a vanguard, to lead the people into making the "correct" choices.

Incentive: Keep this new and unprecedented amount of power indefinitely.

Outcome: Corruption of whatever ideals they might have had.

Capitalism:

Concentrate the wealth and thus power into businessmen/corporations with the purpose of keep accumulating wealth indefinitely.

Incentive: Use the power and influence of wealth to do just that, accumulate more wealth.

Outcome: Manipulation of rules, regulations, and the market.

This is what they are. This is what we've seen for more than a 100 years for both. This is what they are accountable for.

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