91–100 of 244 posts
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That's what I call Metacapitalism.
Seems odd to call it that as there's little 'capitalism' in it. It's abuse of state regulations rather than market forces.
I know a bunch about pharma. The folks who are doing this and saying it's cheaper are often completely neglecting costs that are borne by corporations: the initial R&D, but also the immense amount of quality control and regulatory compliance. I've also talked to the biohackers. S ome of them are smart, careful, and just get stuff done in the lab. Then there are the attention hogs who inject themselves on youtube (typ…
Just to frame all this a bit better: in Italy epipens cost… wait for it… ZERO - nil - nada. You have a diagnose of anaphylactic shock risk? You get epipens. Public healthcare pays for it, therefore everyone pays for it with their taxes. Without a prescription, you can get one for around 75€, which is already considered criminally expensive. This is true for thousands other products. So please now tell me again how r&…
As to why drugs are expensive in the US: because the market bears it. Demand is just elastic enough (or inelastic, I always get it backwards) in the US that providers slowly edge prices up. Sometimes they get it wrong for example aduhelm didn't sell so it had a huge price drop recently.
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That's what I call Metacapitalism.
Seems odd to call it that as there's little 'capitalism' in it. It's abuse of state regulations rather than market forces.
Why not just step forward into the Acceptance-Stage of Ideology-Death, instead of being caught with the intellectual trousers down half a century later by ones googling grandkids on a witch hunt?
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Benchtops are at 60-90 MHz field strengths. That is not really enough to look at more complex molecules, the bigger routine NMR spectrometers are at 400-600 MHz (and there are even larger ones, but those are not used for small molecules that much). And even then those benchtops cost something close to 100k USD, that's quite far from affordable. The "room temperature" superconductors are not used at room temperature i…
Thank you for explaining! Yes, I don't know if the current room-temperature superconductor material (which really is room temperature, 15°C) will ever be useful for this; it was only discovered in 02020, so it is very unlikely that anyone is using it in a product today, even if they find a way to apply the necessary pressure (267 GPa, thus requiring ultrahard anvils). You're probably thinking of something like YBCO,…
The magnets are not the only cost in NMR spectrometers, I think you're seriously understimating the amount of electronics in them. You need to detect very weak signals at several hundreds of MHz, that's not trivial.
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Something can be both an industry consortium and a DIY anarchist collective, like Linux; the Linux Foundation isn't Linux. It turns out that industrial companies don't appreciate being subject to monopoly rents any more than private individuals do! The GPL is undeniably very anarchist, and it serves as a kind of constitution that keeps the companies that participate in GPL projects from controlling them. Consider, fo…
It's misleading to mix up anarchism and marxism-leninism. While both are anti capitalist, ML is the one where you're just replacing one hierarchy (economic power) with another (party membership). Anarchism is fundamentally against coercive hierarchy.
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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…
That's what I call Metacapitalism.
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Even in academia, where most research originates and matures before being sold to corporations, the vast majority of research is tax-payer funded. I wholeheartedly agree with you stance. It's unsurprising that these regulatory barriers keep all but the wealthiest corporations out of the market considering that big pharma and insurance account for significant share the donor-base of most politicians in the United Stat…
Most of the R&D done to make drugs isn't done at universities. They do some initial discovery work and invent entire new categories of drugs, but their overall role in the process of taking a druggable target to market is limited. Academia gets to keep rewards; universities patent discoveries and license the technology to industry. This made $$$ for Stanford and UC (billions of dollars). I am sympathetic to the idea…
My first thought was how dangerous this is. Then after thinking some more, I was left questioning how a developed country can mess up so badly that some people feel this is their only option.
See also payday loans, overage bank fees, credit card APRs, etc.
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That's what I call Metacapitalism.
Seems odd to call it that as there's little 'capitalism' in it. It's abuse of state regulations rather than market forces.
capitalism is a way of organizing production with workers being paid a flat rate and owners keeping all additional value added by the workers in exchange. is that not how pharmaceutical companies are arranged?
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It's misleading to mix up anarchism and marxism-leninism. While both are anti capitalist, ML is the one where you're just replacing one hierarchy (economic power) with another (party membership). Anarchism is fundamentally against coercive hierarchy.
Anarchism is indeed fundamentally against coercive hierarchy, yes, and I apologize for not being clearer about that. That said, Emma Goldman and many other anarchists were delighted to be deported to Soviet Russia until their famous disillusionment; historically speaking, the mainstream of anarchism considered state communism more friend than enemy, until they saw how it worked out in practice. And my own experiences…
I think that's the main reason that most sane leftists* are some flavour of anarchist these days.
* not including social democrats/other liberals in the "leftist" bracket.