Sen. Dianne Feinstein dies at 90
circularfish @ circularfish @beehaw.org Posts 19Comments 133Joined 2 yr. ago
circularfish @ circularfish @beehaw.org
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133
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The truth is, the biggest pharmaceutical companies aren’t really drug development companies at all: they’re marketing, lobbying, and litigation firms with patent portfolios. While Big Pharma holds vast portfolios of existing patents for prescription drugs, the innovation pipeline for new drugs actually has very little to do with Big Pharma. In reality, public sources — especially the NIH — fund the basic research that makes scientific breakthroughs. Then small, boutique biotech and pharmaceutical firms take that publicly generated knowledge and do the final stages of research, like running clinical trials, that get the drugs to market. The share of small companies in the supply of new drugs is huge, and it’s still growing. Fully two-thirds of new drugs now come from these small companies, up from one-third twenty years ago. It is not the research labs of Pfizer that are developing new drugs.
This is completely true. The majority of research, at least for life saving drugs and not baldness cures, takes place at universities and small research firms, much of it funded by the NIH. If the investigators are successful, they spin off a company or license the IP.
Big drug companies then step in, long after the initial “drug discovery” is done. They have captured the regulatory system and, yes, can fund and run Phase 3 trials with their deep pockets and armies of bureaucrats, but at that point they are acting more like record labels, extracting rent (loosely defined) from a convoluted regulatory and distribution system that they themselves had a hand in creating.
Fuck ‘em.
This is really cool.
Viewers get a throw-away line about Big Three’s “record profits” but no sense of what those profits have been: Ford, General Motors and Stellantis made a combined $21 billion in profits in just the first six months of this year. According to the UAW, they’ve earned a quarter trillion dollars in profit since 2013.
This right here. There is a staggering lack of understanding about just how money is circulated in the economy. The assumption is that if you let billionaires and corporations concentrate capital it will be good for the rest of us because they will create jobs. That is true at the margin when capital is at a premium, but in an era easy money, investment isn’t the problem. You can also rest assured that without unions corporations will cut every job they can to boost the bottom line.
Conversely, there is this puritanical sense among some that if you pay workers more, then they will get lazy … or something … and that is bad for the economy. This is bullshit. Billionaires hoard capital. Workers, because they have to, spend their paychecks (lower marginal propensity to save) and keep money circulating. Paying people decently is good for the economy.
I am deeply suspicious of of overly simplistic answers to complex human questions, but I swear that 90% of modern U.S conservative policy can be explained either by grift or fear of the other.
Nah, I would probably get canned. Thanks for the kind word, though!
You too. Thanks.
Here is a perspective from within the belly of the beast in case it is interesting to someone: state legislatures starving higher ed for funding is a story that goes back over 30 years. It is responsible to a significant degree for the tuition hikes that have made a college education too costly for many students. In effect, this funding cut and resulting tuition hike has shifted costs of an educated workforce from wealthy taxpayers to young people. https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/state-funding-higher-education-still-lagging
Administrative bloat is also a problem, and falls into a couple of categories. You have the university presidents and coaches, on one hand, where the appointments are themselves a political plum in some states and game day is an excuse for rich alumni to drive $300,000 RVs to sit in corporate skyboxes. (State legislatures don’t seem to have issues with that spending, for some reason).
Then there is the multiplication of various vice-provosts, directors, department heads, etc. Some of that is legitimate administrative bloat, but it tends to gets pared back fairly regularly when a recession hits or enrollment drops. In many institutions a lot of the remaining bloat is administrative infrastructure built up around competition for students, compliance with Federal mandates, and research efforts to make up for that lost state funding. You have student life. Dining services. Residence life. Disability services. Equal opportunity offices. Financial aid offices. Faculty affairs offices. Institutional research. Institutional support. HR operations. State mandated procurement and budgeting units. Huge staffing structures around the research enterprise. Units dedicated to service and outreach. And the list goes on, and on, and on.
The point is not that all of these these activities are good and have to be preserved, or that they are bad and have to be axed. The point is that a lot of university activity that at first blush looks like cancerous growth is a response to the need to compete for tuition paying students, to keep the feds and state legislatures happy, and to land that the next big grant. A good bit of THAT can in turn be traced back to the aforesaid budget cuts and rising expectations about the sort of support that institutions of higher education are expected to supply.
Wow, that ended up longer than I intended, but I’ll leave it for the 1 or 2 of you who care about this stuff.
What a colossally dishonest take. Being glad no American lives are being lost is not the same as disregarding Ukrainian lives. And it sure as hell doesn’t support the implication that withholding assistance to those struggling in the face of Russian imperialism is a superior outcome to the status quo that somehow respects Ukrainian lives to a greater degree.
(Personal opinion): It would be a better discussion by far to make a policy argument in good faith and be prepared to defend the likely outcome with logic and evidence, rather than bombarding the site with this drive-by libertarian agitprop.
That was a dig directed at those that shout “socialism “ at things that are clearly not socialism (like negotiating prescription drug prices), but you are of course correct. Thank you for correcting my rhetorical excess, internet friend!
Amazed at how the same people who defend a business model that depends on price inelasticities to extract the last dime for lifesaving meds somehow react with horror at the idea that the biggest negotiator of pharmaceutical prices in the U.S. has the gall to negotiate lower prices. The government isn’t ‘dictating’ anything. It is using its market power to drive the price down.
That is the vaunted free market at work. Anything else is just corporate socialism.
OP, we have received reports about the source of this post. Reviewing it, there is a good bit of libertarian and what could be considered pro-Russian propaganda elsewhere on the site, to the point it could be fairly considered an opinion blog pushing an agenda. The headline also deviates from the original source reporting. Other mods may ultimately take this down, but in the meantime please consider substituting the original article upon which this (opinion) piece was based:
The Right: Political violence committed in the name of Islam is “terrorism” and all Muslims bear collective responsibility for stopping it.
Also the Right: Political violence committed in the name of white supremacy can only be attributed to mental illness. Don’t you dare hurt the feelings of white folks by suggesting their grievance-based political movements are to blame.
We have all heard the “never wrestle a pig” adage. This is the pig picking a fight. It is a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters and politicize the concept of justice. The proper response - both rhetorically and ethically, is to say “show me the evidence under penalty of perjury in a court of law and we will be the first to hold Biden, or anyone else, accountable.”
West is right in the quote above. Progressives have every right to advocate and agitate through the primaries and beyond. Arguments about electoral unity in the face of creeping fascism definitely have their place, but it is way too soon to be making them. (Edit: in other words, take a wider view and save that messaging for the general election).
Primary season is where the edges of a coalition have a chance to pull the party back from the center. West probably can’t win, but his voice and others like it are keeping the Overton window from drifting ever rightward. You don’t have to agree with everything he says to appreciate that he is out there.
Gentle reminder that this is the nice Lemmy instance.
This is a good article and the point is well made that there is a lot of troubling colonial history that the story told in the film does not include. The point has also been made that the movie is a biopic about one individual and that wasn’t the story it was trying to tell.
Feel free to explore those issues, as there are some inherently political concerns involved, but please do so without the ad hominem. If “you this” or “you that” starts creeping back into the discussion, we’ll be forced to lock the thread.
Giving off some serious 1930’s mob boss vibes with this one.
I don’t know why this is such an appealing project, but it is. Adding an LED and a switch so it can be used as an emergency flashlight would be cool too.
Great perspective. Thanks.
Are you equating ‘single payer’ with universal health care, which most of the world has, or true single payer in the sense that private insurance is effectively outlawed? The latter isn’t quite as ubiquitous, as you know, and is politically a heavier lift in the U.S. compared to the starting point of simply guaranteeing universal basic coverage through something like medicare (state insurance) expansion.
The latter approach, incidentally, has majority support here, if polls are to be believed. I share your astonishment that we have somehow been unable to successfully agitate for it. We could realistically get to where Germany or France are, but somehow … can’t.