@failedLyndonLaRouchite @DeanBaker13 @merz @jgordon you should be suspicious! but then you should be more than suspicious of the status quo industry whose predations and misallocations of resources—including real and prodigious scientific and regulatory competences!—are legion and legend. @DeanBaker13 offers a lot of reform ideas. by all means critique them. but compare them against not an ideal, but the pretty bad status quo.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @DeanBaker13 @merz @jgordon all I’ve endorsed was having the state pay to overcome regulatory burdens for already developed drugs that would be competitive with domestic monopolists. i’m sympathetic to @DeanBaker13’s broad project of figuring out how to reorganize pharma so we keep the competences but trim the rents and the (profound) incentives to corruption and predation under the current model. but i’m not going to invent a new model in a toot.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @DeanBaker13 @merz @jgordon i don’t think anyone is arguing pharma work should all be done by direct govt employees on the gs pay scale. if you did do that, some costs would go up and others would go down, but @merz concerns about institutional knowledge might be hard to address. 1/
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @DeanBaker13 @merz @jgordon there are lots of pharma reform ideas (lots just from @DeanBaker13), but even when the idea is “let the state fund the work and own the product”, the state can finance start-up labs and let operators of those labs allocate resources, just as private investors now do. how the state then incentivizes high-social-return work, under what form of competition if any, becomes a question to address. /fin
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @DeanBaker13 @merz @jgordon you can hire whoever’s available, but that includes ppl and institutions already here. there’s no debaathification. when incumbent institutions have competences they can provide best at good rates, you hire them. they may not like the more competitive environment, but the only thing that’d cut incumbents out wld be their choosing to attempt a kind of capital strike rather than participating.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @DeanBaker13 @merz @jgordon it’s worth noting that over the last few decades big pharma itself outsourced much of its basic drug development to China. that was the fate of the lab at which i once worked, the former Upjohn in Kalamazoo.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @merz @jgordon @DeanBaker13 yes. but those big pharma partners largely serve as VCs plus compliance / clinical trial specialists. those can be challenging competencies, but they can also be reorganized! i’m not saying things aren’t “hard”. but when (inherently hard) trials are run by financial beneficiaries they are at risk of being corrupt. that things are difficult doesn’t mean the way we currently do them is best.
i wish #NewCollege had Disney’s lawyers. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/30/1167042594/disney-desantis-board-reedy-creek-charles
internet turing tests are getting so hard pretty soon only AIs will be able to pass them.
"Achieving pro-growth policies is a matter of power, not brains... Bad policy is not mere intellectual error. It is the product of capitalism — of economic stagnation and of how capital exercises power over the state." #ChrisDillow https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2023/03/against-schoolteacher-politics.html
i think a very good rule of thumb for all members of the human species is “just don’t detonate a nuclear weapon.”
FDIC’s Deposit Insurance Fund “also earns interest on U.S. Treasury securities it holds, but a sharp rise in interest rates last year caused unrealized losses on those holdings” https://www.marketwatch.com/story/failed-banks-struck-a-22-5-billion-blow-to-the-deposit-insurance-fund-who-will-pay-the-price-e446ea87
// ha!
“are we the baddies?” asks the group, whose members wear gigantic skull tattoos as their emblem.
weird when libertarian anti-fiat bitcoinists get excited about the chinese yuan and russian ruble.
when you answer a phone call, there should be a button you can choose that automatically intones “this call may be recorded for quality assurance” and then does that.
(whose quality did you think they were trying to assure anyway?)
why must landscaping be so loud?
The government itself should run and finance US clinical trials of cheap alternatives to price-gouging patented drugs and vaccines. The taxpayer cost of the trials would be peanuts compared to the public’s savings on the drugs.
see @DeanBaker13 https://econtwitter.net/@DeanBaker13/110106851188936413
not propitious when the bbq place u r going to shares a stripmall with this.
Sign says “Simple. Easy. Affordable. Cremation”
i would like a stochastic carrot.
California will provide a public option for some pharmaceuticals. More like this, please. https://prospect.org/health/2023-03-27-california-drugmaking-insulin/
how long until language-model-enabled stuffed animals talk to our children in character?
This piece by @SteveRoth really highlights the fractal nature of American inequality. Top 1% (by income) households saw their wealth grow on average by a ridiculous 64MM, but I think it's safe to say that the, um, poorest 1%-ers, households earning roughly 600K per year, didn't see anything like those gains. https://wealtheconomics.substack.com/p/new-wealth-accumulation-during-covid