@lmorchard careful with the handle.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @DeanBaker13 @merz @jgordon pharma is obviously structured in ways that reward predation and extract rents. we can try to address that directly. of course it is also a symptom of America’s general inequities and pathologies. there would be much less incentive to predation, and reform would be easier to arrange, if high incomes were taxed again at 90% in the US. 1/
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @DeanBaker13 @merz @jgordon but like with every other problem, while we fight their deep roots we still have to pull up the weeds.
in no domain are we content to say, “well the real root of this corruption is overall stratification and the desperate treadmill a price-rationed caste system provokes which causes people to justify any harm if they can earn a buck. so we’ll just have to endure until after the revolution.” /fin
@counternotions i think i saw prior art on star trek…
@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.
@merz @failedLyndonLaRouchite @jgordon @DeanBaker13 no one argues for erasing the institutional history of pharma and restarting from some blank slate. we argue for changing the financing model under which those competencies get deployed. that does mean, going forward, different, likely smaller, flows of money to the industry. it does not mean burning anything down. (big pharma itself has done a lot of that to itself recently.)
@merz @jgordon @DeanBaker13 okay! i’m not really arguing one way or another about that (but no, i’m not taking your word, and i think you are largely wrong), but using public action to undermine regulatory moats that prevent already developed drugs from being marketed was the Dean’s proposal, which i continue very much to endorse.
@merz @jgordon @DeanBaker13 (to be clear, i don’t dispute that drug development is very difficult. but i do dispute there’s something special about its difficulty that means only institutions not so different from status quo private sector monopolists could perform it.)
@bgawalt however nice the app, your private bank extracts a subsidy and imposes dangers the public should not tolerate. if we make deposits public, as we should, perhaps your bank can still provide the UI and administer them. (lots of proposals look like that!) so, enjoy the app. but your bank should have no actual access to the funds represented by your deposits. and that should not be optional.
@bgawalt 2008 was odd because they contorted themselves to save even shareholders of the big banks. but the bailouts were motivated by institutional private money-like assets, which have been much more strictly regulated since, and should (like private deposits) be regulated away. there must be private risk assets, and public credit-risk-free assets. any hybrid only exists because the private sector is extracting a subsidy from the public sector.
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!
@yarrriv i think china and russia have been shifting their reserves towards gold, though tbf it’s not so weirdo given the real risk (realized in russia’s case) of sanctions they face if they so some of the shitty things they claim would be within their rights.
@jgordon @danwentzel What if (I know, so implausible) Musk is a hidden in plain sight part of an international right-wing conspiracy seeking to undermine liberal democracy as most of us understand it in the United States and other Western countries? 1/
@jgordon @danwentzel If the surveillance and control these platforms afford is dangerous in the hands of a foreign power, aren't they dangerous in the hands of factions, domestic or international, who may use them to usurp or undermine the democratic process domestically? /fin
“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.