Good now lets replace him with someone that's actually a little bipartisan

What? Boehner has been noted for being bipartisan; he's pretty much resigning because he won't be able to deal with the backlash from Republicans after he pushed through a budget with the Democrats and a small group of moderates in his own party.

Why don't you stop being a little bitch and teach yourself?

Different conclusions from different methodology or premises.

The key being to identify the best premise, as we do in science.

Because you're not in your right mind.

You mean like a depressed person?

Nevertheless, psychopaths often are in their right mind. They aren't legally insane, and psychopathy is egosyntonic practically by definition.

If a dictatorship and democratic nation both were successful, it's people happy and prosperous, which is morally correct?

If we're assuming exactly the same level of actual and potential human well-being then they are morally identical.

Quote from: Meta as Fuck on September 24, 2015, 03:25:04 PM

Quote from: spewky bewgie on September 24, 2015, 03:23:29 PM

Can you test them in a scientific lab to say "Person A's morals are the correct ones?"

Yes, if you identify the best basis for morality.

Explain.

It's like identifying the best basis for your epistemology, or your physics. We only reach objective conclusions in physics by identifying and assuming certain values or definitions which then underpin our endeavours. Every realm of empirical study has to make initial assumptions to get off the ground.

Quote from: Meta as Fuck on September 24, 2015, 03:24:24 PM

Quote from: Carsonogen on September 24, 2015, 03:21:58 PM

Surprise birthday parties are a light example. If someone makes it known they don't want them, but it still happens, that's definitely immoral.

In that way, it's more of an implied consent.

Is pulling a depressed person back from the ledge just before they jump immoral?

Of course. You have no right to stop them.

And this is why your form of morality is the most retarded fucking thing I've ever come across. It's entirely possible for people to be incorrect about what would be in their own interests--suicide being perhaps the most important example.

Surprise birthday parties are a light example. If someone makes it known they don't want them, but it still happens, that's definitely immoral.

In that way, it's more of an implied consent.

Is pulling a depressed person back from the ledge just before they jump immoral?

Morality, what we consider to be moral, is entirely a human concept.

So is the economy, it doesn't make economics subjective.

but killing in war is apparently okay to some, while to others it isn't.

And some people don't believe in evolution.

Quote from: Meta as Fuck on September 24, 2015, 02:07:45 PM

I want to know who thinks the Pope has any good ideas for policy in the first place.

Bernie Sanders, apparently.

I'm not surprised.

Here

Lots of misinformation going around regarding the price hike on pyrimethamine both on reddit and in the media and with a dozen people tagging me to answer questions over the last couple of days I figured it would be useful to post all the common questions people seem to have. Also happy to answer any questions people have about pharma or healthcare.

How is there still a patent in place for a drug developed 62 years ago?

There is no current patent in place for pyrimethamine. Instead it has a special FDA classification called orphan drug.

An orphan drug classification is awarded for drugs that have a very small market and the FDA believes that guaranteeing a protected market is the only way to ensure the drug remains available to US patients.

The classification is also awarded for small markets if no prior efficacy trials have been completed for a use and a pharma completes them, this can be an off-label usage or it can be for a drug developed prior to 1965 when we began to require efficacy trials for new drugs. A pharma who completes efficacy trials is awarded a 7 year period of marketing exclusivity in the US.

Marketing exclusivity means that no other pharma can distribute it in the US, it behaves similarly to a patent in this regard.

Doesn't he need to raise the money to continue development?

No. While I can't directly speak to his claims of attempting to develop new drugs none of his prior companies have engaged in drug development activity and instead they have simply purchased licenses for existing drugs.

In addition drug development doesn't work in this manner. Pharma seeks investment and then recovers the cost of development to return to investors when a drug is on market (which is why we have protected markets with patents in the first place), for multi-drug companies they will certainly seek to recover the cost of failed drugs too but they don't increase the price of existing drugs in anticipation of completing new development activity.

How will the price rises impact consumers?

ACA regulated how those with chronic conditions pay for drugs. Cost exposure for individuals who need the drug is effectively unchanged as they are subject to a co-payment instead of co-insurance. The cost will fall on RX providers and the federal government (via Ryan White programs and Medicare) which is obviously a cost for everyone in the country.

What legislative/regulatory action is possible?

While the FDA do move fairly slowly they have the authority to act against those abusing an orphan license in this manner and they probably have already sent out a regulatory notice, pharma are required to notify the FDA before making a public announcement regarding a price change. The process for revoking their orphan license takes about a year, the FDA have done this in the past for similar pricing abuse.

For this specific drug there is also another option as its part of the WHO essential drugs list, any item that appears on this list a country is permitted to simply ignore any patents for under the TRIPS agreement. This would require NiH, congress or the executive to act to assert the countries rights under this agreement.

How long would it take for a new generic to make it to market?

For this drug the process would take around 6 months. Newer generics take up to 15 months.

Older drugs like this are inexpensive to manufacture and can use existing filings rather then having to complete their own clinical work so there is not a particularly high cost of entry in this case. The cost to file with the FDA in this case would be $38,020, assuming an existing pharma takes it on additional entry costs are only for things like designing packaging, drug information sheets etc.

Is it is true the US is the only country in the world which doesn't regulate price?

Every country which is not the US sets a limit on the price they are willing to pay for drugs based on their efficacy, in most countries this process is a dialog as there is not a true objective standard for measuring efficacy. No country tells pharma how much they can charge beyond this, as long as a drug meets their price/efficacy standards they don't regulate prices beyond this.

The US should have a similar system, it will certainly reduce our drug expenditure by removing low-efficacy drugs from the market but the savings likely wont be very large on an average per-unit basis. The drugs we consume the most of are generally not unreasonably priced, we would have a readjustment in prices (some would come up as the efficacy system would set a bar, others would come down for the same reason) but little net change.

In the case of this drug even the most restrictive system in the world (currently the UK) would still buy it, its extremely effective and the price wasn't set high enough for any country to refuse to cover it. However this problem generally would not occur outside the US as the US is one of only two countries which deal with orphan drugs in this manner, most don't require re-approval for a use which has already been demonstrated on-market (IE off-label use can be licensed absent efficacy trials if sufficient data exists elsewhere) and they don't discourage off-label use (EG Medicare prohibits physicians from writing off-label, its thankfully poorly enforced but remains a problem).

How do our drug costs compare with the rest of the world?

On a per-unit basis we are higher then average but not an outlier, our costs are comparable to Germany and Japan. Our per-capita costs are much higher then average and we are an outlier, this is due to very high consumption, we consume a much high proportion of branded drugs and we consume a much higher proportion of on-patent drugs.

Excess consumption mainly comes from those covered by Medicare, an efficacy/cost control mechanism would do a good job of reducing this. Our excess from branded drugs comes from stronger regulations on substitution preventing pharmacists from substituting and physicians writing no-substitute prescription far more frequently then they should. Our on-patent excess is driven by almost all drugs entering the world market in the US before elsewhere as 47% of development cost recovery worldwide is from US markets.

The economist

ONE of the key aims of taxation and public spending is to redistribute income from rich to poor. The way most statisticians, economists and policymakers think about this is in terms of a cross-sectional snapshot: what the distribution of wealth or income is between different people in a population in a single year. But we might care more about lifetime incomes: in the modern labour market, many people now have very high incomes in certain parts of their lives, and much lower ones at other times.

A new paper by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) shines a new light on how well the British tax system redistributes incomes over people's lifetimes, in addition to using the cross-sectional approach. It presents several interesting findings. For a start, it finds that lifetime inequality in Britain has always been much lower than cross-sectional inequality (see first chart). This is because the poorest in any given year are not always poor for their entire lives; the IFS's simulations suggest that those who, over the whole of their life, are in the lowest 10%, only spend an average of a fifth of their lifetimes at the bottom.

More startlingly, policies that increased or cut welfare expenditure appear to have had very little impact on lifetime inequality. For instance, while the benefit cuts of the late 1980s reduced benefits and increased cross-sectional inequality, it had a much more muted effect on lifetime inequality. And, similarly, although Gordon Brown's massive expansion of means-tested tax credits in the 2000s reduced cross-sectional inequality, they had very little impact on cutting lifetime inequality.

The paper also finds that the redistribution performed by the British welfare state is, to a great extent, smoothing incomes over people's lifetimes rather than in a given year.Whereas 36% of individuals receive more in benefits than they pay in tax in any given year, only 7% do so over their lifetimes. Over half of all redistribution is simply across peoples' lifespans; the young pay in while they work, and take out when they retire (see second chart).

This is, perhaps, a result of the origin of Britain's welfare system. The thinkers who developed the principles behind the system, such as Seehohm Rowntree and William Beveridge, envisaged it as a mechanism more to smooth incomes over Britons' lifetimes than as a system of redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. What the IFS's paper shows is that Britain's welfare state still acts in the same way as its founders intended, more like a forced saving scheme for retirement rather than as Robin Hood. That suggests that policymakers today need to think more about inequality on a lifetime basis—and how to reduce it—unlike their predecessors who founded the welfare state.

He's not wrong, instead of constantly bombing each other into oblivion why not hold peaceful talks? How is there anything wrong with that?

Because these people--unlike China and the Russians--are not rational actors. We're dealing with people like ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda and they operate in an intellectual framework where martyrdom is a moral choice and Armageddon is a solution because those who are righteous will go to Paradise and those who are wicked will burn in hellfire, and to them this is a perfect equilibrium.

I've no doubt you could get short-term concessions from some kind of leadership class within these groups, but they are not viable going into the future. We're fundamentally dealing with a group of people riddled with theocrats who are actually willing to hit the wall at 400mph.

Oh, I also dive into a big leatherbound book called the Necronomicon from time to time.

I'm reading quite a few currently. Finishing off GRRM's A Feast for Crows mainly, though.

Started reading Cameron at 10, which is a biography of David Cameron's premiership from 2010-2015, about 80 pages through at the moment. Also reading Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations Books IV-V, Hume's Enquiries Into Human Understanding, Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence and The Undercover Economist Strikes Back.

After that I'll start reading The Martian, a biography of Napoleon, either Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality or Acemoglu's Why Nations Fail, Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, Simon Baron-Cohen's The Science of Evil and Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism.